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Off the Record (Apr 22, 2015)

ON APRIL 10, 2015 at 1:27 AM, the Sheriff's press release begins, correctional staff discovered an unresponsive inmate in her cell during a routine walk through. The 59-year old female was the sole occupant of the cell within a 19-person housing unit. The victim had last been seen sleeping about 40 minutes prior during an earlier cell check. Responding correctional and medical staff determined that she was not breathing and had no pulse, and immediately began performing life-saving measures. Upon their arrival, emergency medical services took over care. The victim was pronounced dead at 2:00 AM. Nothing was discovered at the scene to suggest foul play. The victim had been in custody since April 4, 2015 for possession of a controlled substance for sale charge. The victim’s identity is being withheld pending notification of next-of-kin. A thorough death investigation is being conducted by the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office Investigative Services Bureau. An autopsy was scheduled for April 10, 2015.

Gloria Burgess
Gloria Burgess

UPDATE The victim has been identified as 59-year-old Gloria Ann Burgess of Ukiah. A forensic autopsy was performed on April 10, 2015. Official results are pending blood alcohol and toxicology analysis.

I DIDN'T KNOW GLORIA BURGESS, but I knew her husband, Henry. Henry went to his reward just over 10 years ago. If there's a next life, and it's based on any kind of heavenly merit system, Henry would have had a lot of 'splaining to do.

MY PICARESQUE LIFE has put me in the immediate company of some very tough guys, right from the time as a 17-year-old kid when I went through Marine boot camp, presided over in 1957 by psychopaths who beat the crap out of us for fifteen straight weeks. (The boot camp depicted in the movie Full Metal Jacket was a relative cakewalk.) Then there were the usual young guy bar fights, a number of arrests for the very noblest reasons, a few weeks of jail time with lots of tough guys, and I had years of associations with the criminal families of my foster sons.

THREATS of ultra-vi are a given in the newspaper biz, and I've racked up quite a few associations with tough guys there, too, although the only newspaper menace I worried about was one where DA Norm Vroman himself advised me to carry a gun whenever I visited Fort Bragg. “Everyone up there?” I wondered. “Maybe I should take two guns.” Vroman saw the gun rather too comprehensively as the ultimate solution to the more intractable problems.) Real killers don't announce their intentions and, overall, I think I've been fortunate in that all I've gotten is a lot of woof-woofing. But in all that time and all those tough guys and all those threats, the only guy who truly scared me, the only one who made me wish I had my gun with me, was Henry Burgess, Gloria's husband.

HENRY, I learned only recently, was born in Oklahoma but raised in Ukiah from 1958 on. He was half Native American, or at least enough Native American to qualify him for formal tribal affiliations (the word affiliations will re-occur in this reminisce), although off my experience with him I can't imagine him in a sweat lodge or otherwise celebrating his ethnic heritage.

HE wasn't a real big guy, but he was big enough, certainly, large through the chest and shoulders and, in his youth, very strong, and still quite formidable in his fifties, one of those guys about whom an acquaintance said, “You know that expression, 'He's a guy you don't fuck with?' Henry's the guy that expression is based on. You definitely don't fuck with him.”

HENRY LEFT UKIAH as a kid to join the Marines, not a liberalizing experience for young persons but one many American young people choose, especially young men the authorities and their own families deem in dire need of limits. Henry fought all over Vietnam in the 67-70 period when the fighting was fiercest, and he came home with a chest full of medals. Once at home, he got deep into the fast life and, when I first became aware of him, was alleged to have been involved in the drug-related murders of a Ukiah couple named Cape. That murder remains unsolved, although a Ukiah-area fellow named Figoni was tried for it but hung the jury. Henry's name came up often during the investigations of the Cape dispatch. That's where “affiliate” comes in. Burgess was assumed by the cops of that time to be a drug bill collector for Bay Area-based motorcycle gangs, particularly the Hells Angels, and the Capes, drug dealers in Ukiah, had not paid their bills.

RON GLUCKMAN, A WRITER for the Ukiah Daily Journal at the time of the Cape murders, was terrified by Burgess. As I recall, Gluckman, for writing about the Cape murders, had either been threatened directly by Henry or someone had relayed a threat or Henry had simply fixed Gluckman with a death glare which, coming from him, could very well earn the recipient an eternal follow-up.

WAY BACK, '88 I think, I was placed in the County Jail over a scuffle at a County school board meeting. I'd just written about the Cape murders and had mentioned Burgess, and there I was in the same unit with him. Feets, get me outtahere! Only a few weeks before landing in jail, I was hiking up Mountain View Road, west of Boonville and at least three miles from my gun, sweating through my daily aerobics, and here comes Burgess on a motorcycle, a woman, Gloria maybe, riding pillion. Spotting me, he slowed way, way down and stared at me, goosing his bike alongside me as I kept on walking while I frantically scanned the roadside for a tree limb, a big rock — any kind of weapon. Gloria, or whoever it was on the back of the bike, said something to Burgess and they roared on up the hill.

IN JAIL, Burgess didn't seem to recognize me, but lots of inmates certainly recognized Burgess. They fell all over themselves deferring to him. “Henry, you want my commissary? Anything I can do for you, Henry?” That sort of thing. It was there, in the old jail where well wishers often tossed dope encased in tennis balls over the fence to us vacationers lounging on the lawn, that I heard a career outlaw type say of Burgess, “He's affiliated, you know,” meaning that he was a sanctioned member of organized crime.

ALL THIS is from memory. We did a quick search on the internet last week and Henry's obit popped up. Gloria? I'm waiting for Eversole Mortuary to tell us more about her. We don't have to suppose she had a hard time of it.

NOTE TO CITY READERS: Please vote for Aaron Peskin for SF's board of supervisors. Good guy, genuine political progressive opposed by all the right people — Ron Conway, Mayor Silly Pants, Willie Brown and the City's Democratic Party apparatus, and so on. Natch, the forces of high rises prefer the mayor's appointed robot, Ms. Christensen.

CLOSE READERS will recall that the Fort Bragg City Council removed the Old Coast Hotel conversion from Monday's meeting agenda more than a week ago. It may or may not reappear on the agenda in a couple of weeks, but it seems to us that the Council, at least the 3-2 majority who think a halfway house in a beautiful old structure in the center of town is a good idea, may have postponed discussion to allow time to consider a more reasonable site. “The New Hospitality Center's” Facebook page has had only one post since April 2nd and that was rather generic re: future training, but nothing about getting ready to move in to new quarters.

THE BEST CALIFORNIA NOVELS

1899, McTeague, Frank Norris

1929, The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammet

1939, The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West

1946, Dark Passage, David Goodis

1953, The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler

1958, The Subterraneans, Jack Kerouac

1966, The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

1968, Myra Breckinridge, Gore Vidal

1969, Fat City, Leonard Gardner

1970, Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion

1974, Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone

1976, The Blue Hammer, Ross Macdonald

1978, Lying Low, Diane Johnson

1983, Famous All Over Town, Danny Santiago

1987, The Black Dahlia, James Ellroy

1990, Devil in a Blue Dress, Walter Mosley

1990, Vineland Thomas, Pynchon

1995, The Last Coyote, Michael Connelly

1997, Already Dead, Denis Johnson

2009, Nobody Move, Denis Johnson

— Bradley Haas

I'M A SUCKER for these lists, and I've only read about half these. Couldn't ever get into Gore Vidal's fiction or Denis Johnson's either, but I'd add Kem Niunn's novels to the list along with most of John Steinbeck. Then there's Stegner and, and, and, and there's a really good fictionalized account of the infamous Symbionese Liberation Army but I can't remember either the title or the author. I'm thinking on possible additions, which is what book lists never fail to make you do.

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

It’s time for a woman in the White House. Unfortunately her name should be Elizabeth Warren. The only novelty about Hillary is her gender. The style may be slightly different, but the substance will be the same – banks and the military-industrial complex can breathe a sigh of relief if she takes the helm for what will prove to be 4 catastrophic years (and they will be catastrophic irrespective if the Dums or Repugs win the 1600 Pennsylvania booby prize). It’s the same ‘Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss’ mantra that the Who sang about 44 years ago.

FindsTheFeather
FindsTheFeather

REMEMBER THIS GUY? The feds are still after him for an old bust deep in the Dos Rios outback. Apparently, Mrs. and Mrs. Feather and their three kids have re-entered the country from a long sojourn south of the border. She's living with the kids in Redding; he's in federal custody somewhere.

AVA, June 25, 2008: Kite Isaac FindsTheFeather, arrested back in February at an already legendary grow at 8 Mile Bridge near Dos Rios, legendary because there was so much dope ready for sale, some 100 pounds of processed bud, and so much dope under cultivation — 5,275 plants — in a highly sophisticated indoor grow powered by two huge generators, 350 and 400 kilowatts each, this grow was big, thus legendary, even by Mendo standards. Additionally, Feather had $20,000 in cash and two handguns and five rifles. His bail was set at half a mil, which he posted and hasn't been seen since. Until now.

SUSPICIONS CONFIRMED Law schools, according to jubilant news reports, are being forced to accept students with lower grades as the number of academically gifted high-achievers applying for law school has almost halved in the past five years. Research has found the number of students achieving the top 165 to 180 grade on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) has fallen from 9,400 in 2010 to an estimated 5,400 this year. In response, law schools are this year expected to enroll 8,700 students who scored less than 150 on the LSAT — compared to fewer than 7,000 in 2010.

FISH AND WILDLIFE has found the proposed Fort Bragg trash transfer station wanting. The $5 million project's environmental impact report, says Fish and Wildlife, has failed to satisfactorily address the effects of a garbage facility on wetlands, surface water and the cumulative impacts generally of an industrial trash operation plunked down in the Pygmy Forest a few miles northeast of Fort Bragg.

MIKE SWEENEY, Mendocino County's most thoroughly reinvented person and our County's most interesting citizen, functions as the County's lead trash bureaucrat under the auspices of the usual supine board of directors organized as the Mendocino Solid Waste Management Authority. Sweeney got the bad news from Fish and Game in a March 24th letter from that agency.

THE EIR FOR THE FIVE-ACRE SITE off Highway 20 near Fort Bragg cost upwards of $200,000. It was prepared by the Eureka office of an “international network of engineers, architects and environmental scientists.” The project has been some eight years in creation and has the apparent support of the County supervisors and at least three members of the Fort Bragg City Council.

THAT FORT BRAGG and the Mendocino Coast has a perfectly serviceable trash transfer station at Pudding Creek has been mostly ignored, as the always one-step-ahead Sweeney, his quiescent board of trustees signing off every step of the way for eight years now, is determined to erect a brand new trash operation amidst sensitive habitat, a new operation that will undoubtedly raise Coast garbage rates to pay for.

IT MAY HAVE ELUDED the AVA's hawk-eyed vigilance, but what's always left out of the marijuana legalization discussion, seems to us, is how much stronger your average doobie is than in the days of Flower Child-ism when it became the primary consciousness altering tool of millions of Americans. But pot is bad, very bad for young people. That fact doesn't get mentioned much if at all by the drug's pied pipers. Speaking anecdotally here, over the many years I've watched young people grow up in Boonville, and I've been here since 1970 when pot really got rolling, every single kid who got into it prematurely — age 12, 13, 14 and on through the teen years — has come to a bad end, either through addiction to hard drugs or lost to adult mental illness.

GOVERNOR BROWN'S so-called “realignment” program has not only shifted the jail time of a lot of, ahem, very bad boys to county jails, it has basically decriminalized possession of hard drugs. Net effect? The skies are dark with tweakers flying home to the Mendocino County Jail from the state prison system and, many of them, onto the streets of Fort Bragg, Willits and Ukiah. These dudes are rougher than the average Mendo fuck-up, and quick to settle disputes with their fists, feet or whatever's handy. Sheriff Allman has pointed out that they're a lot harder to handle in the County Jail, which is now so overcrowded a lot of the more harmless dudes are kicked out early.

I HAD AN APPOINTMENT the other day for coffee at Schatt's (Ukiah) with my old friend Mike Geniella, formerly of the Press Democrat, presently DA Eyster's flak catcher and press release maestro. “Eyster wants to see you,” Geniella said when I met him. “If you bring him two chocolate chip cookies you can have thirty minutes with him.” Not a bad deal for an opportunity to rag on Mendocino County's top law enforcement officer about this, that and the other obsessive thing. Two cookies later I was seated opposite the DA in his inner sanctum. On the other side of the one-way glass I saw the usual herd of defendants shuffle past, including ace crime reporter Bruce McEwen notebook and poised pen in hand.

COUPLA THINGS about the DA: One, he's very smart. If you're going to argue with him you better be ready or you're going to get run over. You might get run over anyway even if you think you're ready. Two, he's reasonable. He'll listen to your opinion, and maybe even agree with it. One way or the other, you get a rational response. I was interested in his opinion of a rumor I'd heard. He gave me his opinion. I was pleased with it. We talked about other pending matters. I was also pleased with his opinion of those matters. It was all background stuff, but I thought back to the long years when the DA and the Sheriff refused to even acknowledge any media that didn't hallelujah them. It all changed with Sheriff Tony Craver and DA Norm Vroman. I think they were the first Mendo cops to figure out that there were a lot of half-assed liberals in Mendocino County. And they all voted. Treat them like stray dogs and yer outta there.

DA EYSTER & SHERIFF ALLMAN, though, are post-hippie-accessible on their own accounts. They are among the very few in the state in their jobs who are accessible, and that's obviously because they aren't intellectually insecure. They know they can hold their own with whomever's walking through the door.

SO, WITHOUT MY ASKING, the DA brought up what has become an eternal subject. (Not Sweeney.) He pointed out that his predecessor had done nothing, which was her approach to her workload. Indict everyone except the tough ones. The tough cases? Do nothing.

YES, I THINK Eyster is doing a great job as DA. I wish certain matters moved faster, but with previous people in his position they wouldn't have moved at all. And his dope prosecution policies have made money for the County and have enabled lots of otherwise respectable citizens to simply pay their fines and move on, the first time the pot brigades haven't been a net drag on the law enforcement budget. If you gotta have cops it's a good thing when they're rational. We count our blessings.

THE BOARD OF SUPES AGENDA for this week’s meeting indicates that the Sheriff’s top brass have agreed to a $1200 one time payment for each top officer, plus a 9.5% increase in year one (effective July 2015, which actually started last year on July 1, 2014 when their contract expired, with a backdate making the raise about 3.25% last year and again this year), plus another 3% “general increase.” In the third year of the contract, the Brass will get another 2% raise. This effectively restores the 10% cut they took back in 2008, plus a little more. To sweeten the deal a bit, the Brass agreed to pay the entire amount of their retirement donation out of their increased pay, eliminating the County’s pension match. The agenda item estimates the cost impact of the agreement at about $137k for the first year and $167k for second year (the third year of the backdated contract). The agenda item also notes that it will cost the County $12k this year (part of the initial $137k) for the $1200 one-time payment. Which means there are just ten members of MCLEMA (basically the Sheriff’s captains and lieutenants — not exactly what you’d normally call a “bargaining unit”). Which also translates to about $14k per senior officer for the July 2015 to June 2016 period and another $17k per officer for the following (third) fiscal year. (We’ve heard that there may be some offsetting pension contribution givebacks that the Brass will be agreeing to, but so far they have not been quantified.)

THESE DETAILS ARE IMPORTANT because this agreement will set the bar for the negotiations with the much larger Deputy Sheriff’s Association which is currently in negotiations. (It will probably also set the bar for other County bargaining units, but maybe not directly. The County’s largest bargaining unit, the SEIU at about 700 employees took a $1200 one-time payment themselves last year, but it remains to be seen what the next contract will look like.) But, the other bargaining units are not likely to give up their pension subsidy so easily just to get the 10% pay cut they took a few years ago back. If the much larger DSA was to get something like the brass appears to be getting, we could be talking about fiscal impact of over a $1 million per year just for that one bargaining unit, perhaps backdated to last year when the DSA contract expired — just for the patrol sergeants, deputies and jailers. And if that translates to other bargaining units… Let’s just say that the County’s oft-repeated claim that “revenues are flat” might create a large new budget gap for the budget which starts in July 2015, just over two months from now.

AS ALWAYS treading lightly where the subject is Big Timber, the Supervisors got off this pallid communiqué in draft form:

Resolution Of The Mendocino County Board Of Supervisors Regarding Fire Danger Resulting From Intentionally Killed Timber Left Standing On Forest Lands

Whereas, Mendocino County is in its fourth consecutive year of drought; and Whereas, the 2005 Cal Fire Community Wildfire Prevention Plan, the last such plan written, designated much of the County as at risk from wildfire; and

Whereas, Mendocino County has approximately one million acres of commercial forest lands; and

Whereas, over the past three years (2012-2014) hardwood trees have been killed and left standing on over 22,000 acres, at an approximated rate of over 1.5 million trees per year; and

Whereas, such standing dead hardwoods present fire danger, threatening the health and safety of county residents; and

Whereas, there is no current regulation of the practice of leaving intentionally killed hardwoods standing, nor are there any requirements that such trees be downed and/or removed to reduce fire danger; and

Whereas, this forest management practice continues despite the protests of many residents who would be most immediately affected by any resulting wildfire; and

Whereas, dead standing trees resulting from naturally occurring events, and for preservation of wildlife, shall be exempt from this resolution; and

Whereas, the Board of Supervisors is extremely concerned about the fire hazard presented by dead standing timber;

Now Therefore Be It Resolved that the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors requests that the commercial timber companies, on a voluntary basis, immediately cease the practice of leaving intentionally killed trees standing on their property pending the completion of an independent fire danger analysis, or for a period not to exceed six (6) months from the date of this resolution, whichever comes first.

NOT BAD until the Supes wimp out. Why not order the Mendocino Redwood Company to stop a chemical practice that endangers thousands of people? Instead, we get an invitation to MRC to do the right thing followed by the usual study of tree-killing practices already determined to present a major safety hazard.

A READER WRITES: That was good what was written about abolishing high school. After 12 years of public education, many of my community college students can't write, have no grasp of basic grammar correctness, and have never read any literature. Sometimes I ask, what did they do in High School English, get lectures about not taking drugs and not joining gangs? That's about it, they admit — and we all know how well that's worked out.

“IN HUMBOLDT COUNTY, we have seen an increase in cases of both chlamydia and gonorrhea over the last three years, especially in the last three months,” said DHHS Public Health Nurse Eric Gordon. From Jan. 1 through April 15 there have been 82 cases of gonorrhea reported to Public Health, according to HumCo DHHS’s Epidemiologist Ron Largusa. This trend represents a doubling of cases and rate from 2014 and a 10-fold increase in cases and rate from 2010.”

A READER COMMENTS re HumCo's gonorrhea increase: “Oh my god you guys. Humboldt is so gross up here! One big petri dish of our combined infections. People are getting down like savages. Especially the home grown folks! All impulse, zero caution — like we do everything else. Our stretch of 101 is just one giant snail trail. Now, if you will excuse me I'm going to go eat some moldy bread and hope for the best.”

RECOMMENDED READING: “Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence” by Bryan Burrough. It was more like counter-revolutionary violence, I'd say, at least the Weathermen underground part of it. The black radicals whose program consisted of murdering line cops mostly managed to get themselves killed, while both made assumptions about the state of American society in the late 1960s and the first part of the 1970s unshared by most Americans who hardly comprised the seething proletariat masses necessary to kick off a real revolution. What we got out of the rich kid rev of Bernadine and Billy was a lot of posturing and the worst, least inspiring political prose imaginable until David Brooks picked up a pen. B&B, predictably, resurfaced and became college professors. Less well-connected bomb throwers, black and white, remain buried in the penal system. The interviews and comments by re-entry rads cited by the author all lament how wrong they'd been about American reality. They'd misread it about as badly as it could be misread. America wasn't ready for fundamental change, but it was an outrageously provocatively time, with the usual racism and a war in Vietnam that went on and on. There were armies of terminally frustrated young people, few of whom went over to ultra-vi but a heckuva a lot of those frustrated young people sympathized with their violent brothers and sisters, for a fact. I did, certainly, and I knew people who were “into” things I didn't ask them about. Me, I was married and broke. I had to work, and I always wondered how the leadership — rad talking media figures like Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin and that creepy little character Rennie Davis — managed to fly all over the place with no visible means of support. Well, hell, Lenin was supported by a millionaire, but still these guys seemed totally disconnected by class privilege from the way most Americans lived.

DaysOfRage

MR. BURROUGH is a good, clear writer, and his book is quite a research feat. There are frequent references to “movement” lawyers like Dennis Cunningham who acted as cash conduits to the underground and represented them when they got arrested. Funny to read and hear “movement,” given that the whole show amounted to the first movement in history that moved steadily backwards and, without getting into it, Cunningham isn't my idea of the kind of person who is going to take US any place good.

AS SOME OF YOU older Mendo people will know, and as confirmed by Burrough, the Weathermen were often in and out of Mendocino County where they strategized at posh, ocean view homes lent to them by rich libs, and lots of wanted people hid out for brief periods at the famous Black Bear commune deep in Siskiyou County and naked pile “collectives” in Mendocino and Humboldt counties. There was a whole network of outback hideaways open to people sought by the government. The irony, I'd say, is that objectively conditions now are much more ripe for radical resistance than they were then; the Occupy Movement spoke much more realistically and resonantly to lots more people than were ever reached by the underground rads of the 1970s.

FROM SPY ROCK to the Rock Hall of Fame: Childhood friends Billie Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt formed the Grammy Award-winning pop-punk trio Green Day in the late 1980s. On Saturday, the two, along with drummer Tre Cool, who joined the band in 1990, were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

GreenDayRS

AN EXCERPT from a 1995 column by Gaye LeBaron of the Press Democrat nicely sums up the local angle: “His childhood friends from Laytonville and his Willits High classmates may know him as Tre Wright. But now he's Tre Cool. Together he and Billy Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt are a punk-rock band called Green Day… “The photo on the cover of the Jan. 26 issue of Rolling Stone (Tre is the one with the studiedly dumb look and the green and yellow hair) honors Green Day as the best new band of the year. Tre's parents Linda and Frank Wright and his sister Lori still live in Willits. I think it's fair to say that his parents are in mild shock over the notion of their son as a musical phenom. Since Green Day's performance at Woodstock ’94, in which Armstrong pulled down his pants and Dirnt lost his front teeth in the resulting melee, it’s been a wild ride. The most recent stopover has been the birth of Tre’s daughter, Ramona Isabella, to his girlfriend Lisea, and a fancy new house in the East Bay hills. Here is Rolling Stone writer Chris Mundy’s assessment of this latest ‘hometown hero.’ ‘The youngest of two children, Tre lived in the Mendocino mountains (a location notable for its high concentration of hippies and marijuana farms), where his father — a helicopter pilot in Vietnam — moved the family in order to insulate them upon his return to the States. The nearest neighbor was more than a mile away. “ ‘…Luckily the closest neighbor was Lawrence Livermore, leader of the punk-rock band the Lookouts and founder of Lookout! Records. When his band needed a drummer, Livermore turned to 12-year-old Wright…’ “It’s kind of a folksy story Mundy tells. There's Tre, the sophomore class president at Willits High (and teen-age disc jockey at the radio station) giving up on formal education. He passed the equivalency test and hit out for Berkeley, where Armstrong and Dirnt were looking for a drummer. “The Wrights are a supportive family. Frank, who owns a trucking company in Willits, fixed up a used bookmobile and served as driver for the band on early tours. He shared some of those adventures with writer Mundy: “ ‘On our first tour or two, it was more of a party than anything else. I still scratch my head and say, ‘How in the hell did they make it?’ They used to practice in my living room here. … You hear it coming together … but when it does, you just say, ‘Wow, that's so cool’.” Which is his son’s new name.”

MENDO TO SEND LETTER TO CALIFORNIA WATER BOARD asking them to slow releases from Lake Mendocino. But, as former Third District Supervisor John Pinches reminded us on numerous occasions, the Sonoma County Water Agency calls the shots behind the scenes and they’re not like to agree to getting less water that they can sell to Sonoma County water districts or Marin County.

INTERESTING that Fort Bragg Mayor Dave Turner voted on the resolution to give funds for flooring and solar panels to the Hospitality Center/House on January 12, 2015, but last Monday night recused himself from voting on the final handout of the funds because his business is so close to the Hospitality House?

Carson
Carson

WE THINK this guy has such a distinctive look and size, he might want to consider an acting career. Christopher Carson, 27, is 6-6, 300. Game of Thrones? Perfect. Of course he had some minor legal probs including the one that got him scooped up in our Catch of the Day last Saturday. That one alleges that Chris threatened to kill and/or inflict severe bodily harm on an unnamed someone. A guy this big can certainly do major harm, but we'd have to see the particulars before we judge ol' Chris. Charges can read a lot more dire than their real life circumstances bear out.

BTW, every day people are booked into the County Jail for “probation violation.” Which almost always means they haven't paid one or another inflated fine, late fees tacked on, often for traffic violations. Pay the fine, get out of jail. Or trade time served for the money. It's one more way that the justice system helps keep ordinary people broke.

3 Comments

  1. joelle Burgess July 16, 2016

    Hello my name is joelle Burgess and Gloria was my mother I’ve read this article I got 300 times since I discovered it it brings back so many memories my dad Henry was an amazing man I love him very much and the person who wrote this article made my heart smile however at the end of the article it said something to the effect of hoping that my mom didn’t have a hard time of it however that is completely wrong my mother had a very hard time passing she had A2 inch head wound that show 2 inches of her skull she was detoxing from an opiate that she had used for most of her life my mother hadmedical problems and was refused her medicine or any things to help her detox another had no broken bones when she went to jail but in the report that I picked up from the corner she had money after she passedI don’t understand it I probably never will but I’ll always miss my mother she was my best friend so I wanted to say thank you for the memories of my father that you brought up and forgiving a hoot about people in general thank you for writing this article sincerely joelle burgess

  2. james marmon July 16, 2016

    Joelle, I don’t know if you remember me or not, I was the Harley riding substance abuse counselor at Youth Project back in 1999. I also knew your dad Henry since the 1960’s. We were neighbors of your great grandfathers when my family lived at the “happiness is” trailer park out at the forks. His place was just across the fence. I grew up with the Mayfields, Millers, and Burgess’s. My aunt actually married Jim Miller. That makes me and you family. Henry had a very caring side to him that few people ever were allowed to see, he hid that from everyone for some reason. Your mom was a great lady too. I hope all is well with you.

    James

  3. Joelle burgess November 11, 2017

    I’d like to speed with the person who wrote about my mom and dad please contact me at joelleb145@gmail.com please it’s very important that I can speak to someone as soon as possible

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