Mendocino County Today: March 2, 2012

MENDOCINO COUNTY’S NEW PROSECUTOR, Paul Sequeira, 53, has sued a former Contra Costa County colleague. Sequeira alleges that Harold Jewett, 55, assaulted him during a hallway argument in March of 2010. Jewett says he was merely defending himself against Sequeira. Much of the dispute between the two men seems to have been fueled by office politics as each backed opposing candidates for DA in the 2010 Contra Costa County elections.

FLIP OUT OF THE WEEK (so far). Deputies were first called to the North State Street trailer park Wednesday morning about 8:30 where a young woman was said to be “running through the area and displaying bizarre behavior.” Bizarre behavior being a rather elastic phrase any more, deputies soon concluded that Lacey Lynn Mononi, 26, was merely drunk and animated beyond the normal parameters of alcohol intoxication. They told her to stay at home and get a grip on herself. Wednesday night, their second visit on the day to cool out Ms. Mononi, she was still hyper-loaded. On this second visit from law enforcement, Ms. Mononi threatened to kill the deputies and ran out the back door of her doublewide. She’d run about a hundred yards when deputies tackled her, removing two kitchen knives she’d hidden in her jacket. Ms. Mononi was arrested on “suspicion of threatening a peace officer, possession of a dagger or dirk, resisting arrest and violating probation.” She is being held at the Mendocino County Jail without bail.

STATE AND FEDERAL NARCS, on Wednesday (29 February) found 3,881 marijuana plants, 110 one-pound bags of dried pot and $420,000 in cash from two Eureka structures, one of which was described as a “yurt.” The raid team was apparently surprised that so much free enterprise was contained in such a modest structure. Michelle Gregory, a spokeswoman for the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, said State agents obtained a search warrant for the yurt and an adjoining house a week ago, and served them Wednesday with help from the Humboldt County Sheriff's department. The yurt's owners, 45-year-old John Eaton Cromwell (one of three elementary school teachers at tiny Maple Creek Elementary in Korbel, Humboldt County, about ten miles east of Arcata) and his girlfriend, 42-year-old Elisabeth Nergaard Olsen, were cited for cultivation of marijuana, possession for sale of marijuana and maintaining a drug house, but weren't arrested because they have four young children, according to the Humboldt County Sheriff's department. A third resident of the home, and apparently childless, 34-year-old Charles Bruzza of Portland, Oregon was jailed and held on $75,000 bail.

THOSE FEDERAL SUITS filed by the owners of medical marijuana dispensaries in the aftermath of last fall’s federal crackdown on dispensaries have not been successful. The med pot people’s suits basically allege that the raids on them by the Obama administration violated Obama’s pledge to leave them alone so long as they complied with state law. A federal judge based in Sacramento has dismissed the first dispensary suit to make it to him, declaring that the Justice Department remains free to enforce federal drug laws. The dispensaries were hoping that a 2009 Justice Department memo to federal prosecutors directing the prosecutors “not focus federal resources" on individuals who followed their state's medical marijuana law. This memo followed President Obama's 2008 campaign pledge to let states set their own medical marijuana policies, one of Obama’s many unkept pledges.

NO ONE was hurt by the dagger or dirk

That they found in her shirt when she went so berserk

She’d used too much booze

And had few screws to lose.

Good thing the jerks had no dirks in their yurt.