- You Could Save Dustin's Life
- Ukiah, Then & Now
- Iran Nuclear Agreement
- Like A Good Neighbor
- Remittance Men
- Fort Bragg: Outside Looking In
- Pardon Me
YOU COULD SAVE DUSTIN'S LIFE
To the editor:
Attention! Please read, you could save my life!
On March 9 at around 5:30 PM a white 2008 Toyota Tacoma driven by either Philip D'Angelo or Joshua Williamson collided with my 1995 green Toyota 4-Runner nearly pushing me into the river along Covelo Road. After stopping and attempting to exchange information the driver revved his engine and accelerated directly at me, nearly running me over as it left the scene of an accident.
After the Tacoma accelerated away I followed in order to obtain the license plate number and when I had cellphone service I phoned 911 reporting everything to the California Highway Patrol operator. The operator urged me to no longer follow the truck so I did not.
Two hours later I was pulled over by Mendocino County Sheriff Deputy Jason Cox who searched my vehicle and arrested me.
As it turns out the driver of that vehicle is either dating the daughter of or the grandson of retired police officer Lester Brown and it was his house the driver drove to. At that same location Deputy Cox is heard on recorded audio having a high fiving, handshakes all around reunion with Brown. Immediately Cox returned and charged me with attempted murder with a BB gun he found in a box of toys in the rear of my truck. And assault with a deadly weapon, my truck, from the initial accident.
Due to this lie I could be given September 19 at trial a 25 to life sentence per charge.
Please, it was a busy day that day; many cars passed. Someone saw the accident and they could save my life.
I am a 40-year-old father of three and loving husband with 40-year-old roots in Mendocino County. I am a licensed barber who works hard to keep his family healthy and happy. This lie could end it all.
If you saw the initial accident or if you may have heard Philip D'Angelo or Joshua Williamson bragging or telling the truth of what happened, please either call my lawyer or write a letter to me personally.
Lawyer: Keith Faulder, 707-463-0103.
390 West Stanley Street, Ukiah 95482
Sincerely,
Dustin Henderson A# 55535,
Mendocino County Jail
951 Low Gap Road, Ukiah 95482.
UKIAH, THEN & NOW
Editor,
I remember a Ukiah where there was no mentally ill, drunks, or drug addicts roaming the streets and embarrassing city council members. No county supervisor had to take it upon himself to rid the streets of the homeless and the mess they create. There was no urine or feces left for shopkeepers to have to clean up and there was none of those dreaded shopping carts strung all over town. At only five years old, it was safe for me to walk alone from Luce Street all the way to Yokayo Elementary School (now city hall) without any worry of being accosted by undesirables. The children of Ukiah were given the opportunity to be “free range children.” Ukiah was indeed a very nice and safe town to live in.
In the Ukiah I lived in there was place to get help for these individuals mentioned above. That place was called the Mendocino State Hospital, which most of us in Ukiah at that time referred to as Talmage. Talmage treated thousands of people each year with mental health issues, alcohol dependency, and substance abuse issues. Not only did Talmage provide housing and psychiatric treatment, it had a medical center that was at least 10 times larger than the 8 room hospital located on Dora Street (where I was born on July 4th 1954). Despite the horror stories of the State’s Mental Health System, Talmage was a good place. People did not have to suffer or die on the streets. And, just like the movie “one flew over the Coo coo’s nest,” a large portion of the patients there were voluntary commitments and did not want to leave.
When the hospital closed in 1972, things changed rather rapidly. Talmage was forced to release hundreds of patients to the downtown streets and surrounding areas of Ukiah. Many of them moved on to who knows where, but a good portion of them stayed in town and found housing within the community. A lot of local citizen’s opened their doors to these individuals and some profited well by doing so. Some of these homes were good and some were not so good. I know of one place on Orchard Street that housed several of these former patients in their garage. A local business man in downtown Ukiah transformed his motel across the street from the Palace into a housing facility where he as their payee took most of their social security checks from them and gambled it away while on long trips to San Francisco. Sometimes he left his tenants with no air conditioning or heat for weeks at a time. The place finally caught on fire and several mentally ill tenants died. The owner received a large insurance settlement and the building was remodeled and put to use as an office complex. Jim Jones and the People’s Temple also took on quite a few of them, where we later learned that many were beaten and abused and eventually committed mass suicide.
Plowshares stepped up and opened their doors at an old church on Luce Street and started feeding a lot of these people who were left hungry. For many of them, Plowshares provided their only meal of the day. Today, people blame Plowshares as the problem and want to close its doors. Yes, Ukiah has seen its ups and down when it comes to society’s downtrodden. I could go on and on about the history of Ukiah and the mentally ill. To me, deinstitutionalization of our state hospital was a grave mistake, and it changed Ukiah and America for the worse. Now we focus on how to run the undesirables out of town or throwing them in jail instead of providing the humane services that they need in order to survive. As a community who once had all the answers, we have taken many steps backwards and have not evolved as we should have.
James Marmon
Ukiah
IRAN NUCLEAR AGREEMENT
Dear Editor:
The agreement Iran and the six countries reached is a many page complex agreement that lifts sanctions and places very strict limits on Iran's nuclear program over an extended period of time. The agreement obviously had a lot of give and take during the negotiations. As expected prime minister Netanyahu and the Congress's war hawks have condemned the agreement. The critics in Congress do not not have any suggestions other than to say no to the agreement Their preference is to bomb Iran which would be an insane action. Do they think Iran would not react? We do not need another war, plus we need the Shia militias to defeat ISIS in Anbar Province. Obama needs to get on his bully pulpit and and make it clear what are the consequences of not accepting the agreement. The war hawks love to have American boots on the ground in the Middle East which will end up with the loss of American lives
In peaceand love,
Jim Updegraff
Sacramento
LIKE A GOOD NEIGHBOR
Editor,
I am writing to you today as a result of a recent serious accident. This accident caused me to be put up in the hospital and as of the writing of this article I have been here over 60 days — 66 to be exact. I instantly became unable to care for my dog, home; unable to work and quickly had to think about how to overcome these obstacles, all the while continuing to heal and maintain a positive outlook.
I quickly experienced a kindness and giving from those close by, my neighbors, that I am thankful for, humbled by and grateful that god and the universe allowed me to experience such grace. Let me not forget to mention that often overlooked neighbor; we are aware of their presence, maybe take for granted, too often do not show appreciation for, yet when the time arises, they show up without equivocation — those are the Emergency personnel of Anderson Valley fire, emergency and ambulance-first responders.
Do you have neighbors as described above? Are you the giving, kind neighbor described above?
What value do you put on 'helping others'? Being kind to your neighbor(s)? Do you value the impact these actions have on the communities we live in? Do you believe that it is in every man's interest to be a good neighbor? To be a catalyst to creating a community filled with belonging, identity, empathy, understanding, and a strong sense of community? How and why do some of us ignore these facets?
Isn't life about our connection with other human beings? Marriage, BFF, brothers, sisters, mom, dad, cousins, etc.
None of you can ignore that in every segment of life — interaction with other human beings is inevitable. Work, getting groceries, fixing your car, taking your children to sporting events, the visit to your doctor or dentist. In all exchanges with others, each of us has great influence over how that encounter will be.
A simple smile is very powerful and brings positive energy to the recipient. Please and thank you should be the standard. So why wouldn't anyone take a proactive stance and be the good neighbor? The rewards are apparent and the environment you create is so much better than the alternative. It is within our individual powers to become the good neighbor. Your efforts toward this endeavor will create a harmony this world seriously needs.
Being positive and caring towards your neighbor, towards all people is a powerful tool, one that can not only make your community a happier place, but has a profound effect on us, individually. All of us have a choice, daily. We can choose to smile instead of frown. We can choose to be kind instead of being unkind or simply absent. These very simple steps — all of us should behave like a good neighbor.
It is very important I use this platform to give a special, warm, deserving thank you to my neighbors, my friends, who have gone out of their way “to be a good neighbor.” I cannot thank them enough and really owe them so much more than just “thank you.” I am indebted to you; More than grateful and quite humbled for your grace. I love you. Thanks and big Gar hugs to Carin Bokoff, Sue Marcott, Kay Jablonski, Guy Rowe, Peter Hudson and Jay. Also thanks to Bob Lawson for his visit with Kay. I would be remiss if I did not also give a big, special thank you to the personnel of the volunteer Anderson Valley Fire Department and first responders. Your presence in our community is quite valuable and greatly appreciated. Special thank you to Colin, Sarah and Andres. You guys (gals) kick butt!
Gary Margolis
Yorkville
REMITTANCE MEN
Editor:
You'll never get a job with the Ukiah Daily Journal, Bruce, if you submit this clip of your crisp reportorial prose: “McKenty had been a loyal programmer at Mendo County Radio prior to his purge for the crime of whatever it was — muted criticism of station management, as I recall.”
Bruce, do search your memory, whatever it is, or was.
Gordon Black
Mendocino
Ed Reply: Concern for my employment prospects is doubly appreciated coming from a guy who's never been employed, perhaps because of his life long misunderstanding of that old saw about brevity being the soul of wit. You've always had brevity down, Gordy, but we're still looking for wit. As I recall, McKenty somehow ran afoul of The Dragon, thus joining KZYX's lengthy roster of the non-personed. PS. About your employment history: How have you managed? Are you one of these latter-day remittance men so common in Mendocino County? Reading liner notes at an obscure public radio station doesn't pay all that much, does it?
FORT BRAGG: OUTSIDE LOOKING IN
Editor,
An obvious fact of life is that local government is as it were by definition perilous to freedom. The power that is conferred by even apparently minor offices creates tremendously fertile soil for the cultivation of crafty schemes and profitable public manipulation. Therefore, any local government is basically about the rules that protect the people from their officials.
California is of course in many respects a world leader. In California, officials are held to account, at least in large part, by the elegant little Brown Act. This short chapter, a mere 668 words has the power and beauty of expression that one finds in other mighty documents of freedom. To quote from the opening paragraph of the act, and speaking of public officials, “…it is the intent of the law that their actions be taken openly and that their deliberations be conducted openly. The people of this State do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies which serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may retain control over the instruments they have created.”
Every action, protocol and procedure is informed by these provisions of the Brown Act.
Recently, the people of the City of Fort Bragg undertook the hard task of the reform of a defiant, out of control, hostile city government. At issue was a spate of development that the people knew at a glance to be entirely undesirable in every sense.
City hall planned to rip up our main street for what they called a “merge project”; they undertook a fight to the death with the community on behalf of a developer who intends to build a vastly ugly shopping center on one of our best and most used green areas; and they ignited the revolution by a really bad proposal to participate in probable tax evasion, trample the Brown Act, and make a sweetheart deal with the gang that has a lock on homeless money, a considerable pile.
Now they propose to gut our beautiful historic Old Coast Hotel and turn it into fancy offices for the social services industry and the distributors of psychotropic drugs to the homeless. To replace, in other words, in the center of our city, what had once been a main driver of our local tourist economy, a banal monument to dependency, institutionalization and prescription drug distribution with the broad objective of controlling the behaviors of street people.
It was too much. People approached the elected leadership and got nothing but insults, really bitter ones. And the city government was so arrogantly complacent, so utterly unwilling to listen or compromise that they forced a lawsuit, undertaken as a last resort by exemplary citizens. Besides the lawsuit, there was an effort to recall the mayor. And a ballot initiative to preserve downtown zoning was qualified, as The City, foot dragging throughout, was finally forced to certify it. Now the matter will go before the people on the ballot and the hotel deal is stopped.
As the public discourse and debate on the matter proceeded over the last half-year, a series of emails between city officials was at one point made public. A city official released them to the political opposition and then promptly retired. These emails reveal in graphic detail what was already understood by the people. The deal for the acquisition of the hotel had been made not just with the help of The City but had been aggressively pursued by The City as somehow an exciting opportunity. The City got a big public grant using city time, city expertise, city people as the private owners of the Coast Hotel proposed an outrageous tax avoiding scheme where the seller got almost $2 million in write-offs and another million from the state. The city officials didn’t tell anybody officially, but they got their heads together, sent the emails flying among themselves, conferenced and conversed and generally got so personally excited that they were just barely able to avoid violating the Brown Act. They may have avoided violation by carefully limiting the number of city council members who were mentioned in their emails. But it was a very close thing. If one more city councilman had even seen one more email, it all would have been illegal. Or if it can be proved that one more guy knew of any of it, they will still be flatly busted.
What can't be disputed is that what the Fort Bragg government apparatus did do was to make a deal before there was any public notification and then defended their deal to the death against public outrage. They limited notification to the pubic to the absolute legal minimum (four days), refused any kind of dialogue. They declined to hold public meetings, and even when they were sued just flat deadpanned to the indignant people that they'd done everything by the book.
The Brown Act says that “the people insist on remaining informed so that they can retain control over the instruments [the city government] that they have created.” In this case the city council acted in secrecy and defended their secret deal by subterfuge and misrepresentation. The Brown Act says “the people do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies that serve them.” In this case the officials of local government insisted upon their own sovereign right to determine policy without public participation or knowledge, and then fought for their deal by all means fair and foul against the people. The violation is that they did it in deliberate secrecy.
What will the Grand Jury say?
Rex Gressett
Fort Bragg
PARDON ME
Editor,
A few days ago President Obama commuted 46 people from federal prisons around the country who were serving time for non-violent drug ‘abuse’ cases. Most (not all) involved marijuana. This means he only has another 60,000 people to go! Maybe more!?
As illogical & nonsensical as they are, there were parameters to the pseudo*pardons. One being; the commuted (not pardoned), had to have served at least 10 years of their overly harsh and ‘unfair’ sentences. Which sparks the next fitting question.. Isn’t 10 years for any nonviolent drug offense already a punishment that doesn’t fit the crime? Maybe we should first ask, what is the crime? Where is the wrong? Who’s been wronged? What does the marijuana user do that alcohol and diet soda drinkers don’t do? What does the toker do that a smoker doesn’t? What do pain pills do that cannabis can’t? We have been conditioned to imagine there is a crime going on here. Ask yourself, what is the crime of it? WHAT IS IT? Are marijuana users supping at the wrong water fountain?
The next irrational remedy is jail. What solution is satisfied by putting growers/users in jail? Are we stopping or even slowing the use of marijuana? Are we saving public funds by locking them up for however many months and years? Where is the justice in marijuana laws? Are the growers being punished because they’ve hurt someone? Is marijuana the reason our society is declining? Does anyone ask themselves why we spend so much time and concern with marijuana?
The authorities have two overriding ‘motives’ with regard to marijuana. Money & MONEY! Not necessarily in that order.
Marijuana has become the biggest economic component in Northern California. Everyone north of Santa Rosa is obliged [sic] to the marijuana ‘industry,’ whether they are directly involved or enjoy the fruits of supporting or being ancillary to it. When the police and authorities go after the growers, they are going after their neighbors and constituents. They are hurting their own communities for their purloined piece of the lucre. There is no moral issue here. There is no ethical point.
There is just a group of people that exploit the ambiguities of an organic medicament and abuse their force to extort and steal part of the booty. This is what it’s really about. Simply, a couple of public agencies insuring their places in the economic pecking order by willfully hurting and stealing from others. The terrorizing of family farms by the authorities has nothing to do with public safety or a moral imperative. It’s all about the wampum.
No one would be growing marijuana if no one is buying it. The hypocrisy in this is glaring to anyone who bends their back and sweats to earn a living as a grower of marijuana. There is no shortage of demand and there is no shortage of ‘respectable’ patients either. Musicians, doctors, athletes, lawyers, clerks, mechanics, retailers, carpenters, judges, engineers, firemen and cops (to mention a few). The hypocrisy is as sticky as THC.
This means the same neighbors who stand-by as the farmers get arrested and shaken down are complicit in the corruption and criminal behavior of the police who take advantage of antique notions and contrived legalities in order to exploit and hurt their own neighbors for money. The sheriffs are no different than a delinquent who robs his next door neighbor because he wants something he doesn’t have the will to earn.
It’s really time to stop! Time to stop hurting others for no good reason. The sheriff and the DA need to get on the justifiable side of this issue and rethink their terror for money strategy. It would be beneficial for all to work together and appreciate their contributions. This is not as complex as some would like to make out. It is really a matter of community. We can be greedy and short sighted and let a good crop divide us, Or we can work together to make Mendocino County the place people come to get the best marijuana grown (before they stop in Napa & Sonoma for wine). It’s only a matter of time. Why not now?
Robin Woulde
Ukiah
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