Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

Under California law, certain sex offender registrants must abide by special terms between 5 p.m. and 5 a.m. on Halloween night, including:

• Stay in their own home;
• Not answer the door for anyone except Law Enforcement;
• Keep all exterior lights off;
• Cannot pass out treats;
• Cannot decorate their house for Halloween.

Community members are encouraged to review the Department of Justice’s Megan’s Law database for any area where you intend to take children trick-or-treating and practice the following Halloween safety tips:

For Pedestrians:

• Adults should always supervise children while trick or treating.
• If you will be walking at night, be visible. Carry a flashlight and wear light, reflective clothing so that drivers can see you.
• Make sure Halloween costumes are flame-retardant and visible with retro-reflective material.
• Walk in well-lit areas on the sidewalk, not on the street.
• Never allow children to run out into the street.
• Only cross the street at crosswalks or corners where it is safe.
• Only trick-or-treat at residences with exterior lights on or that indicate they are accepting trick-or-treaters.

For Drivers:

• Drive cautiously and slow down.
• Watch for pedestrians who may be in dark clothing or may cross roads unexpectedly.
• Carefully exit and enter driveways and alleys.
• Be extra alert for vehicles backing out of driveways or leaving parking spaces as drive-up trick or treating may be more common this year.
• Do not drink alcohol and drive. Designate a non-drinking driver if your plans for the holiday include consuming impairing substances.

The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office is a participant in the Region II Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement (SAFE) Team, and these enforcement efforts are funded through the SAFE grant.

PREVIOUSLY

• Cars of Students in CPH’s New Hinarr Hu Moulik Dorms Are Eating Up Road Parking

There’s an unbroken, unmoving line of cars as far as Arcata’s Eye Street goes, all the way down to Cal Poly Humboldt’s Hinarr Hu Moulik dorms. If any of them had been occupied with the intention of driving them anywhere, it’d be a traffic jam; but they are, at the moment, empty. Most of them are not owned by the residents along Eye Street, who have to compete for street parking with the almost 600 students at the end of the road, who have a parking lot with space for 328 cars. Almost since the moment the dorms opened in August, it’s been a contentious issue, brought up more than a few times at city council meetings and the topic of dozens of emails sent to the city — but an end to the parking problem may be at hand. 

Eye Street residents recently presented a petition, signed by around 50 people, to the city council and the Transportation Safety Committee asking them to extend permitted parking down to the end of the street and a side street off of Eye. A city employee confirmed Monday that the item was on an upcoming agenda and will likely pass, though he was unsure when the change will happen. 

To get a parking permit, the applicant has to prove with a copy of the lease or a utility bill that they live in one of the three zones Arcata regulates resident parking in. The Group B parking zone ends just a few dozen yards down Eye Street. The permits are free. 

The parking glut has had its tolls. Lea Nagy, 81, lives and operates an Airbnb on Eye. She herself is an HSU graduate, likes living in a college town, and doesn’t have any beef with the students, who she said were “sweet” and sometimes helped her with her groceries — she just wishes their cars didn’t take up so much space and block her mailbox. 

Guests renting out her Airbnb often have a hard time finding space to park their cars. Many of them, she said, are older and disabled and need to be near the entrance, but sometimes they have to park blocks away. Returning customers tend to be flabbergasted at the change.

“They make comments like, ‘Oh my god, there’s no parking,’” Nagy said in an interview with the Outpost. “They go, ‘God, what happened to your street?’” 

She and her neighbors also worry that a fire truck wouldn’t be able to fit down the road, which was narrow to begin with and is squeezed even tighter with the dozens of cars parked along the side. 

Nagy said she felt supported by the city council and the university; CPH even built her a fence separating her yard from campus and washed her windows. 

“They are good kids,” Nagy said of the students. “They just don’t realize the impact and want to park close. I don’t blame them.”

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This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

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The state of California gave Sylvester Conway every opportunity to kill.

He already had two DUI convictions by 2019, when the California Highway Patrol arrested him for driving drunk in Fresno County. The jail released him three days later. Conway didn’t show up to court and a judge issued a warrant for his arrest.

The cycle continued. In April 2021, prosecutors say he drove the wrong way on the highway with a blood alcohol level nearly twice the legal limit. Conway signed a citation for driving under the influence, promising that he’d show up to court. He didn’t.

The same thing happened in August that year — another DUI arrest, this time by Fresno police, and another warrant for skipping court.

All three Fresno DUI cases were still open, and all three warrants were out for Conway’s arrest, when police say he sped — drunk again — on his way to a casino in February 2022. This time, he lost control, flipped his Acura and killed his passenger, Khayriyyah Jones. He’s now facing murder charges in Madera County.

California’s DUI enforcement system is broken. The toll can be counted in bodies.

Alcohol-related roadway deaths in California have shot up by more than 50% in the past decade — an increase more than twice as steep as the rest of the country, federal estimates show. More than 1,300 people die each year statewide in drunken collisions. Thousands more are injured. Again and again, repeat DUI offenders cause the crashes.

To understand why so many people are dying under the wheels of drunk and drugged drivers, CalMatters reviewed thousands of vehicular manslaughter and homicide cases prosecutors filed across the state since 2019. We also examined other states’ laws on intoxicated driving and sifted through decades of state and federal traffic safety data.

We found that California has some of the weakest DUI laws in the country, allowing repeat drunk and drugged drivers to stay on the road with little punishment. Here, drivers generally can’t be charged with a felony until their fourth DUI within 10 years, unless they injure someone. In some states, a second DUI can be a felony.

California too often fails to differentiate between drunk drivers who made a dangerous mistake but learn from it and those who refuse to stop endangering lives. It’s the missed opportunities to prevent tragedies that haunt the loved ones of the dead.

Sarah Villar, a pediatric physical therapist, was out walking the dog with her fiance in San Benito County when a drunk driver swerved off the road and killed her in 2021. The driver had been convicted of driving drunk in 2018, 2019 and again in 2020 — all misdemeanors — and served just a couple weeks behind bars before the fatal crash.

Villar’s parents buried her in her wedding dress.

“To the broken justice system that allowed this to happen — shame on you,” her father, Dave Villar, said in her eulogy. “If I walked out my front door today onto my porch and fired a shot into my neighborhood every day until I killed someone, when would I be a menace to society? When do I become a danger to my community? I say it’s after the first shot. Our system says it’s after the last.”

California also gives repeat drunk drivers their licenses back faster than other states. Here, you typically lose your license for three years after your third DUI, compared to eight years in New Jersey, 15 years in Nebraska and a permanent revocation in Connecticut. We found drivers with as many as six DUIs who were able to get a license in California.

Many drivers stay on the road for years even when the state does take their license — racking up tickets and even additional DUIs — with few consequences until they eventually kill.

When the worst does happen, there’s often little punishment. Drunk vehicular manslaughter isn’t considered a “violent felony.” But in a twist of state law, a DUI that causes “great bodily injury” is — meaning that a drunk driver who breaks someone’s leg can face more time behind bars than if they’d killed them, prosecutors said.

Despite the mounting death toll, state leaders have shown little willingness to address the issue. A bill proposed in the state Legislature this year would have expanded the use of in-car breathalyzers, which research shows can significantly reduce drunk driving. Most other states already require the device for first-time DUI offenders. But lawmakers killed the provision after the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles said it didn’t have the time or resources to carry it out.

Drunk and drugged driving is now so common in car-centric California that drivers routinely rack up four, five, six DUIs. One woman in Fresno just got her 16th.

The case files we reviewed are full of horrific reminders of this ubiquity. Like the story of Masako Saenz.

In 2000, Saenz was driving with her 5-year-old son, Manuel, to pick up an uncle in Stockton for the family’s Easter celebration when a drunk driver slammed his pickup truck into her tiny Toyota Tercel, killing the boy.

The driver had been convicted of his fourth DUI two months before. He likely would have been behind bars that day, but San Joaquin Superior Court Judge John Cruikshank was letting him finish a rehab program before reporting to jail.

The case made national news when Saenz broke down during the arraignment. “Murderer! Murderer! You killed my son!” she screamed and had to be removed from the courtroom.

She told a Sacramento Bee reporter that people would marvel at how well she seemed to be doing. “But they have no idea,” she said. “They have no idea. Sometimes even now I wonder if I can go on.”

In the years after, her life unraveled, police and court records show. Saenz became homeless, sleeping along Sacramento roadways.

She appears to have started posting to an online memorial website for her son — simple messages of love and grief sent into the void. “He will always be with me,” reads the last post from January 2022.

Three months later, a man with a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit — whose license was suspended after a string of speeding tickets — gunned his car, lost control and careened into an encampment just miles from the state Capitol. A witness found her body wrapped in a tent.

Mother and son were killed two decades apart by drunk drivers who never should have been on the road.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

‘It’s accepted in society until the worst happens’

Once upon a time, California showed that you can reduce drunk driving deaths simply by trying.

Two decades before Saenz’s son was killed, another Sacramento mother’s unfathomable loss galvanized the state and country. In 1980, Candace Lightner’s 13-year-old daughter was walking to a church carnival when a drunk driver — out of jail days after what was reportedly his fourth DUI arrest — slammed into her so hard she flew out of her shoes, landing 125 feet away.

In response, Lightner helped found Mothers Against Drunk Driving, ushering in the modern anti-DUI movement. California was at the forefront, forming a special task force in 1980. State leaders enacted a slate of new laws, setting a legal limit for blood alcohol content and increasing DUI penalties. In 1982, Gov. Jerry Brown touted the reforms as the “toughest package of legislation in the Nation against driving while under the influence of alcohol or drugs.”

In the decades that followed, California cut alcohol-related roadway fatalities by more than half.

Now, the state’s headed backward. And as deaths have increased, law enforcement has done less: DUI arrests statewide dropped from nearly 200,000 in 2010 to 100,000 in 2020.

The death of Masako Saenz launched no new movements. Her killing was briefly mentioned in a local news roundup of homeless deaths from 2022. But that was about it. There wasn’t a picture of her on the site, just a stock photo of a burning candle — a placeholder for a life lost.

The Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office filed a lesser manslaughter charge against the driver, Puentis Currie Jr., instead of the more serious charge police recommended. Currie got three months behind bars, then a few months with a monitoring bracelet so he could keep going to college.

Prosecutors asked Sacramento County Superior Court Judge John P. Winn to sentence Currie to at least community service instead of letting him “sit at home and play video games,” according to a court transcript. But Winn declined, saying he was leaving the department and didn’t want to saddle his replacement with decisions regarding the details of such an order.

Just this past May, police caught Currie driving on a suspended license again after pulling him over for a busted headlight, court records show. That could have meant more jail time. Instead, he got a ticket.

Currie said he needs to drive to and from work and was driving home from a shift when he got the recent citation. Now 25, he hopes talking about his case might keep other kids from driving while intoxicated.

He said that the night he killed Masako Saenz, he had gone out to celebrate his cousin’s birthday. He did tequila shots and took ecstasy and remembers getting in the car but nothing else until after the crash.

One of his attorneys told him about Saenz’s son. The weight of what he’d done hit him.

He said he goes back to the scene of the crash every April.

“I put flowers there just to show, like — ” he said, breaking down in tears, “show that I care, or show her that I’m truly sorry.”

He said it’s too easy to ignore the risk of driving under the influence. Lawyers, doctors, everyone gets DUIs.

“I think it’s accepted in society until the worst happens,” he said.

‘It is literally just a matter of time before they kill’

David Alvarado already had three prior DUIs when a CHP officer saw him almost hit another car in January 2019. He admitted he’d been drinking Coors Light at a friend’s house.

But prosecutors couldn’t charge Alvarado with a felony, which typically brings with it more serious penalties and oversight. His previous DUIs — from 1997, and two from 2006 — essentially didn’t count. In California, a DUI drops off your record after 10 years. He was just another misdemeanor drunk driver in a state with more than 100,000 of them that year.

The Madera County District Attorney’s Office hadn’t even filed criminal charges yet when, 10 months later, law enforcement stopped him again for driving drunk.

Over the next two years, they’d pull him over twice more, citing him once for driving without a valid license and another time for drunk driving, court records show.

That’s three DUI arrests and a ticket in less than three years.

His punishment: probation. The judge ordered him to wear an alcohol monitoring bracelet for 129 days.

Less than a year after his conviction, he was driving a F-250 pickup truck when he slammed into a car stopped at a red light, killing Mary and Paul Hardin, a Texas couple visiting on a church mission trip. Prosecutors say Alvarado was drunk. He is now facing murder charges in Fresno County.

Benjamin Hardin is the second oldest of the victims’ 11 children. He said his parents touched so many lives with their kindness and love. When the family cleaned out the couple’s California apartment after the crash, he said they found a fresh baked loaf of bread with someone’s name on it that their mother must have intended to deliver.

“I know that my parents would want me and my siblings to forgive him,” Hardin said. “My parents would not want me to carry hate in my heart for him.”

Still, he said he was stunned to learn that someone could get that many DUIs.

“It really does feel like it is literally just a matter of time before they kill someone — or in my family’s case, two someones,” he said.

The Victims of Drunk Drivers Memorial at Pacific View Mortuary and Memorial Park in Corona del Mar, on Sept. 24, 2025. Photos by Jules Hotz for CalMatters

State data shows repeat drunk driving is not an aberration. A recent DMV analysis tracked drivers who got a DUI in 2005. More than a quarter got another DUI over the next 15 years. Of the drivers for whom the 2005 arrest was at least their third DUI, nearly 40% went on to get yet another.

San Benito District Attorney Joel Buckingham said he views a third DUI as a crucial moment to intervene, aiming for drivers to serve at least 60 days in jail to “really kind of wake them up.”

But he also tries to take matters into his own hands at home. When he teaches his kids to drive, he tells them to “assume everyone is trying to kill you,” he said.

It’s the lack of consequences or meaningful intervention over years that make so many of the cases read like tragedy foretold.

William Curtis was convicted of driving while intoxicated in May 2012.

Over the next several years, he would be involved in two collisions, receive four traffic tickets and get another DUI, all while his license was supposed to be suspended, Sacramento County court records show.

For the second DUI, he was sentenced to 30 days in jail. Police filed the citations in traffic court rather than sending them to the DA’s office for criminal prosecution. As a result, he got off with little more than a fine for refusing to stay off the road.

And he continued to drive until one night in November 2020, when he sped down Highway 99 drunk and crashed into the back of a stalled car. That vehicle burst into flames. Emergency personnel later found the charred remains of Dominique Howard trapped inside the burned vehicle.

Law enforcement later let him call his mother. Court records reveal what they heard Curtis say:

“I killed someone. I’m going away. I’m sorry, mom. Tell my kids I love them.”

‘You just saved a family of four’

Ryan Nazaroff became a police officer because of the worst day — or maybe one of the two worst days — of his life. He was just 16 in February 2008, with a bunch of friends going from party to party on the roads that run between the farms outside Fresno. There was another car of kids in front of him, Nazaroff said.

He remembers seeing the vehicle in front swerve. It hit the shoulder, overcorrected to the left and started to roll. His 14-year-old brother and another passenger were ejected.

Nazaroff found his brother laying on the dirt shoulder, dead.

In the horror of the moment, he remembers the polite professionalism of the CHP officers who investigated the crash. Nazaroff decided then that he wanted to do that for other people in their worst moments and try to help prevent the types of tragedies his family endured. He eventually joined the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

The first chance Nazaroff got as a young deputy, he took an assignment working traffic patrol on the graveyard shift, cruising alone along the dark roads of Norwalk and La Mirada, 20 miles southeast of downtown LA, looking for drunk drivers and responding to crashes. Mothers Against Drunk Driving gave him awards for his DUI arrests.

“You try and remind yourself, every DUI arrest you make, you just saved a family of four,” he said.

Ryan Nazaroff in Rowland Heights, on Sept. 26, 2025. Photo by Jules Hotz for CalMatters

Nazaroff was up for a promotion in April 2022 when he pulled into the station garage and his phone buzzed. He picked up. A Fresno County sheriff’s deputy was at his mom’s house.

It had happened again.

A drunk driver blew a stop sign and smashed into the dump truck his father was driving. Jeffrey Nazaroff was barely a block from where he was supposed to park his truck, finish his shift and go home. Instead, Ryan’s dad became one of the more than 1,400 people killed in an alcohol-related crash in California that year, federal estimates show.

Ryan Nazaroff called off of work and went home. He sat up all night with his wife before driving to be with his family the next day.

The woman who killed his dad was not a first-time drunk driver. Zdeineb Juarez Calderon was arrested two months before the fatal crash for allegedly driving drunk and crashing into a sign post. He thought that should be enough to charge her with murder.

To sustain a murder charge, prosecutors need to be able to prove that the person knew the danger and took the risk anyway. That typically means showing the defendant received a formal warning about the dangers of intoxicated driving, called a Watson advisement. Judges will typically read a boilerplate warning into the court record when someone is convicted of a DUI or have them sign a form.

But Juarez Calderon wasn’t convicted of anything yet for the earlier crash, so there was no Watson warning in the court records. Prosecutors told him the best they could charge Juarez Calderon with was vehicular manslaughter, Nazaroff said.

He was further frustrated to learn that because vehicular manslaughter isn’t considered a “violent” felony, the repeat drunk driver who killed his dad will likely serve only a small fraction of her 10-year sentence in prison.

That’s because the state requires people convicted of a violent felony to serve more of their time in prison. In general, someone convicted of a violent felony will serve two-thirds of their sentence behind bars while for a lesser felony it’s as little as a third, said Steve Ueltzen, a Fresno County senior deputy district attorney.

“It’s a tough conversation to have with victims,” he said.

Juarez Calderon was sentenced to prison in January 2024. Records show that with the time she already spent in jail pretrial, she’s eligible for release this December.

Ryan Nazaroff displays childhood photos on his phone. The photo on the left shows his father, Jeffrey Nazaroff, alongside Ryan and his younger brother, Thomas Nazaroff. The photo on the right shows his father with Thomas. Rowland Heights, Sept. 26, 2025. Photo by Jules Hotz for CalMatters

‘It’s an abuse of authority and power’

California judges and lawmakers have often refused to require one of the few technological solutions most other states use to at least try to cut down on repeat drunk drivers.

Ignition interlock devices, known as IIDs, are those in-car breathalyzers that a driver needs to blow into for the vehicle to start. The technology has been around since the 1960s. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says they can decrease repeat drunk driving offenses as much as 70% while in use. In California, the devices prevented more than 30,500 attempts to drive under the influence in 2023 alone, state legislative reports say.

But unlike most states, California doesn’t require first-time drunk drivers to use the devices. MADD gave us an “F” on a 2022 national report card of states’ ignition interlock laws.

More than a decade ago, state Sen. Jerry Hill tried to require the devices for all DUI offenders in honor of a friend killed by a drunk driver. The Bay Area Democrat, now retired, grew dismayed by what he deemed a “soft approach” to DUIs, where legislators and committee consultants worry more about inconveniencing drivers than preventing deaths.

Hill ultimately had to settle for a 2016 bill that required the in-car breathalyzers for repeat DUI offenders.

But records suggest even that law isn’t being followed. Judges in more than a dozen counties ordered the breathalyzers for less than 10% of drivers convicted of a second DUI, according to a 2023 DMV report. In Los Angeles, judges made such orders for just 0.5% of the county’s thousands of second-time DUI offenders, according to the report.

“They should be ashamed of themselves, because how many deaths have they caused?” Hill said. “It’s an abuse of authority and power.”

LA County Superior Court spokesman Rob Oftring did not directly respond to detailed questions about how often the court’s judges order the breathalyzers, instead saying they “regularly submit abstracts of conviction” to the DMV.

The DMV hasn’t issued new figures showing the use of the devices in more recent years. Asked for comment, the agency responded via email saying: “The DMV follows the laws established by the Legislature in the California Vehicle Code. The department operates within those laws.”

Even drivers who have killed someone in recent years can get on the road without the device. We identified about 130 drivers who were convicted for a fatal DUI since 2019 who have already gotten their licenses back from the state. Alcohol was a factor in the vast majority of the cases. And although some appear to have had a short requirement to use an in-car breathalyzer, fewer than 20 are currently limited to driving vehicles with an ignition interlock device installed, their DMV records show.

Elias Mack thinks that’s a mistake.

Mack said he wasn’t much of a drinker, certainly not an alcoholic, when he drove drunk in early 2023 and caused the crash that killed Aurora Morris, his high school sweetheart.

“I was just young,” said Mack, who’s now 25.

He was convicted of vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, and at his sentencing, the judge ordered Mack’s license be revoked for three years. But under state law, the DMV is allowed to ignore such orders if the length of revocation is longer than what the statutes require. The agency gave Mack his license back little more than a year after his conviction and with no requirement that he install a breathalyzer, he said.

“I was trying to get my life back on track. I just wanted to do better and make her proud,” he said, adding that he needed to drive for work.

But the grief was almost too much. “To just live with that every day eats you alive,” Mack said.

He would often drive to see her memorial. “The only thing that’s making me feel good is just going to talk to her,” Mack said. But he was also drinking as a way to cope.

On one of those trips, just a few months after he got his license back, police stopped him. He got another DUI.

Mack said he’s sober now and hopes his story can help other people. He wishes the court had ordered him to have a breathalyzer after his manslaughter conviction.

It makes sense the devices would be mandatory, especially after a case like his, and for as long as possible, he added.

“It’s going to save somebody’s life.”

‘You have an opportunity to stop this’

Melanie Sandoval was still a teenager in 1989 when she was convicted in Madera County for driving drunk.

She got her second DUI a couple years later, and the state took her license.

She got her third a few years after that. And then her fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th and 15th.

It still didn’t keep her from driving drunk.

Kevin Bohnstedt saw the headlights coming toward him. The next thing he remembers, he was trapped in his seat with the airbags deployed and a woman outside rapping on the window.

Police found a pint of vodka in Sandoval’s car, said Ueltzen, who was the prosecutor in the case. It was her 16th DUI.

Bohnstedt, who spent 21 years flying jets off aircraft carriers as a naval aviator, said for months afterward he’d close his eyes and see the headlights coming for him. It took a while before he felt comfortable driving at night.

Kevin Bohnstedt stands in front of his home in central Fresno on Oct. 7, 2025. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local

Sandoval pleaded no contest to felony DUI and went to rehab. At a sentencing hearing in October 2024, Ueltzen implored Superior Court Judge Charles Lee to also send Sandoval to prison.

In a sharp back and forth, the judge and the prosecutor argued the weaknesses in the system.

Lee noted that if he sentenced her to four years, she would be out in two at most.

“What changes? She has been to prison so many times on so many different DUIs,” Lee said. “We warehouse her for a number of months. She comes out. She is still an addict. How is public safety addressed by a prison commitment here when we know she has gone to prison over and over and over again on DUIs?”

Ueltzen said that at least she could be forced to stay sober for a while.

“The public safety is addressed by the fact that while this defendant is in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, she is not behind the wheel of a car,” he said.

Lee was unmoved. For driving head on into another vehicle in what was her 16th DUI, the judge granted Sandoval probation with no additional time behind bars.

Her own attorney, who asked the court to send her to rehab instead of prison, said in an interview that there was “no accountability” in state law for repeat DUI offenders.

“If you have 16 DUIs, you likely should be doing 20 years in prison,” Marc Kapetan said.

Sandoval went on to violate the terms of her supervised release by showing up drunk to a probation appointment.

Just this summer a different judge ordered her to serve out the remainder of her four-year sentence in prison. With credit for the time she was in rehab, plus the time she spent in jail pretrial, plus the credit the state gives you just for behaving yourself behind bars, she should be out next year.

Bohnstedt said he recognizes the government can only do so much to stop people from making bad decisions and drivers have a responsibility for their own actions. But he said he was floored the court tried to let her off with mere probation and is baffled California can’t either get people like Sandoval the help they need or keep them from endangering the public.

“The biggest concern I have is the next time that it happens, there could be kids in the car. And she could kill them,” he said. “Or she could run people down. Any number of different horrific things could happen. And it could lead to somebody dying.”

If that happens, he said the state — lawmakers, law enforcement, the courts — will have blood on its hands.

“You have an opportunity to stop this.”

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We attempted to reach every driver named in this story or their attorneys — oftentimes both. If a person or their attorney isn’t quoted, we were unable to reach them or they declined to comment.

Court research by Robert Lewis, Lauren Hepler, Anat Rubin, Sergio Olmos, Cayla Mihalovich, Ese Olumhense, Ko Bragg, Andrew Donohue and Jenna Peterson.

With profound sadness, we share that our beloved father and cherished husband, Juvenal (John) Regalo, passed away peacefully, surrounded by his family, on October 19, 2025. He is survived by his wife, Nilda, and his five children (Angela, Ana, Carlos, Paul and Steven) along with their husbands and wives (Alfonso, David, Kim and Lori) and five grandchildren: Emmanuel, Yousuf and Noura, Lacey and Landon.

Juvenal was born on September 22, 1935 in Sao Jorge, Azores, Portugal. He is preceded in death by his parents, Manuel and Ilidia Regalo and two siblings, Aurelio and Fatima. He is survived by three sisters: Alda, Irene and Leocadia.

Juvenal moved to the neighboring island of Terceira, where he met his devoted and lovely wife, Nilda. He worked for the fishing port in Angra do Heroismo and with his father, creating quality wooden furniture and their favorite musical instruments. In 1967, Juvenal and Nilda with their young family immigrated to Eureka. He worked in the fishing, the timber and, ultimately, the construction industry as a self-employed master craftsman. He also designed, fabricated and serviced equipment in the local dairy industry surrounding Arcata. He did everything with ingenuity and passion, and so his work was a special gift to his family and community. First and foremost, he enjoyed working alongside his children over the years which imparted an uncompromising work ethic as well as a lifetime of knowledge and skills. Juvenal shared his artistic spirit and creative solutions with people he knew. He brought his talents to support friends in the Portuguese community, helping to remodel the Portuguese Hall of Arcata. The entrance doors of that building remain as one of many examples of his love for fine craftsmanship. He came from a well-known musical family in the Azores, and often at the end of his work day he enjoyed playing his favorite instruments, the organ or guitar, for all at home.

Juvenal was a devoted husband, father and man of Catholic faith. He lived with humility, commitment and with unwavering determination. We take comfort in knowing that Juvenal’s life was guided by a desire to care for his family and friends, with a constant eye toward improving people’s living situations. With his strong hands and the playfulness of a gentle soul, he will continue to be present in all our lives.

Thank you for keeping our family in your prayers and we are profoundly grateful for the outpouring of love during this time. We also wish to express our appreciation to all his compassionate caregivers during his last years.

A Rosary will be held at St. Bernard Catholic Church in Eureka on November 8 at 9:30 a.m., followed by a funeral mass at 10 a.m. Juvenal’s final resting place will be at St. Bernard’s Cemetery with a burial service at 2 p.m. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that contributions be made to either the Portuguese Hall of Arcata or St. Bernard Catholic Church in Eureka in his memory.

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Drivers! If you’re traveling down Eureka’s Seventh Street — or its 14th, or Buhne, or Harris — and you pull up to C Street, thinking you’re going to turn on to it… 

You should double-check to make sure that you can still turn the way you’d like to turn! Probably you cannot!

There’s lots of signage up now, and most of the roads have been re-painted and re-striped, but we know old habits die hard. The fact is, that the C Street Bicycle Boulevard is in full effect these days, meaning that there are stretches of C that are one-way only. You don’t want to drive them the wrong way!

While most of the work on the project is done, there’s one key aspect of the bike boulevard that is still missing. Eventually — probably within a month, according to project manager Jay Wortelboer — large planter boxes will be placed in the intersections that are no longer open to vehicular traffic. The boxes are “en route,” Wortelboer told the Outpost today.

Until then, drivers are going to have to do without those sorts of large, physically impenetrable clues and instead use the more subtle signs and lane stripes that now adorn those intersections. 

How to get on to C? Go around the block via B Street or D Street, or head up to Wabash. But probably only do that if you’re going to a location on C itself! Remember — you can’t drive it all the way through anymore!

Questions? Wortelboer told us to tell you that he welcomes questions. Reach him at 707-441-4194.

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A group of Fickle Hill residents will have to endure the effects of larger guest lists and overnight stays at a neighboring wedding and events venue following yesterday’s decision by the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors to deny the group’s appeal of recent permit changes.

The owners of Ridgefield Weddings and Events, a rental venue located 2.3 miles up Fickle Hill, east of Arcata, recently got approval to level-up their operations. Early last month, the Humboldt County Planning unanimously approved their request to modify the property’s conditional use permit to allow:

• an increase in the maximum number of events per year from 30 to 40 (though only 30 of them can have amplified music and voices),
• an increase in the maximum number of guests per event from 120 to 150, and
• up to 14 guests to stay overnight in the existing residence for one to three days.

But a group of neighboring property owners cried foul, saying the Planning Commission failed to adequately address their concerns about noise, property values, water usage, the venue’s septic system, public safety, fire, increased traffic and drunk driving.

They brought their grievances to yesterday’s supervisors meeting, with neighboring property owner Kenneth Stumpf as their spokesperson. 

After setting up a prepared PowerPoint presentation and trying to negotiate extra speaking time (to no avail), Stumpf said he and his neighbors worry that “the future commercialization” of their forested hillside has never been thoroughly studied.

“We fear that there’s an apparent pattern of permanent venue expansion through the incremental permitting process without there ever being consideration for the planned future venue as a whole,” Stumpf told the board. “We do not want a commercial resort in our area.”

He spent the next 10 minutes detailing his objections to Ridgefield’s expansion plans, largely focusing on what he described as “loud amplified music and DJs and crowd noise — cheers, chants [and] so forth.”

Regarding the overnight stays, Stumpf said, “They created a weekend package where they actually would take three events and convert them into one event.”

In effect they’re turning Fickle Hill into a slippery slope, he argued.

“We don’t want Ridgefield Events to morph into Ridgefield Destination Wedding Resort,” Strumpf said. “What other amenities are they going to next be petitioning for? A restaurant? Bar? Spa? Permanent shuttle service? Laundromat? Swimming pool? What if they apply for a cannabis dispensary … ?”

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Scott Davies, who owns the wedding venue with his wife Krista Duarte Davies, painted a more idyllic picture.

“Ridgefield is a destination wedding venue located in Arcata, bringing couples and guests from around the country and the world to visit the redwoods, celebrate some of the most tender moments of their lives and vacation in our beautiful corner of the country,” he told the board.

Davies touted the economic benefits of tourism dollars and insisted that he and his wife have taken a thoughtful and thorough approach toward permitting, carefully measuring sound impacts and hand-delivering notifications to neighbors. 

“We have built a successful tourism-based wedding business, delivering vendor partnerships, tax dollars and a very substantial economic impact on our local economy,” Davies said.

The heart of the recent permit modification request, he said, “is the ability to host weekend retreats where a small group will stay with us from Friday through Sunday with a single wedding on Saturday.”

As for the noise complaints, Davies said, “The Planning Commission weighed the concerns of neighbors against clear evidence that we’re operating well below our sound threshold” before granting the modification request. 

Meredith Matthews, executive director of the Humboldt Lodging Alliance, spoke in support of Ridgefield and its owners. 

Neighbor Kevin O’Brien spoke about the nonprofit water company that supplies eight parcels on Fickle Hill, including Ridgefield, and said that while the company recently changed its monthly fee structure and made plans to purchase more water for delivery, “Scott Davies has been a valued member of our company.”

But another neighbor, Joanne Olson, said that a neighborhood water agreement says water is to be used only for single families and gardens. She noted that Davies and his wife don’t currently live on the property, though they plan to return to it soon. And Davies now challenges the legality of the water agreement, she said.

Yet another neighbor, Dave White, urged the board to reverse the Planning Commission’s approval.

“He’s putting a commercial enterprise in what is a residential area, and it’s not fair to all the neighbors,” White said. “So I’m asking you to revoke the modifications and let us have some peace and quiet in our neighborhood.”

Several other neighbors also spoke out against Ridgewood and its owners plans. 

When the matter came back to the board for deliberation, Third District Supervisor Mike Wilson asked planning staff a variety of questions and then said he’d like to add a condition of approval for the permit modifications: that the Davies contribute to the county’s transient occupancy tax, a fee typically imposed on hotels and vacation rentals. 

Planning and Building Director John Ford said a fundamental problem in resolving this type of dispute is that “noise is subjective.” Strumpf had made this point earlier by noting that a mosquito doesn’t register high on a decibel scale but still makes an annoying sound. Ford added that sound can be affected by a huge range of factors, from temperature and humidity to topography and trees. 

Fourth District Supervisor Natalie Arroyo asked Davies if he’d be willing to limit pre-wedding brunch and rehearsal events to 14 guests instead of the 20 currently being advertised on Ridgefield’s website. He said he would. 

First District Supervisor Rex Bohn said he hadn’t heard anything during the day’s testimony that would compel him to override the Planning Commission’s unanimous vote. 

Wilson and Ford discussed the debate about whether wedding party sleepovers, with brunch and rehearsals, are more akin to three separate events or a single event, in terms of noise and disruption. Ford said the Planning Commission concluded that the overnight guests are less disruptive than separate events, which would require more setup and teardown. 

Second District Supervisor Michelle Bushnell pushed back on Wilson’s proposal to demand transient occupancy tax of the owners, and the two supervisors went back and forth on the matter for a bit. 

After some more debate, the board voted unanimously to deny the neighbors’ appeal, but to modify the conditional use permit to allow a sign identifying the location of the business; to apply the transient occupancy tax to overnight guests; and to require annual reports of sound measurements from all events.

[CORRECTION: While the transient occupancy taxes were discussed, staff explained that the county does not have a mechanism to assess TOT on entities that don’t use Airbnb, and, furthermore, this appeal hearing was not the appropriate venue in which to impose such a condition. The Outpost regrets the error.]

Press release from the California Highway Patrol:

On October 28, 2025, at approximately 1409 hours, CHP Humboldt Communications Center (HCC) received a call of a vehicle fire and a head-on traffic crash on US-101 Southbound near Metropolitan Road. Emergency personnel arrived on scene and located a 2012 BMW engulfed in flames.

Through on-scene investigation it was determined a 2020 Ford F350, driven by Justin Ambrose, was traveling southbound on US-101 in the number two lane. Ocean DelCastillo was driving a 2012 BMW 328, with a passenger, northbound on US-101. For an unknown reason, DelCastillo allowed the BMW to cross the center median and drove the wrong way onto US-101 southbound toward Ambrose’s Ford. The Ford and BMW crashed head-on within the southbound lanes of US-101. After the crash, the BMW became engulfed in flames. DelCastillo’s passenger succumbed to fatal injuries on scene. DelCastillo was transported to St. Joseph Hospital with major injuries. It is unknown at this time if drugs and/or alcohol contributed to the cause of this crash.

The CHP Humboldt Area would like to thank Rio Dell Volunteer Fire Department, Fortuna Fire Department, Humboldt County Sheriff Department, Fortuna Police Department, Rio Dell Police Department, City Ambulance, California Department of Transportation, and all other emergency personnel on scene for their assistance in this incident. The CHP Humboldt Area office is continuing its investigation and asks anyone who may have additional information to contact the California Highway Patrol at 707-713-6300.