JIM MARTIN
Dear Friends of Jim Martin,
It is with a heavy heart that I share the news of Jim's passing. As many of you know, he fought hard against lung cancer for the past few years. He loved life, and wanted it to last as long as it could, but because of that he didn't always share his struggles. He was a man that cared deeply for those around him, and I'm sure you each felt that from him. I hope the thought of him brings you a smile or a chuckle, because joy and laughter were core components of who he was and what he brought to this world.
If you have a moment and the desire, we (his family) would love to hear a few words or a story that you remember of your time with Jim.
Thank you for being an important part of Jim's life.
Beth, Gracie and May
Emails can be sent to Beth at bbenson@mcn.org
A READER WRITES: “When we arrived in Point Arena, I heard stories from a couple of the teachers about the bad mojo which blew through daily at the elementary school. The school was rumored to have been built on the site of a very old local Indian burial ground. Windy spots are good for carrying the spirits to their transcendent grounds. It is said that after massacres in Round Valley, local Native Americans were loathe to step onto state-run school soil for a long, long time. It took the dying off of a few generations with memory of the relatives they lost here and at Round Valley before the Pomo would attend school on this spot in Point Arena.”
STATE WATER RESOURCES, in 2001, says there are “130 illegally built reservoirs on the Navarro system,” and they said that in 1997 when they took a close look at aerial maps rendered that same year. How many more have been built in the years since?
A CRYPTIC PARAGRAPH from the old Mendocino Beacon’s “Old Time Notes” column I’d like to know more about: “A 160-acre tract of Indian land in Mendocino County sold to the highest bidder for $3,000 is included among 64 such tracts sold recently in Sacramento for a total of $267,968.” This particular theft occurred in December of 1951.
MAZIE MALONE: Re; Converging Public Health and Mental Health Director in my opinion is a giant mistake. We need Jenine Miller’s focus on Mental Health, Illness and Addiction, period. The problems are too numerous and pervasive for her to be in both roles, it muddies the waters even more. Obviously I understand the intersection of PH and MH, so seems like it makes sense, but it is a very bad idea. Families and those suffering with Mental Health Issues deserve and require a faithful focused Mental Health Director.
A READER WRITES: Didn’t we just undo the failed experiment of combining MH PH and Soc Services? (HHSA) And here we go again. Ms Miller will burn out, it’s too much for one person. HHSA went from 3 directors to 1. When that failed it went back to 3. Now we are going to 1 again? We never learn and we repeat, repeat, repeat and wonder why we are where we are. Stupid, stupid stupid. And what is happening at Soc Services? Without a director now for how long? And who now is over Children’s Services since the sad and untimely death of Jena Conner? No one in leadership is mentioning any of these events.
JULIE BEARDSLEY: As a follow up to Adam Gaska’s letter regarding the proposed merger of Behavioral Health and Recovery Services (BHRS) and Public Health, I’d like to point out that over 30 experienced Public Health staff left, retired or were fired after Public Health Director Anne Molgaard was fired by CEO Darcie Antle, and Dr. Jenine Miller, a psychologist with no Public Health background was appointed as interim PH Director. Since that time, Miller has forced out or fired staff members who knew what should be done and spoke out, (including the Director of Nursing, the Director of Maternal Child and Adolescent Health, the epidemiologist, and multiple RN’s, and Supervising Public Health Nurses), and surrounded herself with “yes men” who laud her and praise her, despite the fact that Public Health is a shadow of what it was. Dr. Coren left early because he disagreed with Jenine Miller’s management. Public Health is being overseen by BHRS staff who are not familiar with the functions of a Public Health department, and many projects and initiatives that were underway when Molgaard was the Director have now been shelved. These projects were important to the health of the community. BHRS staff may be well-intentioned, but I am very concerned about how the functions of the PH department are being eroded. Back when the Health and Human Services “super agency” was broken up, there was discussion about whether to merge BHRS and PH. At that time, past Medical Officers and Directors, as well as current PH staff, contacted the BOS to express their concerns and to urge them to not approve a merger because Jenine Miller was in no way qualified to run Public Health. Nothing has changed, except that a majority of people who understood what was necessary for a functioning PH department have left and you have inexperienced employees who naively believe that everything is fine, rah-rah Jenine Miller, or are afraid to speak up for fear of retribution. I hope going into the summer we have no major Public Health events. And I would also note that Mendocino County is now #1 in drug overdoses, one of the top counties in suicide rates, and you just have to drive down State Street to see the number of obviously mentally disturbed individuals wandering around yelling at their hallucinations. It seems to me that whatever BHRS is doing is not being very effective, and I would urge the BOS to have Dr. Miller focus on the issues of mental health and substance misuse.
Public Health is about prevention. BHRS is about treatment. They are two very different modalities and require different degrees and training. Our community deserves better.
MARK SCARAMELLA: The Supervisors’ knee-jerk tendency these days is to consolidate thinking it might save money or because they simply can’t fill senior positions. These are not good reasons for consolidation. It has nothing to do with Ms. Miller. The original idea to combine Public Health, Social Services and Mental Health was to reduce three directors and three separate sets of admin/finance staffs to one. Instead, all it did was leave the three quasi-directors in place and create a new and completely unnecessary fourth super-administration over them which, coincidentally, became Carmel Angelo’s first position in Mendocino County. We were the only ones pointing out that that “consolidation” without the reduction in admin and director positions was nothing but a giant waste of money. It turned out to be a power grab by Carmel Angelo who soon became disenamored of Mental Health because their billings were not reliably reimbursed by the state, not because of any perceived operational shortfalls. So she privatized Mental Health by bringing in former Ortner Manager Tom Pinizotto who rigged the adult mental health contract for Ortner who had no qualifications for the work. When the Grand Jury pointed out that Mr. Pinizotto had “the appearance of a conflict of interest” (he had an actual conflict, not that Mendo cares about such things), the Supervisors denounced the Grand Jury and insisted that the Ortner contract was “legal.” When that blew up Camille Schraeder picked up the pieces while everybody blamed Ortner and became the monopoly they are to this day. (The County has since sued Ortner for mental health data they don’t have and Ortner as a company is out of business. We have no idea where that suit stands; it’s pointless anyway since Ortner doesn’t have anything to provide.)
Where was I? Oh yes, consolidation.
We do not know of a single “consolidation” in Mendocino County history that has worked out well. The combination of the Assessor’s office with the Clerk and Recorder’s office has not saved any money and put a person inexperienced in Assessor’s office operations in charge of it and assessments have been in catch up mode ever since. The consolidation of the Auditor and Treasurer was a bad idea opposed by everyone but the Supervisors, and it’s still a mess. The consolidation of Animal Care with Animal Control could have been an improvement if it was put in Ag or the Sheriff’s office, but instead it sits as an bastard child in what was Health and Human Services. We have no idea who the Animal Care & Control Director reports to. Ms. Angelo’s attempts to put combine the cannabis program into Ag and then in Planning and Building were complete failures. And now we have this backdoor consolidation of Public Health and Mental Health because they can’t find anyone to run Public Health (they had a perfectly good Director in the person of Barbara Howe but she ran afoul of Angelo and was escorted out by security in one day. Now they are talking about combining Mental Health and Public Health without any plan or analysis (just like they did with Auditor/Treasurer). A few Board members have balked a little because there has been no formal organizational change or plan, just an extra assignment for Dr. Jeanine Miller. But Supervisor Mulheren doesn’t want any dissent in the room so she’s trying to push through the Mental Health/Public Health marriage despite these bleats from her colleagues. Since the Mental Health department is little more than an administrative function that funnels no-bid contracts to the Schraeders now after privatization, its role is mostly a financial and administrative/contracting function as an extension of Ms. Schraeder’s private company who does whatever mental health “work” is being done.
There was never a good reason to combine any of these offices which were set up by people in the past who knew a little about what they were doing, as opposed to these bumblers and pretenders. The public needs an independent Auditor, an independent Treasurer, an independent Assessor and an independent Clerk-Recorder because they should not be subordinate to the political winds and whims in the Supervisors chambers. Unrealized, unanalyzed and un-followed up on consolidations for alleged financial or personnel reasons are a formula for corruption, nepotism, insider dealing, and waste. But, as shown by the recent election of a patently unqualified candidate over a clearly experienced one in the First District, and by the near-complete lack of public interest in the Board meetings or the budget, the public no longer seems to care about such basic County matters. So here we are and things are not likely to get any better. And when the AVA is gone, all this sordid history (including the intelligent remarks like those above) will be buried in our archive where no one will remember it’s even there.
PS. The Plot Thickens. Late Wednesday we heard that the County’s SEIU 1021 Union rep has filed a formal complaint about the hurry-up petition that was circulated among the Public Health and Mental Health employees late Tuesday afternoon pointedly asking those employees to sign up in favor of Dr. Miller’s appointment to run both offices.
The person who circulated the petition is a woman named Angle Slater, a public health nurse who works directly for CEO Antle as a Disaster Relief Nurse Manager and who was Supervisor-elect Madeline Cline’s campaign manager while serving in that taxpayer funded position.
FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER, I felt sorry for Trump as I read about Stormy Daniels testimony yesterday at Orange Man's weird trial for whatever in New York. In my under-informed opinion of the lascivious proceedings against the former president and infamous rue, I thought it had something to do with financial irregularities, among them paying Stormy to keep quiet about a joyless but non-commercial sexual encounter the two of them shared years ago at a golf tournament. Why the judge allowed Stormy to even appear let alone describe the mechanics of what the fun couple did seems to have had more to do with humiliating Trump than anything that looks like justice.
HOW DANGEROUS IS TRUMP? As they have done for the last sixty years, the Democrats are keening in loud weepy choruses that if Trump is re-elected it means “the end of democracy.” In the country whose two political parties are owned by the rich, What democracy? But fer shure Big Trouble is headed our way in November, although Trump's first tour as president wasn't nearly as destructive as W. Bush's, the latter igniting the entire Middle East and destabilizing the whole world based on the lie that Saddam Hussein was about to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. W's entire administration should still be in the federal pen, but these creeps get standing o's wherever they go..
TRUMP is not Hitler or Mussolini. He doesn't have the smarts, doesn't have a plan, doesn't have smart enough helpers, doesn't have the support of even a solid half of us Americanos who vote, which is way less than half, doesn't have the generals, doesn't have, overall, the means to “end democracy,” which has managed to end itself anyway in money and the Joe Biden Construct.
WHAT TRUMP can and already has done is stir up the armed wahoos, who he's rhetorically prepped to jump off if he loses to the Biden Construct. How much trouble can bully boy militias cause? Regionally, probably a lot, but not enough to bring shopping or the NFL to a halt.
TRUMP'S JUDGE lacks gravitas. He looks like… well, a silly person, a person not to be taken seriously, as if the bailiff had barked, “All rise!” and Captain Kangaroo walked out. Without going all Retro White Man on you here, but Mendo's two judges back in the day, O'Brien and Broaddus, looked and acted like judges. There are nine Mendo judges today for a population of 90,000 people.
TODAY, likely as not, you get a judicial Captain Kangaroo. O'Brien warned me one day when I argued with him about his illegal order that a kid I was responsible for be banned from the county, “If you say another word I will have you taken into custody.” Something like that, but he wasn't jivin' and I had to get back to Boonville so I sat down and shut up. Another day I was in Broaddus's court when he fired like a half-dozen guys off to state prison. His courtroom was packed with crying wives and girlfriends, and the judge, who seemed in a foul mood, appeared to take each felon personally. As the weeping increased at about the fourth guy, Broaddus, looking fiercely out at the crowd, growled a loud, “Next!” I got a little apprehensive myself that he might send everybody in the room to the state pen.
BUT FAST FORWARD to a courtroom in Las Vegas and OJ. Yes, that OJ. In a mesmerizing Netflix documentary, called, “OJ: Made in America” there's a clip of the broken football hero, an internationally famous person, a god who fell as far as any god of ancient myth, as he was being sentenced for a bumbling robbery aimed at getting his memorabilia back from the petty crooks who'd stolen it from him. The judge, a youngish woman, took a long, loud slurp from her fast food drink before she read off a long list of inflated charges that got OJ more than 30 years in prison. The consensus among observers was that she was taking OJ all the way down for getting away with his murders of Nicole and Ron. But I ask you, slurping a soft drink in this context?
ON THE SUBJECT of courtroom farce, DA Eyster's conjured non-case against falsely dismissed, elected County Auditor Chamise Cubbison has yet to get to the prelim to see whether Eyster has a case or not. The DA was going to bring his non-case himself, but he's handed it off to a Santa Rosa attorney at $400 tax dollars an hour to argue it for him. Last we heard, the Rose City ace was “getting up to speed” on the matter, which is non-existent so she'll have to make one up. Which, I would think will take some time. When this howling bullshit finally gets to court what do you think the odds are that the judge will toss it? A million to one? Ten mil?
INCIDENTALLY, Democracy in Mendocino County is looking kinda shaky. We have the DA, in league with a cowardly and incompetent board of supervisors removing an elected county official, waiving the presumption of innocence, and we have Mendo's wine industry funding the election of a young Potter Valley cowgirl over much more experienced candidates simply because she can be depended on not to interfere with the booze biz.
THE SF CHRONICLE’s Esther Mobley recently wrote a lengthy article about the troubles the wine industry is facing these days what with young people shunning wine as “poison” and climate change, and a glut and all… You won’t find me shedding any tears for the wine industry’s self-inflicted problems. But Ms. Mobley’s report sounds to me like just a 2024 version of the old “How do you make a small fortune in the wine industry? Answer: Start with a large one.” Call me jaded. Every few years there’s a big hullabaloo about one wine industry problem or another. Underlying most of it is the natural boom-bust cycle and the periodic gluts (i.e., overproduction based on overhyped wine drinking expectations) associated with it. Back in the early 2000s Lewis Purdue documented a lot of it in his outsanding little book about the SoCo wine industry: “The Wrath of Grapes.” In the past it’s been unsubstantiated health claims, or the glassy-winged sharpshooter, or the demanding banks/lenders, or water shortages, or adulterations making it into the mainstream wines (and the news), or two-buck chuck, etc. You pick. People forget that the wine industry almost literally owns the California Democratic Party (and vice versa) (Thompson, Pelosi, Newsom, etc. etc.) and they are not going to let the wine industry suffer like other “ag” crops. You can be sure that if things get particularly tight, some quasi-bailout bill or another will be engineered for them at the federal or state level. Of course, there will be some accompanying shake-outs and some marginal little guy wineries will be forced to sell their vineyards and wineries and tasting rooms to their neighboring big guys. But that’s what they deserve for raising their glasses to toast an industry that sees them as little more than captive grape juice suppliers. Those smaller, frequently organic and fair-labor staffed outfits better prepare for another bumpy ride while Big Wine gets ready for another government handout. (Mark Scaramella)
SUPERVISOR MCGOURTY DENIES ALLEGATION OF IMPROPRIETY
To Whom it may Concern,
This letter is being shared to shed light on some inappropriate behavior by an Elected Official in Mendocino County. First District Board Member Glenn McGourty abused his power to get special treatment for a family member through County services and threatened staff. As a witness to these events and the impact on the staff directly involved, I was appalled at the behavior and abuse of power.
In 2022, a family member of Mr. McGourty required County services. Mr. McGourty and his wife demanded special treatment for their family member and expected special privileges given Mr. McGourty's political position. When County staff attempted to intervene in this inappropriate demand, they were threatened by Mr. McGourty and his wife, who reminded staff of Mr. McGourty's position of power within the County implying there would be consequences for not bending to their will.
A few things stand out from these events:
1) The County has a fiduciary responsibility to ensure taxpayer dollars are spent appropriately; 2) Each citizen of Mendocino County should be treated equally in terms of County services provided, regardless of economic status or political position held; and 3) Mr. McGourty and his wife expected special treatment for his family member and threatened County staff who attempted to do the right thing.
Mr. McGourty needs to be held accountable for his actions and should resign from the Board of Supervisors.
SUPERVISOR MCGOURTY RESPONDS:
Dear AVA:
The anonymous correspondence that you received is factually incorrect. This accusation occurred in a closed Board of Supervisors Session whose proceedings under the Brown Act are confidential. Additionally, medical records are confidential under the HIPAA laws, and cannot be discussed without consent of the person being treated.
Sincerely:
Glenn McGourty
I THINK it's more likely that the present board of supervisors instinctively, all five of them, instantly assume the prone position before authority, which accounts for their collusion with DA Eyster in his malicious pursuit of our elected auditor, Chamise Cubbison, a pursuit guaranteed to cost local taxpayers millions of dollars when Ms. Cubbison cashes in her lawsuit against the county. Too bad that everyone involved can't be held personally liable, but as it is none of them will be, and none of them will ever express personal remorse for lending themselves to such a crummy series of events. Or even aware that they are ethically, morally defective.
YOU KNOW what the problem is? With everything? Tell us, O Sage of Boonville. Ready? Write this down: Everything's too big. Plato said when political units — towns, cities, get over five thousand people, 5,040 to be exact, the individual is unlikely to be either represented or have an effective say in the affairs of his community while everything goes to hell. (cf Ukiah)
WHILE THE SAGE is passing out his statements of the obvious today, the root cause of homelessness, as it has evolved to its present intractability, and apart from its context as a society organized to promote despairing mental illness, is the cash-flush bureaucracies ostensibly working to get capitalism's casualties indoors. The helping pros' first allegiance is to their own cush jobs while the homeless function as mere funding units for them, hence the State of California's expenditure of $24 billion to get the homeless housed, an expenditure of public moeney whose net effect is more homelessness than ever.
LOCALS won't forget that the County of Mendo spent $60 grand on a homeless consultant named Robert Marbut, who reported back on how to radically reduce homelessness in Mendocino County only to have our supervisors ignore the advice they'd paid mightily for. The County's helping professionals were panicked that Marbut had implied that the local helping pros were an obstacle to getting the house-less indoors, and they quickly convened a mass meeting in the basement tomb of the Ukiah Convention Center where they decried Marbut's cruelty, his lack of humanity! And right there we had the perfect mass statement of why central Ukiah has become an outdoor asylum and is likely to stay that way.
ABOUT TIME. The MCN chatline is finally being moderated after years of a handful of demented Coasties bombarding each other with insults all day every day, “If you would like to flag an offending post for moderation, send a message to mlp@mcn.org.” It seems the worst offenders have already been 86'd from MCN, a couple of them predictably complaining that they've been stripped of their 1st Amendment rights to free speech.
THE SF CHRONICLE did away with its comment lines recently because it probably took someone or several someones to edit out the dementia, which ran into money for a newspaper already on the fiscal ropes.
SIGNS OF THE APOCALYPSE: Donald Trump's lawyer asked Daniels about making porn films. “You have a lot of experience of making phony stories about sex appear to be real?” Necheles said. Daniels countered, “Wow, that's not how I'd put it.” She said “the sex in the films is very much real.” She added “just like what happened to me in that room,” referencing her alleged encounter with Trump in 2006. Daniels was asked about a supposedly fake story about having sex with Trump. She responded: “If that story was untrue, I would have written it to be a lot better.”
FORMER GEIGER'S OWNER Michael Braught needs to do the right thing and allow the new owners to re-open the place. He's made his money, plus some, so time to halt the screwing of 3,500 people and turn the operation over to the buyers. He apparently defaulted on the operating lease ($25K per month) long ago, so he doesn't have a legal leg to stand on and will get clobbered in court. I've always said and still believe that problems just don’t happen, people make them happen. It's way past time for Braught to quit creating problems, otherwise people might think he's a jerk.
Hasta Luego,
Jim Shields
Editor & Publisher
The Mendocino County Observer
PO Box 490
Laytonville, CA 95454
(707) 984-6223- Phone
JEFF BLANKFORT
Let there be no doubt about it. The Jewish Political Establishment wants everyone to know, they are running America on Israel's behalf and any one who challenges their control will be smashed by their "Benjamins,"
Which reminds me of what Ariel Sharon said in reply to Shimon Peres in 2002 when Peres was worrying what Americans would think about the Zionist pogrom in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank:
Not to worry, said Sharon. "We, the Jews, run America, and the Americans know it," he reportedly said on Israeli Army Radio.
The question has always been, what are Americans going to do about it?
Well, at least on the college campuses, they may have started.
KENNY ROGERS SCREWED AGAIN
Supported in his release effort by the Secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), a former Westport man convicted of attempting to have a political opponent murdered in 2005 failed in the Mendocino County Superior Court Wednesday morning in his attempt to have his 25 years-to-life sentence recalled and reduced.
Kenneth Allen Rogers, more commonly known in the day as Kenny Rogers, now age 66 and housed at San Quentin, appeared by video at the Department B court hearing with his local court-appointed attorney.
The People were represented by District Attorney David Eyster. Appearing also by video was Rogers’ attempted murder victim. The original prosecutor, Tim Stoen, also appeared, listening intently from the courtroom gallery.
While Rogers had long ago failed in all of his avenues of appeal, this latest 2024 round of litigation was authorized by Sacramento with the passage of Assembly Bill 600 wherein the Legislature enacted Penal Code § 1172.1, effective January 1, 2024.
In essence, this new law grants judges the authority to recall previously ordered prison sentences and re-sentence an inmate to a lower sentence, if not outright release, no matter the crime if the original sentence no longer aligns with the current legislative changes to the state of California law.
As in Rogers’ case, if the request for sentence recall and reduction is initiated by certain authorities, including the Secretary of CDCR who is a Governor’s appointee, the burden falls on the local District Attorneys to rebut a legislative presumption in favor of recalling the original sentence by making a showing that the inmate still poses “an unreasonable risk of danger to public safety,” as that phrase has also been restrictively defined by the Legislature.
The CDCR Secretary based his recommendation on a referral from the San Quentin warden, who had reported the “exceptional conduct” of inmate Rogers, in that Rogers has purportedly demonstrated a “sustained compliance with departmental rules and regulations, as well as prolonged participation in rehabilitative programming.”
However, the same letter also noted instances where it has been necessary to “counsel” Rogers for (1) attempting three times to intimidate a correctional officer into removing negative information from his prison file; (2) attempting to “manipulate” prison staff when Rogers had been denied a medical appointment he was seeking; (3) being scheduled for a medical appointment but Rogers opting to go to the gym instead of the appointment; and (4) participating in a work stoppage after being counseled.
In anticipation of Wednesday’s hearing, DA Eyster had witnesses ready to address the Court to explain that Rogers still poses an unreasonable risk of danger to public safety and the reasons why they hold that belief. Many letters were submitted in support of Rogers and even more in opposition to the sentence recall and possible re-sentencing of Rogers.
When all was said and done, Mendocino County Superior Court Judge Victoria Shanahan determined that – in light of the charges that Rogers stands convicted of and the 25-to-lfe sentence previously imposed – the Court did not have the discretion to grant a recall and to re-sentence Rogers in this case.
Judge Shanahan also noted that even if she had discretion to change the sentence, for example, to grant probation instead of prison, she still would not be willing to re-sentence Rogers to a grant of probation.
In talking to interested attendees outside of the courtroom after the hearing, DA Eyster cautioned that Rogers – surprisingly with the assistance of prison staff and others who seek to reduce state prison inmate populations – continues to build a resume to present to the Board of Prison Terms panel at his first parole hearing, now advanced by parole authorities to happen sometime in February 2027.
DA Eyster expressed his belief that the CDCR Secretary’s letter will be given great weight by the panel of commissioners, and the issue of future “dangerousness,” the danger Rogers poses to those who opposed him back in the Westport days and who continue to join together to oppose his release through the present, will be given short shrift.
DA Eyster finally noted that it will again take a concerted letter-writing effort by concerned citizens in 2027 if there is to be any hope at forestalling Rogers’ release.
For those unfamiliar with the background behind this investigation and successful prosecution of Kenneth Allen Rogers, the following is a paraphrased summary of facts taken from the Court of Appeal’s appellate opinion:
Kenneth Allen Rogers was the chairperson of the Westport Water Board and the assistant chief of the Westport Volunteer Fire Department. He was active in the local Republican Party and believed he had a future in Sacramento. The victim moved to Westport in 2002.
Rogers was not universally popular in local politics. In 2004, a petition circulated to recall him from the water board. The victim signed the petition and became the only candidate to run against Rogers. Rogers visited the victim at his house and asked him to remove his name from the recall petition, but the victim refused. In an election held August 31, 2004, Rogers was recalled from office on a vote of 29 to 19, and the victim replaced him.
In December 2004, Rogers called the victim and said that if he did not put 50,000 gallons of water in the water storage tank by the next morning, Rogers “was going to hang” him. Knowing that Rogers was angry about losing the recall election, the victim construed this as a serious threat on his life and reported it to law enforcement.
On January 19, 2005, the water board, led by the victim, voted to replace the chief of the volunteer fire department and Rogers, the assistant chief. Rogers said this was a “terrible day for Westport” and filed a lawsuit challenging his termination.
In March 2005, Richard Peacock was released from prison. Rogers knew Peacock and gave him a job at his auto detailing business in Sacramento. Peacock told his parole officer that he “loved” Rogers because of their friendship and “would do anything for him.”
By May of 2005, the victim had decided to move from Westport and put his home up for sale. Also in May 2005, Rogers told a woman who was notarizing loan documents for him that he felt incensed and persecuted over his removal from the water board and fire department.
On June 17, 2005, Richard Peacock travelled to Westport in a white convertible Miata. He was stopped by a police officer in the town of Williams for driving with expired registration and said that he was traveling to Mendocino County with his parole officer’s permission. In fact, he did not have his parole officer’s permission.
At about 10:30 that night, Richard Peacock knocked on the front door of the victim’s house in Westport, aggressively demanding to speak to “Kathy.” The victim, who was alone inside, told the man he had the wrong house and called 911. While still on the phone with the dispatcher, the victim opened his door and saw a man leaning against a white sports car with front end damage. Peacock walked back toward the victim, saying, “Hey, man, I don’t want any trouble,” and then pulled out a gun and fired it at the victim, grazing his head.
The victim stepped back inside, closed his front door, and dropped to the floor inside his house. Peacock fired several more shots through the door and injured the victim’s right wrist. Police who investigated the scene eventually found eight expended .22 caliber shell casings on the victim’s front lawn and nine bullet holes in his front door.
Law enforcement officers spotted Peacock driving the white Miata near Westport the following day. When they attempted to stop him, he accelerated and threw a white plastic bag out the window. Peacock eventually stopped the car and was arrested; the bag was recovered and contained a Ruger .22 caliber semiautomatic handgun containing only one of ten rounds. Ballistics tests revealed that the Ruger was the gun used in the victim’s shooting.
The gun was previously owned by Velma Bowen, who had allowed Rogers and his family to stay in her home in 1999. During the visit, Rogers had stored some guns that he owned under Bowen’s bed, near a box where she stored her .22 Ruger. After Rogers and his family moved out, Bowen discovered the Ruger was missing. She asked Rogers whether he had taken her gun, but he said no, he had his own Ruger.
According to Rogers’ wife, however, she and Rogers later found Bowen’s gun in a toolbox and assumed it had been taken inadvertently during their move out of Bowen’s home.
Rogers was interviewed about the victim’s shooting by Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department Detective Alvarado [now, in 2024, the DA’s chief investigator]. Rogers acknowledged that he had issues with the victim (describing him as “an asshole,” “rude,” and “a jerk” but denied having anything to do with the shooting. He admitted telling the victim he wanted to “hang” him politically.
Rogers told Alvarado that Richard Peacock and his brother Michael Peacock were convicts, that he had known Richard Peacock for 12 to 15 years, and that he had given Richard Peacock a job in his auto body business because he liked to help people. Rogers said he had also employed Michael Peacock as a groundskeeper of some property he owned near the Jack of Hearts Creek, where he grew marijuana.
Rogers was concerned about publicity regarding the marijuana because it was “not really the best thing for a Republican representative to have.”
Rogers acknowledged that Richard Peacock had come to the Jack of Hearts property about a week earlier in a white convertible. He told Detective Alvarado that he “hoped to God” Richard Peacock was not involved in the victim’s shooting, and commented, “I think [the victim] would set up shit like this.” When Alvarado said that seemed unlikely given the victim’s injuries, Rogers suggested that the shooter could have been the husband of one of the women the victim had been “sleeping around with.”
Rogers complained about the lack of respect shown to him by the “new blood” in Westport and about the victim’s public ridicule of him. Rogers continued to deny his involvement in the shooting in a subsequent interview.
On June 26, 2005, Richard Peacock called Rogers from the Mendocino County jail and complained about the charges against him. Rogers told him, “[T]hey’re trying to pull me into this whole thing, too.” Rogers promised to “be there” for Peacock and to “take care of every bit of business on the outside that I have to … until you’re out and free and released from this garbage.” Peacock told Rogers he was “sorry that all this came to your doorstep.”
On June 28, 2005, the authorities searched Rogers’ Jack of Hearts property and seized 120 to 130 marijuana plants and processed marijuana. Also seized was a digital camera which contained a photo of the victim’s home, taken from the inside of a vehicle sometime after March 11, 2005.
Rogers was arrested and on June 29, 2005, made a telephone call from jail to his wife in which they spoke about the evidence against Rogers being a “convict story.” Rogers called his auto detailing business on the same day and told the person who answered to “make sure everything’s all cleaned up.” He complained that “Michael and Richard are pulling some bullshit, I don’t know what … my bail is like half a million dollars.”
Meanwhile, Richard Peacock received a letter while in jail that read, “Dear Richard. [¶] Hope all is going okay for you. I heard about Michael[‘]s B.S. and can’t believe he could be related to you. Anyway, I will get the “Red Dog” to your kid with some school clothes, money, and will keep an eye out for her. Hope to see you soon, but it’s tough. I’m sending … $40 for your books, more to come. [¶] Your friend, Kate. [¶] P.S. Who’s this Keith guy calling for Michael? I’m not returning his calls. I think he has $ for?” The letter had a Yuba City postmark but no address; Richard Peacock did not know any “Kate” from Yuba City, and thought Rogers’ wife had sent the letter.
Rogers was called as a witness at Richard Peacock’s preliminary hearing on August 4, 2005, and winked at Peacock as he left the stand. Later in the day, Rogers’ then-attorney Donald Masuda gave Peacock’s attorney a message to the effect that Rogers wanted Peacock to know that Rogers’ wife would be looking after or taking care of Peacock’s daughter.
When this message was relayed to Peacock, he became extremely upset and angry and said that the message was a threat to harm Peacock’s daughter. Peacock explained that the “Red Dog” mentioned in the letter from “Kate” was a gun that had a red handle or an emblem of a red dog on the handle.
Richard Peacock did not testify, but Mendocino County Deputy District Attorney Tim Stoen offered his statements about the threat and the “Red Dog” letter under the spontaneous statement exception to the hearsay rule, based on his demeanor upon receiving the message.
In addition to the evidence described above, the prosecution called Michael Peacock as a witness at Rogers’ trial. He testified that he had a lengthy criminal record and had spent time in prison. In 2003, Rogers and Michael Peacock had several conversations about a Black man in Westport, and Rogers was “wishing somebody [would] hurt him, beat him up ….” Michael Peacock thought Rogers had offered him money and/or marijuana to beat the man up. He helped Rogers grow marijuana on his property and saw guns on that property, including one that looked like the gun used in the attack against the victim.
Keith Grier, a Westport resident who attended meetings of the water board, was asked to be a candidate against Rogers in the recall election, but declined. Grier is African American.
According to Michael Peacock, he and his brother Richard had a conversation in Sacramento either the day of or the day before the victim’s shooting. Richard told Michael he had plans to visit Westport and that Rogers had asked him to “severely hurt” the guy who had got Rogers “kicked off the water board.”
Michael had told police that Richard said he had been offered three to four pounds of marijuana by Rogers to carry out the attack. Richard was looking for a “piece” and asked Michael where he could get one, though he did not say he was going to use a gun on the victim.
To rebut the evidence that Rogers had threatened Richard Peacock’s daughter with a gun known as the “Red Dog,” Rogers’ wife, Christine Rogers, testified that she had helped Richard Peacock’s wife and his daughter financially, and that appellant had promised Richard he would give his daughter a large stuffed animal – Clifford, the Big Red Dog – that he had won at the Marine World theme park. Alva Haught, who knew Rogers and Richard Peacock, testified that in early 2005, he had seen the stuffed dog in Rogers’ auto body shop and asked if he could have it to give to his daughter.
Eric Beren, who knew both Rogers and Richard Peacock, testified that Peacock was scary, violent and “institutionalized.” Peacock did not have a lot of friends, and Beren believed he was so loyal to the friends he did have that he would take violent action against anyone who gave them problems. Beren also claimed that he and his wife had been interested in buying property in Westport and that Rogers would sometimes show them pictures of houses for sale in that area on his digital camera.
The police officers who searched Rogers’ home and his property on Jack of Hearts Creek did not find a gun with a red handle or a picture of a red dog on the grip.
(DA Presser)
ED NOTE: If you read the above carefully you will note that there is no evidence linking Rogers to Peacock the shooter. Why the Eyster Gang, automatically of course supported by the usual clubby judge, is so intent on keeping this guy in prison, is a mystery. Here's what I think happened: Rogers had helped ex-cons, including the Peacock brothers, by giving them jobs. Out of loyalty to Rogers, Richard Peacock shot up the front door of Rogers' Westport political enemy, inadvertently but slightly injuring him. Rogers, 66, has a perfect record in prison, hence prison officials' recommendation he be freed, and who better to make that judgement than them? BTW, around the County Courthouse, certain lawyers and judges have snickered that Rogers got an “immaculate conviction.” He also got an incompetent defense that bankrupted him. In all my years in Mendocino County, the Rogers case is as unfounded (and sleazy) as DA Eyster's own manufactured, evidence-free persecution of Chamise Cubbison, an elected official our cowardly board of supervisors removed from office on Eyster's say-so.
MARK SCARAMELLA ADDS: Prosecutor Tim Stoen told me at the time of the first trial that his case was a “guilt by association” case. So Stoen went to great lengths to have the Peacock brothers testify. Even though their testimony did not help the case against Roger, their criminal appearance made Rogers look guilty “by association.” I also happened to have attended several days of the Rogers trial. Rogers’ attorney (who later went on to be appointed a Lake County judge) failed to ask obvious questions time and time again causing myself and then-AVA reporter Tim Stelloh to wonder about his competence or if he was really acting on Rogers’ behalf. Prior to the trial, then-DA Meredith Lintott had offered Rogers a year and a half deal minus time-served plea bargain citing “lack of evidence.” But when the plea bargain came before the late judge Ron Brown, Brown said that given what Rogers was admitting to in the plea bargain he (Brown) couldn’t accept it. The case then went to the “guilt by association” trial with Rogers defended by an incompetent attorney.
MENDOCINO COUNTY SHERIFF MATT KENDALL: A huge thank you to The Forks Cafe for their continued support of local public safety. Today The Forks Cafe supported the Corrections Division (MCSO & Naphcare) day/night shifts by providing some food for our annual Corrections/Nurses Week BBQ held at the Mendocino County Jail. We are all very thankful for the support and appreciation!
SUPERVISOR WILLIAMS: Starting July 1, under SB478, California restaurants will no longer be able to charge service fees — which have become an increasingly common tool to sustain higher wages for workers as food businesses move away from tips — and must instead fold them into menu prices, the attorney general’s office said.
IS IT anti-Semitic to be against circumcision? The Old Testament said circumcision was an inviolable contract between God and Jewish males, but when the Christian revisionists came along to bland down the message in anticipation of drive-thru Sunday services, their New Testament simply asked Christians to circumcise their hearts by worshipping Jesus. Me dear old mum, a registered nurse, explained that circumcision was simply a hygiene measure, no foreskin, no penile probs.
NOTHING WISHY-WASHY about this fascist politician: Congressman Brian Mast was confronted by peace protesters led by Medea Benjamin who asked the Army veteran, who lost both his legs to an IED in Afghanistan, if he agreed there should be a ceasefire in Gaza. Mast replied, “I think Israel should go in there and kick the shit out of them, just absolutely destroy them, their infrastructure, level anything they touch. Clear enough?”
KINDA RECOMMENDED. The Netflix series “A Man In Full,” a kinda comedy, is kinda vulgar, kinda witless, kinda full of grafted on sub-plots of the tiresomely righteous type, still manages to be kinda watchable. Jeff Daniels, who's always good, plays a kinda psycho business man who’s dead as the movie begins but still manages to ask, “When you die, will people notice?” Which is a question that assumes you're not dead enough not to care.
THE FIRST MOVIE I ever saw was at the Lark Theater in Marin. It was called Bill and Koo and featured talking parakeets. The full house of mostly adults laughed throughout. I may have wondered what was wrong with me, but I remember for sure wondering why people were laughing.
CHARLIE’S BRASHNESS remains on full display as the story flashes back to 10 days prior, at his 60th birthday party. He confidently — arrogantly — makes the rounds, asking his ex-wife’s best friend Joyce (Lucy Liu) if she’s had cosmetic work done and forcefully greeting a banker, Raymond Peepgrass (Tom Pelphrey), with a hand tightly (and uncomfortably) clasped around the back of his collar — a moment that foreshadows the final scene, where Charlie’s hand once again finds its way around Raymond’s neck. But how exactly does Charlie’s hubris lead to his downfall? It’s time to dive into the many moving parts of ‘A Man in Full,’ starting with its origin.
PIG HUNTERS are invited to try this one from the Chron’s great outdoors writer, Tom Stienstra: “Anybody do the math? It takes a wild pig sow 121 days to have a litter, and then 21 days later they are back in season. In each litter, they average 4.5 piglets that survive. Of these, figure half are female. So over the course of five years, one sow can produce how many related offspring?”
THE LATE Ukiah City councilman Phil Baldwin, a man who cared, used to bring “quality of life issues” to public attention, by which he meant the ongoing war against ever increasing numbers of slobs. Fresh off his defeat to get leaf blowers banned from within the Ukiah City limits — anywhere else a slam dunk — the irrepressible Baldwin attempted to rouse Caltrans, aka the State of California, to get litter off Highway 101 where the heavily-traveled highway bi-sects the Ukiah Valley. Baldwin pointed out that most of the litter strewn everywhere along the highway’s margins came from Ukiah’s nearby fast food parlors as he lamented the passing of the very last generation of non-slobs. “Fifteen to 20 years ago there were many more courteous people alive,” Baldwin said at a meeting of the council. “The courteous people are dying off. Many times the younger generation is not concerned with anything beyond themselves.”
I DISAGREED. I think we’re talking cross-generational slob-ism here, perhaps even genetic slob-ism. A young slob, or a slob-in-training, doesn’t instinctively toss dirty pampers and Chicken MacDeath wrappers out the windows of moving vehicles, someone taught him. I think we’re talking fourth and fifth generation slobism in a society that no longer assumes public responsibility.
NEWS FROM SUPERVISOR MULHEREN (via facebook): “Mendocino County is desperately seeking a Public Health Officer. Please share this job announcement on Social Media, with your friends, with your cousins College roommate, at the coffee shop, at the park…”
Mark Scaramella notes: The reposted agenda item on last Tuesday’s Supervisors meeting to appoint Dr. Theron Chan, CEO Antle’s roommate, was again withdrawn at the last minute, just as it had been two weeks earlier. Now it appears the Board is looking for someone else.
“Looks like the Air Quality lease went through and they will be moving out of the Observatory House mid-June making room for the VSO to return. I recognize this has taken longer than some would like and just want to say thanks for your patience. I look forward to increased communication and more support of our local Veterans from the community as well as the County.”
Mark Scaramella notes: This is progress, albeit at a snail’s pace. Supervisor Mulheren doesn’t say how soon the VSO (Veterans Service Office) will move back into their original Observatory House, nor does she say how much this all cost or how much it will cost.
FOR SEVERAL YEARS, I read the Times Sunday book review section until I belatedly figured out, after buying some unreadable fiction based on their reviewer's recommendations, that a lot of the reviews were simply log rolling and that I'd been burned as probably the only guy in the country who didn't know that.
THE AUTHOR of ‘The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism’ is heavy on the superlatives for Times staffers. They're “brilliant and accomplished” who eat at brilliant and accomplished restaurants, which he invariably names, especially if they're expensive. (Product placement?) The most interesting sections of the book are the Jason Blair plagiarism scandal and how Judith Miller singlehandedly kicked off the War On Iraq as Bush-Cheney cheerleader. Blair, a drunk, drug head and more or less functioning psycho, was an affirmative action hire who the army of Times editors was reluctant to crack down on because he was black and the paper was light on minority writers. Miller should have been checked early on by the same army of editors, assistant editors, and assistants to the assistant editors who failed to see that Blair was either faking a lot of his copy or stealing it from distant papers he assumed the army of editors in New York wouldn't catch and that Miller, as crazy as Blair in her own way, bought the totally implausible fantasy that “Saddam has weapons of mass destruction” fed to her by Dick Cheney.
ALSO INTERESTING is how the Times, after expensive misfires, made a go of its on-line edition, a huge transition for all of us paper-paper people when the cyber-deluge threatened to kill us all, and has killed most of us. The Times made it pay, the AVA is hoping to make it pay, and so far the on-line AVA , the only Mendo publication behind a paywall, is paying its way because local people want to read about the place where they live and will pay for it.
I'VE had some direct experience with the NYT, the Boonville weekly having been the subject of its lofty attentions a few times. Newspaper people are always interested in other newspapers and newspaper people. Back in '84 the NYT's famous editor, Abe Rosenthal, stopped in at the Boonville Hotel where, as newspaper people will do, picked up a copy of the local paper, which he liked and sent us a note saying so. I don't know if that appreciation appeared in the mother ship but we were buoyed by it. Years later, another major Times figure, R.W. ‘Johnny’ Apple, stopped by our editorial offices. We talked for an hour or so during which he said he'd been offered the job of editor-publisher of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat when the paper was owned by the NYT. “I turned it down because I would have had to fire everybody,” he laughed. He was startled to learn that the Times' lead science writer, Gina Kolata, was the sister of Judi Bari. “Our Gina Kolata?” Restraining myself from launching into a monomaniacal rant about the Bari Bombing scam, I suggested he get Gina to look into her sister's sad fate. I asked Mrs. Apple to come inside with her husband but she stayed in the car, and this was before cell phones. Maybe she had a book.
ANOTHER MEDIA NOTE: I ask you, is the following “Corrections Dept” item from the current edition of Marin's Pacific Sun weekly a joke?
“In the article titled ‘Everybody Welcome’ (April 24, 2024) we mischaracterized Emily Hope Parker as an ‘advocate for the disabled’ instead of an ‘advocate for inclusion.’ We apologize for the use of ‘disabled persons’ instead of the preferred term ‘people with disabilities’ as advocated by Parker. It’s important to note Parker did not say the quoted statements attributed to her in the article. Alchemia was inaccurately portrayed as a non-profit partner to the Inclusion Festival, when in fact Inclusive Compass holds that role. We apologize to Parker, Inclusive Compass, Alchemia and our readers.”
FINALLY, this provocation from today's Press Democrat: “Golis: More than ever, we need the wisdom of moms.” (Pete Golis’ cold, dead prose hand has scrawled weapons grade tedium at the Rose City Daily for years.)
AS A MATTER of grim historical fact, Moms have been co-conspirators in every mass slaughter and human error since the beginning of time, and are no wiser than their hubbykins.
“Nervous about public speaking, he wrote down what he hoped to say, but when the time came, he discarded his notes and spoke from the heart. He talked about her enthusiasm for life and all that he learned from her example. Here was a woman who devoted a career to nursing the sick while also making sure her family remained healthy and strong. She is more than a memory, he said, because her love for life goes with him every day. His tribute was a loving reminder of the quiet influence of mothers. Not politicians, not celebrities, but moms make the world go around. Which makes this a good time to say: Happy Mother’s Day to moms everywhere. Please know we need your wisdom now more than ever. When we look around the world today, we see too many politicians pounding their chests and pretending to be tough guys. Their bombast will get us all killed if we aren’t careful. Too many people are already dying, and we face the risk of wider and even more destructive wars. Better than most, mothers understand that anger and violence can only lead to more anger and violence. It’s a lesson they teach their children in grade school. On this Mother’s Day, let’s celebrate how the roles of women have changed since Mother’s Day was established.”
AS TOMMY WAYNE KRAMER famously said a few years ago: “If oatmeal could write, Pete Golis would be out of a job.”
WHAT THIS PICTURE DEPICTS is beyond disgusting and is criminal. It should offend all good people.
The book-sharing “house” at Wabash and Laurel in south Ukiah was destroyed by one or more crooks sometime Saturday night into Sunday.
Anybody with information as to the perpetrator(s) of this attack on community goodwill and literacy is asked to call the Ukiah Police Department (463-6262) or the DA’s investigators (463-4211).
(DA Facebook post)
MIKE GENIELLA: Always amazes me how much the surrounding landscape has changed, even in our lifetimes.
This is a great photo of Coyote Valley, which was flooded in the 1950s to create Lake Mendocino. Locals wring their hands when lake levels reach new lows but most of us forget that Russian River water users from Ukiah to Healdsburg didn't have any water storage, nor were there any guaranteed flows downstream for fish, until the mid-20th century when Coyote Dam was constructed. I've always had a personal interest in this place, since a grandmother, Sarah Burns Geniella, was born in Coyote Valley in 1864. Imagine how her farming family lived then. Thanks for posting photo, John Johns.
MENDO’S LATEST EXCUSE FOR NOT DELIVERING MEASURE P MONEY TO FIRE DEPARTMENTS
Monica Huettl, reporting on the latest Redwood Valley Municipal Advisory Committee meeting on Mendofever.com describes the County’s latest excuse for not delivering Measure P money to the fire districts it was intended for.
“After last year’s optimism about possibly getting $250,000 in funds from Measure P [for Redwood Valley Fire], things have taken a grim turn. There is a ballot initiative coming in November called the Two Thirds Voter Approval for New or Increased Taxes, requiring a two-thirds vote for new taxes. If this passes, it will be retroactive back to 2022, cancelling out Measure P. The proposed anti-tax initiative [from the Howard Jarvis tax-haters who gave us Proposition 13 that cleverly exempted corporate property transactions] would negatively affect all county Fire Departments. So far the Redwood Valley Community Fire Department has received $80,000 from Measure P, which is being held until the election in November, in case the money needs to be returned. The County has not finished the financials for last year, and they will not know the amount of property taxes allocated to fire departments until the financials are finalized.
Ms. Huettl also notes some law enforcement news: “Three new patrol deputies and four correctional officers have been hired. There are more applicants in the pipeline. The jail behavioral health wing is under construction, and Sheriff Kendall is hoping to keep costs down as the construction progresses. Kendall is working with Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal to staff this year’s cannabis task force.”
(Mark Scaramella)
SUPERVISOR MULHEREN (facebook): “To respond or not to respond?, that is the question. … There’s been some letters to the editor, there have been some comments on social media about a number of things including how I run the meetings and homelessness and specific individuals. A lot of really important topics that are coming up. I’d love to address those and will be doing that here on this page [facebook: mo4mendo]. If you’d like to ask me a question instead of writing about me on the internet, it’s 707 391-6664.”
PERHAPS a better question would be: “To respond or not to the original comment in writing?” Supervisor Mulheren could “address those comments” in writing for public review instead of with a semi-private video for her facebook friends on her own facebook page or in a private phone call. We’d be happy to post her responses. But the County Supervisor and current Board Chair prefers to refer to comments she doesn’t like indirectly phrased in her own misleading way — as she does in this recent post — with a facebook video where there’s no written record and conveniently avoiding the original complaint or who made it. We’re pretty sure one of the comments she’s bothered by is Jim Shields’ latest column pointing out Brown Act violations engineered by Supervisor Mulheren. Also criticism of her cutting off discussion of Supervisor Gjerde’s mention of a senior grant-writing position that he felt was no longer required, and people disputing her claim that homelessness is down in Mendocino County. By only summarizing what she’s responding to without quoting the original complaint or responding to the source, the Supervisor can paraphrase the original complaint, make it sound frivolous, tell her facebook friends how unfair they are, and avoid further discussion. Further, she can keep the viewers of her facebook page from seeing the original complaint, depriving her facebook friends of assessing the original complaint which provoked a response. Also, the Supervisor’s characterization of the comments as from “social media” (Shields and his paper the Mendocino Observer, the Ukiah Daily Journal and the AVA are not “social media”) and as “writing about me” is misleading. The comments were about her performance as Board chair on the public dime in a public setting, not about her personally. Either way, since this is the way she prefers to respond, we’ll be paying attention to her facebook page videos and responses as usual.
(Mark Scaramella)
YEARS AGO, I wrote a long story about the ordeal of a woman named Carol Mardeusz to get custody of her then-pre-school age daughter. A trim, attractive blonde woman on the sunny side of forty, she'd been the court reporter for one of my court appearances. She had called me to say she thought I'd been wronged, which of course endeared her to me, but had wasted no time launching into how she'd also been wronged in the courtrooms of Sonoma County. Ms. M's complaint seemed emblematic, and still does, of the raging custody disputes that rage on in courts across the land.
MS. MARDEUSZ had suffered an unfortunate infatuation with a well-connected Sonoma County fellow named Leo Magers. Magers’ mother was even better connected than her wayward son, having many personal associations with Sonoma County’s power people. Ms. Mardeusz had nobody but herself and her own dogged inability to approach the dispute with cunning and stealth. She just couldn’t keep it together long enough to fight smart for her little girl.
THE LEGAL SITE of the Mardeusz-Magers custody dispute was Santa Rosa where the court reporter's putative mother-in-law had all the advantages. Ms. Mardeusz, ordinarily sane, was instantly driven mad by what she saw as an arbitrary custody decision to give her daughter to an unfit father. She was a single woman up against a connected local family and her own unhinged courtroom behavior.
CAROL MARDEUSZ lost. Given the father's record, and properly representation, she might have won custody of her daughter, a young child who, it seemed to me, belonged with her mother, as most young children do. Ms. M had raised another daughter by herself, and that kid — a straight-A student free of even a hint of surly adolescence frequently characteristic of the teen beast, was the quality kid any parent would be grateful for. Young people generally reflect the ability of their parents to be parents, as most of us know and, on the evidence of her first daughter, Ms. M was a model parent.
WHEN I MET MS. MARDEUSZ and her daughter I was instantly on her side based simply on the evidence of this impressively together child. Also, Ms. M was restrained in my presence, only occasionally breaking into heated denunciations of “the system” she thought had wronged her.
I THOUGHT that any social worker and family court czar who claimed that sole custody of Ms. Mardeusz’s second child should go to the child’s father and not her mother would have to be backed up by some serious evidence of Ms. Mardeusz’s parental inability.
THERE WAS NO EVIDENCE that Mardeusz was in any way unfit. There was an abundance of evidence that her ex, Leo Magers, was a drug player, woman beater, unemployed and probably unemployable — facts irrefutably documented by Sonoma County court records. If it weren’t for his mother constantly picking up the pieces of his disastrous life for him, including nearly full-time care of his and Ms. Mardeusz’s little girl, the guy would have been sleeping in doorways. But his mother wanted the little girl, and Ms. Mardeusz's unhinged behavior in court got the sedate, determined older woman what she wanted, her errant son's daughter.
MS. MARDEUSZ argued to the court that her daughter wasn’t safe with her father. Her fears did tend to express themselves in wild accusations about him she was not able to support, but Ms. Mardeusz knew her ex was dangerously out of control from her experience with him and not the kind of guy who should have custody of a five-year-old.
MS. M went for months at a time without so much as an hour with her daughter. When she was finally allowed regular visits, they had to be in the company of a social worker, and then only for an hour or so at a time.
THE CHILD barely knew who her mother was.
THE SYSTEM seemed to ignore what they see every day in custody cases, that loss of a child to an unfit other can make the non-custodial parent crazy.
AND it kept getting worse for the court reporter. One day, when she dropped by her daughter’s school simply to be near enough to her to say hello and to gage the child’s well-being, mom became a criminal herself and lost all access to her daughter when she was charged with kidnapping.
MOM fought on, but one morning I picked up the Press Democrat and read she'd been arrested again and charged, for the second time, with kidnapping.
NOT LONG after that sad, doomed attempt by Mom to see the blood of her blood, flesh of her flesh, the Press Democrat reported that Leo Magers’ current love interest, Anna Marie Cavazos, 33, was found dead in Magers’ Rohnert Park home.
THE POLICE said the “circumstances” of Ms. Cavazos death were “suspicious” in that Ms. Cavazos appeared to have been beaten to death.
NOT THAT I’M any more perspicuous than the next person, but I think like the large majority of my fellow citizens I can usually tell who’s nuts and who isn’t. I knew Carol Mardeusz wasn’t all that nuts, but I remember being assured “off the record” by several persons close to the case that she wasn’t “all there.” When I argued that her teenage daughter certainly had it together for a kid raised by an alleged crazy woman, one social worker calmly replied, “Lots of kids raised by crazy people have it together.”
I LOST track of Carol Mardeusz. She used to call regularly then she didn't. Her daughters would have children of their own by now, and I hope they know that their mother, in her way, tried to do her best for them.
CHUCK ARTIGUES:
On Saturday, May 4th I went and saw the new play at The Mendocino Theatre Company, “Born With Teeth”, and I am still thinking about it. Now it can be argued that I am not an objective observer because my sweetie, Betty Abramson, is one of the Artistic Directors there and maybe that does influence me. But I am writing this because I love theater, and this is truly something special.
The story is about London in the 1500s where Christopher Marlowe is the preeminent playwright, and he meets the up and coming William Shakespeare. While it is true they both were in London at the same time, and many scholars believe they collaborated on at least two of the ‘history’ plays attributed to Shakespeare their interaction is all in the imagination and creativity of the playwright Liz Duffy Adams.
A local actor was originally cast as Marlowe but had a family emergency and had to bail at the last minute, so Producing Director Elizabeth Craven, who is also the director, reached out to an old student of hers, Randall Jaynes, to take over. Brady Voss, an excellent actor from Santa Cruz plays Will Shakespeare. The two of them on stage is amazing!
The reason I’m writing this is because this is some of the best theater I have ever experienced. I get it, live theater is quirky and not for everybody. For may years people have been saying it’s a dying art form, is the theater really dead? But this is really a ‘not to be missed’ production. The dynamic acting, the set, staging, sound is all first rate. The show is a tidy 90 minutes and you are out by 9pm. The quality of this play is right up there with anything you would see at Ashland, Berkeley Rep or ACT. In fact if you go to this show and aren’t wowed, call me (707-813-8195) and I will personally refund your ticket price.
Last show June 2, tickets and info at mendocinotheatre.org 707-937-4477
THIS AND THAT. The functioning of the Mendo supervisors? The present board, as has been copiously documented, has been a disaster, primarily, it seems from here, because none of them stood up to the disastrous reign of CEO Mommie Dearest, architect of serial disasters placed like time bombs in the rocky path of Mendo functioning. Wrongful terminations alone, occurring when the CEO flipped out on administrators, have cost, and will cost our broke ass county several million dollars, as will the suit brought by Chamise Cubbison for her breathtakingly arbitrary removal from office orchestrated by our petulant District Attorney, in theory our lead law enforcement officer who has routinely chiseled on his expense account, which the intrepid Ms. Cubbison called him on, hence her removal by the DA and his five little helpers on the board of supervisors.
MS. CUBBISON was the county's elected auditor, but DA Eyster wanted her out for challenging his expenditures, which is her job, and the five supervisors, no questions asked, fired her. One would have thought at least one of them would have said, “Hey, wait a minute. Where's the evidence she did anything wrong?” Eyster basically said, “Don't worry your fraught little heads. I've got the evidence and when the ink is dry on it you can see it.”
BUT, BUT, BUT… isn't there a presumption of innocence in Mendocino County? Not in Cubbison's case, which hasn't even gotten to a preliminary hearing before one or another of our clubbly little judges yet because Eyster, on his own dubious authority, after first insisting that he should not be recused, farmed out his non-case to a Santa Rosa attorney that local taxpayers are funding at $400 an hour to manufacture a case against Cubbison. At $400 an hour it just might take the Santa Rosa mouthpiece several more months to conjure a complaint — after she takes her sweet time looking at the materials Cubbison’s attorney subpoenad from the County. This costly farce will play out over months, maybe years because the county's judge club can be depended on to let the DA drive the schedule bus.
ANY HOPE the recent elections for supervisor are likely to improve the board's functioning? Maybe. Bernie Norvell in the 4th District can't help but be an improvement over Silent Dan Gjerde, a huge disappointment as a supervisor because he's a smart guy who understands how government works but seemed to give up a couple of years ago, perhaps despairing at a context of a psychologically impaired CEO and incompetent colleagues.
THE KID from Potter Valley, Miss Madeline Cline, was elected by the county's Farm Bureau, these days merely a front for the wine industry, a chemically dependent business even more dependent on exploited Mexican labor. She has zero experience doing anything even remotely pertinent to local government but, who knows? Victoria became Queen of England when she was 16…
UKIAH'S ELECTORATE seems stuck in high school, hence 2nd District supervisor Mulheren, an ongoing obstacle to competent civic functioning.
WILLIAMS, HASCHAK AND NORVELL will have to carry the supervisor's load, but off the evidence, Williams has been almost totally irresponsible with Haschak running a close second, both of them sharing responsibility for the disastrous tenure of CEO Angelo and the Eyster-Cubbison fiasco. And much will depend on the unpromising functioning of CEO Antle's office, and… 2024 is shaping up as The Year of Catastrophe, from president all the way down to the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors.
LET’S TAKE A CLOSER LOOK at the County’s recent announcement that they are going to sit on the proceeds of the emergency services Measure they went to a lot of trouble to put on the ballot two years ago which barely passed at 52% to 48%. The County has been sitting on this money from the quarter-cent Measure P sales tax for almost two years now. Recently a little bit of the millions collected so far was almost accidentally released (although we have not seen a copy of any checks). But that was immediately followed by an announcement that the rest of the money will be held on the off chance that an anti-tax ballot measure which might be on the November 2024 ballot might pass and which might be retroactive which might call for such Measures as Measure P to be re-voted on with a two-thirds majority which the County might have to finance just to re-propose the measure and it might not pass.
In other words, the County, trembling in its pathetic little boots, is pre-emptively caving in to such theoretical craziness before a bunch of speculative events even take place! To withhold the Measure P money like this means that if the ballot measure passes the State Supreme Court without removal of the questionable retroactive provision, and if it makes it to the ballot, and if it passes by a two-thirds majority and if it retroactively applies to Measure P, the County will immediately fold its tent and write a check back to the state for millions of dollars they’re accumulating without word one about challenging it and without paying the money out to local fire departments which desperately need it in the face of rapidly increasing operational costs? Mendocino County won’t balk and tell the state to stick it? The won’t say, Sorry, we already distributed it so if you want it, go to court and try to argue that local fire services should be deprived of the money?
Answer: Apparently yes. Thus this ridiculous pre-emptive roll-over — which also allows the County to accumulate interest for years and years as this all plays out — is probably a product of the fevered minds in the totally unaccountable and grossly overpaid County Counsel’s office which could not care less if local volunteer fire departments have enough money to operating under increasingly difficult conditions.
And so far we have yet to hear a single word of complaint from the nearly two dozen unjustly deprived fire departments in Mendocino County.
Mendocino County: where there’s always a bad reason to do the wrong thing.
(Mark Scaramella)
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] Here’s a couple of good questions for an election year: while we may talk about minimum wages, why don’t we ever discuss maximum wages? And, while our politicians may argue about how little a family can survive on, why do they never address the other end of the inequality scale: just how much accumulated wealth might be too much?
This week in January is always a pertinent one for such questions. As the world’s billionaires have private-jetted out to Davos to slap themselves on the back once again for their outrageous fortune, Oxfam has produced its annual report about the growing gap between that happy few and the other 8 billion from whom they profit and with whom they share the planet’s resources. This year’s report, Inequality Inc, again articulates a trend that we have all witnessed for the past four decades and more. While most people, locally, nationally, globally, try to survive on the same or less, the rich and the very rich become phenomenally more wealthy year by year. Since 2020, the report reveals, “60% of humanity has grown poorer, [while] billionaires are now $3.3tn or 34% richer than they were at the beginning of this decade of crisis.” The wealth of the world’s five richest men has more than doubled in that period, adding an unprecedented $464bn to their fortunes.
[2] All they do is lie, connive and contrive propaganda that is then blasted through the left leaning media.
When called on the lies they quietly might make a retraction.
Is anyone surprised?
They also repeatedly call for violence and then claim they are not doing it.
In 2018, Maxine Waters criticized the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy on illegal immigration that led to separating families at the border, telling a crowd, “If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere!”
If this is not a call for violence I don’t know what is.
[3] Is Biden’s empty threat to withhold a few bombs from Israel anti-Semetic?
[4] Something big is about to happen, just not sure what yet. It seems like it has been quietly boiling under the surface here lately, just as we are starting to get nice weather. If nothing else, the DNC convention in Chicago this summer will provide the ultimate shit-show.
[5] I did not know there was a strategy in tug-o-war. I was in exactly one tug-o-war game as an adult (yes, there was alcohol involved).
Both sides were mostly fit, athletic young men, and I somehow ended up at the head of the line on my side. I’m quite small.
At first I thought, how am I ever going to pull any of these strapping guys over the line?
Then I realized it wasn’t my job to do that, my job was to not step one foot over the line myself.
I could do that.
We won.
There’s some kind of metaphor in that.
[6] WE WERE going to have a gender reveal party for our new kid. But then we decided we’d wait until it’s 21 years old just to be sure.
— Jimmy Carr
[7] Have you ever wondered why suburban neighborhoods and empty parking lots feel creepy and uncomfortable? Why does America look the same everywhere? Images of suburbs are often used as Liminal spaces which are in-between or transitional space between two places. They’re designed exclusively for cars and not for people. As a result, everything becomes a thoroughfare rather than a destination. Everywhere becomes a place to drive through and not a place to drive to.
[8] I’m sitting in my living room, looking out to the woods in my backyard through my wall-length sliders. We get lots of birds flying around with typical woodland creatures about.
I now can understand why a lot of old men sit in rockers on their front porches and just look out at the world. It is very peaceful.
Birds are everywhere. A lot of the time they congregate on the railing of my deck. Plain sparrows, red-breasted robins, beautiful red cardinals, huge, cawing crows, different kinds of woodpeckers, the occasional hummingbird and magnificent, soaring hawks. This year big honeybees are flitting to and fro. Woodchucks, turtles, deer cross through my back yard. And it’s not that far from downtown Boston.
It’s so spiritual watching this parade of life. Since I retired and now have more time on my hands, I’ve really appreciated the world around me. I’ve always known I live in a beautiful place, but I usually had too much to do to enjoy it.
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