They'd known each other all the way back to their home country of Mexico, and had crossed the border together a decade before. In the Anderson Valley they'd worked together in the vineyards and the marijuana gardens.
Compadres.
But all that shared history was cut in half late on a Friday afternoon in early January of 2003 when Rodolfo Saldana walked up on Ramiro Bolano and pumped a magazine of nine millimeter bullets into the man he'd known all his days.
It was a little after 5 when Rodolfo Saldana shot Ramiro Bolano to death in the middle of Boonville with many people nearby at the end of the work day.
Rodolfo lived in a cabin near Lauren's. He only had to walk a few yards to where Ramiro, in his usual red headband and serape, sat on the front porch of the busy restaurant.
Ramiro stood up when he saw Rodolfo coming.
Rodolfo kept on coming and kept on shooting at Ramiro until he was standing over Ramiro where Ramiro had fallen, face down, a few feet from where he'd seen the last man he'd see, the man who killed him, his brother from the old country.
Ramiro was hit by nine of the twelve shots in Rodolfo's gun. Three of those shots were lodged in Ramiro's back. Rodolfo nudged Ramiro's body with his foot then, apparently satisfied his friend was no more, Rodolfo leaned up against a car parked in front of Anderson Valley Market to wait for whatever came next.
What came next was the peculiar slow-motion pandemonium that accompanies sudden violence where it isn't expected to happen. People freeze in place. People who can't see what happened wonder if they've heard firecrackers or guns. When it's clear that it's over, whatever it was, a tentative crowd gathers.
Two bold young women from out of town walked up to the shooter and suggested to him that he put his gun down. Rodolpho seemed to ignore them. The two young women had just emerged from Anderson Valley Market when a young man they'd never seen before was shot dead a few feet from their car.
Inside the market, Carolyn Wellington called 911. Lots of people called 911. The Anderson Valley Ambulance arrived. The emergency people turned Ramiro face up. He was dead. Deputy Squires arrived directly from his home a mile away. The deputy took the gun from Rodolpho, then he took Rodolfo and put him in the back of the deputy's cop car.
Rodolfo went peacefully. He was finished. His friend was dead and so was he.
Ramiro lay face up where he'd fallen for the next five hours.
”Why don't they cover him up?” Ernesto Cuevas asked nobody in particular. “If he was white they'd cover him up, wouldn't they?”
The crime scene was roped off with yellow crime tape. Three detectives and several uniformed cops, supervised by deputy Squires, roamed the site between Lauren's and Anderson Valley Market looking for witnesses, spent slugs, explanations for the presence of dead man in a place where most dead men get that way from living a long time.
District Attorney Norm Vroman arrived.
Lauren's exterior wall had a bullet hole in it. Wayne McGimpsey's house next door to the market had two bullet holes in it.
”Ricochets,” a cop said.
The young mother of Ramiro's two children appeared. She was crying and shaking. She knelt and cried and trembled. She stood and cried and trembled. She hadn't been with Ramiro for three years, but he was the father of her children. But there's always some feeling left whatever else happens between men and women. The young woman stood and cried and trembled, and knelt and cried and trembled, and she stayed that way until Ramiro was finally covered and taken away.
James Owens, a young Boonville man, had walked up to say hello to Ramiro only minutes before the shooting. Ramiro told James to get away because “something was happening.”
James kept on walking.
Another young man who saw the shooting from across the street knew what he'd seen.
”It was definitely an execution. The one guy started shooting at the other guy, who was sitting down at first, from about 30 feet away. The dead guy was hit right away, but the other guy just kept coming toward him and shooting more and more until he was point blank over him. Then he started kicking the body. It was a big gun with a magazine. Big caliber son of a bitch! My hands probably couldn’t get around the grip.”
Another witness disagreed.
“No, the man wasn't sitting down when he was shot. He was standing up. Those ladies who came out from the store were kinda stupid. You don’t know what a guy’s intentions are. He could go off again. If he’s going to stand and wait, which he did, leave him alone! But they walked right up to him. It seems pretty cut and dried. The shooter just stood there. Come and arrest me. I did it. It was still light out, so there was no mistaking what you saw. It wasn’t murky at all. He shot him, then he kind of kicked him like a, Is he still alive? kind of kick. Not a vicious kick. He wasn’t sorry, I can tell you that! He stood there for a good 12 or 15 minutes before anybody showed up. It was Rod Balson who told him to put the gun down. The guy was leaning up against Betty Sue’s car, the white Thunderbird. That’s where the body was. On the side of that Thunderbird. He was just standing there looking down at the body. Just waiting. Pretty cool customer. I’m sure he emptied that gun on that guy.”
Ramiro Bolanos Almeida was born at 3am on February 23rd, 1969, in Manzanalez, San Felipe, Guanajuato, Mexico. He leaves behind a brother and a sister, both of Mexico. Ramiro's parents died when he was young. He went to work in a shoe factory when he was still a boy. He’d made his way to America and the Anderson Valley when he was 19. A handsome man with a dazzling smile, Ramiro was well-known here. He worked for several years at Handley Cellars and, later, as a laborer with several Valley vineyard contractors.
Ramiro had two sons with Pam Balson. The boys were eight and nine years old. Ramiro was not good to the mother of his sons. They separated and stayed separated.
Over the past year, and especially since his return from a deportation to Mexico, Ramiro, deep into methamphetamine, had stopped working and had become a familiar sight wandering up and down Boonville. He slept in doorways, talked to himself and, it is said, insulted Rodolfo whenever he saw him, often pelting Rodolfo with stones as he derided him.
Ramiro would spend hours sitting in front of the bunker-like Pacific Bell structure opposite the Farrer Building in downtown Boonville. He'd sit there breaking big rocks into little rocks, which he would then neatly array along shop windows or in small mounds in the front yards of private homes. Late at night, he would carefully surround a Mexican candle with stones and stare into the candle's flame, rocking back and forth, singing and talking to himself.
Ramiro was already gone, he just wasn't dead. There was no help for him.
Rodolfo Saldana has family in Anderson Valley, and family in Lake County. He has worked for years with Donn ‘Uncle Donn’ Jaekle, a Boonville contractor. Rodolfo had no history of violence, so far as anyone knew.
He spoke good English and got along with everyone except Ramiro.
Rodolfo started not getting along with Ramiro about two years ago when they quarreled over a marijuana patch theft. Over the last month, the trouble between the two young men got worse.
And worse.
And then, last Friday afternoon, Rodolfo ended whatever unbearable torment Ramiro had caused him by shooting Ramiro to death.
Deputy Squires recalls that there was a dispute between the estranged friends “over a marijuana rip off a couple years ago. Then, just recently, Ramiro was calling the other guy names. I'd just talked to Ramiro a couple of weeks ago. I told him to leave Rodolfo alone. Rodolfo had come to my house on December, 21st, a Saturday, to complain that Ramiro was sitting down there at Moya Taco calling him names, throwing rocks at him and threatening to kill him. So I went down and told Ramiro that I was ordering him to stay away from Moya Taco. I told him to go find somewhere else to sit. Rodolfo lived just behind Moya Taco so he could hardly get away from Ramiro because Ramiro was camped out front.”
Ramiro moved forty yards down the street to Lauren’s Restaurant. He'd sit on Lauren's concrete front porch much of the day, working with his rocks, greeting passersby, talking to himself.
Rodolfo couldn't go to the store without passing Ramiro. Or the post office. Or any other place north of Moya Taco.
”The most violent thing Ramiro did that I know about,” the deputy continues, “was he took Uncle Donn's American flag and burned it about three weeks ago because Uncle Donn had kicked him off the property. He wasn't violent, but I got a lot of complaints about him. I'd have to tell him to leave this place or that place because people didn't want him loitering wherever he was loitering. He got to looking pretty bad so he scared some people just because of the way he looked. He had no place to go so he'd sleep in doorways. I was surprised that Rodolfo would do something like this. I walked up to him just after the shooting and said, Who did this? And Rodolfo said, ‘Keith, I shot him.’ I said, You? You? I couldn't believe it. He's the last guy I'd think would shoot anybody.”
Carolyn Wellington was at work inside Anderson Valley Market. Ramiro lay dead just on the other side of Carolyn's distinctive gray Pontiac, parked where it's always parked when she's at work at the market.
”I just heard the shots and called the cops,” she said. “Someone came to the door and said they needed an ambulance. I called and said I needed an ambulance and the sheriff, now! I didn’t give them time to argue. People started running out there. I told them to stay in the store. I didn’t know if there was one, two, three shooters. I didn’t go outside until someone came in and said they needed an ambulance. When I went outside, the medics were there, the fire department was there. I knew both of them by sight. I'm shocked by it. The man who did it has been coming into the store nearly every night lately. He seemed nice.”
Another woman said she didn't like the way the crime scene was handled.
”They could have called the fire department and at least had the blood hosed off.”
Rod Balson came by the next day and cleaned it up. “And another thing. It happened a little after five and the dead guy was still there at 10:30. They were taking all kinds of pictures, that’s why they said they were delayed taking the body away. You need five and a half hours to take pictures?”
Lauren Keating was inside her restaurant getting ready for a busy Friday night when she heard the shots.
”We heard the gunfire. I walked by the man who was killed maybe five minutes before when I went to the market. He was sitting on the end of my front porch in front. I didn’t know it was gunfire at first so we had a little debate about whether it was shots or not. Then we went out front to look. I saw him lying face down and I ran back into the restaurant to call 911. No one in our place saw it happen. We only saw the aftermath. We saw the shooter just standing there. He didn’t have the gun in his hand. I didn’t expect to see anything because I thought it was someone firing a gun, but not firing a gun at someone!
”But then I saw the body and saw the guy just standing there who was the shooter. It was all very odd. Other people thought so too. You think you should go to the person down on the ground to see if you can help, but there was this person standing over the body and leaning back against the car, not doing anything. It seemed too dangerous to ask him, What can I do to help? I couldn't believe he was the gunman until he pulled the gun out again to show it to someone. We ended up being busy, but it was a very surreal night. I didn’t notice the bullet hole in my wall until the next day!”
”I was using Ramiro as a helper two summers ago,” Brian Blumberg, a long-time Anderson Valley plumbing contractor, recalls. “Two summers ago while he was working with me he started bingeing again. I’d pick him up for work but he’d be too out of it to work. I gave him a place to stay at Rancho Navarro but I had to kick him out because he was causing too much trouble. Ramiro had moved in because he needed a place to stay. He told me some pretty wild stories about people threatening to kill him. He was pretty scared for a while and stayed pretty straight.
”Then he drifted back on to drugs again. I asked him to leave and that was that. He got deported, came back, got deported again. Then he called a few people in the valley wanting them to help him pay his mule to get across the border. He called me and asked me for money to get back, but I told him the best thing for him would be to stay down there. He said he had to come back to see his kids. And he did. I saw him when he got back and he was really out of it. But he was still friendly, smiling, shaking everyone's hand, but he wasn't the same Ramiro I knew. When he was straight was a good guy. Good worker. It's very sad. Very, very sad.”
In court, Saldana testified that Bolano liked to call him “faggot,”
Saldana said he ignored the name calling, but when Bolano split from his wife a year-and-a-half ago he had become more aggressive and Saldana became frightened.
Then, about a week before the shooting, Bolano started throwing things at Saldana and threatening him.
“He started to threaten to kill me,” Saldana said. “He would hold his arm behind his back, as though he had a gun, then pull his arm around and point his gun finger at me. I'm going to kill you when you least expect it. I'm going to kill you when you're asleep.”
Saldana was sentenced to state prison for a total term of 40 years to life after a jury denied his “imperfect self-defense” claim and found him guilty of second degree murder “involving the personal use of a firearm.”
A fund for Ramiro's two young sons was established at the Savings Bank of Mendocino. Saldana is out of prison. Remiro's two sons grew up, won college scholarships, graduated from college, and went on out into the world where, and from all reports, they are doing well.
Be First to Comment