Lost Coast Outpost

Eureka Police Arrest Local 44-Year-Old Man in Connection With Explosion at Bayshore Mall Parking Lot

LoCO Staff / Monday, June 6, 2022 @ 2:25 p.m. / Crime

PREVIOUSLY:

Police Investigating Explosion in the Bayshore Mall Parking Lot Yesterday

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Press release from the Eureka Police Department:

On June 2, 2022, at about 10:30 a.m., an explosive device was detonated in the overflow parking area of the 3300 block of Broadway in Eureka. The explosion was heard and felt from at least a ½ mile away and debris traveled over 250 feet, nearly striking two citizens.

Detectives and an Evidence Technician responded to collect evidence. During the course of the investigation, the suspect was identified as 44-year-old Casey William Moore of Eureka. Due to the potential danger to the public, detectives authored a search warrant for Moore and his vehicle. On June 3, 2022, Moore was located in Arcata and detained without incident. Moore was found to be in possession of explosive chemicals, compounds, and homemade fuses.

Moore was arrested and booked into the Humboldt County Correctional Facility for possession of an explosive device, reckless possession of an explosive device, and possession of materials to make a destructive device without a permit.

The Eureka Police Department would like to thank Bayshore Mall Security, the Humboldt County Drug Task Force, and the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office Explosive Ordnance Disposal team for their assistance with this investigation. If you see a device that seems suspicious or out of place in your neighborhood, do not touch or move it, but contact your local law enforcement.

Pedestrian Killed in Early Morning Hours on Highway 101 Near Bayside Cutoff

LoCO Staff / Monday, June 6, 2022 @ 8:49 a.m. / Traffic

California Highway Patrol press release:

On 06/05/2022, at approximately 3:04 AM, the CHP Humboldt Communication Center (HCC) received a call of a vehicle versus pedestrian traffic crash on US-101 Northbound, North of Bayside Cutoff. Based on CHP’s preliminary investigation, it appears this crash occurred when a pedestrian was struck by a 2003 Mercury Mariner, driven by 32-year-old Kayla Guest of McKinleyville. Emergency medical personnel arrived on scene and rendered aid to the involved parties. Due to the severity, the involved pedestrian succumbed to their injuries and was pronounced deceased. The identity of the deceased is being withheld pending notification of next-of-kin.
Impairment is not considered to be a factor in the driving of the vehicle. Impairment of the pedestrian is unknown at this time and is pending toxicology results by the Humboldt County Coroner’s Office.
The CHP is continuing to investigate this crash and asks anyone with information to contact the Humboldt Area CHP at (707) 822-5981 or the 24-hour dispatch line at (707) 268-2000.
The California Highway Patrol extends its condolences to the family of the deceased and would like to thank the following agencies for their response and assistance with the investigation: Arcata Police Department, Humboldt County Sheriffs Department, Arcata Mad River Ambulance, Cal Poly Humboldt Police Department, California Department of Transportation and J&M Towing.

Attorney General Candidates Divided on New Police Shootings Law

Nigel Duara / Monday, June 6, 2022 @ 7:15 a.m. / Sacramento

Images from body camera footage shown at a San Francisco Police Department press conference after police shot and killed two men on May 19, 2022. Screenshot via SFPD OIS Virtual Town Hall

On a Thursday night in May, at least 16 San Francisco police officers responded to a fight underneath a freeway overpass.

Two men were struggling on the ground, one armed with a knife. In body camera footage released by the San Francisco Police Department, officers fired bean bag rounds at the man with the knife and pleaded with him to drop the weapon.

After more than 10 minutes, San Francisco police said later, the man with the knife drew the weapon closer to the other man. Three officers fired pistols and a fourth fired a rifle. Both men were killed.

The San Francisco incident was the latest shooting investigated under Assembly Bill 1506, the 2021 law that compels police departments to turn over investigations of the killing of unarmed civilians to the state Department of Justice.

It was the 17th such investigation launched since July, out of 31 incidents examined, the department said Friday.

Attorney General Rob Bonta was appointed to the vacant AG’s post in March 2021 by fellow Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom. Now he is up for his first election, facing a slate of candidates further to the political right amid a new national focus on police transparency around their use of force.

Bonta, while in the state Assembly, helped shepherd the bill into law, but his challengers from the right are divided on the law’s effectiveness.

Conservative independent and Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said she supports the law but worries about investigations being “politicized.”

Bonta, who did not comment for this story, has said previously that the law is strengthening accountability and transparency in police shootings.

Nathan Hochman, the candidate with the state Republican Party endorsement, believes the law could lead to an overreach of state power. The candidate furthest to the right, Eric Early, worries that AB 1506 investigations could make police officers hesitate “in the heat of battle.”

(CalMatters 2022 Voter Guide What Californians need to know to prepare to vote Go to Voter Guide)

In 11 months since the law was enacted, the Department of Justice has not filed any charges against officers out of the 17 cases they have investigated.

That includes the first AB 1506 case, when Matthew James Sova was allegedly threatening people with a pistol-shaped butane lighter on a busy section of Hollywood Boulevard in July. He was shot and killed by Los Angeles police.

A University of California, Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies/Los Angeles Times survey released Friday found that Bonta maintains a commanding lead among likely voters in Tuesday’s top-two primary, including 38% of voters not affiliated with any party.

Among Republican candidates, Early led Hochman, 16%-12%, with a nine-point lead among likely Republican voters. Schubert, running without party affiliation, had just 6% of the vote among likely voters, the survey showed.

In her role as Sacramento County District Attorney, Schubert decided not to file charges against two officers for the shooting of Stephon Clark, a Sacramento man killed by police in March 2018 while holding a cell phone that officers said they thought was a gun. In fact, she has never charged a police officer after an officer-involved shooting since being elected in 2014.

Schubert came to national attention when she declined to file charges in the Clark case. In the following months, then-California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and the FBI both made the same decision.

But to protesters, Schubert remained the symbol of a system that failed to hold police accountable for the shooting deaths of unarmed civilians.

After the initial Clark protests, Schubert’s office constructed an eight-foot-tall, chain-link fence around the district attorney’s building. Protesters came back, this time to protest the fence. And they brought a piñata of Schubert.

“I’d never had a piñata made (of) my head,” she told CalMatters in April. “And so for me, you have to be willing to recognize that these are difficult conversations, and there’s community anger.”

A diagram based on body camera footage shown by San Francisco Police at a news conference following the shootings of two men on May 19, 2022. Screenshot via SFPD OIS Virtual Town Hall

In January 2019, less than one year after Clark’s death, Sacramento Democrat Kevin McCarty introduced AB 1506. At the time, McCarty said he was dissatisfied when the Department of Justice refused to conduct independent investigations of several police shootings, despite requests from community activists.

Schubert said in April she supported the bill and generally isn’t troubled by taking fatal police shootings out of the hands of the locals.

“I think it’s perfectly fine going to the attorney general as long as you’re getting a full, fair and independent investigation, and things are not politicized,” she said.

Hochman, a former assistant U.S. attorney, told CalMatters in April that he has experience prosecuting rogue officers, especially the case of six Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies convicted of conspiring to steal cash from drug dealers in 1990.

He worries that the state could overreach, bulldozing over local authorities.

“These are very tough cases,” Hochman said. “If the state attorney general comes in like a cowboy and decides, ‘I’m just going to do this myself and not cooperate or work with anybody else,’ it’s a bad way to deal with this situation.”

Early, the leading Republican candidate in the UC Berkeley/Los Angeles Times survey, said the law isn’t necessary, since the attorney general can still investigate individual shootings. In the meantime, he said, AB 1506 investigations only serve to slow down officers when they should be thinking fastest.

“Laws such as AB 1506 may plant an additional seed of doubt in an officer’s mind which could cause them to hesitate at a moment when their life may hang in the balance of a split decision,” Early said. “There are often times when a split second decision could mean life or death for the officers involved.”

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CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

(MUSIC VIDEO) Local Rapper ‘Hiway’ Gets Political With His New Track ‘Orange Cap City’

John Ross Ferrara / Sunday, June 5, 2022 @ 3:45 p.m. / Music

The “Orange Cap City” music video. | Directed, filmed and edited by Hiway.

Local rapper Hiway hits the streets to address Eureka’s opioid crisis in his latest song “Orange Cap City.”

While littered drug paraphernalia can be found throughout Humboldt County, Hiway, formally known as Aaron Kaplan, specifically takes aim his hometown of Eureka in the new song. The track’s title, “Orange Cap City,” is a reference to the littered heroin needles and orange syringe caps commonly found in Eureka.

“If you visit, watch where you’re walkin’, might step on a needle,” he raps.

Hiway also dropped a new music video to accompany the song on June 4, which highlights several Eureka neighborhoods. In the video, the rapper also uses irony to compare the color of the syringe caps with the City of Eureka’s new orange logo, which it unveiled in 2020.

As a follow-up to the song, the rapper is putting his words into action. Yesterday, Hiway teamed up with ~~Pacific Outfitters~~ the PacOut Green Team of Eureka and E.C.O. Eureka to help clean up litter around the city at this month’s “trash bash.”

Watch Hiway’s new music video in the video embedded at the top of this story.

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PREVIOUSLY: Local Artist Hiway 101 Collaborates With Famed Rapper Tech N9ne for New Music Video

Humboldt Rapper Hiway 101 Releases New Music Video Filmed at the Eagle House

(AUDIO) HUMBOLDT HOLDING UP: It’s Time to Vote! Breaking Down the June 7 Election With Hank Sims and Tom Wheeler

LoCO Staff / Sunday, June 5, 2022 @ 10 a.m. / Humboldt Holding Up

VOTE HERE (but probably somewhere else) on Tuesday

(AUDIO) Let’s Talk About This Election

After months of training your brain to not register the garish yard signs screaming at you from every street corner, we’ve just about arrived at Election Day, thank goodness. Let this be over!

On Tuesday, Humboldt will head to the polls — if they haven’t already conveniently sent back the ballot they should’ve received in the mail, that is — to fulfill their civic duty by voting in the June primary. So, to get you primed for this blessed occasion, on today’s episode of Humboldt Holding Up we speak to Tom Wheeler, local political nerd and executive director of the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), and Hank Sims, editor in chief of the Lost Coast Outpost (LoCO), about the various races we’re tasked with making decisions on this cycle. We’re talkin’ supervisor races! District Attorney! Yes, even Auditor-Controller! More! We lay out the stakes and then force Wheeler and Sims to give us their predictions on how this thing will play out. Believe it or not, this is fun for some people!

Click the audio player above or click over to Apple Podcasts to hear Sims and Wheeler gab it up with LoCO’s Stephanie McGeary and Andrew Goff. And also feel free scroll our list of past guests below if that seems beneficial in some way to you.

PREVIOUS HUMBOLDT HOLDING UP GUESTS:

GROWING OLD UNGRACEFULLY: Masks Versus Omicron

Barry Evans / Sunday, June 5, 2022 @ 7 a.m. / Growing Old Ungracefully

“The evidence suggests that broad mask mandates have not done much to reduce Covid caseloads over the past two years.”

—David Leonhardt, NYT, 5/31/22

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Masks are more than a pain the butt. They get in the way of speaking, of making ourselves understood, of listening without constantly asking the other party to repeat themselves, of fogging up glasses, of curtailing education, and all the rest. Not to mention that they’re uncomfortable, effectiveness being in tune with discomfort.

The bigger issue is that masks can lead to social isolation, along with the many downstream problems brought about when we feel we’re alone and friendless: mental health issues, overdoses, crime, high blood pressure, family disruption, etc. We’re gregarious creatures, and don’t do well when we’re out there on our own. So the question of the trade-off between avoiding Covid and suffering from the effects of isolation is more than an academic exercise. This is our lives we’re talking about, our one-shot, no-rehearsal, short and urgent lives.

So the real question is, Do masks actually work?

Truth be told, not very well, especially now, given the contagiousness of the Omicron variant. They certainly reduce the spread of the Covid virus, since most of the tiny (really tiny!) viral particles are carried in much larger droplets, and while masks can’t do much for the viruses themselves, they do a pretty good job of trapping the droplets, in the same way a tissue contains a sneeze. But just think of all the times you’ve taken your mask off (or, like nearly a third of Americans, wear it below the nose in a useless virtue-signaling compromise): to take a sip of a drink or bite of a burger; to make yourself understood when the cashier can’t hear you properly; when you’re already in the store by the time you remember to put it on…

I trust NYT columnist David Leonhardt. He’s a realist. In a recent column, he pragmatically likened the super-contagious, game-changing, Omicron variant to tossing a dice every time you walk into an enclosed space. Contracting Covid while wearing a mask is like throwing a one-spot; without a mask is like getting either a one or a two spot. The odds are exaggerated, of course, but you get the idea. Either way, you’ll eventually get Covid. A mask reduces your chances, but doesn’t eliminate them. Case in point: Hong Kong just went through a huge Covid outbreak, despite virtually universal mask-wearing.

“The available data suggests that more than half of Americans have had Covid in the past six months,” according to Leonhardt. If that’s true — you can check his sources here — then most of us are unlikely to contract it again. [Ed. note — You sure about that, Barry?] If masks are of limited use when it comes to prevention, what does work?

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, or only watch Fox, you already know the answer: vaccination. And you already know the weird public health divide between red and blue states. Even in individual states, the numbers are damning. In Georgia and Texas, for instance, “Trump” counties (more than 60% of the vote share) reported 60 COVID deaths per 100,000 versus 40 per 100,000 for “Biden” counties. In Washington State, it was 50/27 Trump/Biden. (Citation here.)

Is than an N95??? (Public domain)

So masks aren’t as effective as we (well, I) might have thought, pre-Omicron. If you wear a good one (N95) consistently when you’re inside with other people, you’re somewhat less likely to get COVID. But if you really want to help your chances of avoiding hospitalization and worse, get the damn vaccine + booster shots. The life you save may be your own.

(PS, do I need to say this again? I’m not a doctor. Grain of salt, please.)

THE ECONEWS REPORT: Toxic Tires?

The EcoNews Report / Saturday, June 4, 2022 @ 10 a.m. / Environment

Photo: Photo by Robert Laursoo on Unsplash.

On this week’s EcoNews Report, Warner Chabot of the San Francisco Estuary Institute joins Gang Green to talk about micro-plastic pollution, including that which comes from car tires. A chemical in tires has been found to kill coho salmon. Now the California Department of Toxic Substances Control is considering regulation to address this threat.

AUDIO:

“The EcoNews Report,” June 4, 2022.

Eureka Police Arrest Local 44-Year-Old Man in Connection With Explosion at Bayshore Mall Parking Lot

BOOKED

JUDGED

CHP REPORTS

ELSEWHERE