Faulder was referring to a case involving a fight between neighbors wherein the wife had started the fight but had called her husband to come finish it. But when wifey saw that hubbykins was losing, she called the cops. This case was passed on to Deputy DA Beth Norman who passed it on to the newest hire in the office to sort out. Wifey and Hubbykins had claimed to be the victims but in fact had been the aggressors.

Now 56, Willie Williams is the nicest guy you’d ever care to meet. Even the toughest prosecutor in the DA’s arsenal of flinty prosecutors, Kitty Houston, the scourge of every dope-smoking, coke-snortin’ junkie, tweeker, and prescription-drug addict with a 707 area code… even Kitty had to admit she had a “sort of” a soft spot for Willie Williams.

But it turns out to have been something of an understatement.

Grubbs & Diaz

Sheriff Bobby Grubbs is the top cop in Brownwood, Texas, a small town of some twenty thousand church-going souls smack in the center of the Texas vastness between Abilene and Fort Worth. Brownwood has a big reputation for drug arrests in a state with a bigger reputation for life sentences for even small amounts of marijuana.

So here comes a long-haired Mendocino County kid tooling through 2am Brownwood in a battered old Mercedes station wagon with California plates. It was Chris Diaz, 22, the married father of two children ages 4 and 1. Diaz was immediately pulled over on your basic pretext, as in pretext stop, as in automatic pretext stop of a long-haired kid driving through town in the middle of the night in some kinda hippie wagon with California plates.

Ms. Barr

The cop said Diaz’s registration tags had expired, which they demonstrably had not. Soon, all four of Brownwood’s night shift cops were on-scene, and what ensued became Brown County’s top media story for the next three months, the town not having seen so much excitement since Candy Barr fled the place in 1954 to make pioneer porn films, get herself popped for pot smoking in ’57 and mixed up in the Kennedy Assassination in a kind of peripheral way in ’63.

So young Mr. Diaz tells the cops, “No, I don’t have a driver’s license and I’m going to video you boys while you go about your cop business.” That statement got Diaz jerked out of his antique station wagon and handcuffed face down in the roadside Texas dirt.

The four cops proceeded to break into the kid’s locked suitcase where they found a whole half ounce of marijuana product, which Diaz, in and out of hospitals since infancy for life-threatening breathing difficulties, says was and is his medicine. He and his family has since argued with convincing plausibility that cannabis is the only way he can find relief from crippling asthma attacks. Diaz also possesses his 215 card and a doctor’s prescription. In California he’d be street legal. In Texas, a half-ounce of pot can get you 5 to 99 years in prison, which the young man is now facing.

Diaz lives on the Mendocino Coast. Diaz’s mom, who also lives in Mendocino County, is from Amarillo, and his dad lives in Austin, a kind of Texas sanctuary city where the dope laws and the law generally is reasonably applied. Diaz was driving to Austin when Sheriff Grubbs waylaid him in Brownwood.

As the kid languished in the Brownwood jail his family went gone broke raising bail and temporarily staying in Brownwood to fight the case, watching the Brownwood judge refuse to hear any argument having to do with marijuana as medicine. Then Diaz’s Brownwood public defender dropped dead just after he’d informed Diaz that he was headed to the Texas State pen for at least five years.

At that news, Diaz did what any sensible young family man would do — he got to hell outta Texas and came home to his kids in Mendocino County, California.

And Texas came looking for him. As did federal marshals who drove down from Eureka to bust in on Diaz’s mom’s house looking for the kid. So, right about here you ask, “Do you mean to say Texas wants to extradite this young man for a half-ounce of cannabis? They must want him for a bunch of other crimes.” Nope.

That’s it. the half-ounce. Diaz is not wanted for anything else except being in full possession of his survival instincts by leaving Texas to avoid being locked up for who knows how many years. And there he was in the parking lot of Mendosa’s Market in Mendocino Village on Sunday afternoon the 30th of October, confident that Texas was behind him, when deputy J.D. Comer of the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department pulls up and says, “Gotcha.” Diaz’s mom immediately pulled out a megaphone and amplified her son’s sudden and wholly unexpected capture, the result of a snitch-tip by the way, but Diaz was off to the County Jail in Ukiah where he’s been ever since and where he awaits an extradition hearing in Judge Anne Moorman’s courtroom on Wednesday, November, 30th at 1:30 p.m.

Petitions opposed to the young man’s forced return to Brownwood have quickly filled up, and his plight is being widely publicized. We’ll be in court with him next week and we hope you’ll be there, too. This kid should not be sent back to Texas where they’re laying for him and can be counted on to max him out.

Where did Judge Henderson go?

The detectives working the case are expected to present the court with a number of Hurtado’s co-defendants.  There’s been an outbreak of gang violence in recent months, but the overall problem has been festering for years. South State Street in Ukiah is pretty much a rural gangland, and Noyo Beach in Fort Bragg is often the scene of gang initiation parties involving as many as 30 youths at a time.

There’s also a dummy glut at the Mendocino County Courthouse. We’ll get to it.

Deborah Cano-Johnson had just related her eyewitness account of how her estranged husband, Marvin “Junior” Johnson, 33, and three other Willits men, had suddenly appeared in the Lake Mendocino Bu Shay campsite the afternoon of July 20th campsite that she shared with as many as 15 other homeless people, and shot two men, killing Joe Litteral, 40, and seriously wounding Brandon Haggett, 20.

Last April, four methamphetamine users, brought to the Hanes Ranch by a very long distance Hanes cousin named Holly Phillips, 46, helped themselves to a number of valuable items while the Hanes family was away. Since the visitors had been the only people at the sprawling ranch deep in the hills west of Boonville when the home and outbuildings were burglarized, Ms. Phillips and her friends instantly became the suspects, the only suspects, and soon transformed from likely status to full-on perps by a confirming abundance of evidence.

Kenneth Hanover, Gabriel & Ira Bowes

On July 9th, Ira Bowes was walking along UP Ave­nue in Covelo, and as he passed the Hanover residence, he became the object of what spirited men refer to as “fighting words.” Being outnumbered three to one, Ira kept walking, apparently planning, as he walked, to get himself some reinforcements and return to the scene of the insult.

Mr. Bowes is no stranger to violence. He’d taken a bullet through the chest about a year ago, and this inci­dent, it may be safe to say, had taught him what’s called “an object lesson,” the lesson being that up close combat with certain persons can be life threatening.

The patriarch of the Hanover clan, Kenneth Hanover, is a barrel-chested, fit man in his late 40s. Mr. Hanover has two fine, strong, movie star-handsome sons, the youngest just 18. The two sons do not care for Ira Bowes. It was them who’d rained insults down on Ira Bowes as Bowes walked past their home.

But is was dad, Mr. Kenneth Hanover, who took a bullet in the mouth for his boys on that violent day last July.

Francis’s fingerprints were found at the scene of the crime, but he told Anderson Valley’s resident deputy, Craig Walker, that he’d never been to the Sanchez home in his life.

Henderson, pushing 70, is the oldest judge in the Mendocino County Courthouse except for a few retired judges who fill in occasionally.

“Even in all my years as a lawyer, I never saw anything more disgusting than this,” he added.

We’ve embalmed some truly hideous characters in these pages, but never have we encountered a more abominable specimen of depravity than Steven James Henry.

Last year, Chef solidified his local reputation as a hard guy when he stabbed another kid for stepping on a red handkerchief, red being the Norteños color.

But there was one more test he had to pass: He had to show the gang that he was loyal; that he wouldn’t be tempted to try and save himself, that he would sacrifice himself and even break his poor mother’s heart for the glory of the gang.

And this he has done spectacularly.

Her Ladyship, Deborah Mefferd

Just ask the wine writers (sic) at our best newspapers.

In Anderson Valley, where the Aristocracy of the Vine holds royal sway over much of the labor force up to and including elected officials, there’s no such thing as a wine drunk.

So, when a member of the Royal Vine got popped by local deputy Craig Walker who couldn’t help but see her vehicle swerve across the double yellow near Philo, Her Ladyship took it personally, and then she took it to court.