• Special Agent Peter Hoyle of the Mendo Major Crimes Task Force has brought another Bulgarian pot pharma to justice. This one is Dimiter Kostantinov, formerly of Sofia presently of Huntington Beach. Three years ago, Hoyle bagged two other Bulgarians in the fertile hills of Covelo.
Ann Moorman defended those Bulgos, but Hoyle's latest international trophy, this Bulgo, is appearing before Ms. Moorman who is now a superior court judge.
And, oh! what a difference a little more authority makes. The evidence was almost the same as the Bulgos that the judge was defending a few short years ago, about 70 plants worth. And Hoyle nailed this Bulgo in just about the same location as he'd found the previous Bulgos — Bentley Ranch Road out of Covelo.
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• Phillip Frase was in civil court last week wearing a nice suit and so freshly barbered I scarcely recognized him. Last time I saw him he was sitting in the criminal dock with a long plaited beard and scraggly hair and looking positively Manson-esque. He was facing two separate murder charges, one in Mendocino County and one in Siskiyou County. He pled to manslaughter in the death of Steven Schmidt and the charges in Siskiyou County were dropped.
He got out on parole on October 3rd, he said, and had come home to dear old Mendo only to find that members of the Matthew Graves family had taken over his house on Bell Springs Road and had turned it into a marijuana grow site. Frase said he tried to get the Graves people to leave, but they chased him off, and he had to call the cops, only to receive a threatening phone call from Matt Graves. He was in court to get a temporary restraining order (TRO) to keep Graves away from him. Judge Cindee Mayfield granted the TRO.
Frase said he'd killed Steven Schmidt in self-defense, and looking through his file, I read the transcript from his prelim, wherein he told Detective Clint Byrnes that Schmidt struck him [Frase] and knocked him down. Frase said Schmidt had demanded a pound of weed to sell but Frase had refused and Schmidt hit him. While Frase was on the ground he found a length of pipe, and came up swinging, killing Schmidt with four blows to the head. Frase then fixed a noose around Schmidt’s neck and dragged him into the woods where he secured the body to a tree and covered it with debris.
Schmidt’s girlfriend, Kathy Troxell, grew worried over Schmidt’s absence and called the cops, who brought in a cadaver dog and found Schmidt's remains. Frase had also been seen driving Schmidt’s motor home, which was found in Fort Bragg. The DA wasn’t willing to go all the way to self-defense on this one, but they did offer Frase a reduction to manslaughter charges. At the time, Richard Petersen was representing Frase, and Frase said he would have taken the case to trial if Mr. Petersen hadn’t had to retire for health reasons. So he pled to manslaughter and soon got out on parole (he had already spent 499 days in the Mendocino jail) only to find Matt Graves ensconced on his land. Frase is currently living in motels in Willits and Ukiah, until he can get his property back.
Frase was also accused of murdering a Siskiyou woman who was involved, it is alleged, in a dope-growing business Frase had in that county before moving to Bell Springs Road, one of Mendocino County's more exciting neighborhoods.
How many people have restraining orders against Matt Graves? I asked Probation Officer Tim King, but he just waved his hand in disgust and exasperation. It seems law enforcement can do nothing with the jolly Graves, who beats Mendo in court every time he's prosecuted here. But on March 5th Graves goes to federal court in San Francisco, and the local authorities seem happy to be shed of “the Matt Graves problem,” as one officer characterized it.
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• The jury came back last Thursday with some good news and some bad news for Glenn Hughes. The good news was the jury found him Not Guilty of Count One, first degree murder, in the beating death of Jose Madrid just 13 months ago at the Hidden Pines Campground outside of Fort Bragg.
The bad news was they
found Hughes guilty of second degree murder, and with his record of prison priors, he’ll be going to prison for a long time just as Governor Brown has come under federal orders to thin out the state prison population. More bad news came in the form of a Guilty verdict on Count Two, using force likely to cause great bodily harm to Shannon Wilson, the late Joe Madrid’s girlfriend, who tried to stop the beating of Madrid. Sentencing won’t be until March 1st. Hughes is already pushing 60 so he's essentially looking at death by geriatrics.
Considering the impact the 911 call had on the jury — they could hear Madrid being beaten and Ms. Wilson frantic efforts to pull Hughes off Madrid, spending his golden years behind bars is perhaps the best defendant Hughes could have hoped for.
When defense attorney Carly Dolan brought up the unanswered questions as to how the injuries to the decedent’s head — which the County Medical Examiner admitted were “superficial” -- had caused his death, Hughes must have entertained some hope of acquittal. The actual “mechanism of death” was uncertain, and vital organs like the brain and heart were not preserved for further examination.
Ms. Dolan is too smart herself probably knew better than to stake her defense of Hughes on Madrid being dead before Hughes started beating on him, and in her closing statements she tried instead to get the jury to consider her client’s state of inebriation in hopes of getting the thing reduced to manslaughter. The jury instructions allowed for this possibility, but were not convinced that Hughes had been totally out of his mind from drink, mainly because of some of the things he said and did during the police interrogation.
Hughes lied about everything during the taped interview with the homicide detective about four hours after the event. His coherence did not seem consistent with someone who claimed to just been in a state of alcoholic blackout a few hours before. And at one point when Hughes was left alone in the interrogation room, he could be heard muttering to himself that he surely was going to be going to prison for the rest of his life.
When Hughes took the stand, he claimed he didn’t remember any of the police interview, ample time to sober up at least a bit, it seems. And all the jurors had been screened to make sure they had more than just a nodding familiarity with the effects of liquor on themselves and others.
A few hours before the verdict was returned, the jury had returned to the courtroom for clarification on one of the instructions about the law as it pertains to getting drunk out of one’s mind and beating someone up, in this case, as it applied to the beating of Ms. Shannon Wilson as she tried to stop Hughes.
And a little while later, Mr. Hughes went off to spend the rest of his days in prison.
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