Mendocino County Today: Monday 3/18/24

DRY, SEASONABLY WARM temperatures will continue across the interior through Tuesday, while coastal areas experience nightly stratus development followed by afternoon clearing. Unsettled weather and cooler temperatures return late in the week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A foggy 49F on the coast this last day of winter. Foggy mornings & clearing afternoons for the next few days giving way to a return of rain on Friday & thru next weekend. Rain amounts look moderate at this point.

THERE HE IS, BEHIND THE TREE

On Saturday, March 16, 2024 at approximately 05:14 A.M., Deputies from the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office received a report of shooting in the area of Boice Lane and N Highway 1 (17000 block of N Hwy 1) in Fort Bragg. Upon arrival to the area, Deputies were provided a description of a vehicle observed fleeing the area northbound on Highway 1 towards the city of Fort Bragg. The vehicle was described as a white four-door Honda Sedan with an Hispanic female driver. Fort Bragg Police Department units and oncoming MCSO dayshift units assisted in the search for the suspect vehicle.

Based on the description of the vehicle and the driver, Deputies believed the suspect vehicle likely belonged to a 22-year-old Hispanic female whose vehicle was associated with other gang-related activity and a previous shooting. The female was also determined to be currently out of custody on pretrial release terms for a previous shooting case. One expended 9mm casing was discovered near the intersection of Boice Lane and N Highway 1.

Deputies had knowledge of the Hispanic female being associated with Dylan Dixon, 18, of Fort Bragg, who resided at a residence on Dryer Lane in Fort Bragg.

Deputies proceeded to Dryer Lane in search of the suspect vehicle and as they approached the general area, the white Honda sedan was observed leaving the location eastbound on W. Highway 20 at a high rate of speed.

Deputies began pursuing the white Honda and lost sight of the vehicle near mile post marker 2.00 on W. Highway 20. After travelling some distance further east on W. Highway 20, Sheriff's Office personnel began checking side roads while travelling west back to where the vehicle was last observed. The vehicle was then observed travelling east on W. Highway 20 again near mile post marker 3.00. An enforcement stop was initiated in the 29000 block of W. Highway 20. The Hispanic female was contacted driving the white Honda with one additional passenger. A search of the vehicle was conducted; however no evidence related to the shooting incident was discovered. A single 9mm bullet hole was discovered in the driver's door and the female advised she did not know how the bullet hole originated. While contacting the occupants of the white Honda, Deputies observed the female driver was receiving text messages on her phone from Dixon. Deputies ended their contact with the occupants of the white Honda and proceeded back to the Dryer Lane address where Dixon resided.

While entering the Dryer Lane address, Sheriff's Office Deputies and Fort Bragg Police Department Officers contacted another vehicle leaving the location with numerous young adults observed inside the vehicle. One of the subjects inside the vehicle was found to have active arrest warrants from Mendocino County, and was taken into custody without incident. As Deputies and FBPD Officers continued to the residence on Dryer Lane, Dixon was observed climbing out of a window of the residence with a black duffle bag, and fleeing into the wooded area behind the residence. Deputies and FBPD Officers pursued Dixon into the wooded area and located him hiding behind a tree.

Dixon was detained and a search of the immediate area revealed the black duffle bag and Dixon's cell phone on the ground next to it. When Deputies searched the black duffle bag they discovered a silver .38 revolver, a silver Mac-11 style automatic pistol, and a large bag of suspected psilocybin mushrooms. Dixon was arrested for numerous firearms-related charges, violation of the terms of his pretrial release, and possession of controlled substances (mushrooms).

Sheriff's Deputies requested a bail enhancement for Dixon from a Judge with the Superior Court of California - County of Mendocino. Dixon was ultimately booked into the Mendocino County Jail in lieu of $150,000 bail.

Anyone with information related to this investigation is requested to call the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office Dispatch Center at 707-463-4086. Information can also be provided anonymously by calling the non-emergency tip line at 707-234-2100.

IMPORTANT POTTER VALLEY PROJECT MEETING COMING UP

Editor,

The Mendocino County Farm Bureau (MCFB) would like to encourage the community to attend and participate in an upcoming local meeting regarding the Potter Valley Project.

The Eel-Russian Project Authority (ERPA) is a joint powers authority formed by a joint exercise of powers agreement between the County of Sonoma, Sonoma County Water Agency (Sonoma Water), and the Mendocino County Inland Water and Power Commission.

ERPA will have the power to negotiate with the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) as the utility moves ahead with plans to surrender operations of the Potter Valley Hydroelectric Project and to decommission the Scott and Cape Horn dams on the Eel River. The new authority will also have the legal capacity to own, construct and operate a new water diversion facility near the Cape Horn Dam.

ERPA will be meeting in Ukiah on March 19 from 3-5 p.m. in the Mendocino County Supervisors chambers with a zoom option also available. This meeting will include an update on discussions with Pacific Gas & Electric regarding the Potter Valley Project and an update on a grant application to United States Bureau of Reclamation.

The water supplied by the Potter Valley Project is used by more than 650,000 people downstream of Potter Valley for beneficial uses in Mendocino, Sonoma and Marin Counties. This is why it is important that the public attend this upcoming meeting and other forums regarding our shared water future.

For more information on ERPA’s efforts to maintain a water diversion, and the upcoming meeting materials, please visit https://www.eelrussianauthority.org/ or visit https://mendoiwpc.com/our-shared-water/ for more history on the Potter Valley Project.

Devon Boer, Executive Director, MCFB

Ukiah

AT THE REDWOOD VALLEY MUNICIPAL ADVISORY COUNCIL MEETING on Wednesday, March 13, 2024:

Sheriff Matt Kendall addressed the recent fentanyl overdose at the County Jail, saying this is a picture of what is going on all over California with regard to fentanyl. This smuggled fentanyl is different from prescription fentanyl. A body scanner is used at the jail to check for contraband, but the amount of fentanyl needed to get high is so tiny that it gets past the scanner. The Sheriff’s Department has obtained a drug detection dog for the jail, and hopefully, the dog can be better at detecting fentanyl than the body scanner. …

(Monica Huettl, MendoFever.com)

. . .

There is a signature-gathering effort for a ballot initiative to increase sentencing for shoplifting, street crimes, and fentanyl sales. Kendall said, “If breaking a law is punishable by a fine, that means that it’s legal for a price.”

mendofever.com/2024/03/17/redwood-valley-mac-tackles-speeding-and-cannabis-disputes-while-taking-a-stand-against-proposed-gas-station/

LAZARUS (Willits): The Measure B funds will likely not end well. I’m sure the Sheriff will get his share and more as the protocols play out. More will be needed for the jail, and Measure B will be the piggybank.

However, the PHF, I feel, will never be built. The County is masterful at not meeting deadlines. This 9mil grant has a drop dead date attached.

The smart money says the County will, for whatever reason, not make that deadline. And will blame anyone, likely an expendable staffer, who is left standing around when the shit flies.

Call me cynical? You bet!

* * *

MAZIE MALONE:

Well, who needs a PHF when the jail is the main housing facility for all the homeless mentally ill addicted folks? ….The PHF is only a brief encounter to subdue and possibly stabilize folks. And let me tell you it does not provide what is necessary, that is how the system works. Take the money, talk crap, pretend we are addressing the issues because we build stuff with your tax dollars and our grand bullshit plan.

Upholding the status quo is going to crush us!

* * *

SUPERVISOR WILLIAMS:

To: Mark Scaramella,

“Yet neither the Supervisors nor the Measure B committee have asked the Sheriff for a staffing plan or budget forecast for the new wing of the jail.…”

I’ve mentioned it several times. Once the wing is complete, it’ll require staffing at a significant cost. Of greater concern, once the wing is complete, the jail will likely be out of compliance.

The county has more mandates than dollars. Fix the revenue crisis, pay off the underfunded pensions, optimize everything else, and the county will still be short. The state has architected a system that works for urban counties. There’s nothing in the design that ensures no-growth rural counties can sustain. We can replace management, replace elected representatives, but the basic math problem will persist. The structure is nonviable. Rural counties like Mendocino fix one problem by creating another.

* * *

MARK SCARAMELLA REPLIES: Williams is probably right about fixing one problem to solve another. But that shouldn’t keep him and his colleagues from asking for a staffing and finance plan for the new wing at the jail, a plan to repay Measure B, and a plan for staffing the PHF if and when it is built.

* * *

ADAM GASKA: The County needs to hire a construction project manager to get their building projects built on time especially considering the director of General Services was fired. As time goes on, the cost keeps going up.

* * *

MARK SCARAMELLA REPLIES: The County has construction management built into the budget for Jail and the PHF. It’s name is “Nacht & Lewis.” If the Board wanted to, they could re-allocate that money to an competent local construction manager. If Gaska is referring to a construction administrator in the General Services office, we doubt that would do anything to help the County “get their building projects built on time.”

ED NOTES:

Just a thought: The Hatch Act makes it illegal for government employees to work for candidates. So what about the CEO's staffer’s advocacy for Cline?

BACK IN THE EARLY 2000s, Anderson Valley High School called the Sheriff's Department to have a 15-year-old taken into custody for allegedly threatening to blow up coach Jason Page's pick-up truck. It was the day after a kid had opened fire on a high school campus near San Diego. AVHS seemed to share the popular misconception that every other adolescent is about to go for his gun, which is not the case. In any case, Mr. Page, the owner of the truck that wasn't blown up, was the school's gym teacher and football coach. The 15-year-old was a special ed student prone to exaggeration. I doubt if Page considered the threat to destroy his transportation a viable one. I happened to have known the alleged teen terrorist. I'd known him since he was a pre-schooler. I didn't think he was crazy. Of course, I'm not a mental health professional, and I liked the kid and was biased in his favor. I don't like many mental health professionals. I think some of them would be much more likely to blow up a football coach's truck than this particular 15-year-old would. But I concede I'm probably in the minority there. The mental health professionals, incidentally, backed up by the edu-mob, had had this boy on strong drugs since he was in kindergarten, allegedly for therapeutic reasons. I would have expected his liver to explode long before he put together a frontal assault on the coach's transportation. Anyway, the kid was put in juvenile hall in Ukiah where he was sure to go crazy if he wasn't already while the experts looked him over for ultra-vi potential. It's all part of the television-sponsored hysteria about violent teenagers that is not based in any kind of reality. And most school people, disclaimers of their undying devotion to “the kids” aside, will throw a real kid overboard every time to cover their own cringing behinds.

UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK

If you’re looking for a BIG dog, Boomer is your guy! This gentle giant has a happy-go-lucky personality and an amiable attitude to life! Mr. Big enjoys playing with stuffies and going out for walks. Boomer does pull a bit on leash, so some fine tuning in the training department will be needed. But, all in all, Boomer is a good walker. Indoors, this delightful guy is pretty mellow, and he’s happy to lay down and take a nap any old time! Boomer is a Labrador X, one year old and 92 pounds.

To see all of our canine and feline guests, and for information about our services, programs, and events, visit: mendoanimalshelter.com.

Join us every first Saturday of the month for our Meet The Dogs Adoption Event at the shelter.

We're on Facebook at: facebook.com/mendoanimalshelter

For information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453.

LET THE PALACE PLAN PROCEED

To the Editor:

Let me begin by expressing my love for the Palace Hotel—its architecture, beauty, and the countless memories it holds for me.

When I was growing up my father Robert, my grandfather Walter, and uncle Bert Sandkulla were the Palace barbers. The first location was on School St. next to the Ukiah Tour and Travel. The next spot was in the middle of the hotel down the winding hallway, and the last home of the barber shop was on State St. and was adorned with beautiful woodwork. I still remember the old chairs with my father’s leather strap he used for sharpening his shaving blades and the many colorful bottles of tonic that lined the shelves. As a child I spent many fun days exploring the hotel and playing on the old iron elevator. I swept up hair for quarters and knew all the staff by name. In later years I celebrated my proms there and attended many parties and dinners.

Sadly, the hotel I grew up in is no longer, the woodwork is gone, the bar is gone, the place is infested with rats, roaches and mold, gutted of all my fond memories.

I now own one of the many small businesses downtown that border the hotel. Over the last 30 years, we have seen several people try to save and rescue the hotel to no avail. In my opinion it is too far gone.

More recently there is a successful local businessman that is in escrow to purchase the hotel and has many amazing plans for its future, this would have a huge positive impact on our town. This businessman along with a group of investors was well on the way to securing a grant to demolish the hotel and resurrect it with architecture and paying homage to the grand hotel it once was. The plan was to be able to use as many of the original materials as possible.

Unfortunately, steps in a writer from the Ukiah Daily Journal poisoning the waters to stop these investors from retaining their grant.

People love the idea of saving the hotel, as do I, but unfortunately it is not economically feasible. Banks don’t want to lend the money to pour into this massive project, thus leaving the hotel in limbo once again as an eyesore and danger to our community. The pertinent question begs an answer: Why would anyone undermine a project with the potential to breathe new life into our town?

Leslie Bartolomei

Ukiah

STRONG TOWNS, WEAK AGENDA

by Tommy Wayne Kramer

Ukiah’s City officials are hoping to rev up some of that old school spirit with an artificial “competition” among a few other cities, probably none so deficient as Ukiah, but you play the hand you’ve got.

Old-timers recall when Ukiah was gifted with altogether undeserving recognition as “Best Small Town in California” and, simultaneously, the sixth finest in all the USA. This was a widely publicized bookselling stunt by an author who had never visited Ukiah, couldn’t find it on a map nor spell it.

Now we have the “Strongtown” showdown. This seems a proper time and place to ask each other what we think of in terms of a small city being “strong.” Robust economy, right? Thriving businesses, safe streets, good schools and great leadership? Low crime, of course, and not much homelessness.

If those are the categories you’d pick, then Ukiah’s in the wrong competition. In this case, “strong” towns are calculated by adhering to progressive fantasies about mass transportation, bicycle lanes and the joys of living in apartments.

Sound like heaven to you?

Strongies are all for apartment living over single family homes, a view not shared by anyone raising a family in an apartment or who wants a bit of yard for a garden, dog, kids, privacy, whatever. “Suburban” is a dirty word to elites wanting to remake society into a world of big apartments, zero cars and lots of buses. Their website has a long, spirited essay on why apartments ought to be built more easily (fewer restrictions) in cities, obviously authored by someone who’s never been to Ukiah, or at least never tried to build anything within city limits.

Strong Town advocates are particularly focused on halting highway construction, favoring instead what they call “sustainable” travel.

QUESTION: Has our past century of reliance on cars and trucks proven unsustainable?

In the real world Ukiah needs more freeway construction, not more wind-powered blimps. This is wildfire and earthquake country, and to be able to flee disaster we need more than two paved lanes north, south, east and west.

We need easier commute times to Santa Rosa, not Rail Trail strolls to nowhere.

Ukiah made a commitment to mass transit 40 years ago with the laughable Mendocino Transit Authority, a bus service that would disappear by tomorrow if not 98% funded by government. No one we know rides the MTA anywhere.

Do Strong Town enthusiasts consider the state’s catastrophically expensive and utterly failed Bullet Train a fine example of mass transit? How about Ukiah’s infamous Hobo Highway? Many millions of dollars shoveled out for a paved strip through dangerous turf, sold to us as an “Urban Trail.”

NOTE: We already have plenty of urban trails. They’re called sidewalks.

Dear friends and occasional readers, this entire Save-the-World-by Riding-a-Bus movement has been spinning its wheels for as long as any of us can remember.

The secret to making bus service work, and also the answer to why it will never gain traction in Ukiah: It only makes sense in big cities. Mass transit needs a lot of customers in a relatively confined area. It’s impossible, and always will be, to take trains on tracks to jobs in Ukiah.

We can’t commute around Ukiah via buses, rail trails, unicycles, hot air balloons or walking. Can’t be done. Nor can we routinely go to Hopland, Lakeport or Fort Bragg. Santa Rosa? Maybe a few cars a day.

Bear in mind that Ukiah is the lone candidate for this prestigious (not!!) award because competition is limited to members of the Strong Town club.

It’s the equivalent of a Beauty Pageant winner selected from the only 16 people who show up at your family reunion.

KWIKEE KWIZ

1) What’s the future for Ukiah’s JC Penney building?

A) Executive Administrative Offices, City of Ukiah

B) Hauled over to North State and West Smith Streets, refurbished as Palace Hotel II.

C) $600 million renovation as homeless shelter for 3000 nightly guests; currently booked through 2145.

D) Six dozen Asian Massage Parlors

2) Who had the deadliest punch?

A) Mike Tyson

B) Jack Dempsey

C) Sonny Liston

D) Jim Jones

BOB ABELES:

I’m also on a United Health Care supplemental plan, G to be exact, that I purchase through a deal with AARP. These plans are federally regulated as to what they cover and how much they must pay, so when purchasing a supplemental policy there’s not much difference between carriers. AARP throws in some little extras that include a dental discount that has saved me enough this year to cover the G premiums for a couple of months.

On the other hand, the Medicare Advantage plans are pure poison. You do save the additional monthly premium you’d have to pay for a supplemental plan, but in exchange you may literally pay with your life. Any treatments, surgeries, and medicines your physician has prescribed are subject to “prior approval” which outfits like UHC will routinely deny while you languish. Additionally, Medicare Advantage plans operate like HMOs where you are required to stay within their network. The rub here is that the pool of providers willing to be part of a plan’s network is steadily shrinking due to their costs dealing with the carrier’s processes (see “prior approval”) and their poor reimbursement rates. There are also geographic barriers that the Advantage plans put up that make seeking care outside the county in which you reside an out of network event.

Then there’s the Medicare supplemental trap to consider. When you initially enroll in Medicare, you are eligible to purchase supplemental coverage without underwriting. This means that regardless of the state of your health you can purchase a plan. However, if you opt for an Advantage plan and later develop a chronic condition you may not be able to pass underwriting and so will not be able to leave the Advantage plan.

Finally, there’s a hidden insurance sales grift that goes along with Advantage plans. In California an agent that signs you up for an Advantage plan receives a commission of about $700 initially and then about $350 per year that you remain in the plan.

WILLITS SAYS GOODBYE TO EDIE CECCARELLI, Town’s 116-Year-Old Celebrity Of Longevity

“Edie was truly a one-of-a-kind person who enjoyed life to its fullest,” Lee Persico, a second cousin of Ceccarelli, said in his eulogy Saturday.

by Chris Smith

Willits picked a perfect weekend — glowing, mild, enlivening — to bid farewell to the central Mendocino County town’s adored celebrity of longevity, Edith “Edie” Ceccarelli.

The past few days couldn’t have been better for the public gatherings that blessed, buried and celebrated Ceccarelli and her historically long and vital life.

How fitting for the fun-loving, highly sociable woman who through 116 astonishing years had more very good days, it seems safe to say, than most of the rest of us have days of any sort.

“Edie was truly a one-of-a-kind person who enjoyed life to its fullest,” Lee Persico, a second cousin of Ceccarelli, said in his eulogy Saturday. As Persico spoke at the lectern, sunbeams brightened the stained-glass windows of St. Anthony’s of Padua Catholic Church in Willits.

During the open-mic portion of the funeral mass, longtime friend Tana Craighead, 63, recalled taking Ceccarelli to Las Vegas when she was in her early 90s and watching in amazement as she danced in heels until about 1 a.m.

“Edie was up for anything,” Craighead said.

Ceccarelli made headlines far and wide in recent years. Simply by waking morning after morning, dressing nicely and savoring another breakfast, the Willits native set or seriously challenged state, national and world records.

Over the past year or so, she became the oldest living American, the oldest verified California resident in the history of the state, and the second-oldest person on the planet.

People from Willits and beyond gathered by the hundreds this past Feb. 4 for a rainy-day parade heralding Ceccarelli’s 116th birthday, which came the following day.

To live to 116 isn’t just impressive, it’s epic, almost unheard of. Gerontology scientists have validated that no more than about 30 human beings have reached or exceeded that age – ever.

On Ceccarelli’s birthday Feb. 5, just two of the estimated 8 billion people on Earth were 116. The world’s current longest-living person, Maria Branyas Morera, who was born in 1907 to Spanish parents in San Francisco but has lived most of her life in Spain, turned 117 on March 4.

Edie Ceccarelli enjoyed extraordinary health and vitality for most of her life. She was still dancing at 102 and she didn’t move from her Willits home into an eldercare residence until 107.

But in recent months, she several times showed little or no interest in eating, which was highly unusual for her. And she was sleeping more.

She was 116 years and 17 days old when she passed away in her sleep on Feb. 22 at the six-bed Holy Ghost Residential Care Home.

She was buried on Friday afternoon at her family plot at Willits Cemetery.

Near her grave are those of her first husband, Elmer “Brick” Keenan, for 36 years a Press Democrat typesetter, and her parents, Italian immigrants Maria and Agostino Recagno.

The Recagnos gave birth to seven children in Willits, Edith Rose being their first. She would outlive all of her siblings, none of whom lived to age 100.

Well before she qualified as a supercentenarian by turning 110, Edie Ceccarelli was celebrated in Willits for her kindness, verve and generosity, and for the style and class she was famous for.

“She was a perfect dresser,” businessman, community leader and longtime friend Bruce Burton told the crowd Saturday afternoon at a post-funeral reception at the Willits Senior Center. “And she was a flirt!”

Burton reminded the gathering that Ceccarelli was born in 1908 and personally witnessed what many today regard as ancient history. Burton recalled Ceccarelli telling him she remembered walking on Baechtel Road one day and listening to the pealing of every church bell in town.

It was Nov. 11, 1918. The first World War had ended and people around the world celebrated the armistice. Edith Rose Recagno was 10½ years old.

Burton noted also at the reception that young Edith grew up to be a disciplined investor. She recommended the purchase of annuities, which involve giving money to a company in return for the promise of lifetime payments.

“Of course she liked annuities!” Burton said. The companies that sent her monthly payments surely did not count on those benefits continuing to age 116.

One way of looking at how extraordinary it is for Ceccarelli to have reached that age: Life expectancy for American women stands now at about 79 years. Ceccarelli lived nearly 50 percent longer than that.

Along the way, she offered what might be history’s greatest piece of advice for living — not only very long but very happily, “Have two fingers of red wine with dinner, and mind your own business.”

Amid his remarks at Saturday’s celebration of Ceccarelli’s life, Burton, the founder of Willits Redwood Company, said that in February the town was hoping to see her “make it up the next rung” and attain age 117.

Though that won’t happen, Burton said he and his town are grateful to have witnessed parts of Ceccarelli’s most remarkable life. “It was fun to be part of it,” he said.

Burton said also, “We all owe her a big thanks for the great publicity she brought to Willits.” Her last birthday was covered by ABC World News, the Guardian and the New York Times.

It’s conceivable that one day the correct answer to this question could win a trivia contest: What do record-holding supercentenarian Edie Ceccarelli and champion thoroughbred racehorse Seabiscuit have in common?

Both had astonishing runs, and both rest now and forever in Willits.

(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

A MOTHER’S BEHEADING SHAKES LITTLE RIVER

by Kevin Fagan

Little River, Mendocino County — The night before the shooting and killing and roaring flames changed everything, Asahn Smith got a text from a friend he hadn’t spoken with in years. Fletcher Pinkham, his old hip-hop songwriting pal, had a new tune called “Cannabis Cowboy.”

“I can show you how to grow that fire,” rang the chorus.

“The song — it’s super catchy,” Smith told the Chronicle.

It may have also been horribly prescient.

Early the next morning, on Feb. 20, 2024, police say Pinkham staggered out of the woods at his mother’s home in a remote area of Mendocino County, with her four-story house engulfed in flames. His 75-year-old mother’s decapitated body, shot more than a dozen times, lay burning inside. Her severed head was pulled from a pond outside the house, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation who weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

Pinkham, who was living with his mother at the time, was gibbering unintelligibly, officers reported. His nearby car was stocked with guns, ammunition and clothing.

The 39-year-old man was taken to a county hospital for evaluation before being booked into jail on murder charges, where he now awaits psychologists’ conclusions on whether he is mentally competent to stand trial.

As far as most folks in this tightly woven coastal enclave of woodsy villages are concerned, the evaluations will just confirm what they’ve feared for decades. Pinkham killed a man nearly 20 years ago in what was described as self-defense. It left him damaged, they say, and since then, he has been violently troubled, a time bomb likely to explode in one way or another.

Now, as they struggle to make sense of Pinkham’s arrest and the death of his mother, artist and singer Linda Mercurio, 75, they wonder if anything could have been done to stave off the sorrow that has gripped their community for weeks.

This is a bucolic part of California where people move to get away from city bustle, so thinly populated that most folks know at least a bit about each other. And around here — according to more than 50 law enforcement officials, neighbors and family friends contacted by the Chronicle — the Pinkham-Mercurio family was known as sweet, super-smart, musically gifted and athletic.

That held perpetually true for Pinkham’s mother, brother and sister — but even as the family notched professional and artistic achievements over the past 20 years, things changed for Fletcher Pinkham himself.

He turned from an amiable BMX rider and Little League baseball star into a man with a hot temper and destructive relationships with drugs and booze, according to court records and interviews with dozens of people who know him.

The breaking point apparently came in 2005 in Santa Barbara when, according to court records and police, he stabbed a man to death with a bayonet during a marijuana deal gone bad. He was not charged in the killing after officials concluded he acted in self-defense.

Over the ensuing years, Pinkham was convicted at least a half-dozen times in Mendocino and Sonoma counties of battery, drug charges and of assaulting three people who took out restraining orders against him. He was also thrown out of bars in the village of Mendocino so many times bartenders lost track.

“Fletcher was trouble, and everyone in town knew it,” said Will Poehlmann, bartender at the oldest bar in Mendocino, Dick’s Place. “You felt bad for him, but I had to toss him out of here about a year ago. He could get so angry, and he was saying racist stuff about the border wall and people there.

“I don’t think Fletcher was ever the same after that thing in Santa Barbara, after taking a life,” he said. “He started really liking hallucinogens, LSD. It messed with his mind. His mom? She was sweet, but having a son like that was hard.”

Smith made music with Pinkham for years when they were young men, and he has trouble reconciling the musician with the crime he’s accused of committing. The new song lyric about fire was referring to smoking pot, but seems to carry a disturbing connotation in hindsight.

“It blows my mind that I was communicating with him 12 hours before the fire,” Smith said. “I had stopped talking to him after 2013 because he’d been in trouble and I didn’t need that in my life, but a year or so ago he contacted me and said he wanted to reconnect and make things right. And then that night before the fire he sent me that song. He called me several times, and now I wish I’d picked up.

“Fletcher has had his troubles, but I still can’t wrap my head around it,” he said. “I mean, he loved his mom. But for him — I think taking a life in 2005 affected his soul. I don’t know if he ever got past it.”

The hamlet of Little River consists of a couple of businesses along Highway 1 and about 100 residents scattered into redwood-studded mountains overlooking the coast. It’s a short drive from tiny Mendocino, which with a grocery and an actual main street is the nearest place to shop. The four-story house where Mercurio raised her three children lies five miles deep into those mountains along a winding road.

Today, most indications of what by many accounts was a placidly rural early family life are gone. The house burned utterly, leaving little but charred rubble, a cement foundation and large Tibetan prayer flags ringing the property.

As a youth, Pinkham was known as so fun-loving he’d jump his bike off the deck, for being the life of parties. His sister Heather was an A student at Mendocino High School, which the kids all attended, and as a piano prodigy at 14 she played in the Mendocino Women’s Choir with her mother, who sang alto. Eric, the other sibling, was also an A student and a tech whiz.

Today, Eric is a top engineer at a Bay Area computer firm and Heather is a renowned composer and pianist touring Europe.

Fletcher moved through winery and hotel jobs before settling into tech work himself. His LinkedIn profile says he was most recently president of Focus Tech Inc. in Santa Rosa, installing security systems. Calls to the company were not returned, but the owner of the previous tech firm that employed him told the Chronicle he was fired in 2018 after crashing a company vehicle and refusing a drug test.

Pinkham declined an interview request at the county jail, and his siblings did not respond to messages from the Chronicle.

“The family is devastated, and the kids want justice for their mom,” said Kathy Wylie, who taught all three children in school and has visited with the siblings since the fire. “Their lives are going to be hell, and now they have this sibling who is probably going to go away forever.

“Linda raised pretty exceptional kids, and this thing that happened has been a real shock,” she said. “Heather and Eric were brilliant, and what we remember about Fletcher is that when he was a kid, before he got that violent side, he was the best BMX rider around. His physical ability was amazing — he’d do jumps no other kid would do, wheelies around town. I’d call it daring.”

Pinkham’s Little League coach described the youngster he coached from ages 10 to 13 as “a sweet kid, never got in trouble, always listened to you.”

“He was a really good athlete,” said Gary Poehlmann. “He was such a mellow, soft-spoken kid, but then after that thing down south where he was getting robbed and stabbed that person to death, he was an angry person.”

Pinkham had been living in a family-owned house in Santa Rosa and earlier this year he was frequently visiting his mother, several people said. And he seemed to have improved.

“I saw him two months ago … and he said he was back in town and he’d turned things around,” Poehlmann said. “I was so relieved that he looked so good, because the last time I’d seen him a couple of years ago, he was pretty messed up.”

Robert Hollister, an auto mechanic who lives down the road from the Pinkham home, said he also thought maybe things were turning around for Pinkham.

“A giant tree fell on the back of my building here during the last big windstorm, and four days before the fire Fletcher stopped by and offered to help me get rid of the stump,” Hollister said, standing next to the smashed part of his home. “A few months ago he said he was back in town, getting his fill of the outdoors — you know, shooting guns, fishing, doing the things we do up here. It was a real change from the guy I’d known. He had real anger issues for a long time.”

He said Mercurio asked him about 10 years ago to hire her son “because he needed to stay out of trouble. So I gave him a job. He lasted three days. He didn’t like getting his hands dirty. All he wanted to do was write rap songs and grow pot.”

He shook his head sadly. “Linda did everything for him,” he said. “She tried to push him to be successful, but it didn’t seem to take.”

Indeed, Mercurio frequently sought help for her son, several friends said. She asked Poehlmann to write a letter to a judge after one of his assault convictions, and she took him to a Zen center for meditational healing. It fit with who she was.

“Linda was a calm, lovely human being,” said Cynthia Frank, who directs the women’s choir. “She was a good mother, and we’re all shocked and appalled at what happened.”

Struggling to help her son didn’t mean Mercurio didn’t live a full life, though. She ran an import business, traveled frequently, created artwork in her home, and frequently attended gatherings at the Zen center with her husband, Robert Pinkham, who died in 2021.

Her skills as a singer dovetailed nicely with her daughter’s keyboard expertise, Frank said, and in 2006 they performed with the women’s choir at Carnegie Hall in New York and at a church at 9/11’s Ground Zero.

“I just saw Linda at the store the day before the fire happened, and she seemed fine,” Frank said. “It makes no sense.”

To another neighbor, though, Pinkham’s anger issues and rap sheet were warning signs that should have been heeded. Jade Aldrich is a family support advocate in Mendocino County, and both she and county Supervisor Ted Williams say local mental health resources are radically underfunded.

“We mostly keep to ourselves up here, but I just have to think, how did we do this child — and later, this man — a disservice?” she said. “Could we have helped him more? Our resources are so scarce up here it can take weeks or months to get your first clinic visit — and the nearest one is in Fort Bragg,” about 20 miles away.

Mendocino County Sheriff’s Capt. Quincy Cromer said investigators can’t share what they found at the death scene, or details of the investigation, but “it’s still our belief that the fire was set to destroy or conceal evidence.”

The day of the fire, the mountain canyon where the house sat was shrouded with fog, and the smoke didn’t stand out too much at first, Aldrich said. Power was out in the area, “so at first we thought maybe it was just people lighting fires for heat because of the outage.”

When firefighters and police finally showed up, the home was engulfed. Pinkham staggered out from the trees — some responders said he was naked — and “he was acting strangely, talking nonsensically, not making a lot of sense,” Cromer said.

“We didn’t know if he needed medical attention or not, so we did take him to a hospital for examination and a blood draw.”

He went from there to jail in Ukiah, where the appalling incident now joins a strange pantheon of eye-opening crimes in this widespread county throughout the years.

Maniacal murderers Charles Manson and Leonard Lake ran operations in Mendocino in the 1960s and '70s, as did deranged People’s Temple preacher Jim Jones. In the middle 2000s, Aaron Vargas made headlines when he gunned down his childhood rapist and the townsfolk of Fort Bragg rallied to his defense.

“This has always been a place where bad stuff happened,” longtime resident and stone-carver Robert Millhollin said as he grabbed groceries at the tiny Little River Market. “I’ve repaired probably 30 marble headstones from the 1800s where one says this guy was shot, then next to him his brother was shot, and next to that the sheriff was shot.

“But I’ll tell you, there’s more to this area than that,” he hastened to add. “This is really an art colony around here, with a rich heritage. It’s a good place to be away from everything, but when something like this death happens, everyone knows about it. It hurts.”

The blaze at the Pinkham house burned so fiercely it was three days before it cooled enough for crews to find Mercurio’s remains.

Six days later, 50 people gathered for a memorial at a local Zen center. According to people who attended the memorial, the monk who officiated told the hushed crowd: “Listen to the ocean, listen to the wind, and let it sweep through your mind. You’ll never get to the bottom of how something like this can happen, because there is no rational explanation for it.

“But you can rest in the truth that in Linda’s love and dedication to her children, she gave everything.”

(SF Chronicle)

Proud Pomo parents with their baby and pup in Ukiah 118 years ago [Photo taken by Rena B. Shattuck in the Public Doman available on the Library of Congress]

(The photograph is credited to Rena B. Shattuck, a standout as one of the North Coast’s earliest female journalists with bylines in periodicals throughout the region.)

(via MendoFever.com)

THE PINCHES CHRONICLES, 2001

We have always considered John Pinches to have been a good supervisor, certainly a much better supervisor than any of his four colleagues when one applies the standard of the greater good. The prevailing myth among the County’s libs is that Norman de Vall, Richard Shoemaker, Charles Peterson, Seiji Sugawara, Liz Henry, Hal Wagenet, Kendall Smith, David Colfax, Dan Hamburg, Ted Williams, John Haschak… and all the other Democratic Party endorsed “liberals” are on our side. And anybody in a cowboy hat must be on the other side. Most of our Liberal supervisors have disappeared from political life in the County after their stints as Supervisor, leaving one to wonder what they thought they stood for in the first place. In 2000 Charles Peterson billed himself as a Fifth District Supervisor candidate without launching a single cream pie as an excuse or reason for running. His incessant, content-free yammering went over well with many coast liberals so he joined the other three faux libs during his one term in office. He then quit and disappeared saying he was tired and his critics, many of them the very liberals who voted for him, were a bunch of meanie faces. Shoemaker was a liberal by no known standard of that much abused term; he left office and soon got a cush job as the tiny town of Point Arena’s “city manager.” Etc. In fact, name one liberal who stayed involved in County affairs after their lucrative terms in office.

Cowboy John Pinches came through the door saying right off the bat that then-Sheriff Tuso was a liar, that dope policies were self-defeating, that the Supes don’t need another layer of computers… Pinches rightly complained that so-called in-service trainings were a waste of tax money, that certain logging rules harm small timberland holders to the advantage of outside timber corporations, that a lot of in-County spending is indefensible… Pinches generally held the bureaucrats’ feet to the fire. Besides which he’s a decent person face-to-face, not one of these pinched-faced Republicans or one of those cowardly backbiters of the Coastlib/KZYX type.

Many of our vaunted liberals tend to be major jerks up close — arrogant and vain beyond all reason — and have never stood for much of anything beyond getting their pay increase, their cliched opinions and silly faces in the local newspapers, and their nasal-voiced PC platitudes onto KZYX where there are no hard questions, no standards at all and certainly no memory. Yes, my fellow lib-labs, it’s come to this: A libertarian cowboy Republican who announces rodeos, eats big slabs of red meat and cuts down trees is a better liberal than most of the local enviros, KZYX, and The Poetry Hour all rolled into one.

In April of 2001 Cowboy John Pinches of deep Laytonville announced that he probably would run again for the Third District Supervisor's seat that Pinches had held for four years in the 1990s.

After his initial four-year term as Third District supe in the 1990s, Pinches left his seat for a quixotic run for the state Senate in the Republican primary. A young cipher from a rich Healdsburg wine family beat Pinches in the primary by outspending the Eel River Canyon cowboy who'd limited campaign contributions to $99. Pinches had also offended Republican fat cats by refusing the big dough.

The incumbent at the time was Tom Lucier, a Willits mortician known around town as “The Jolly Reaper.” In office, Lucier might be mistaken for one of his plumper cadavers; the only times he showed signs of life were when his direct financial welfare was involved. Lucier was quite animated when he took office, easily managing to successfully convince the board's grasping majority that his mortuary's contract with Official Mendocino County for dealing with North County corpses should continue. Just happening to have County contracts with the county he also supervised, Lucier reasoned, didn't necessarily represent a conflict of interest, not even an appearance of one. Gosh, supervisor pay was so low, we'd never attract the kind of “excellence” we would need around here if an elected person can't wear more than one hat at a time. (cf Supervisor Glenn McGourty who grows grapes using Russian River water over whose allocations he has official authority.)

Their supervisorial excellencies, even before their last two rounds of raises, made almost twice as much as the average Mendocino County worker, especially when the county's fat package of fringe benefits for top officials is factored in. Lucier also tried to weasel some public money out of the Willits City Council to improve a beauty salon — run by his girlfriend – in a building he owned. And, of course, he was all for top-dollar pay raises for supervisors and top bureaucrats. Politically, Lucier was an instinctive, reflexive “yes” vote for bad. If it was big and destructive, The Reaper lit up as if a Greyhound had careened into the Van Hotel in downtown Willits and 60 bods had to be pickled, painted, packaged, and packed in $5,000 caskets at his mortuary around the corner.

Any other place, Lucier's simultaneous county corpse franchise and elected official position would be regarded as a textbook-quality example of conflict of interest. The law says an elected official isn't supposed to profit from the public's business, but the law in Mendocino County, thanks to our Clintonian cadre of judges and attorneys, is quite a bit more elastic than it is most places; depending on who you are, the law can even be waived. So long as Lucier isn't discovered hunkering over a cadaver with a pair of pliers and a little velvet bag of gold fillings, what the hey? (On second thought, if he said he was doing a tracheotomy he could probably help himself to the fillings unmolested by local authority.)

Pinches is a lifelong Laytonville rancher. The Third District was very lucky he decided he would run for his old Third District supervisor's seat, then occupied by Lucier. The popular Island Mountain rancher knew he could drub Lucier or anyone else who ran against him. In his first election to the 3rd District supervisor's seat seven years earlier it was as if Pinches had been awarded the seat by acclamation. He easily defeated the lukewarm Willits lib, Ellen Drell, who with her husband David, founded the Willits Environment Center. The Drells are long-time Willits-area residents. Mrs. Drell is a capable person who pulled a pretty good slug of the hill muffin vote but, like much of Mendolib and even the flatland 'muffs, she was too comfortably removed from the work-a-day reality faced by a majority of the people in the Appalachia-like 3rd District. Pinches, always a hard worker in a hard-scrabble, resource-based economy, is smart, attuned and sympathetic.

As a supervisor, Pinches was scrupulously honest, plain-talking, careful with public money, and unafraid to take on the county's entrenched upper-echelon bureaucrats, many of whom behaved as if they'd descended directly from the Sun King. Pinches drove the County's monarchically inclined department heads nuts, which all by itself was ample reason to vote for him. But what was most refreshing about Pinches, it seems to me, was his ability to get along with all kinds of people. Mendolib, for all its talk of tolerance and dialogue, regards argument or criticism as a form of bad manners or confuses it with what they call “negativity,” and tends to be about as tolerant of dissent as the right-wing they oppose.

In 2002, prior to his run against Lucier, Pinches eventually ran and won back his Third District Supervisors seat. But many people have forgotten that before that Pinches applied for the County’s vacant Director of Transportation position, then being filled by an interim appointment.

Long-time KZYX radio host Karen Ottoboni invited Pinches on the air to discuss his application and the Supervisors refusal to appoint Pinches. From that discussion it became obvious that Pinches should have been appointed to that top slot in the county's crucial Department of Transportation. It turned out that Pinches had been jobbed out of the job by the County Counsel's office to whom his enemies on the current Board of Supervisors, notably the incompetent and dishonest Patti Campbell, had rushed for a legal pretext to deny Pinches a position he was eminently qualified for by temperament, training and experience. County Counsel dug up a personnel stipulation they claimed said the top local DOT guy had to have a college diploma in engineering. (They waive these things all the time, but not for Pinches.) Who would you rather have maintaining local roads? The guy who's done it, or the guy who has read books about doing it and knows where the next grant is coming from?

We’re pretty sure that the real reason Pinches' enemies in the County Administration Center — and he had got lots of them — didn't want him in charge of keeping Mendocino County's roads in good repair because of his unshakable commitment to fiscal responsibility and effective, efficient, well-managed operations.

The Laytonville cowboy annoyed the hell out many entrenched local bureaucrats and those among his elected colleagues when he was previously on the Board because he was constantly on the watch for ways to save taxpayer money. Lots of tax-paid, well-paid slugs out on Low Gap or wandering around the County Courthouse with their coffee cups and blissed out grins on their plump pusses, resented the hell out of Pinches and feared him because he was the only supervisor in recent history, aside from Jim Eddie of Potter Valley, who had a clear majority of his constituents behind him. And he never hesitated to take on the bureaucrats, the only supervisor since Joe Scaramella to do so.

During his hour with Ottoboni, Pinches said he'd like to “trade in some old, little-used equipment for an excavator so that the county could assign a small group of workers to do their own safety-related road repair and upgrades.” Pinches said the county workers could be helped by CCC, CDF and inmate crews, the work to be done in the summer months when the county crews aren't as busy as they are in the winter. Pinches was referring to projects like the restoration of blind curves to at least partial vision, the widening of narrow spots in the many miles of perennially hazardous outback roads and so forth. He also said he thought county trucks should be used “to deliver our own aggregate for our own projects, instead of contracting the work out.” The guy pays close attention, he carries budget books around like a bible thumper carries his bible, and he knows what he's talking about. Naturally, he had to be prevented from getting the job as department boss. Hell, competence could break out all over county government and then where would our travel and conference budgets and two-hour lunches go?

The amiable Pinches, who somehow manages to keep his temper even when sorely provoked, mentioned that as he was denied the county's Department of Transportation job, Fourth District supervisor Patti Campbell had gratuitously remarked that he was “a liability to the county. I didn't appreciate that,” Pinches said.

We didn’t either, and several thousand other Mendolanders are similarly unappreciative, especially considering Patti Campbell's performance in office. During the last election, out of which Campbell, thanks to the Coast's abundance of no-spine liberals who either don’t bother to vote or consciously vote for criminality as represented by the incumbent, emerged with another four years in office. In office, Campbell faithfully ran errands for a handful of unindicted Fort Bragg crooks, er developers, while cooing at the libs that she feels their pain. She also seemed to be mildly nuts, several times breaking down in tears during supervisor meetings at no visible provocation. Not that being dishonest or crazy has ever been viewed by county voters as electoral negatives, but Campbell took the negs pretty far even by local standards. Perhaps the most outrageous of her many lies during her campaign for another four years ensuring that Mendocino County remains a retro public policy sinkhole, was when Campbell took credit for paving the Branscomb Road, a project in fact accomplished by Pinches when he was a supervisor.

Anyway, during the Pinches-Ottoboni discussion, Pinches pointed out that the County's Department of Transportation budget had ballooned from $8 million a year to $14 million annually since he left office, and that stat just about says it all about why the powers that be didn't want Pinches running the department. The guy who got the job that rightly should have gone to Pinches, a fellow named Calvert who'd already once abandoned the position for more lucrative work outside the county, said of his department, “We're lucky to get three projects done a year.” Pinches said three projects a year is “unacceptable.” It is unacceptable, as is officially sanctioned sloth in much of what official Mendocino County does.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, March 16, 2024

ISIDRO ACOSTA-MURO, Covelo. Marijuana for sale, disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, probation violation.

LINDA ALMOND, Ukiah. Unlawful camping on private property, trespassing/refusing to leave, failure to appear.

DEAN AMMONS, Lakeport/Ukiah. Parole violation.

JANNETTE GALLEGOS, Hopland. DUI.

RICARDO GALVAN-DOMINGUEZ, Ukiah. DUI.

CASSANDRA GREEN, Ukiah. Willful cruelty to child.

MELCHOR GUTIERREZ-CRUZ, Covelo. Marijuana for sale, disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs. controlled substance, failure to appear.

DANIEL HEATH, Ukiah. Suspended license for DUI.

CARLOS HERNANDEZ-ESTRADA, Covelo. Marijuana for sale, disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.

PAUL LEO, Mendocino. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

TREVOR MILANI, Ukiah. Attempt to buy or keep stolen property, contempt of court.

JAMIE MORO-YOQUI, Covelo. DUI, marijuana for sale, suspended license.

WILLIAM OWENS, Ukiah. Parole violation.

TRAVIS ROLLER, Willits. Domestic battery.

CARLOS ROMERO-GUTIERREZ, American Canyon/Ukiah. DUI, suspended license.

ALDEN SODD, Philo. DUI.

LARRY SUTHERLAND, Laytonville. Domestic battery, false imprisonment.

JALAHN TRAVIS, Ukiah. Petty theft with priors, disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.

JEDIDIAH WOLFE-HUNNICUTT, Windsor/Ukiah, Willful cruelty to child.

TAKE-AWAYS FROM THE 179TH SF IRISH PARADE!

1) Falun Dafa seemed to have the largest contingent! That’s very Frisco!

2) The Seamus among the spectators who roundly curses out a Marcher waving the Union Jack? Priceless! And Vital!

3) The Archbishop Riordan High School Marching Band (Recently in Rome!)? Yup, sounds like there’s an Irish Connection there. And they rock!

David Svehla

San Francisco

PS That’s Rome in Italy.

MEETING DOUG HOLLAND

by Paul Modic

I was going to be up in the Seattle area and wondered what it would be like to meet Doug Holland, who chronicles his daily life with a blog (‘Diary Of A Fat Slob’), a recliner, and his name on the Anderson Valley Advertiser’s masthead. (He also writes a whole lot of movie reviews at www.itsdougholland.com)

I sent him an email.

“Hey, how ya doing?” I said. “Another good one in the AVA, way to go! Passing through Seattle this weekend and wondering what it'd be like to meet the guy who viciously stole my spot on the AVA masthead, and my role as designated crank in those pages. I could meet you on my way back through Sunday, but with your anti-social tendencies, umm, are you anywhere near I-5?”

“Everything is near I-5,” he said. “Jeez, I hate meeting people cuz I'm a hermit and always a disappointment to others. I have nothing much to say in person, which is why I write, but fuck it, if your standards are low enough, then why not? If you're buying I'll google around and find an expensive restaurant. If it's BYOB there's a good cheap burrito place. Lemme know.”

“Great,” I said. “I want the fool tour: Meet your annoying roommate Dean, confront a rat, and take a bus ride. It will be epic!”

“Guarantee you will be disappointed in me,” he said. “Everyone is. No meeting anyone from the house, or my mother for that matter, just me. Last chance reminder: being a hermit I will probably be awkwardly silent and have little to say, unless you catch me in a weird mix of biometric loops…”

“Awkwardly silent? So I would have to launch my egomaniac thing? Easy. Your hermit thing is similar to my can’t-handle-cities-thing, traffic, parking etc, so we’ll see if I even make it off the freeway,” I said.

I arranged to meet him at a donut shop in South Seattle on my drive back south from the wedding in Bellingham. “You’re going to be disappointed in me,” he had said, but why would I have any expectations or care? (And why would I want to meet his annoying mother?)

We both wrote for the AVA but I had fallen out of favor after submitting an uncensored story about the Editor, my name had been taken off the masthead within a week, and replaced almost immediately with Doug’s.

My brother-in-law had put my revenge fantasy on Chat GPT: kidnapping Doug, holding him for ransom, and trying to wheedle a hundred bucks or so from the Editor. Within about four seconds AI spit out a 600 word story with a happy ending, not what I was looking for.

Before my drive down I got very complicated directions to Lucky Donut off the internet, drove through the lightly trafficked Seattle on Sunday afternoon, and quickly found myself profoundly lost. I composed the next text in my head, a two-word message: “Lost. Cancel.”

Then I saw a familiar name, First Street, and soon 152nd Street, the exact location of Lucky Donut! I parked in the shade with a view of the front door and watched the jets glide in for landings, about one a minute skimming over the buildings, a very entertaining thing to do, although I avoid flying myself.

His last text said, “Fat guy. Tie dye,” and as I read it he came walking across the lot with his famous belly leading the way, carrying a laptop and a bag with a few back issues of the AVA bulging out of the top.

I had seen a couple people leaving the donut shop while watching the planes making their approach to SeaTac but there was no one except the proprietor inside when we reached the front door. We shook hands, he apologized for no outdoor seating, which I had requested, and ordered our coffees. I knew I shouldn’t, having trashed out during the three-day wedding party, but I got a donut while Doug chose two cheese Danish and said, “I’ll probably get a dozen to go.”

We found some ridiculously tiny plastic chairs but then I saw a couple more comfortable-looking bigger ones stacked in the corner, covered in dust. I went up to the Asian donut-maker, asked him for some paper towels, and he handed me a damp washcloth that was sitting on the counter. I wiped my chair while Doug cleaned his with his tie-dyed shirt sleeves.

I sat in my chair, he sprawled out in his, long legs stretching across the tiny room, and while we munched on the delicious pastries with the okay coffee, we started to talk.

Doug was owed a $400 a month annuity generated by a job he had had for ten years but whenever he tried to get it he was drowned in red tape. Same with Medicaid, the application process was too convoluted, complicated, and difficult for him, so he just gave up. “When I really need it I’ll get it,” he said. (Later I found out he was eligible for Social Security also, but refused to apply because he “didn’t want to be treated like a trained circus animal.”)

“But by then you might be too weak to go through with it,” I said.

“This friend who just died recently was helping me do it,” he said. So he was done with all that but he said it triumphantly, as if he had won! He’s not going to play their game.

(I offered an analogy about a weed dealer: There was this buyer in the neighborhood who could be abrasive, pushy, and nasty. After another one of her tirades my neighbor said, “I’m never going to deal with Catalina again!” And he never did.

“Micky,” I had said, “you expect the best from people, but I know how people are, and I’m willing to eat a little shit to get paid.”)

I told him about a few scams I had pulled and got his interest up. He wanted to hear what my best one was so I told him about when I had exploited a gray area, cashed in, and they’ll never know it happened. He enthusiastically approved of my scheme, how I had won one for the little guy. (Being a working man, he had never heard of SSI and I explained it to him.)

It struck me that this intelligent writer just couldn’t get in the mindset necessary to fight the system and get what he deserved, some healthcare. Maybe he had ADD, AHDD, or some PTSD? (I wondered if I could help him on that application?)

I told him that the AVA only published about one out of every five essays I send in and he seemed surprised.

“You’re on a roll,” I said. “Just about every week recently I see you in there.” (Two months after meeting Doug I’m on a roll again, four straight weeks. I may have finally figured out what the Editor likes: Not too much deep self-reflection, not too much weed, not too much Mexico. A little less me, and a little more just what happened?)

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m trying to send them in once a week.” His recent ones were about doing someone’s laundry, a confrontation with a rat in a trap, and observations about the constant construction in his changing neighborhood. All were the type of interesting real life stuff that balances the AVA’s serious politics, my goal also.

I told him that a story I worked a lot on had been rejected, I’d cut out huge chunks of personal interactions and complaints, had resubmitted it, and then they ran it.

“I never change anything for anyone,” he replied.

“Oh yeah, I’ve written a couple letters-to-the editor where I disagreed completely with the Editor but never sent them, though it probably wouldn’t have mattered,” I said. “Once I had a sort of risque story but before I sent it in I removed the word ‘clitoris’ and replaced it with ‘breast.’ They ran the story but I noticed that ‘breast’ had disappeared.”

The proprietor said the place was closing.

“Just five more minutes?” I asked.

“No,” he said emphatically.

(As we were leaving I asked when he started making the donuts and he said at 1:00 am. Just you?, I asked. Him and another guy he said.)

The display case was empty, we walked across the parking lot to my car, and I asked Doug if he knew of a sports bar nearby. The 49ers were playing the Rams and I wanted to catch the end of the game, but he had no idea where to go.

I gave him a copy of my children’s story compilation and my English-Spanish dictionary and headed off to look for the game. He left to find his bus home, stopped and turned, and said, “Thanks for not kidnapping me.”

APPLICATIONS OPEN FOR CALIFORNIA’S RED ABALONE RECOVERY PLAN COMMUNITY WORKING GROUP

California Department of Fish and Wildlife is seeking a diverse group of individuals to provide input on ongoing red abalone population recovery plans

by Mary Callahan

Red abalone were once abundant on the North Coast, but a series of environmental catastrophes over the paast decade has decimated the species to the point where its fishing season was canceled in 2018.

The state Department of Fish and Wildlife has been charting the course for recovery of the state’s red abalone stocks for several years, but now it is seeking volunteers to help.

Interested people have until April 5 to apply to what’s being called a “community working group” to represent stakeholder groups and provide input to state officials and scientists developing a Red Abalone Recovery Plan.

The Sonoma-Mendocino coast is Ground Zero for an oceangoing tradition that drew thousands to the region beginning April 1 of each year for diving, feasting, friends and family gatherings that passed a love for the meaty mollusks down through generations.

But the coast is also the region most affected by the rapid collapse of the bull kelp forest, which left abalone starving and dying in masses.

Red abalones, long a traditional food source and sport catch along the California Coast, already had been in decline when a series of unfortunate events that drastically altered the marine ecosystem hit last decade.

They included sea star wasting disease, which, beginning in 2013, killed off a wide range of sea stars, notably the giant, multiarmed sunflower sea star, or pycnopodia helianthoides, a key predator of urchins.

That led to a population explosion of purple sea urchins, which, along with a marine heat wave, wiped out more than 90% of the region’s bull kelp, the main food source for abalone.

By 2018, abalone hunting season had been canceled. It is now shut down until at least 2026, though scientists predict a much longer wait before the stocks can be restored.

Fish & Wildlife officials are looking for tribal members, former recreational and commercial abalone fishers, conservationists, aquaculture practitioners, nongovernmental organization representatives and others to form the working group.

The commitment is likely to last through 2026 and will include monthly meetings, at first, though meeting frequency is expected to vary and could include smaller subgroups, Fish and Wildlife said.

Members will be asked to attend as many meetings as they can and should be ready to review appropriate documents and provide comments when solicited between meetings, as well, the agency said.

Those interested in joining the working group must apply online by 5 p.m. Friday, April 5, at wildlife.ca.gov/Conservation/Marine/RARP#join.

More information is available at wildlife.ca.gov/Conservation/Marine/RARP#about

Questions? Please contact CDFW at Abalone@wildlife.ca.gov

(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

TEACHERS NEED MORE HELP

Editor:

Americans blame our education system for many things, and in some cases it’s wholly justified.

The media have been frothing at the latest high-profile failure in our schools: New data reveal that only 32% of fourth graders are proficient as readers. Educators are toiling in an era of unprecedented challenges, and they’ve been excoriated for this alarming revelation. However, there’s more to this story.

Our public education compact, as it were, always has been predicated on parents taking an active role in supporting their children’s schoolwork. There are no shortcuts where this commitment is concerned.

What used to be an expectation now is an indicator of privilege. Between long commutes and a significant percentage of people who work multiple jobs, fewer parents have the luxury of time or resources to sit down and work with their kids. In addition, many parents lack the necessary language skills to assist with their kids’ assignments.

There’s only so much a single teacher can do with a classroom of 25-30 students, many of whom are English learners who never learned to read in their native languages. These students need far more support, and so do their teachers.

Mark Wardlaw

Santa Rosa

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

It’s really amazing that no matter how many times the phrase “All that decriminalizing them will do will be to free up police, Court, and jail resources to deal with actual criminals” is used to push for loosening drug bans and yet those people never seem to notice there is never any less “serious crime” nor are the courts “freed up”. You know what actually makes for less “serious crime” in reality? Locking up repeat offenders and having an aged population.

I’d spend some time finding supporting data to show that but it’s clear that will not, like presenting data to anti-vaxxers, keep them from repeating their preferred scenarios. People who screw up their lives, or provide the means for others to screw up their’s, say such crap because they want what they want. About ten years from now, a lot of research is going to show the harm to health smoking pot does. Then ten years after that, it’s going to show the harm that ingesting it does. Because it, like tobacco use doesn’t have the same affect on everyone, it takes data collection on a large scale to show clearly any non-catastrophic harm. And, just like tobacco use, those addicted to it will just keep dismissing any negatives.

WHENEVER WE ENGAGE in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.

― Vandana Shiva

ON TODAY’S ABSURD NEW YORK TIMES HIT PIECE

by Matt Taibbi

In advance of oral arguments tomorrow in the Supreme Court for Murthy v. Missouri, formerly Missouri v. Biden, the New York Times and authors Jim Rutenberg and Steven Lee Myers wrote a craven and dishonest piece called, “How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation.”

The Times implies both the Twitter Files reports and my congressional testimony with Michael Shellenberger were strongly influenced by former Trump administration official Mike Benz, whose profile occupies much of the text. Benz is described as a purveyor of “conspiracy theories, like the one about the Pentagon’s use of Taylor Swift,” that are “talking points for many Republicans.” They quote Shellenberger as saying meeting Benz was the “Aha moment,” in our coverage, and the entire premise of the piece is that Benz and other “Trump allies” pushed Michael, me, and the rest of the Twitter Files reporters into aiding a “counteroffensive” in the war against disinformation, helping keep social media a home for “antidemocratic tactics.”

This all has a strong whiff of setup. I have nothing to say against Mike Benz, but let’s set some things straight. As Rutenberg and Lee Myers themselves note, I first talked to Benz in March, 2023. The Twitter Files reports were virtually all done by then. I would publish just two more, one on the day of my testimony, March 9, 2023 (“The Censorship-Industrial Complex”) and one on March 17 (“Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of ‘True Stories’.”).

Mike was the source for exactly one piece of information in those two stories: a video his Foundation for Freedom Online posted of Stanford Internet Observatory director Alex Stamos, in which Stamos said Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership was created to “fill the gap of things the government couldn’t do” legally:

This was true, public, and newsworthy, not a “conspiracy theory” about Taylor Swift or anyone else. Did “Trump Allies” force Stamos to put that video on YouTube? Rutenberg and Lee Myers imply Benz influenced a change in my personal reporting, since I didn’t discover “evidence of direct government involvement” in the first installment of the Twitter Files about the Hunter Biden laptop story:

The author of that dispatch, Mr. Taibbi, concluded that Twitter had limited the coverage amid general warnings from the F.B.I. that Russia could leak hacked materials to try to influence the 2020 election. Though he was critical of previous leadership at Twitter, he reported that he saw no evidence of direct government involvement. In March 2023, Mr. Benz joined the fray. Both Mr. Taibbi and Mr. Benz participated in a live discussion on Twitter, which was co-hosted by Jennifer Lynn Lawrence, an organizer of the Trump rally that preceded the riot on Jan. 6â¦ As Mr. Taibbi described his work, Mr. Benz jumped in: “I believe I have all of the missing pieces of the puzzle.” There was a far broader “scale of censorship the world has never experienced before,” he told Mr. Taibbi, who made plans to follow up.

Nice try. Though I didn’t find “direct evidence” of government involvement in censorship programs in the first Twitter Files piece, we did discover it, on a grand scale, almost immediately after. Subsequent Twitter Files reports reflected this, including “Twitter, the FBI Subsidiary” from December 16th, 2022, including the “Twitter and Other Government Agencies” story published on Christmas Eve of 2022, the day the IRS opened a case on me.

Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and other Twitter Files reporters discovered the key elements of the Twitter Files reports, from the “industry calls” held between the FBI and Internet platforms like Twitter, to the role of Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, to the role of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center in sponsoring “anti-disinformation” work, in the first two weeks of research. Our central thesis about state-sponsored censorship was online months before we met Benz. By mid-December 2022, I knew we were looking at a sweeping federal content-control program, and repeated the idea many times. As I wrote on Christmas Eve, 2022:

The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government â”from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIAâ¦ The operation is far bigger than the reported 80 members of the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF)â¦ Twitter had so much contact with so many agencies that executives lost track.

Nonetheless, the gist of today’s Times piece is that Shellenberger and I got this thesis from Benz. They literally wrote it that way, that when I testified to Congress, I was presenting his thesis: Later, Mr. Shellenberger said that connecting with Mr. Benz had led to “a big aha momentâ¦”

A week after that online meeting, Mr. Taibbi and Mr. Shellenberger appeared on Capitol Hill as star witnesses for the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Mr. Benz sat behind them, listening as they detailed parts of his central thesis: This was not an imperfect attempt to balance free speech with democratic rights but a state-sponsored thought-policing system.

Michael, Bari, Lee, David Zweig and others involved with the Twitter Files project have been subject to a lot of silly smear jobs in the last year-plus, but this piece of deep state fan fiction in the Times is low even by their standards. It’s clearly intended to re-cast the outing of federal censorship initiatives as Trumpian conspiracy theory before oral arguments begin in Murthy v. Missouri tomorrow.

As the Times notes, this is one of “the most important First Amendment cases of the internet age,” and “could curtail the government’s latitude in monitoring content online.” Originally filed by the Attorneys General of Louisiana and Missouri, the lawsuit “accuses federal officials of colluding with or coercing the platforms to censor content critical of the government.”

The reason the government faces such danger is because two lower courts have already affirmed the core accusation that multiple Executive Branch agencies, including the White House and the FBI, violated the First Amendment when they engaged in mass-flagging programs of the type identified in both the Twitter Files and the original Missouri v. Biden complaint. After these lower court decisions, the Times notes with sadness, “the Biden administration has largely abandoned moves that might be construed as stifling political speech,” facing as it now does the specter of “legal and political blowback.”

The administration faces this blowback because the story about the censorship programs is true. The Times didn’t bother trying to argue we got anything wrong. It just said we knew Benz, showed a picture of him sitting behind Shellenberger as he testified, then said things like “More recently, Mr. Benz originated the false assertion that Taylor Swift was a ‘psychological operation’ asset for the Pentagon,” as if that had something to do with us. It’s Six Degrees of Misinformation.

Rutenberg two election cycles ago authored the seminal article on “oppositional” journalism in the Trump age. “Trump is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism” came out in summer of 2016, and was hugely influential. It said Trump was such a threat that the job going forward could no longer just be about reporting facts, but reporting facts that will “stand up to history’s judgment.”

Now he’s arguing the exposure of censorship programs is “paralyzing” official efforts to police social media, the medium that was “central to [Trump’s] political success.” Apparently misleading the public about my reporting is the new version of staying on the right side of “history’s judgment.” Let’s hope the Supreme Court doesn’t get distracted by these hysterics. Is there any doubt that’s what this story is designed to accomplish?

SEPARATED AT BIRTH? (Lee Edmundson)

THE ONLY PEOPLE who hate leftists more than rightists do are liberals, which is a bit funny because rightists think leftists and liberals are the same.

— Caitlin Johnstone

STEPHEN ELLIOTT: About 15 years ago my wife and I cleaned out the lonely little Brooklyn apartment of her late uncle. Charlie was a nice guy, smart, a little eccentric, who had had a career in the lower ends of the typewriter repair, jewelry, and tchotchke trades.

Among his books was a nice old Modern Library hardcover of The Wandering Jew (1844) by Eugene Sue (1804-1857). Last year I read this giant, 1357 small print pages, and it bowled me over. A wild tale, centered in Paris, but with stops far and wide, including Java, India, Siberia, Eastern Europe, and even in America's Rocky Mountains. Animals have a big role, including horse named Jovial, a dog named Spoil-sport, and a black panther named Death.

The wandering Jew himself was a humble cobbler who told Christ, bearing the cross and seeking a moment's rest on the bench outside his shop, "Move on!" A mistake! Not a bad guy, the cobbler, probably just having a bad day, but because of this remark, he was condemned to wander the globe indefinitely and was still wandering in 1832, when the story comes to a climax. The wandering Jew is more a presiding spirit than a major player in the plot. Before he was a writer, Eugene Sue had been a physician in the French navy and he has an old salt's common sense, humanity, humor, eye for detail, and flair for story telling. He sets forth a nice socialist vision and tosses in a great love story and plenty of kick-ass action. While the book is long, the chapters are short and manageable. Write down names and places on the back of an envelope. The story will grab you!

My edition, oddly, didn't name the translator from the French, but some research and a couple of tells suggest that it was James Fenimore Cooper, of all people. It's a colorful and skilled translation! Fun fact: Eugene V. Debs, most appropriately, was named after Eugene Sue — and the V. in Debs' name is for Victor Hugo, another old left comrade.

PS. In the January 17, 2024 AVA Bruce Anderson described the tattoos on Mike Tyson's muscular arms as depicting Mao and Malcolm X. No, Mao is correct, but the other tattoo is of Arthur Ashe, a much wittier and more original pairing.

I HATE WRITING, I love having written.

― Dorothy Parker

H.G. WELLS, author of the famous science fiction story “War of the Worlds,” was a committed socialist who wrote the story with a political purpose. Wells intended his tale of the earthlings’ encounter with technologically advanced aliens as an allegory. His frightened British commoners (New Jerseyites in Orson Welles’s radio adaptation; Americans in the more recent Tom Cruise version) were analogous to the “primitive” peoples of the Canary Islands or the Americas, and his terrifying aliens represented the technologically advanced imperialism of the Europeans. As we identify with the helpless earthlings, Wells wanted us also to sympathize with the natives in Haiti in 1493, or in Australia in 1788, or maybe even in the upper Amazon jungle in the 1990s. Several historians have written about this. We particularly liked an article by Phillip Klass in the a New York Times Book Review piece in 1988. Ironically, in Wells’s story, the aliens are finally done in by microbes, while in reality, disease wiped out the Natives. Wells was probably hoping things would have turned out different during colonialization and the invaders would have suffered from New World diseases. But who’s going to be that picky?

— ms

7 Comments

Casey Hartlip March 18, 2024

I liked the way Old Joe referred to ‘My Predecessor’ in his state of the union address over a dozen times. Obviously it was a campaign speech as there’s not much to brag about how his policies are going. Joe the Uniter.

Lee Edmundson March 18, 2024

Thanks for publishing the ‘Separated at Birth” piece I sent y’all several months ago. When ‘The Donald’s’ mugshot was first published, I recalled I’d seen that expression somewhere many years ago. Took me about half an hour to find the monkey’s shot in a book buried deep in my library. Worth the time and effort, as the two photos so closely resemble one another. Just couldn’t resist showing the comparison.
Sorry to say, Mr. Trump has a great deal in common with his counterpart in the presentation: The naked human monkey is backed into a severely unforgiving corner. He’s got to win the Presidency or else he’s most likely going to jail. Consequently, he’s going to do and say just about anything — no matter how incendiary or outlandish — between now and November 5th.
“Keep your eyes wide, the chance won’t come again.” — Bob Dylan

- Chuck Dunbar March 18, 2024
  
  A good catch there, Lee. Thanks for persevering in search of that photo.
  
David Jensen March 18, 2024

Why I miss John Pinches.
When I was Program Manager of the Environmental Health Land Use team (wells and septics), John and I would occasionally find ourselves alone together in the men’s restroom, an oddly conducive location for meaningful discussions. At that time HHSA management (my boss) did not allow us to speak to the Board, so this was my one chance to be heard. John was a great listener, and a sense of trust grew between us. He was interested in the problems my staff faced, and when one of his constituents was having problems, the three of us would meet to resolve the issues. I don’t think that any other Supe at that time knew who I was.

John Sakowicz March 18, 2024

To the Editor:

I love Johnny Pinches.

Back when I served on four different county grand juries during the decade of roughly 2005-2015, I spent a lot of time in the county office building on Low Gap. As a grand juror, it was often my responsibility to monitor the Board of Supervisors. I went to their meetings, summarized them, and reported back to the grand jury. Consequently, I got to know the individual Supervisors quite well, Johnny Pinches chief among them.

After a while, Johnny started to take me out to lunch. We became friends. Sometimes, we would jump into his big old truck and take a ride somewhere.

Once I asked, “Hey, Johnny, we seem to have water resources with the Eel River, South Fork, the Russian River and Gualala River. Also, Lake Pillsbury, Lake Mendocino, Howard Lake, Mill Creek Lake, Hammerhorn Lake, and all. So where does all our water go? Why does Mendocino County declare drought emergencies every summer?”

Johnny replied, “Let’s find out!”

And just like that, we drove to the Sonoma County Water Agency on Aviation Blvd. in Santa Rosa, and I got what Johnny used to call an “education”.

He was the best.

Another thing. Johnny Pinches saw County CEO Carmel Angelo for who she really was.

Johnny foresaw the disaster County CEO Carmel Angelo was creating by consolidating her power by taking over county departments, like she did with general services, risk management and IT, or privatizing departments, like she did with mental health.

“Boss” Angelo further consolidated power by taking over the responsibilities of Clerk of the Board. She started developing the agenda for BOS meetings and, in time, locked them out of that process.

She hoarded financial information or otherwise completely withheld it from the BOS. She controlled the budget process. In every way possible, the BOS was marginalized by Angelo, including, at the very end of Supervisor John McCowen’s tenure, locking him out of his office and falsely accusing him of stealing county property.

We now know Angelo hid the county’s structural deficit. Also, we will soon be in the midst of a water crisis with recent PG&E decisions that took our county by surprised and unprepared. Our county’s wildfire response will be no better than it was for the last wildfire. Our unfunded pension liability is ballooning. Our county’s clunky computer system and non-existent financial reporting by department continues without end, keeping the BOS in the dark, as always.

In short, Mendocino County is in a survival mode. Johnny Pinches saw it all coming.

John Sakowicz
Ukiah

Julie Beardsley, MPH March 18, 2024

The Hatch Act does permit County employees to manage political campaigns, as long as they do not solicit support or pass out campaign materials at work. The CEO employee in question was passing out campaign information about Cline. This was witnessed by another employee. While I don’t think this rises to the level of firing that employee, it may warrant a cautionary warning to all employees of what is allowed and what is not. Since we are discussing Cline’s candidacy, I would like to point out that money in politics certainly advantaged Cline. I would like to see a cap on spending in local elections to level the playing field.

Julie Beardsley, MPH March 18, 2024

In further clarification, the Hatch Act refers to Federal employees, but the County code covers campaigning at work.
Sec. 3.16.170 – Political Activity.
(A) County officers and employees may not actively engage in political campaign activity during paid work hours.
(B) County officers and employees may not actively engage in political campaign activity on the premises of County offices.

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