Mendocino County Today: Thursday, July 31, 2014

• Confidential Incompetence & Cruelty
• Laytonville Lightning Fires
• Priest Penpals Prisoner
• Prune Packer to Pros
• No Water, No Fish
• New Willits Medicopter
• Catch of the Day

AS IS INEVITABLE in Mendocino County, where secrecy in all matters covers up all manner of official crimes and misdemeanors, we can only speculate about the Berry Family case.

FIRST THE KNOWN FACTS. SGT. BERRY is a disabled Marine — totally disabled at a hundred percent from combat injuries he suffered in Afghanistan. He is the married father of two girls, ages two and one. Mrs. Berry is Sgt. Berry's live-in caregiver. He'd be lost without her.

LAST WEEK, Sgt. Berry started screaming in his sleep. Mrs. Berry was calming him when the police arrived at the Berry home. Somehow the cops determined that Mrs. Berry had committed an assault on Sgt. Berry. She was arrested and spent the night in the County Jail, leaving the heavily medicated Sgt. Berry, who soon was back asleep, home alone with his two infant daughters.

MRS. BERRY bailed out and came home. Two Mendocino County social workers were soon standing in her livingroom. Falsely arrested for domestic assault, Mrs. Berry now faced the confiscation of her two daughters. The two social workers, with a nod from their boss back at the office, wanted Sgt. Berry out of his house and the two toddler girls in a foster home. The social workers said they'd work up a plan for the Berrys to get their girls and their family back.

THING IS, the Berrys had been doing well given the circumstances of Sgt. Berry's post traumatic stress disorder, which is piled on top of his physical problems caused by combat wounds. His wife and babies are his life, and without the remarkable Mrs. Berry the family falls apart. She has kept her home together as she and her family await placement in a Palo Alto home specially designed to care for and rehab disabled vets and their families.

THE DISTRAUGHT MRS. BERRY has been trying to get her family back. She's been in court for two days with Ukiah attorney Kitty Houston Katharine Elliot. No one will say what has happened there, and I can guess why: The attorneys and the judge have warned Mrs. Berry that the proceedings are absolutely confidential and things could go bad for her if she talked to the media, meaning the AVA — especially the AVA. We don't have a high opinion of either CPS or most Mendocino County lawyers, public and private.

THE “CONFIDENTIALITY” of child custody cases, the court and the clubby attorneys who comprise the Mendocino County Bar Association, will tell the occasional victim who asks about taking their case to the media, that “confidentiality” is necessary “for the welfare of the children.” In fact, often it's necessary, as in the Berry case, to cover up incompetence and sanctioned cruelty.

FOR THEIR SAKE, I hope the Berrys get their daughters back and get the hell outtahere and into the Palo Alto program before Mendocino County destroys them.

TROUBLESOME fires are burning in the wilderness set-aside west of Laytonville. They were ignited by lightning last night. CalFire is reporting it this way:

and more recently...

THE PRIEST & THE PRISONER

by Gerald F. Cox

I was ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood on June 16, 1950 in St Mary's Cathedral, San Francisco for the Archdiocese of San Francisco. Shortly afterwards I was appointed as an Assistant Pastor at St Mary's Church in downtown Oakland, California, a poor Mexican-Black neighborhood which characterized a community also of social security pensioners living in one-room transient hotels, as well as a lively group of skid row alcoholics. Among my many responsibilities were weekly visits to the Oakland City Jail, the Alameda County Jail, and the county Juvenile Hall. Although born and raised in this city I had never set foot in this part of town nor had I ever seen the insides of a jail. So my first visit was filled with fear and trembling. It was here that I started my education on crime, criminals, and contrition.

One of my first encounters with ex-cons was with the one who pleaded for money to visit his mother in Los Angeles. Besides getting a Greyhound bus ticket from me, he also stole my golf clubs out of the back of my station wagon, tried to pawn them, was arrested, and jailed. When I reported the theft to the Robbery Detail of the police department, it was suggested that I come in and identify a recent set of clubs. Sure enough they were mine. So as I exited the Oakland City Hall, dressed in black suit and roman collar at lunch time, hordes of departing city employees smiled and said “18 holes today, Father?”

Years later as a Pastor in Santa Rosa, I had another interesting experience. Seated on the toilet seat I heard the musical refrains of “Las Mananitas,” the traditional Mexican morning song sung on one's birthday. I opened the window to see a group of my Mexican friends singing below. We celebrated with pan dulce, coffee, and Presidente, a Mexican brandy. Among the group were two Chicano former State prison inmates who had just been released and who were pretty well “snockered.” As the group left through my garage the duo lifted a gallon jug of homemade wine that had turned into vinegar. Years later at a barbeque in San Jose, a well tattooed Chicano male approached me saying, “Hey man! I seen you somewhere! You ever been in the Joint?” (Read San Quentin State Prison). When I mentioned “Santa Rosa,” immediately he recognized me and exclaimed “Yeah! You're the priest whose wine we stole and got sick as dogs!” So as a result of my experiences I guess I always have had a soft spot in my heart for jails and their inmates.

One of my favorite organizations that I support is the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama. SPCL publishes a magazine of their activities. One of the issues featured an article “A Jew In Prison,” written by David Arenberg, an inmate in a Western State penitentiary. He described his total exclusion on the part of other prisoners because he was Jewish. He was forced to eat alone in the dining room, and was even physically beaten with metal objects wrapped in sweatsocks. My compassion reached out to his loneliness and exclusion. I wrote To SPLC asking about a possible pen pal relationship with him. The answer was “yes,” so Jerry Cox, former Roman Catholic Priest, and David Arenberg, Jewish prison inmate doing 13 years for forgery, started a four-year correspondence that has continued to today.

A strange venue for Catholic-Jewish relationships? We initially shared our political philosophies and experiences: my social action activities with the Civil Rights Movement, my close friendship with Cesar Chavez and the UFW, as well as my continued activity with Chicano communities in Northern California. David's confirmation as a Socialist was a gift from his father.

Born with a twin brother in Chicago, and after graduating from high school at age 15, David received his BA in Psychology at the University of Chicago. He acquired community organizing skills and became an organizer. He later moved to New York City where he became very successful in developing low cost housing units as well as conducting some successful rent strikes. One of his staff members was Alan Ginsberg. Eventually the “Devil made me do it” phase takes place in his life, as he mastered the art of forgery, scamming banks and insurance companies, and living a life of cash, cocaine, and cars (read BMWs). The Justice System caught up with him and gifted him with a 12 year prison term.

David's response to the Justice System was very creative. He studied it, digested it, and turned it around for his own benefit, as well as his brother inmates. He has conducted federal and state trial and appellate litigation, and has drafted pleadings and motions that have led to negotiated settlements for other prisoners. This new role turned racial hatred and exclusiveness into inmate admiration. He referred to himself as a “jailhouse lawyer,” and hoped that his legal expertise might eventually lead to meaningful employment upon his release.

David experienced weeks and days of severe depression as he evaluated his past and looked at his future as a 58-year-old ex-con. My letters to him sang of “hope” (Out of the mud grows the lotus), as I tried to bolster his self confidence that he could make it on the outside. I also sent him various books, helped draft a resume, wrote to prison officials on his behalf, and contacted several legal firms and organizations.

David's exposure to prison racial hatred became an opportunity for him to evaluate himself as a Jewish person. An 80 year old prison volunteer Rabbi introduced him to Zen meditation, but his PST robbed him of concentration and stillness. He described his demons as little "file clerks who opened the cobblestone drawers of his memory, and threw them in his face.” The discovery of a personal Jewish spirituality led him to request a copy of the Jewish Study Bible, a commentary on the Torah, which he used in a prisoner study group. He was convinced that he would remain “clean” upon his release by remaining faithful to the Hebrew concept of “t'schovah,” a returning to the mark from which one has strayed. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that I won't return to a life of immediate gratification at the expense of my soul.”

Some years ago I rescued a woman from drowning in the Mexican ocean off of Acapulco. She had swum out to a raft 50 yards from shore and was worried about making it back. I suggested that she swim alongside of me, but after a few strokes she cried out that she couldn't make it. So I placed her on my hip, and one stroked her back to shore. This was my image of our relationship. “I want you to know,” he once wrote, “that I really value this correspondence with you. I was spiritually starved, and although I am not a religious man, I have started saying the Shema daily.”

David exited his fraternity house on November 8, 2013, found an apartment, and employment with a tenants rights organization, while he looks around for other possibilities. We have continued our contacts and hopefully plan a face to face reunion in the future. My association with David has not only won me a friend but also a teacher who has taught me what it's really like on the other side of the bars.

“L'CHAIM! TO LIFE!”

FROM THE PRUNEPICKERS TO THE PROS

The 100-mph-throwing art school kid: An incredible story of a scouting find

by Jeff Passan

About 10 scouts showed up last fall for the Academy of Art University baseball team's pro day. They munched on powdered donuts and sipped the gratis Sunny D and figured this was like any other small-college showcase: a waste of a morning. The position players finished running the 60-yard dash when up walked one more kid, a pitcher for the tiny San Francisco school, who asked the scouts if he could try.

They looked up and nodded. Brandon Poulson stood 6-foot-7 and weighed 240 pounds with 8 percent body fat. "He's like Ivan Drago," said Elliott Strankman, a Minnesota Twins scout there that day. "You know that scene in Rocky IV – 'Whatever he hits … he destroys.' That's what he reminds me of."

Poulson slipped off his spikes and stood in his socks. He wanted to run without shoes. The scouts cast weird looks to one another. He took off. The scouts clicked their stopwatches. He crossed 60 yards, the standard measurement for baseball players. The scouts didn't believe the numbers on their watches. One said 6.59. Another said 6.61. And another 6.60. That wasn't just fast. It was speed for a middle-of-the-diamond player, not a pitcher.

Intrigued, the scouts flocked to see the right-hander throw. It was ugly. Bad mechanics. Fastball topped out at 91 mph. Didn't have a breaking ball. Turned out he would be 24 years old when the season started. Strankman knew it was too good to be true. And when he checked in during the Academy's season and Poulson's stats were brutal, Strankman didn't bother with a follow-up.

Then came the phone call 17 days ago. Strankman was in Sacramento. A friend had a tip. There was a kid pitching for a team called the Healdsburg Prune Packers of the Golden State Collegiate Baseball League. He was throwing hard. Really hard. He went to some art school. The New York Mets were scouting him. Might be worth a look-see.

"Drago," Strankman thought.

He found a phone number for Poulson, called him up, told him not to sign with anyone, not until Strankman could see him. On July 15, Strankman drove to Healdsburg, Calif., about 70 miles northwest of San Francisco. The Prune Packers play at Recreation Park, an old field with wooden stands. One of the regulars comes to games with a parrot perched on his left shoulder.

Strankman wasn't the only scout there. The A's, the Braves, the Giants – all of them heard the stories about the kid. They sat behind the plate, waited eight innings, watched the Prune Packers take a 9-0 lead, before Poulson came in to pitch the ninth. The scouts sat shoulder to shoulder. They poised their radar guns. In stepped a kid named Evan Ramirez, an outfielder for the Nevada Big Horns. He dug in. Poulson fired a fastball. And like the stopwatches at pro day almost a year earlier, the radar guns flashed different numbers.

Most of them were 99. One read 100.

* * *

Every few years, a legendary scouting story hits baseball. Thirteen years ago, a kid named Gregory "Toe" Nash signed with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. He was a high school dropout from the sticks of Louisiana who earned his nickname from size-18 feet. The Rays found him hitting 500-foot home runs in semipro ball and signed him for $30,000 after he went undrafted. He flamed out amid legal troubles and ended up in jail. And yet scouts who saw him still talk about Toe Nash like he's some myth.

For the rest of his life, Elliott Strankman will tell the story of Brandon Poulson. Perhaps 100 people in the world can throw a baseball 100 mph, and here he was, the art-school kid who reached triple digits, the former football player who took up semipro baseball on a lark, the construction worker and workout freak, the raw clay who molded himself into something incredible. He went undrafted, too, and it was a good thing for the Twins, because the story got even better on Tuesday, when they signed Poulson for $250,000.

* * *

He was always an athlete. Brandon Poulson never played basketball, and he can do a 360-degree spinning dunk. He's the size of an NFL tight end, and he can almost do the splits thanks to hours spent in Bikram yoga classes. Poulson dabbled with baseball at Piner High in Santa Rosa, Calif., and played football for a couple years at Santa Rosa Junior College before decamping to the real world.

His father owned John's Excavating, and Poulson wanted to learn the family business, maybe take it over some day, so he toiled away driving 18-wheelers and heavy equipment. One day, Poulson's father pulled him aside and told him he had the rest of his life to work. If he wanted to pursue something more, now was the time.

Baseball wasn't going to leave him with long-term injuries, so Poulson joined a Sunday-night men's league, Wine Country Baseball. He touched the upper 80s with his fastball, popped a 91 or 92 now and again. He didn't know where the ball was going, either, though his arm strength impressed an umpire enough that he tipped off Brian Gwinn, the coach of the Academy. Poulson threw a bullpen session. Gwinn offered him a scholarship.

Word traveled quickly in the small baseball community. Poulson ran into the GM of the Wine Country league, Riley Sullivan, at a grocery store, and Sullivan introduced him to Joey Gomes, brother of Red Sox outfielder Jonny Gomes and the Prune Packers' manager. Gomes hooked Poulson up with Caleb Balbuena, a former minor leaguer and pitching coach as intrigued as everyone else about the monster athlete who didn't know what he was doing.

"He was the Tin Man from the 'Wizard of Oz,' " Balbuena said. "Very stiff and methodical. I didn't even know there was a baseball team at the art school when I first met Brandon. I'm thinking of Step Up. And then I meet this 6-7, 240 guy, and I don't think he's a dancer."

On Dec. 30, 2013, Poulson threw his first bullpen with Balbuena. He needed to rebuild Poulson's delivery. He stressed the three planes of motion – frontal, transverse and sagittal – and how, when linked together, the kinetic energy created would jump his velocity almost immediately. Out of the 40 or so pitches Poulson threw that day, about three felt right. He went back to school in mid-January and returned in late March.

They kept working, kept smoothing out his mechanics, until one day, Poulson said, "I felt like my hips threw the ball." Balbuena brought out a radar gun. Poulson threw a pitch. It popped the catcher's glove at 94 mph. Poulson couldn't stop smiling. He started thinking of what he could do in a real game, with adrenaline, with a batter in the box, with this arm that finally worked.

"Dude," he said to Balbuena, "I want to learn how to do that."

The Academy of Art University Urban Knights finished 12-36 this season. Brandon Poulson, multimedia communications major, pitched in 14 games. He threw 19 1/3 innings and walked 24 batters. His ERA was 8.38. The Major League Baseball draft lasted 40 rounds and 1,215 picks. There was a good reason his name wasn't called.

"I've always been the most dedicated person off the field," Poulson said. "I do yoga. I never cheat my diet. I read books on sleep and nutrition and workout plans. I'm always in the gym. Then it comes time to go to the field and I struggle. That part hurt me the most. I'm working harder than everyone. They're all out partying. I'm here doing everything I should be doing, and come time to pitch I can't even throw a strike."

The Urban Knights' season finale came May 3, a seven-inning game against Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. Poulson came on in the sixth inning. He threw two innings and struck out all six batters he faced. Balbuena's lessons were taking. He felt like a pitcher. Though nobody, not even Poulson, knew how good he was getting.

* * *

The velocity kept jumping. The 94s turned into 95s, then 96s and 97s, and oh my that one was 98, and then he was sitting 99, and nobody in the Golden State league ever had seen 100.

"Once I get a little more dialed in," Poulson said, "I'm gonna hit 101 or 102 or maybe harder."

He can get better. The Twins are banking on it. Never has Poulson been in a baseball-rich environment with top-level talent, a place where pitchers teach each other grips and fiddle with finger pressures. Strankman recognized all this – that Poulson's nascent slider can grow into a weapon, that when asked to try a changeup in a recent bullpen he unfurled one with unfair diving action on his second try – and realized this was a once-in-a-scouting-lifetime opportunity.

"It's one of those moments as a scout where you look at each other because it doesn't happen," Strankman said. "It's fun. We're looking at each other like come on. Guys are taking pictures of the radar guns. And the thing I like about him is he just doesn't know how good he can be. He doesn't have that appreciation of what he can be, so he's working to get better. He's not just resting on the fact that he's throwing hard and is a good athlete."

Strankman sped back home the night he saw Poulson pitched and called his bosses, scouting director Deron Johnson and west coast supervisor Sean Johnson, and told them the Twins needed to sign him now. It didn't matter Poulson had walked 15 hitters in 12 1/3 innings. He also struck out 31, and the walks were abating, and the 18 pitches Poulson threw that night were all Strankman needed to see.

The Twins had leftover money from their draft bonus pool, enough for a competitive offer. They started at $225,000. Poulson slept on it. He went back and told the Twins he thought he could do better. Strankman bumped the offer to $250,000 and told him he had 30 minutes to accept. Poulson said yes, and six weeks after going undrafted, he agreed to a bonus at the same level allotted to a mid-sixth-round pick.

When asked by Twins brass what he was going to do with the money, Poulson said he wanted to make sure he could stay in good shape and keep eating organic food.

* * *

Poulson went to Minnesota last week to see what the major leagues were like. He ran the gauntlet at Target Field – physical to make sure his arm was OK, drug test to make sure he was clean – before meeting a few of the players. When Twins starter Mike Pelfrey saw Poulson for the first time, he turned toward Sean Johnson, the scout who he knew because they both went to Wichita State.

And with the same sort of incredulity people everywhere feel the first time they see Poulson, Pelfrey said: "Who the [expletive] is that guy?"

This is just the beginning. Brandon Poulson wants to be in the major leagues, wants to be there soon, joining a list of undrafted players who made good. He wants to be like Dan Quisenberry and Darren O'Day, like Kevin Mitchell and Daniel Nava, like Frank White and Larry Walker – like dozens of those who were overlooked or didn't fit the scouting archetype or simply needed a little more time to learn how to play the game.

"He's so close," Balbuena said. "He's so close where you can wrap him up in a bow and hand-deliver him as that dude that's gonna be in the big leagues for a long time."

None of those players did it like Poulson, which is what excites Balbuena and Gomes and Strankman and everyone in the Twins organization, all the men who spend their lives dedicated to this game and who understand that an art-school kid throwing 100 shouldn't be real.

"I probably don't realize what this means yet," Poulson said, "but I'm starting to."

On Wednesday morning, Poulson will go to the airport with a ticket to Elizabethton, Tenn., where he will join the Twins' Appalachian League affiliate. He will play with Nick Gordon, the 18-year-old chosen with the fifth overall pick in this year's draft, and Michael Cederoth, another triple-digit-throwing right-hander. He will look just like everyone else, in a uniform, with a baseball in his hand, trying to get to the big leagues. To those perusing the program or following the game casually, he will be another name, another arm, another kid.

Those in the know will see something else: They'll see art school and 18-wheelers and Prune Packers and 100-mph fastballs and the sort of scouting story that will live forever.

(Courtesy, Yahoo Sports)

NO WATER, NO FISH

Secretary of the Interior turns her back on the Klamath River as fish deaths are reported

The Secretary of the Interior today rejected calls by Indian Tribes, communities and scientists in the Klamath Basin to release water to protect migrating adult salmon.

Just a week after California officials reported salmon deaths in the Klamath basin, Bureau of Reclamation officials announced that Secretary Jewell has decided to roll the dice. She will continue to divert water to irrigation uses and set aside the senior rights to water under federal and state law for Trinity and Klamath River salmon.

The Hoopa Valley and Yurok Tribes have fisheries on the Klamath River, and its largest tributary the Trinity River. Those rights are protected by federal law and held in trust for the tribes by the United States.

“The Secretary is betting that if fish start dying she can make an emergency release of water to provide relief,” said Mike Orcutt Hoopa Valley Tribe Fisheries Director. He added, “But our scientists say that water wouldn’t reach the fish for 4.5 days and once disease appeared in 2002, up to 70,000 adult salmon were dead within days.”

In prior years, including 2012 and 2013, the Secretary released water to create water conditions for safe migration of salmon.

In 2013 Central Valley Project contractors filed suit to block flow releases. The court rejected their claims, water flowed, and there was no fish kill.

This year, however, the Secretary abandoned this science-based, field-tested flow release fish protection measure that is widely recognized as prudent and necessary.

“It is as if the Secretary of Transportation said let’s forget about automobile seat belts, airbags and antilock brakes and spend the savings on ambulances,” said Hoopa Valley Tribe Chair Danielle Vigil Masten. She added, “The problem is that the ambulance may or may not get to a crash scene in time, and when it does arrive, the crew will have to deal with far more serious injuries.”

Council Member Ryan Jackson said, “We have made numerous trips to Washington, D.C. and Sacramento visiting with Congressmen, Senators, Interior Department officials, White House representatives and countless staff. We are extremely disappointed in the wide gulf between the Administration’s statements professing commitment to Indian trust responsibility and respect for Indian Tribes, and the federal actions that are taking our trust resources to the brink of destruction. That is no way for a trustee to act.”

“The law of the Trinity River has been set aside by the Secretary’s decision; in its place she has put the risk of catastrophe entirely on us and Trinity Basin communities, in order to cater to politically favored interests,” said Masten.

(Hoopa Valley Tribal Press Release)

REACH AIR MEDICAL SERVICES ANNOUNCES NEW AIR AMBULANCE BASE IN WILLITS

Emergency Medical Air Transport Base Opening this November will Offer 24/7 Service

Santa Rosa-based REACH Air Medical Services (REACH) announces the expansion of their Northern California emergency helicopter service to include a new base opening in Mendocino County, California. Located at the Willits Municipal Airport known as Ells Field, this base will provide round-the-clock, life‐saving emergency medical services to the community. Patients will be transported in a new Eurocopter EC135 aircraft, which will be dedicated to this market and to the hospitals REACH has been serving for years. REACH flies medical helicopters and planes from more than 20 bases located throughout California, Oregon and Texas.

“For more than 27 years, REACH has served the communities of the North Coast. Our company founder’s vision started with serving the Redwood Empire. In fact, REACH stands for Redwood Empire Air Care Helicopter,” says company President Sean Russell. “With this base being located at the center of the Redwood Empire, Mendocino County, we have come full circle.” He adds, “While we have been serving this area for many years from bases located in Sonoma and Lake Counties, this base will allow us to better serve customers in this rural area where time-critical transports are essential. The EC135 helicopter was chosen because of its increased capabilities to operate in inclement weather. It also allows us to use our network of company developed and FAA-approved GPS approaches and routes, further enhancing our safety and reliability.”

“The choice to open this base in Willits is born out of a need identified through years of serving Mendocino and Humboldt counties,” states Anna Blair, Vice President of Business Relations. “We treasure the hospital and pre-hospital staff who we work with every day and are very excited to bring this resource to them.”

Patients transported by REACH will be flown in a new, state-of-the-art Eurocopter EC-135 helicopter, capable of airspeeds of 150 miles per hour, operating under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR), equipped with night vision goggles (NVGs) to enhance safety of nighttime operations, as well as helicopter-specific terrain awareness equipment (TAWs). The base will be staffed 24/7 with nationally certified Flight Nurses and Paramedics along with the highly skilled aviation staff and maintenance support. This practice ensures optimum availability and response time when regional medical emergencies occur.

REACH invests in its customers through safety and clinical education training for emergency and hospital personnel throughout Mendocino County, sharing of clinical data and knowledge, and a robust customer service response program aimed at continuous improvement of service.

REACH is part of the AirMedCare Network — the nation’s largest emergency air medical transport membership program — which covers out-of-pocket expenses in the event of an emergency air transport by REACH or another AirMedCare Network provider. For a low-cost annual fee, individuals and companies may join more than 1.5 million members who receive coverage from more than 200 air transport locations in 27 states coast to coast.

About REACH Air Medical Services

REACH Medical Holdings, LLC, headquartered in Santa Rosa, operates REACH Air Medical Services and Cal-Ore Life Flight providing critical care air and ground transport service to communities throughout California, Oregon and Southern Texas. REACH has provided safe, patient-centered care for more than 27 years and successfully transported more than 90,000 patients. REACH employs hundreds of highly-trained nurses, medics, pilots and aircraft maintenance technicians to provide service to patients utilizing a fleet of 18 medically equipped helicopters, eight airplanes, and nine ground ambulances. REACH and Cal-Ore Life Flight are accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Medical Transport Services (CAMTS), which is the gold standard for patient care and safety for air medical transport services. For more information, visit www.REACHair.com.

About AirMedCare Network

REACH Air Medical Services is part of the AirMedCare Network. AirMedCare is America’s largest air medical transport membership network, providing emergency access for the highest level of care for its 1.5 million members. The AirMedCare Network combines the membership programs of many leading air ambulance operators in 27 states from more than 200 air transport locations. For more information about memberships, visit www.airmedcarenetwork.com.

CATCH OF THE DAY, July 30, 2014

DEANNA ABDUL, Tracy. Fake ID, possession of drug paraphernalia.

KEITH BACON, Laytonville. Honey oil manufacturing, marijuana cultivation, processing, sale, armed with firearm.

WILLIAM BARRY, Ukiah. Drunk in public. (Frequent flyer)

NICOLE BRITTON, Covelo. Court order violation.

MILES GUERRERO, Ukiah. Fake ID, possession of drug inhalation/injection device.

ALAN HOLLIDAY, Ukiah. Drunk in public. Probation revocation.

JOHNATHAN ISQUITH, Laytonville. Honey oil manufacturing, marijuana cultivation, processing, sale. (Picture not available.)

ROBERT JAMES, SR. Ukiah. Failure to appear (2x).

ROBERT JAMES, JR. Ukiah. Failure to appear (2x).

EDWARD JOHNSON, Ukiah. Drunk in public,

RICO MICHEL, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

THOMAS SANDERS, Willits. Drunk in public.

CARRIE TALIMAN, Montgomery/Ukiah. DUI, Probation revocation.