THE MENDOCINO Major Crimes Task Force, led by the legendary Peter Hoyle, was busy in Point Arena this week. Seems that someone with the initials P.R., living on Schooner Gulch Road South of Point Arena, had either dispatched or received a hunk of dope or dope-related cash by Fed Ex, still one of the most convenient delivery systems for marijuana from the Mendocino Coast. On the hunt for the mysterious “P.R.”, Hoyle and his commandos rushed up Schooner Gulch Road, first arriving at Pete Rose’s property. (Mr. Rose is not the famous ballplayer.) The Fed Ex package wasn’t Pete’s, but Hoyle nevertheless confiscated Pete's computer, records and miscellaneous other pieces of Rose's property.
ROSE has been tossed before, big time. Thanks to intervention by the Innocence Project, Rose was released from prison some years ago after DNA proved he was not guilty of the rape he'd been falsely convicted of. Rose was well compensated for the 8 years taken from him by the false accusation and bought himself a place on Schooner Gulch. Rose may be in for another cash payout if the invasion of his home was unwarranted.
WHEN HOYLE didn’t find what he wanted at Pete Rose’s place, and working his way through the P.R.s in the neighborhood, Hoyle and Company moved on to Peter Reimuller’s home deeper in Schooner Gulch where Hoyle again came up empty.
ABOUT HERE Point Arenans were remembering the infamous Mendo raid on Billy Hay's Point Arena ranch some years ago that made Hay rich. In that one, a Mendo-led posse ran into Hay's house early one morning yelling the usual TV-derived obscenities and waving guns at the Hay family. The cops proceeded to keep Mom, Pop and the Hay kids in handcuffs and pj's all day while they ransacked the premises. No dope, no dope-related cash. Hay sued and won $8 million tax dollars.
FINDING NADA at Reimuller's place, Hoyle proceeded on to carpenter and boar hunter extraordinaire, Bob Nobles’ property. There’s nothing PR about Bob’s name – not one “P”; not one “R”, unless you call him Robert. And Nobles was clean.
FOG EATERS are still grumbling about a Hoyle-led raid on a rental home on Port Road in Point Arena in March 2012. In that one, the tenants of a guy previously busted for growing at that address were jacked up simply because of the owner's bust. The owner, (who wants to remain nameless because he says, “The DA still has my left nut in a vice until I’m off probation the end of 2013.”)… This guy had moved out and rented the place to a couple of guys from Hawaii who liked to surf. The home was only a hop, skip and jump from the waves at Arena Cove. The surfer dudes were rarely home and paid their rent on time.
SO HERE COMES HOYLE and his Task Force along with a couple of Fish and Game wardens. Guns drawn, the dope hunters asked for the owner of the home who, of course, wasn't there because he'd rented the place to the surfers. “Where’s (the owner), I have a warrant for his arrest. Hoyle demanded. The surfer dude explained that the owner didn’t live there under their lease, and so on and a safe on the premises was empty.
THE HOMEOWNER: “So I called my lawyer, and he called Tom Allman, DA Eyster… who all said there was NO warrant for my arrest. My lawyer tells them they have a cop over on the coast saying they have a warrant out for my arrest. We want to find out what’s going on. It ended with the Task Force pulling the few plants the renters had growing, and went home without any arrests or confiscations. The renters had posted the medical marijuana script documentation but it was ignored by the federally-funded Task Force who tossed the place. My renters moved because they were told by Hoyle of the Task Force to 'leave here and never come back again'. So that’s what they did. They went back to Hawaii.” ( – Debra Keipp reporting)
THE COUNTY IS POISED to privatize its mental health services. Today (Tuesday the 21st) the Supervisors will hire a pair of contractors to provide mental health services for the mentally ill among Mendocino County's children and adults. Redwood Management Company will get $8.8 million annually to provide children's mental health services, and Ortner Management Group (OMG!) will get $6.7 million to handle adult mental cases. The contracts would cover the 2013-14 fiscal year “with five additional renewals through 2019,” according to the staff report. Adults younger than 21 will get emergency services “24/7 Access Centers ... inland and on the coast.”
“PERSONS with a psychiatric or addiction disorder may not show visible signs of injury or illness; they often suffer extreme waiting times when competing for the attention of emergency room staff treating other critically ill patients or waiting for a bed,” according to the OMG contract. OMG assures us that they will provide an “access center” from where they will dispatch patients to North Valley Behavioral Health, Saint Helena Hospital, Woodland Memorial Hospital, Aurora Behavioral Healthcare and Marin General Hospital, “where stays could last three to seven days.” The Sequoia Psychiatric Treatment Center, a locked facility in Yuba City, would provide rehabilitation services as “an alternative to some inpatient admissions ... a court-ordered placement site for persons incompetent to stand trial, a short-term placement for difficult to place clients and a moderate-term placement for clients with persistent behavioral problems,” according to the contract with OMG.
TWENTY-FOUR HOUR, intensive residential care would be available to clients “who are low functioning, difficult to place or have mild to moderate behavioral problems,” and would aim to “prepare clients for personal responsibility and a return to community-based living,” the contract states. Stays could last three to 12 months. Community living centers will be established in Ukiah and Fort Bragg where mental health patients could stay from one to six months.
THIS IS A HECKUVA lot of money for “services” that are basically stop-gap, but Mendocino County or any other place hasn't been able to provide long-term care for the dependent mentally ill, relying for years on the County Jail to house the severe cases. What to do with the increasing numbers of crazy people roaming the land should be resolved at the state and federal levels of government, but it is now the responsibility of individual counties. How long can Mendocino County afford to pay out annual millions to temporarily house a growing population of permanently crippled individuals?
HAL TITEN, 79, of Redwood Valley, was arrested Monday for failing to register as a sex offender. We've long considered Titen emblematic of public education in Mendocino County, then and now. A long time administrator with the County Office of Education, Titen, back in 1999, had relocated video equipment from the County's education headquarters at Talmage to the back room of a bar he operated on North State Street, Ukiah, where Titen used the educational equipment to make pornographic films starring underage Ukiah girls, an enterprise that proved even a little too much for the authorities of the time and Titen was arrested and packed off to the state pen. Another MCOE crook, Jack Ward, also did some County time for helping himself to tax-funded property from the educational efforts he allegedly supervised. MCOE, at the time, was a nest of thieves and incompetents, among them Paul Tichinin, presently functioning as the County's Superintendent of Schools. Tichinin, and the rest of the gang at Talmage, naturally claimed they had no idea what their pal Titen was up to, and Tichinin not only went on to become tuti di capo of the entire redundant apparatus, distinguishing himself a few years ago with a public attack on a teacher's rep as a racist for describing Ukiah High School's administration as niggardly during union negotiations. These characters set the edu-tone for all of Mendocino County where versions of them preside over all of our individual school districts.
TYLER G. FIELDS, 19, of Ukiah drowned Tuesday (May 14th) in Lake Mendocino His body was recovered by Sheriff's Department divers early Tuesday evening. Fields was reported missing a little after 3 Tuesday afternoon by the three other young men he'd been swimming with. All four had gone into the water at the South Boat Ramp, designated as a “swim at your own risk” area. The Lake is already quite low. The swimmers had apparently been trying to reach a small island that appears when the Lake drains early.
THE LOST COAST MANHUNT for Shane Miller, presumed killer of his wife and two little girls in Shasta County, has been scaled back, way back. No sign of Miller has been found in the Petrolia area of Humboldt County where Miller was last seen nearly three weeks ago. Miller grew up in the Petrolia area.
LAST TUESDAY Sheriff Allman told the Board of supervisors about Mendocino County’s limited role in the manhunt for Miller: “We have received a request and we have accepted the mutual aid request from the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office regarding the triple homicide suspect who was last seen in the Mattole-Petrolia area. Our SWAT team has been activated. We have responded to the area. We will be there through tomorrow night (Wednesday night, May 15). It's a 48-hour commitment. We responded yesterday. Sheriff Mike Downey and I have been in contact every day with this. The suspect was last seen in an area close to the northern part of our county — the Whale Gulch area and part of the Lost Coast Wilderness area. Our SWAT team is there. It is similar to the unfortunate Bassler situation. Humboldt County was one of the first sheriff's office to respond to our request for mutual aid in the Bassler case. So we made a decision to work with them closely and hopefully resolve this as soon as possible, not just for public safety but for the quality of life in the Petrolia-Mattole area.”
LAST AUGUST, a 79-year-old retired contractor from Fort Bragg named Howard Moore was arrested by a Mackerricher State Park ranger for (allegedly) arguing with State Parks rangers over a drainage pipe that apparently served Moore's home near the park. Its installation had been approved by the County, but for some reason Parks staff removed it even though it was not on Parks property. A few hours after Moore complained to a ranger about the pipe's removal, Moore went to the Parks office at Mackerricher to explain his objections. At the office, Moore says, he was ordered out of his truck, manhandled to the ground by three rangers, arrested for disturbing the peace and resisting arrest, taken to the County Jail, held overnight, booked, paid his $10,000 bail, which his wife raised in cash, given his bail money back and released. No charges were filed against him. Moore has formally complained to State Parks. We hope to have a full account of the Moore Affair soon, but we can say preliminarily that we don't think force is necessary on a guy that old.
FOLLOWING THREE HOURS of grisly testimony Wednesday, Wilson L. “Josh” Tubbs III, 38, of Fort Bragg, was bound over for trial on charges of “child abuse resulting in death.” A-month-old infant, Emerald Herriet, was carried unconscious by Tubbs, her foster father, to Coast Hospital December 2nd of 2012. Tubbs said the baby had fallen from her changing table, but the baby, as subsequently determined at Oakland Children's Hospital where Baby Emerald died, had suffered extensive head and brain injuries over “a period of several weeks to several months.”
TUBBS told DA investigator Kevin Bailey that he had “slapped the child upside the head” to stop the child from crying, but Dr. Rachel Gilgoff, a pediatrician specializing in child abuse, testified that the autopsy revealed that the baby had been severely beaten on more than one occasion.
DR. GILGOFF SAID, “This was one of the worst cases I have seen so far in my career, and definitely evidence of a violent physical assault that happened around December 1st. But I think what also makes it horrific for me is that it probably could have been prevented if people had identified something happening probably around November 2nd.”
WHY THE CHILD was placed in Tubbs' home by the Mendocino County office of Children's Protective Services is not known. He has at least one methamphetamine-related arrest and was in no way capable of caring for an infant.
IN YET ANOTHER SIGN of the Apocalypse, on May 13th, the Sheriff's Department tells us, “deputies from the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office were detailed to investigate the report of an indecent exposure incident which had occurred on May 12th near the Eel River in Leggett. Deputies contacted an adult female who advised she had been at the river swimming with some adult aged friends and their children (pre-teenagers & teenagers) when they noticed a white male adult above them in the bushes. The adult female advised the suspect had his pants down with exposed genitals and appeared to be masturbating while watching the group of swimmers. The swimmers were able to locate the suspect’s vehicle and provided the license plate number to Deputies. Further investigation revealed the vehicle was registered to Carlton Lawrence Draper, 53, lately of Geyserville. Through investigative efforts deputies discovered Draper was a registered sex offender and was currently on probation in Mendocino County for a similar offense. One of the swimmers was able to positively identify Draper in a photographic line up. A stop and arrest Be-On-The-Look-Out was issued by Deputies for Draper in regards to the incident. On May 14, Draper was contacted by Deputies from the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office and arrested for the violations. Draper was subsequently booked into the Mendocino County Jail where he was to be held in lieu of $15,000 bail on charges of indecent exposure and violation of probation.”
IN BETWEEN CALLS to round up weenie waggers, deputies were summoned to mile marker 1.04 on the Willits end of the Covelo Road where a traveler had discovered a pile of charred bones, human bones which have since been packed off to the state lab for closer analysis. Lots of non-experts, including cops, can tell at a glance if bones are human or not. These must at least be 'tweeners.
POINT ARENA HIGH SCHOOL has hired a new principal with almost no apparent school board or public involvement, but a hiring that may turn out to be valid. Point Arena Superintendent Colleen Cross made the surprise announcement on Thursday that a Mr. Matt Strahl will replace Warren Galletti who quit a couple of months ago to take a position in Ukiah. There was no explanation why Galletti quit, and no explanation of how or why Mr. Strahl was hired, just that there would be a meet and greet for him on May 29. Mr. Strahl will come to Point Arena from Calaveras County (about 80 miles southeast of Sacramento) where he was principal of John Vierra High School and Vallecito High School, both of which are Alternative/Continuing Education Schools (kind of like the whole Point Arena high school is now, in fact). According to a recent report in the Sonora Union Democrat, that district’s off-site continuation school headed by Strahl was closed for budgetary reasons and the principal and teachers were laid off as the students were brought back to a remodeled science building in Angel’s Camp. The total enrollment at the continuation schools formerly headed by Strahl was about 50 students, and of those 50 students there were just two Hispanic students. In March, when the budget cuts were announced, Strahl was quoted in the Calaveras Enterprise saying, “Due to budget cuts and declining enrollment, the district needs to cut about $440,000 from their budget. My job will be one of the cuts made. It is not something I like, but it is the reality of life and business. I know they (the district) would like to keep me, but someone has to go. No one needs to be mad or upset about the situation and go talk to people (board members or other administrators) or accuse people of doing something wrong. … All I ask for is your support during this time and if you hear of an administrative job in California education, please let me know or put in a good word for me.”
GIVE THIS MAN an A-plus for humility and all-round intelligence. How unlike the burbling twaddle we get from most of the county's educational leadership. We like him already, but is Mendocino County ready for an intelligent school administrator?
THE LAST TIME Point Arena hired a principal from out of the area (who also happened to be named Matt — Matt Murray, a former English professor with idealistic views on elementary education and serious standards for teachers. Murray was quickly undermined by both Point Arena’s torpid elementary staff and then-superintendent Mark Iacuaniello. Murray was fired after less than two years without explanation. He sued the appallingly treacherous Iacuaniello for breach of promise and narrowly lost in a civil trial. (The jury shook his hand afterwards in recognition that he'd been screwed.) Murray then took a principal's job in Idaho where, we hear, he’s back on his feet after spending a lot of money on lawyers and taking a bath on the house he bought in Point Arena in the naïve belief that he could lift Point Arena's elementary school out of its years of failure, a school so bad it had been placed in a kind of receivership by the state.
“DEAREST FRIENDS AND FAMILY, I have been invited to hang my art at the Gallery Opening for What’s Afoot Gallery in Caspar. I know how busy you are but if you could make it to the reception on Friday evening 5-9pm, May 24th it would sure mean a great deal to me. Attached is a digital image of the poster I designed for the event, I took 100 photos and picked this one. Sure hope you can attend. — Ralf Laguna, Fort Bragg.”
A 40-FOOT cave in at the east end of the Skunk Train's Tunnel One will prevent the popular tourist line from chugging on through to Willits until the tracks can be cleared and the tunnel shored up, an effort that will cost an estimated $300,000 the Skunk doesn't have but is in the process of raising. Tunnel One, about a quarter mile long and more than a hundred years old, is about three miles from the Fort Bragg terminal. For now, the Skunk is running tourists out the three miles and back again to Fort Bragg.
MENDOCINO COAST TELEVISION has got to move out of the Footlighters building at 248 E. Laurel, Fort Bragg. The two groups (Footlighters is a theater group) have shared the space for years, but newly appointed Superior Court Judge Jeanine Nadel, as reported by Frank Hartzell of the Fort Bragg Advocate, “has ruled that MCTV must give back the Footlighters building at 248 E. Laurel St. in Fort Bragg and pay $36,315. The tentative ruling stems from the 2007 transfer of the building from then-Footlighters president Bud Farley to MCTV, a transaction the judge found to be illegal. The suit dragged on for three years, while MCTV continued to spend on the building and Footlighters operated in other venues.”
HMMM. I WONDERED why he didn't file last week. Woke up Saturday morning and there was a big color photograph in the Press Democrat of my star environmental reporter staring down from an oak tree a little north of Willits High School. Will Parrish, as close to the story of the Willits Bypass as a reporter can get, has begun a tree sit to draw attention to the pure destructive folly of the project. Red Tail Hawk, aka Parrish, hauled a large banner up in the tree with him that reads, “Save Our Water. Stop CalTrans Now.”
MEANWHILE, CALTRANS now has a pile driving apparatus on-site they'll use to pound hundreds of huge steel piles (poles) and 55,000 (count 'em) wick drains into the wetlands route of the Bypass with which to withdraw the wet from the wetlands and keep it out, doing huge and lasting damage to the area as they go.
SATURDAY, THE RUCKUS SOCIETY, held a training in aggressive non-violent protest at the Willits Grange. The RS is funded by liberal foundations such as Ben and Jerry's and has a long history of helping mobilize direct action protests.
DIRECT ACTION RESISTANCE could only stop construction of the Willits Bypass if many, many (pick a number) people were willing to go to jail to stop the machines. I'd say about 500 people could clog the works if that many people could be found with the commitment to put themselves through the catch and release arrest process. So far, only a handful of mostly Senior Citizens have been willing.
GORDON OSLUND has been hired as principal at Ukiah High School. Oslund's wife, Karen, previously sat on the Willits City Council. Oslund had worked at Willits High School under Deb Kubin, who is now superintendent of the Ukiah School District. Blithely denying that Oslund's hiring was the usual inside Mendo edu-job as she just as blithely confirmed suspicions that it was, Ukiah school board trustee Anne Molgaard said, “I just want it to be known that he didn't get the job because he was from Willits. The search was very competitive.” Oslund himself said (of course), “I am super-excited to be coming to Ukiah,” the first person in years to express more than tepid enthusiasm for the big-boxed, fast-fooded, paved-over County seat.
PATRICIA JOHNSON of San Berdoo has been named the new superintendent of the Willits schools. She, too, is “excited” at her “new challenges” and on into the usual auto-blab we get from our school administrators. Mendo hires its own! And when its own aren't available they head out to San Berdoo.
IDIOT'S GUIDE to the Big Picture:
ONE: THE IRS scandal? The scandal is that many corporations park their vast profits overseas and pay no taxes at all. The very rich pay nowhere near their fair share of taxes and are seldom, if ever, audited, and most non-profits are phony and shouldn't have non-profit, tax-exempt status in the first place.
TWO: BENGHAZI. The scandal is that our government plunked diplomatic people down in the middle of what is basically a war zone with inadequate security. There wasn't any cover-up.
THREE: The Obama government's spying on the Associated Press will make the corporate media even more timid than it is now. Surveillance tech grows in sophistication by the day, and pretty soon even the paranoids will have legitimate cause for concern.
“THE ORDINARY PERSON. I'd been thinking about a mythological individual, the hero of modern democracy, Ordinary Person. Sometimes known as Ordinary Hardworking Person, he is the opponent to mythological villains like Fat Cat Banker, Workshy Scrounger and Faceless Bureaucrat. He obeys the law, pays taxes, puts money by and raises a family. He's one of us. The trouble is that in real life you don't meet ordinary people. Who's one of us? I know I'm not.” (—James Meek)
LOOKING BACK: “I was an American soldier in Occupied Germany after the Second World War. We GIs lived in a former SS barracks in Frankfurt am Main. We were comfortable and happy, free to loot the fine wine cellar the Nazi elite had stored in the basement. Our ‘shit work’ — cleaning toilets, sewing uniforms — was done mainly by Polish, Russian or Balkan Jews, some of them Displaced Persons from the murder camps, others tossed into western Germany by the chaos of war. Gerard Daniel Cohen is correct when he writes that ‘contrary to the collective invisibility and silence of Holocaust survivors elsewhere in Europe, Jewish DPs loudly asserted their identity.’ The key word is ‘loudly.’ On the whole we GIs preferred the compliant, smiling deferential, defeated Germans to these spiky, sallow, sullen, often angry Jews who looked like ghosts from another world. German mothers offered their daughters to us in exchange for a bar of soap of Lucky Strike cigarettes (coin of the realm then). The DPs had to keep their lips zipped as we, their recent liberators, fraternized with the former enemy who had killed their families. DPs I spoke to were desperate to get out of Europe's ‘bloodlands’ and somehow make it to Mandate Palestine. They begged me to sell or smuggle them guns to take on their escape route to Bari and thence to the eastern Mediterranean. There was no talk from them of Zionism; that came later. These were people who, based on their experience with American soldiers who didn't much like them, felt they had no choice.” (Clancy Sigal, LRB, May 2013. Sigal is the author of the wonderful novel, ‘Going Away.’)
LINDA WILLIAMS of the Willits News has done the best reporting on the Mendo-Kansas dope ring story. Her latest report can be read at at the Willits News website (www.willitsnews.com).
RECOMMENDED VIEWING: THE ICEMAN co-starring Anderson Valley's very own, Winona Ryder, raised deep in the hills of west Philo. Children under the age of 50, especially Pollyanna's kids, won't care much for this one, which is based on the true story of a legendary hitman for organized crime named Richard “The Polack” Kuklinski. When he isn't knocking off other criminals, Kuklinski, a devoted family man, is at his suburban home with his wife and two daughters. Winona Ryder, “Nonie” as she was known as a child, plays Kuklinski's unsuspecting wife. She thinks her husband is a currency trader. His two girls attend a Catholic school. The only laugh comes when the hitman, seeing his daughters off to school, tells them, “Don't take any crap from the nuns.” Michael Shannon is excellent as the Iceman.
THIEVES after the copper wiring, cut the phone and DSL lines out of the Sea Ranch-Timber Cove area of the South Coast almost two weeks ago (Friday, May 10th). Ham radio operators picked up the slack while the lines were under repair. DSL lines belonging to SuddenLink have several times been vandalized in Humboldt County, not for copper wiring but, it seems, in retaliation for some unstated grievance.
KNOW YOUR NEIGHBOR DAY? From the Agenda for the May 21, 2013, Board of Supervisors meeting: “Potter Valley resident Freeda Burnstad proposes that the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors proclaim a ‘Know Your Neighbor Day’ on June 15th 2013. Ms. Burnstad notes in her initiative that in this rural decentralized county we often associate with our geographically spread peer groups more than the people who live closest to our residence. In times of emergency though, we may not be able to reach our closest friends to receive or provide help. It would behoove communities striving for sustainability to come together in small regionally based groups of neighbors to support each other. These gatherings provide a forum for neighbors to discuss common interests and issues. By passing the Proclamation, County government can support local residences to increase friendship, safety and economic collaboration. Ms. Burnstad will plan a gathering in her own neighborhood of Pine Avenue in Potter Valley and encourage other communities to do the same by suggesting a model. This template will be disseminated through distribution of a tri-fold brochure and by spreading information regarding the Board of Supervisors proclamation through local media outlets. Together we make Mendocino County the wonderful and unique place that it is; recognized for its friendly and sustainability minded local communities. Let's celebrate and reinforce these qualities on ‘Know Your Neighbor Day,’ June 15th 2013.”
MS. BURNSTEAD has a point, of course, as far as it goes. But not all neighbors are as “sustainability-minded” as she may think. Knock on the wrong neighbor’s door and you just might be sustaining the nabe's pitbull. We agree that Mendocino County can be “tight-knit” but tight-knit in the sense of affinity groups, not in the old fashioned sense of a community where we all knew and loathed one another. Looking around Anderson Valley what you find is like-minded people associating solely with each other. But communities are now so fractured that they're not communities but collections of pals, and in this county there are a heck of a lotta people who prefer absolute anonymity, and not all of them are in witness protection programs. I know people who live in the hills of the Anderson Valley who haven't been seen in years and prefer it that way. Anymore, we're simply individuals who happen to share the same geographical area. Also, “mutual economic support” is likely only among small groups of like-minded individuals drawn from the same social class. The only cross-class occasions in the Anderson Valley, for instance, occur at annual crab feeds and a few other popular sports or community events after which everyone goes their separate ways. If, however, your worldview tends to the apocalyptic, and you assume our vandalized and looted economy will continue to implode, we may soon all be compelled out of necessity into old-fashioned community similar to the community that existed in this country during the Great Depression. We're on the way to a repeat performance.
ALSO ON TUESDAY’S AGENDA is a dog license amnesty proposal — for one (1) day: “In October 2012, the Board approved a 60-day dog license amnesty program, which resulted in the licensing of approximately 900 dogs whose license had expired or who had never been licensed. In an effort to encourage dog owners who may have failed to license their pet, or may have failed to renew a previously issued license before it expired, the Mendocino County HHSA Animal Care Services is asking permission to offer a one-day dog license amnesty program. The amnesty program would occur on Saturday, June 15, in conjunction with a scheduled low-cost rabies vaccination clinic. State law requires owners obtain a license for all dogs, and the license can only be issued if the dog is currently vaccinated for the rabies virus. This amnesty opportunity will give dog owners an opportunity to establish a current license for their pet without facing any penalties, if they do not have outstanding citations.”
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