Jose Luis Gonzalez told his family he was going hunting. He didn’t tell his family he was going hunting for marijuana.
Gonzalez, 34, was a non-violent hunter. He went hunting marijuana without a gun, and that day he had driven up from his Santa Rosa home to go non-violent pot hunting in Mendocino County on Mountain View Road, west of Boonville.
Jose Gonzalez found the pot he was looking for but lost his life to the man who’d farmed it, a farmer with a gun and two names, Antonio Torres Gonzales and Pastor Madero Pena. Most people in Anderson Valley knew the killer by the second name, Pastor Pena.
Jose Gonzalez had walked into the marijuana garden in 2004 without a gun but witih a couple of garbage bags. If he’d collected all the bud he’d seen two days earlier, Jose Gonzalez would have made himself a quick and easy $20,000 or so, tax free.
But what he got was a quick and easy bullet to the back of his feckless head, although stupidity isn’t a capital offense, and Pastor Pena is not God.
Jose Gonzalez had found Pastor Pena’s pot patch. He'd also found Pastor Pena, and Pena wasn’t happy to see him.
Pena 48, of Yorkville, was so unhappy to find Gonzalez in his garden on land neither entrepreneur owned that Pastor Pena put a bullet in Gonzalez’s fatally dumb head. Pastor Pena said later he had coughed a few times and made other warning sounds to get the fool to go away, but the fool didn’t go away, and soon the fool was dead.
Pastor Pena had commuted all summer from his Yorkville home on Shapiro Flat all the way out Mountain View Road, every day humping water to his secret little garden of 200 plants. And here comes this gavacho to steal the fruit of Pastor Pena’s labor?
Jose Gonzalez may or may not have known what hit him, but only one man survived the encounter. Pastor Pena had a gun, Jose Gonzalez didn’t have a gun. It is also known that the marijuana belonged to Pastor Pena, not Jose Gonzalez. And it is now known that Pastor Pena shot Jose Gonzalez because Pastor Pena told Detective Cline he shot Jose Gonzalez.
Pastor Pena was a tough guy. He’s got an FBI file, and he associated with other tough guys in the bucolic Anderson Valley. It’s better than even odds that Pastor Pena simply walked up on Gonzalez and, as they say, “blew him away.” Pastor Pena is not known to have suffered much in the way of remorse for his summary execution of Jose Gonzalez in 2003. By 2004, Pastor Pena was already at work on his annual cash crop.
Pastor Pena had met Jose Gonzalez for the first and last time at dusk on a Monday evening on the 15th of September 2003 at about 8pm. Gonzalez had parked his car on Mountain View Road at exactly mile marker 7, nearly 30 miles west of the Pastor Pena’s home in Yorkville. After parking his car, Gonzalez, unarmed, went looking for the marijuana not far off the pavement of Mountain View Road.
From Yorkville almost to Manchester is a long commute to a 200-plant pot garden, but not an unusual commute for Anderson Valley’s immigrant pot planters. People close to these ever more numerous Marijuana Sons of Michoacan say, “They’ll go way out Fish Rock Road, way out Mountain View Road, way out Greenwood even. They’ll find a spot where there’s a little water — a spring or a stream — way down some hellacious trail, and that’s where they’ll put their gardens. This one, though, the murder marijuana, wasn’t all that far from the road. He probably had some other plants in the area, but more and more they were going deeper into the country off the roads, and in September, likely as not, there will be a guy, maybe two or three guys, with their AK-47’s guarding the farm. Only a fool or a suicide, even one with a gun himself, goes out looking to steal marijuana in September in Mendocino County.”
Gonzalez’s family didn’t report him missing for three days, but some of the Gonzalezes were with the deputies who found Gonzalez’s car, then Gonzalez’s body, in Pastor Pena’s freshly harvested marijuana garden off Mountain View Road.
Marijuana may be a happy drug, but a whole lot of unhappiness goes into its manufacture. Every year Ecotopian people die for it.
The gun shot in Gonzalez’s head was big and ugly, so big and ugly investigators at first thought it had been put there by a big, strong guy with a pick-axe. But it turned out the hole was made by a high caliber rifle shell.
After Pastor Pena shot Jose Gonzalez in the head, Pastor Pena drove home to Yorkville to his young wife and two small children and went on living. It was like he’d killed a mosquito, or one of those pot-eating field mice.
Pastor Pena didn’t run away when the cops came around looking for him almost a year later. The first time the cops came around, Pastor Pena’s young wife said he was “at work.” Which Pastor Pena was, in his 2004 marijuana garden, this one way to hell and gone off Greenwood Road. Pastor Pena seemed to think the cops were nosing around on some other beef, some minor thing, something a lot less serious than murder. He thought the cops wanted to talk to him about a drunk driving charge he’d never cleared up because he thought his two or three names would confuse the cops so much they’d never nail him for it.
So when the cops came around the second time when Pastor Pena was at home, he was surprised the cops wanted to talk to him about this Gonzalez guy, the stupido he’d sent off to stupido heaven last year.
There were a couple of younger pot planters at Pastor Pena’s Yorkville home, and then the cops went off to have a look at Pastor Pena’s 2004 garden, although they didn’t go all the way into the ‘04 Greenwood Garden because “There are two men with guns down there, Señor.”
The cops would have to go back to that one with superior firepower this September. It was probably still there, armed guards and all.
Pastor Pena didn’t know the cops had linked him to his Mountain View Road pot patch and the dead man in it. He thought they were looking for him on that old drunk driving warrant. Pena was shocked when the cops told him they wanted him because they knew he’d shot Jose Gonzalez to death over $20,000 in marijuana. How could they know that? Pena must have wondered. It’s a year later, and they say they want me for the murder of this Gonzalez?
Why hadn’t Pastor Pena just told Gonzalez to go away, then grabbed his bud off their drooping stalks and gone on home to his young wife in Yorkville? There was no objective reason for killing the man, was there?
No, but if you’re a certain kind of tough guy you don’t need an objective reason for murder, the subjective reasons are plenty good enough.
“My dope, he’s stealing it, he dies.”
The logic is perfectly illogical.
“A dope in my dope, so I kill him.”
And kill your own life too, as it is likely to turn out for Pastor Pena who will do at least 15 years in state prison. He’ll be 63 when he gets out, if he gets out in one piece. His children will almost be out of Anderson Valley High School when their father is put on the deportation bus for Mexico.
Pastor Pena, husband — marijuana farmer, father, outlaw — could have run for the border if he’d known the cops had figured out he’d killed that thief, whatever his name was. But Pastor Pena stayed home and put in his ‘04 plants, at peace in his mind that he’d done what he had to do and the cops would never, ever catch him for it.
“Mexicans never give up to anything,” the cops say. “You’ve got a video of him killing someone, the Mexican is going to say it’s not him behind the gun.”
Oh the dangers of ethnic generalizations.
After eight hours of very careful, very smart questioning by a very careful, very smart, very young bi-lingual Mendocino County detective named Kevin Cline, Pastor Pena stood up and said, “I did it. I killed him. You got me.”
On a summer Wednesday afternoon, Antonio Angulo staggered drunk from a picnic at Lake Berryessa. He wasn’t reported missing until Saturday because his friends thought he’d gone off on his own after an argument whose subject nobody could remember.
A search and rescue team of more than a hundred persons on horseback, reinforced by six trained dogs, spent much of two days looking for Angulo before they gave up, but last Thursday, the immigrant laborer was found floating in Lake Berryessa’s Capell Cove, “the apparent victim of an accidental drowning,” the Napa County Sheriff's Department said. Police said identification on Angulo’s “partially decomposed body” told them they’d found the missing man.
Angulo, 41, left behind a young wife and a toddler son. The family lived on the Vista Ranch west of Boonville. Mr. Angulo worked as a landscaper, Mrs. Angulo worked in the vineyards. They are said to have been very happy.
Antonio Angulo was reported missing Saturday night, three days after he walked away from friends during that whatever-it-was-about argument near the Capell Cove boat launch and parking lot on the west side of the lake. Angulo was last seen walking north on Berryessa Knoxville Road. The fisherman found him near the opposite shoreline of the cove. He’d done quite a hike for a drunk, and who’s to say an angry someone, smoldering over the argument nobody could remember, hadn’t followed Antonio Angulo and won the argument nobody could remember by hitting the young father over the head and pushing him into the lake? But nobody could remember the argument, and everybody said it wasn't the kind of argument people die over.
Diversity is our strength!
So shut up with your yeah-buts.