THE NAVARRO RIDGE murder-suicide last week took the lives of Valerie Ann Morales, 77, and Martin Charles Morales, 80, both of whom, we understand, were in failing health. He shot her, then himself. These exits are always called murder-suicides, and maybe this one was, too, but it may have been more of an agreement to leave before total dependence.
WHY ISN'T this woman being cared for by the Ortner Management Group? OMG is gets $7 million a year from the County of Mendocino to take care of the County's mentally ill. Kelisha Alvarez was arrested again. A very frequent flier out of Ukiah, Kelisha is large, agile and volatile. And she's mentally ill. Clearly. Kelisha's latest arrest occurred when she lay down on the floor of the Adventist hospital's emergency room and refused to leave. How the Ukiah PD got her off the floor and into the County Jail is not known, but I'm sure the logistics were, uh, strenuous.
THE SUPES are in unanimous support of Sheriff Allman’s desire to go after $20 million in state money to expand the Mendocino County Jail. New facilities unconnected to the present jail would be built to house the mentally ill and various rehab programs. Applying for the money and getting it are not necessarily the same thing, but the mentally ill, a population obviously on the increase everywhere in the land, don't belong in a jail setting and, as we never tire of pointing out, the most difficult among the frequent flier type are not currently being treated by this county's half-privatized, $15 annual million, mental health apparatus. Maybe an expanded County Jail will expand enough to house Kelisha and the rest of the presently unhoused, un-rehabbed and perhaps un-rehabbable frequent fliers.
A READER WRITES: "I disagree that none of the County supervisors work even half time. I work in law enforcement and I can tell you many times McCowen’s truck is parked in front of the county admin building late into the night. I don’t know where he finds the time to clean up the river and paint out the graffiti, but he does. Everyone who watches the meetings says he is best prepared. He used to call us or UPD fairly often to report homeless camps but when our staffing dropped he started confronting more of them himself. I’m pretty sure he knows the risk but he seems determined to protect the river from getting trashed. You could ask Walker about it. Name anyone else doing that without getting paid for it. From what I can tell Carre Brown is also on the job, especially on water issues which are critical in case you haven’t noticed. The rest I don’t know about except Hamburg who is anti-law enforcement and seems content to mouth his liberal whine without ever doing something." — From the night shift.
TALEN BARTON, the alleged (sic) Laytonville teen killer, grew up in the foster system, which means he spent his first years in a chaotic and probably dangerous home, then was bounced from temporary placement to temporary placement, finally arriving in Laytonville as a teenager where he seems to have seriously considered bludgeoning his foster mother. Following the aborted bludgeoning, Barton's best friend invited Barton to live with his warm and intact family, which Barton, in a midnight rage, destroyed. These are the basic known facts, but in broad outline it's not hard to see what happened with this guy.
THE FOSTER SYSTEM manages to accomplish the opposite of what a child, any child, needs, which is stability, predictability, security. Thousands of foster children grow up envying stable homes, and they grow up enraged at what they haven't had, and at age 18, and no longer eligible to be converted to hard cash by the social work apparatus, they're cast out into the world to fend for themselves.
THIS ISN'T TO SAY that foster parents are bad people because most of them aren't. But they're part of a bad system that resists change and even the obvious, doable reforms. Like what? Well, how about this? Pay stable people a living wage in return for which they obligate themselves to parent unto death. Foster parents have to deal with very difficult, very needy, very screwed-up kids, and that's a full-time effort that deserves full-time pay.
SEEMS TO ME that Barton, as metaphor, is one more example of America losing its way. Until the 1960s, church-run orphanages, operating on the stability assumption that would be lost in the 60s when family instability became the norm, raised dependent children in one place and, contrary to latter day scare mythology, these places provided warm, secure homes that were actually superior in resources and opportunity to what most American homes could then provide children.
THERE WERE LOTS of orphanages from Marin north to Ukiah, and I'm sure there were several farther north. As a kid, I had good friends and sports teammates who grew up at Sunny Hills in San Anselmo. It has since become a youth psychiatric facility of some kind, but in the late 1950s Sunny Hills was an orphanage. My pals seemed happy there. As I recall, they had a gym and a swimming pool, amenities at that time not known to many private homes. So far as I know, my teen chums didn't grow up any crazier than anybody else and, from what I've heard, a couple of them did very well out in the world.
ST. VINCENT'S in San Rafael was the first orphanage in the state, and in Ukiah for many years we had the Albertinum where our state historian, Kevin Starr, spent part of his youth. The facile criticism of the Catholics, Methodists and other religious denominations who sponsored these institutions always annoys me. Without them we had nothing, which is pretty much what essentially orphaned children have now — nothing.
AS FOR BARTON and dope — he was reported to have said he smoked all his waking hours — the preponderance of medical evidence is that young people with a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia, who also smoke a lot of marijuana as adolescents, tend to run off the rails as young adults. This guy? Who knows, but the love drug didn't seem to mellow him out much.
A READER quickly wrote in on the Barton subject: "The comments about a series of temporary placements likely fits with most foster kids, but that was not the case with this young man, Talen Barton. He came to Mendocino County at the age of seven (not as a teenager) and spent ten years with the same family, until January 2013. After the incident with his then foster mom, he was taken in by the Norvell/Palmeri family." (I think originally he was from the LA area where he was taken from his natural home. His early formative years can't have been healthy ones if he was made a ward of the state at such an early age.)
MONDAY'S 3PM CLOSED SESSION of the Fort Bragg City Council evaluated the job performance of city manager Linda Ruffing and also reviewed, with FB's exorbitantly compensated San Francisco attorney, a bogus federal suit filed by Sebastopol shakedown artist, attorney Jack Silver of the phony environmental non-profit called River Watch.
IN THIS PARTICULAR ABUSE of the legal system, Silver alleges Fort Bragg tolerated polluted runoff from the Caspar transfer station. Based on the honest reports filed with Regional Water Quality by the entities he's suing, Silver says the County of Mendocino, Solid Wastes of Willits and the City of Fort Bragg have violated the Clean Water Act. Which, technically, they all may have done but not from neglect or willful disregard for clean water. Silver has sued every municipality on the Northcoast, often picking up a quick $25,000 or more simply because it's cheaper to settle with him than litigate. He should have been suppressed years ago, but he's still at it. (Our former Congressman Mike Thompson once promised he’d fix the “Silver loophole” but never got around to it. Of course.)
HAVING TUNED OUT popular culture 50 years ago, and I don't say this to pass myself off as some kind of pseudo-highbrow but as a simple statement of fact, I'd only caught a few minutes of Jon Stewart, and that was while I was looking for the ball game, the only reason I even turn on my television set. Ever. I'd heard about him, of course, from younger people, including my own children, who were big fans. But I never went back for more, because… Well, I thought the discussion, full of knowing looks and the other camera-mugging you get from television comics, was mainstream NPR but with an audience that howled at everything Stewart said like it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. The problem I had was a basic one that all the laughter at obvious absurdities, and the absurd personalities leading us to the brink, inspires only cynicism and, ultimately, the feeling that nothing can be done, that it's all just a big joke. It's a joke only on a superficial level. On the real level it's not funny, and it's going to take serious political effort to get out of it, not laughs.
SPEAKING OF COMEDIANS, I got one at the Cloverdale Starbucks drive-up window the other afternoon. Brandishing a gift card I got for my birthday, a jolly voice asked, “And what can I do for you this fine day, my good sir?” It's 105° and I'm sitting in a life-abbreviating cocoon of a strip mall and service stations with a view of the 101 off-ramp. All I want is out of this particular fine day interlude. But I play it straight: “I want a small, black coffee and, given the splendor of the day as you've described it, my friend, a medium-size Very Berry.” (The Very Berry is like watered-down koolade with a single, ragged blackberry that looks like it was excavated from the Russian tundra.) The speaker voice then asked, “Do you want the very, very, very Berry or just the Very Berry?" This was getting positively exciting. “Do you mean I can get three berries instead of one?” I was eager to see who was messing with me, so I said, “The works,” and drove up to the window where a kid with a red mohawk beamed out at me. I gave him my gift card and a fiver. “I hope you're the manager of this place, buddy. You've got the right attitude.” He said, "Enjoy your Very Berry."
UKIAH COURTHOUSE ANTICS. The last thing denizens of downtown Ukiah expected to see Friday morning was a hurried landscaping project going on in front of the Mendocino County Courthouse. In August? During a four-year drought? But there they were, crews from a Western Tree Service trimming the historic magnolias out front, and then planting azaleas and rhododendrons in the bone-dry soil. Hastily installed drip irrigation lines were part of it. Courthouse workers peered out windows, wondering what the hell was going on. Passersby on the surrounding sidewalks stared in disbelief. The assumption is it was another state-funded “programmed” project — the ones that are simply put into a court admin computer somewhere and are auto-approved and auto-funded no matter how dumb — since the courthouse for now is operated by the state and not the county.
WHILE WE AWAIT THE FULL VIDEO of last Tuesday’s Board Supervisors meeting, let’s revisit the “Stepping Up” initiative — a national idea to try to reduce the number of mentally ill people in jail. It was on the Agenda again last Tuesday, after having been tabled several weeks ago.
IN JUNE, you’ll surely recall, the Board allocated $150k — Health and Human Services Agency Director Stacey Cryer had asked for $250k — of otherwise hard-to-come by discretionary money to, well, step up. At that time Health and Human Services Agency Director Cryer said that Stepping Up was “an initiative, a movement, a new way of thinking, stepping out of the box, coming together, collaborating…” … and “we decided to do something a little more proactive.” Adding, “We are meeting about the way that people are picked up and the way they are delivered and how they are in the emergency room and how they end up in jail.” … She wanted to “move this county forward in a new way” and “focus on the problem. It's really putting our money where our mouth is,” and “get the collaboration started, get the collaboration of groups together and supporting what we think could be some steps to move this forward.” … “We estimated $250,000 to go into this project, again to start the conversation and a group really — we don't have the money so we haven't talked about how it would be used. We would use it in different venues to move this item forward, to move this movement forward.”
AT WHICH POINT Boonville's beloved community newspaper awarded Ms. Cryer the all-time Mendo Cliché Award for the most buzzwords and phrases in one comment by a local public bureaucrat.
THE SUPES said they wanted a few more specifics before they actually turned over the $150k, and Ms. Cryer assured them they’d have a few more of those proactive, paradigm-shifting specifics in an upcoming presentation.
BUT ACCORDING TO Willits Weekly’s Supes reporter Mike A’Dair, seven weeks later, what do we have? “[Sheriff] Allman, Cryer and [Public Defender] Thompson have been working with other countywide and statewide organizations to craft [sic] an effective strategy for Mendocino County. Allman said on average some 20-22% of the jail inmate population has mental health issues. Currently the jail holds about 300 inmates. 20% of that would be 60 inmates. According to Allman the idea is to divert low-level offenders from the correctional system and into the mental health recovery system. ‘Once a person is in the county jail, funding stops for mental health services for this person,’ Allman said. ‘If we can prevent low-level offenders from crossing the threshold of the jail and hand them off to mental health then our community is better off’.” We don’t know if by “our community” Allman meant his Jail staff who have to deal with roughly 60 mentally ill people at any given time, or the larger community.
“ALLMAN said the $150,000 would be used to expand training to other branches of law enforcement that may not have had it. ‘The guys in my department have had training in the past four years,’ Allman said. ‘What we want to do is expand the training to police officers, ambulance personnel and other first responders.’ When Supervisor John McCowen asked what providing one-time money would mean for the future, Allman replied the commitment would likely be ongoing. ‘I certainly am not trying to tell you that $150,000 is going to solve this problem forever. This needs to be a continuing conversation.’ Public Defender Linda Thompson told supervisors the combined efforts of her office, the district attorney, the Health and Human Services Agency, and the Mendocino County courts have diverted 85 people with mental health issues from the jail over the past 2.5 years.”
NAMES! WE'RE SUSPICIOUS of Ms. Thompson’s numbers. 85 diversions? We know they’re not the frequent flyers, most of whom obviously have mental health problems, and because the frequent flyers continue to “cross the threshold” — aka get arrested — in the usual wholesale numbers. We’d guess that if there were 85 people “diverted” from jail they’d be the “low hanging nuts,” er, fruit — the self-diverted, mostly.
REPORTER A’DAIR also noted that “No one from either of the county's two privately owned mental health providers, Ortner Management Group and Redwood Quality Management Company, spoke to supervisors in support of the national Stepping Up campaign.” A’Dair added, “While supervisors appeared to view the presentation from Allman, Cryer and Thompson with approbation [sic] they did not vote to assign the $150,000 to the training program.”
TRANSLATION: Staff spent seven weeks developing what they first said would be a “pilot program” or at least some specifics and all they could come up with was a vague “expanded” training program? At least the Supes realized this wasn’t even close to a “program” — in fact it was an insult: Did staff really think they could get $150k for nothing more than ill-defined “training”? Do they think the Board will hand over money for literally anything if it’s accompanied by a blizzard of buzzwords? (Don’t answer that.)
DA DAVID EYSTER to Sheriff Allman:
"We have completed our review of the in-jail death of Steven Kellogg Neuroth. Accordingly, under this cover I am turning over to you the investigation binder of reports and evidence which were compiled by my investigators to allow for our independent review of the chain of events that lead to the declaration of Mr. Neuroth’s death just before 1 o’clock on the morning on June 11, 2014. As I believe you know, Mr. Neuroth was arrested by the Willits Police Department about quarter after 10 o’clock on the night of June 10, 2014. He was arrested for using and/or being under the influence of a controlled substance, a misdemeanor violation of Health and Safety Code section 11550(a). It is obvious from all accounts that Mr. Neuroth was suffering from drug-induced delusions at the time of his arrest, this finding supported by the report that Mr. Neuroth was perceiving non-existent snakes writhing on the floor of the patrol vehicle he was being transported in. After being transported down the hill to the Mendocino County jail facility for sobering, booking, and housing, Mr. Neuroth exhibited significant paranoia and was resistant with jail personnel.
"WHILE PHYSICAL FORCE was necessary to overcome Mr. Neuroth’s resistance, my review of the available evidence leads me to conclude that only that force necessary to reasonably overcome the inmate’s resistance was employed. Given his words and actions, I find that the inmate clearly posed a safety risk to the correctional officers and they acted in a reasonable manner to address the situation without putting their own individual and collective safety at unnecessary risk. There is insufficient evidence for me to conclude, or any other objective fact finder for that matter to conclude, that the actions of the Willits Police officers and/or the jail’s correctional officers caused the death in question. The scope of this review has been straightforward. The focus has been to determine whether there is evidence available that would lead a reasonable person to conclude that Mr. Neuroth’s death was the result of criminal misconduct — whether intentional or negligent — by any one or more of the police officers and/or correctional officers who interacted with Mr. Neuroth from Willits until his death in Ukiah.
"IN SHORT, while an extremely unfortunate situation, the information I have reviewed, along with all reasonable inferences that may be drawn from same, do not indicate or otherwise support criminal causation. Finally, I will note that the amount of methamphetamine circulating in Mr. Neuroth’s body at the time of his death is staggering and, in the pathologist’s opinion, likely contributed to his symptoms as reported, as well as his eventual death. As noted in the hospital emergency room report, Mr. Neuroth had a “history of active methamphetamine abuse,” abuse that seemed to be especially out of control during the weeks, days, and hours leading up to his death. Yours truly, C. David Eyster, District Attorney."
THE HOMELESS, a local case history. I saw two men doing lateral side straddle hops down South State Street last week. It was about noon and it was hot, too hot for side straddle hops even if you were in gym clothes. And who does those anymore anyway, even in a gym class?
THESE GUYS were both tall, well over six feet, and tweaker-lean. They'd hop straight at pedestrians then veer off just before running into them, and a couple of times they ran under building overhangs and back out onto the sidewalk, their faces frozen in maniacal grins.
WHEN I GOT CLOSER I recognized one of the men. He'd been born and more or less raised in Boonville. He got bigger anyway, a lot bigger, although he'd been semi-abandoned by both parents, one of whom, mom, used to run up behind me hissing like a goose, startling hell out of me. When I asked her to please not sneak up on me like that she hissed some more.
I'VE KNOWN Side Straddle since he was a child. He and his brother, from the time they were in junior high school, lived in a dirt floor house that had been hauled on to property the grandparents owned. Side Straddle's father would appear every few weeks to drop off bulk containers of food like his sons were zoo animals.
SIDE STRADDLE was, predictably, eccentric as a kid. But not unmanageable. He went to school, behaved himself. Boonville was kind to him and his brother. We all knew the situation, and lots of people did what they could to make that situation easier for the two boys who resisted assistance not out of resentment but because they seemed to assume their feral context was more or less normal. Side always seemed startled when you gave him stuff.
OF THE TWO, Side was the smartest, and he was very smart, testing out very big brain by school measurements. He had, and I guess still has, an artist's creativity. I have some drawings and a painting he did which I think are very good. I always encouraged him to take art classes at the college but the fast-forwarded movie he always had going in his head prevented intake from anywhere but his own impressions, which often became odd obsessions, like the one he developed for everything and anything Japanese. With some training, Side could be a real artist.
ONE NIGHT, driving late back to Boonville over the Greenwood Road, here comes Side furiously pedaling uphill towards the Coast. I caught up with him and asked if he was ok. Without answering he kept on going.
ANOTHER TIME, Side was walking near Boonville when I stopped to give him some shoes and shirts. Because we're roughly the same size, I'd keep my surplus clothes in my car for whenever I saw him. “I'm kinda pissed off at you right now, Bruce. I don't want to talk to you.” And he walked off looking furious. Whatever, as the young people say. I didn't press him. And that was maybe three years ago, and the last time I saw him in Boonville because he moved over the hill to Ukiah.
I FIGURED OUT later Side was probably mad at me because I'd suggested that he apply for SSI. “But I'm not nuts,” he said. “I wouldn't get it.” I could name fifty people on SSI who are a lot less nuts, not that I said that. “I know you're not nuts,” I said, “but just go in there and pretend you are. You gotta eat, man.” I heard he got it, and him getting it is not a handout. He really does qualify.
I OFTEN SEE SIDE in Ukiah, and I've seen him in the Sheriff's Log a few times. I'm sure the Ukiah police are on a first name basis with him, not that he commits crimes of any magnitude, and not that he's ever been violent. But Side lacks, well, judgment, and the drunks and amphetamine-driven people you see shuffling up and down State Street to and from Plowshares are now Side's community. He'll get steadily worse, and he's already a quality-of-life guy, a destroyer of public space because of his size and behavior.
THE OTHER DAY when I spotted him doing his mid-day laterals for a quarter mile or so, I'd guessed he was tweaked to the max. He'd have to be to be doing what he was doing on a hot day in Ukiah. In his booking photos Side's got those telltale tweaker face scabs.
SIDE'S MONTHLY SSI CHECK probably isn't enough to cover rent and food so he lives rough off South State somewhere near the old Thomas pear sheds. A Boonville guy told me that at dawn, “All the homeless tweakers get up and walk out of there in the mists. It looks like a horror movie.” In 1960, Side would have been confined to a state hospital program where he probably would have been set to rights, made functional. He's off, but not that far off with structure and help. But anymore there's a small army of Sides out there, and they get nothing but crazier.
AT LAST some rational perspective on cop funerals from the East Bay Express: "Cop funerals around the nation have morphed into giant spectacles. So much so that they've become wildly disproportionate to the dangers of being a police officer and the relative importance of the job. Although police officers certainly perform a pivotal role in our society and work in a dangerous profession, they don't have the most dangerous job in America, not by a long shot. It's not even in the top ten. What is the most dangerous? According to a 2015 Bloomberg News report based on labor department statistics from 2006 through 2013, fishermen have the deadliest job in the nation. In fact, fishermen are eight times more likely to be killed on the job than cops. After fishermen, the other top ten most dangerous jobs in America are: loggers, aircraft pilots, extraction workers (which include explosives workers and oil drillers), iron and steel workers, roofers, garbage collectors, farmers and ranchers, truck drivers, and power-line installers and repairers.
So where do cops rank? Fourteenth, behind agricultural workers (11), construction laborers (12), and taxi drivers and chauffeurs (13). You read that right: It's more dangerous to drive a cab or chauffeur the wealthy in America than it is to be a cop. So, then, why aren't there massive funerals featuring governors and mayors and TV news crews when a cab driver or a power-line worker or a fisherman is killed? And why aren't these people referred to as "warriors" and "heroes" when their jobs are more dangerous than that of cops?
DEPT OF UNINTENTIONAL HUMOR. Willits Weekly reporter Mike A'Dair, in the August 6th edition of the paper, under the title “Fire Safe Council: Too Many Trees,” the ubiquitous Madelin Holtkamp (ubiquitous among the County's plethora of non-profits, that is), "said the problem of experiencing uncontrolled catastrophic wildfires stemmed from having too many trees. ‘There are just too many trees… There are more trees out there now than at any time since the inception of Western civilization on the North American continent. Finding a reasonable way to address that risk is something we are looking at. The solution is: We need fewer trees. Everyone knows that. It is how to economically remedy that, that is the tricky bit’.”
EVERYONE KNOWS THAT? I didn't know that. I asked the people in the office. They didn't know that either. We all thought trees were good, that they help beat back global warming, that more trees was a global desire, that even the most environmentally devastated countries had tree planting programs going.
MS. HOLTKAMP is Executive Director of the Fire Safe Council, one more Mendo non-profit that exists to feed itself. According to A'Dair, who reported this nuttiness straight, “Holtkamp noted that Native Americans who lived here prior to 1850 used fire to affect vegetation on the landscape. ‘In the summer, when the grass turns brown, they would throw a couple of burning twigs out there. Then they would go over to the coast and go fishing. In the fall when they came back, everything was great and there was no problem. What I would like to see is a set of policies in place that people would follow so that if there is a wildland fire it will not be a catastrophic fire,’ she said.”
WHO'S to argue? Madeline's no kid. Hell, maybe she was there. Maybe she watched the Indians throw a couple of “burning twigs out there” before they all went out to the coast to go fishing.
MS. HOLTKAMP and her Fire Safe Council was talking about the fire danger associated with Mendocino Redwood Company's widespread use of tree-poisoning as a way to kill their non-commercial hardwoods. There are now thousands of upright dead trees on MRC's thousands of acres, hugely exacerbating both the fire and toxic hazard if the forests burn.
THE JIVE-O Fire Safe Council was a convenient way for the Board of Supervisors to avoid doing anything about MRC's hazardous tree-thinning practices, so they shifted the problem to the bogus Fire Safe Council.
BY "TREES" Ms. Holtkamp may have been referring to the dry brush build-up in recent years which is indeed a fire hazard, but she should have said so if that's what she meant. The problem could at least be partially dealt with by issuing firewood permits to local woodsworkers (as the old Masonite Corp used to do), but MRC prefers poisoning because its cheaper, and now that most of their unwanted trees are poisoned, would-be firewood cutters wouldn't touch them anyway.
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