Permission to Enter
The total lowdown on search warrants issued and served in Humboldt County
Cover Stories
A Little Advice
If you want to keep your illegal arsenal of guns, don’t brandish them at your neighbors. WHY? That’s why police were called to a house in Hoopa. If you steal a refrigerator don’t leave a receipt with your name on it behind. WHY? That’s what police found after someone burglarized a community center in…
Search and seizure in the age of text messaging
While searching an apartment off of L.K. Wood in Arcata in January of this year, special agents from the Humboldt County Drug Task Force discovered a cell phone. As the agents searched the phone for contacts, a text message came in from an Ohio-area phone number. The following messages detail the conversation once the agents…
Permission to Enter
Something was off. One day last year, Sheriff’s Deputy Mark Peterson was patrolling Ettersburg, an area in Southern Humboldt, when he noticed a newly constructed driveway. An unmarked metal livestock gate sat open a few yards from the road. Peterson plugged his GPS coordinates into the computer in his squad car and checked out the…
How We Did It
This story was written and reported by the students of JMC 326 at Humboldt State University: Preston Drake-Hillyard, Matt Drange, Carlos Esqueda, J. Daniel Fernadez, Nels Ferre, Brandi Fleeks, Daniel Froloff, Alex Gautreaux, Yelena Kisler, Satoshi Kondo, Molly Lovelady, Mallory Madison, Scott Meyers, Haley Nessler, Desiree Perez, Luke Ramseth, Ahron Sherman, Milo ShumpertAppel, Kaitlin Skeels…
Nosing Around
Jeremiah Benton slid from bed and looked out his window when Boss, his albino pit bull, started barking. Outside he saw about a dozen sheriff’s deputies in flak jackets, some with assault rifles. One carried a battering ram. Benton, a 31-year-old Eureka resident, was part of a marijuana collective. About 200 plants grew inside his…
When They Don’t Need a Warrant
Police don’t need a warrant if the person living in a residence grants them permission to search. Consider the case of Chris Grumbine. He and three friends smoked some marijuana in Grumbine’s dorm room on the Humboldt State campus when he decided to light some incense. “I wasn’t trying to cover up the smell,” he…
Tri-City Weekly: Now With Dada Headlines!
Ever on the lookout for new ways to stimulate the voracious intellect of its readership, the Tri-City Weekly has evidently hired a student of early 20th century European surrealism to compose absurdist tone poems for the front cover: Q: What does it mean? A: What does a chicken mean, you filthy bourgeois?
Grovies: CALL TO ARMS
It is ON, says Grovie organizer Jeff Muskrat in an e-mail call to arms that came across our desk today. Muskrat says that trees are already being felled in preparation for the Richardson Grove project; he’s forecasting direct action starting Memorial Day weekend. !RICHARDSON GROVE ACTION ALERT! The environmentalists’ last stand? I’m forwarding this to…
Fiorina Courts Arcata Conservatives
U.S. Senate hopeful Carly Fiorina held a town hall meeting this afternoon inside a cavernous warehouse at Arcata’s O & M Industries. Addressing the crowd of 50 or so locals — which included Eureka Mayor/County Supervisor candidate Virginia Bass, County Planning Commissioner Dennis Mayo and County Supervisor candidate Ryan Sundberg (who said he’d just learned who Fiorina…
HAF-time Show
It’s an impossible statistic to verify, but let’s just go ahead and declare Humboldt County the nation’s leader in “per capita artsiness.” Why not? With monthly arts nights in Eureka, Arcata and McKinleyville, the fine work done by local organizations like the Ink People, the Humboldt Arts Council, the Main Street programs, the Mateel and…
Doom Boom
Pig Tree, a post-apocalyptic comedy in two acts, played last weekend at the Arcata Playhouse — or rather, outside of it. Theatergoers were led from the Playhouse lobby into the cold night, to bleachers facing a set (a bench, steel desk and a few other pieces), in front of a few stylized bare trees and…
Backs to the Future
You walk into work one morning and your boss says, “You know the meeting we were going to have next Wednesday? We’ve moved it forward a couple of days.” Question: Is the meeting now scheduled for Monday or Friday? Think about this for a moment before reading on. We envisage time metaphorically, usually in relation…
Living Comic Book
Wham! Tattooed Adam Thronstowe, half of the tagteam known as “Reno Scum” hits the mat, thrown by a burly opponent. Before you know it, Adams bounces back and reverses the situation, bringing the pain with an elbow to the neck. The crowd roars. “We call it the living comic book,” said Dominick “Dom” Jerry, one…
Stark Raving Rad
The British tale of the Robin Hood and his outlaw band dates back to 15th century balladry. Author/illustrator Howard Pyle’s 1883 book The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood planted one image of him (and helped name his men). Movies starring Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn gave us a swashbuckling 20th century update on the character;…
Notes from the Hustings
After the Tone “So, uh, Bonnie, how did you like the — the, uh, bad press I’m giving you? I will stop at nothing to ruin your campaign. I will stop you. I’m a bulldog. I’m gonna stop your campaign and you’re gonna fail.” This message is what greeted campaigners for Bonnie Neely’s re-election campaign…
Therapeutic
Chris Pureka writes strong, sometimes chilling songs that get to the point. “So, go, get the fuck out of this house, just hurry along now. There’s work to be done,” she wails in “Damage Control,” a song on her recently released fifth album, How I Learned To See In The Dark. Pureka says she mostly…
High Violet
The tradition of siblings in rock and pop often doesn’t bode well. Bad blood has risen from the Everly Brothers to Ray and Dave Davies of The Kinks to The Black Crowes’ Robinson brothers. To have two set of brothers in a single band is a bit over-the-top. However with the Brooklyn-based The National, the…
Big Stink
A couple of weeks ago in Blue Lake, the atmosphere around town was rather steamed — well, actually, smoked. It looked, recalled resident Scott Bradshaw last week, as if everyone in Blue Lake had fired up their wood stoves all at once. It sounded like revving jet engines, whining high. Agh, the burning throats and…
Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis
In his new book, Eaarth, Bill McKibben notes that one reason we have trouble facing the future being created by the climate crisis is that, “We lack the vocabulary and the metaphors we need for life on a different scale.” He offers his “candidates for words that may help us think usefully about the future.”…
Return to Walmart
Last week, just after we went to press, Security National’s Randy Gans stood up at the regularly scheduled meeting of the Eureka City Council and make a surprising announcement: The company he represents, which has been seeking to develop a long-vacant railroad on the Eureka waterfront for the last five and a half years, wishes…
Dancing wild mustard
Big yellow presence being the wind resilient flower…
Arts Arcata!
1) Arcata Artisans 883 H St. Joyce Radtke, mixed media, ceramics; Marsha Mello, etchings, Diane Sonderegger, ceramics. 2) Arcata City Hall* 736 F St. Bicycle Themed Art, Bicycle Awareness Month. 3) Arcata Exchange 813 H St. Bosha Struve, subliminal spaces; Greg Willis, live music. 4) Arcata Main Street 791 8th St. Matt Filar, photographs featuring…
