From the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

On April 7, 2022, deputies with the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office Marijuana Enforcement Team (MET) served a search warrant to investigate a multi-parcel illegal cannabis cultivation operation. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife and Humboldt County Code Enforcement assisted in the service of the warrant.

Three parcels were investigated during the service of the warrant. The parcels did not possess the required county permit and state license to cultivate cannabis commercially.

At the first parcel, located in the Blocksburg area, deputies eradicated approximately 2,080 growing cannabis plants. Assisting agencies located four environmental violations, including: water pollution, water diversion and depositing trash in or near a waterway. Investigating deputies also located instances of spilled oil seeping into the ground.

Indoor cannabis growing operation in Blocksburg.. Photos: HCSO.

At the second parcel, located in the Korbel area, deputies eradicated approximately 1,021 growing cannabis plants. Deputies seized and destroyed over 121 pounds of processed cannabis. Additionally, assisting agencies located three environmental violations, including: water pollution, water diversion and depositing trash in or near a waterway.

Large generator supplying power to illegal grow in Korbel.

At the third parcel, a Fortuna residence, deputies located an indoor cannabis grow operation inside a garage on the property. While there, deputies eradicated approximately 336 growing cannabis plants.

Additional violations with civil fines are expected to be filed by the assisting agencies.

Two suspects associated with this investigation have been identified. The case is being forwarded to the District Attorney’s Office for prosecution.

Anyone with information about this case or related criminal activity is encouraged to call the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office at (707) 445-7251 or the Sheriff’s Office Crime Tip line at (707) 268-2539.

Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

On April 11, 2022, at about 9:58 a.m., Humboldt County Sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to a motel on the 800 block of Redwood Drive in Garberville for the report of a vandalism.

According to the reporting party, an unknown man had reportedly lit a small fire inside a storage shed on the property, which had been contained to a plastic tote. The man left the property prior to the notification to law enforcement. Sheriff’s deputies patrolled the Garberville area for an individual matching the man’s description, however, were unable to locate him at the time.

Later that afternoon, at approximately 12:56 p.m., the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Emergency Communications Center received multiple 911 calls reporting a large fire at the motel. Numerous fire agencies were dispatched to assist in knocking down the fire, including Cal Fire, Garberville Fire Protection District, Briceland Volunteer Fire Department and Redway Fire Protection District. The fire is estimated to have caused up to $750,000 in damages. 

Based upon evidence and witness statements collected on scene, the fire was determined to be arson. Investigators from the Humboldt Bay Fire Arson Task Force were dispatched to assist deputies with an arson investigation. Through their investigation, deputies were able to identify the suspect of this and the earlier vandalism as 30-year-old Spencer Reuben Jordan. Jordan had fled the hotel prior to the arrival of emergency personnel.

On April 12, at approximately 6:18 a.m., Jordan was located by California Highway Patrol Officers at a motel on the 700 block of Redwood Drive. During a search of Jordan incident to arrest, deputies located evidence consistent with arson.

Jordan was arrested and booked into the Humboldt County Correctional Facility on charges of arson (PC 451(b)) and vandalism (PC 594(b)(1)).

This case is still under investigation. The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office would like to thank all participating agencies for their assistance and coordination with this investigation.

Anyone with information about this case or related criminal activity is encouraged to call the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office at (707) 445-7251 or the Sheriff’s Office Crime Tip line at (707) 268-2539.

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PREVIOUSLY:

• Highway 101 Shut Down Near Spy Rock Due to Jackknifed Big Rig, Injury Collision

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From the California Highway Patrol:

On 04/11/2022, at approximately 1435 hours, a brown Nissan pickup truck with one occupant was traveling northbound on US-101 south of Spy Rock Road. A white Peterbilt truck tractor with a flatbed trailer hauling pallets of soil with a solo occupant was traveling southbound on US-101 south of Spy Rock Road just north of the Nissan . For reasons still under investigation, the Nissan crossed from the northbound lane over the solid double yellow lines into the southbound lane into the direct path of the Peterbilt. The Nissan struck the Peterbilt head on and both vehicles and the Peterbilt’s load came to rest blocking the entire portion of US-101. As a result of the crash the Nissan became fully engulfed in flames and the driver died at the scene. The driver of the Peterbilt sustained major injuries and was transported to Howard Memorial Hospital from the scene for medical care. US-101 was closed in both directions for approximately six hours for the investigation, clean-up and vehicle recovery. It is unknown at this time if drugs or alcohol were a factor in this crash .

There were two dogs in the Nissan at the time of the crash. One of the dogs died as a result of the crash and the other was taken to the Mendocino County Animal Control Shelter.

The California Highway Patrol, Cal-Trans, Laytonville Fire Department, Cal Fire, Mendocino County Sheriffs Department, and Mendocino County Animal Control all responded to the scene . This collision remains under investigation by the California Highway Patrol-Garberville Area.

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In the early 2000s, California lawmakers identified a problem: There weren’t nearly enough state investigators and lawyers to pursue all the potential violations of workplace laws, such as minimum wage, overtime pay, and more.

So they passed a law letting workers sue their employers in the name of the state, seeking penalties that up until then had been the exclusive domain of a state labor agency. Essentially, it deputized workers to help enforce labor laws via private lawsuits.

That law, called the Private Attorneys General Act, was challenged by a Southern California cruise line in a case recently heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. The specific question the court is expected to decide by June: whether workers who have signed job contracts that bar them from suing their employer can still bring a case to court under the law.

It’s nerdy legal stuff — can you bring a certain kind of lawsuit if you’ve signed a work contract with a certain clause about how disputes get settled?

But it has practical ramifications for a large share of Californian workers.

Contracts requiring workers and employers to settle agreements through a private third party rather than going to court are known as arbitration agreements. More than a third of private, non-union workers in California are already required to use arbitration instead of going to court, according to a study from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

Employers tend to favor arbitration because it’s faster and cheaper than going to court. But a review of over 1,000 arbitration decisions published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies found that workers won in arbitration just 21% of the time, lower than their win rate in court. Typically, private arbiters are paid by the employer.

The Supreme Court will be deciding whether workers who signed arbitration agreements can still bring claims under the law to court, or if they have to stick to the arbitration process.

Other states including New York, Washington, Oregon, and Vermont have considered legislation similar to California’s law. Maine’s legislature passed a similar bill in 2021, but Maine Gov. Janet Mills vetoed the measure.

So what do we know about how this law has been working?

Thousands of workers have used the law to address labor law violations

Each year, thousands of California workers bring claims under the law, according to data from the state Labor and Workforce Development agency. Most of those claims don’t result in civil penalties, an analysis by the agency found — which could be for a number of reasons, including if workers and employers reach a settlement before they go to trial.

Nearly nine out of 10 claims allege wage theft, according to a study conducted by two advocacy groups and the UCLA Labor Center.

The law has notched wins for workers and changes in companies’ policies:

• In December of 2021, video game publisher Riot Games agreed to a $100 million deal to settle a gender discrimination lawsuit brought in part under the law. The video game maker, which created the popular game League of Legends, will be paying $80 million of the settlement to workers, at least 2,300 of whom are eligible, according to the Washington Post. Under the deal, the company will also increase transparency about pay for job applicants, create 40 full-time positions for qualified applicants who previously worked for the company as contractors, and will have a woman or member of an underrepresented community present on employment panels.

• In 2019, a claim brought by a Safeway cashier under the law resulted in a $12 million settlement as well as seating for some 30,000 cashiers, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

• And in 2017, a group of workers for West Coast Tomato Growers brought several claims under the law, including alleged violations of meal and rest break laws, said Cynthia Rice, an attorney for workers in the case and director of litigation, advocacy, and training for California Rural Legal Assistance, which provides free civil legal services to low income people. The resulting settlement required the company to adopt dozens of new policies including informing workers of heat illness regulations, providing them with equipment sufficient to their jobs, bringing in an ergonomic expert to reduce physical hazards to field and packing shed workers, and more.

The ability of one worker to bring a claim on behalf of other workers who’ve been similarly affected is a key element of the law, said Mariko Yoshihara, legislative counsel and policy director for California Employment Lawyers Association, an organization for lawyers who represent workers in employment disputes.

Employees tend to not want to accuse their current boss of wrongdoing. “There’s a huge fear of retaliation,” said Yoshihara, so a system that relies on workers to come forward one by one is less likely to catch violations than a system that allows one worker to bring a claim on behalf of many.

Under a one-by-one approach, “there will always be an economic incentive to pay less, to deny rights and to rip workers off,“ said Rice, with California Rural Legal Assistance.

The law has also generated new income for the state government to use to enforce workplace laws. When employers are required to pay civil penalties in a dispute under the law, 25% of the penalty goes to workers and the rest goes to the state labor agency. In 2019, the penalties brought in $88 million for the labor agency, according to the UCLA report.

Critics point to lack of oversight and poor settlement deals

But business groups criticize the law, saying the state’s oversight of the process is extremely limited, and private attorneys bringing the cases reap the biggest rewards.

“If they’re going to allow private attorneys to step in the shoes of the attorney general, there needs to be checks and balances,” said Tom Manzo, president of California Business and Industrial Alliance, a trade organization of nearly 200 businesses dedicated to changing the law.

When a worker or a worker’s lawyer alerts the state that they intend to pursue civil penalties, the state labor agency generally has 30 days to review the notice and decide whether to investigate the case itself. If it doesn’t investigate, or it does investigate but it doesn’t wind up penalizing the employer, the worker can proceed to court with their claim.

“If they’re going to allow private attorneys to step in the shoes of the attorney general, there needs to be checks and balances.”
— Tom Manzo, president of California Business and Industrial Alliance

An agency budget document from 2019 provides a window into how the state reviews claims brought under the law. Between the summer of 2017 and 2018 — the most recent year included in the document — the government was notified of 5,383 claims.

A team of nine people reviewed 1,339 of the claims and investigated 16 of them.

A much larger budget and a staff of 197 people would “arguably right-size” the team, authors of the budget document wrote, and allow for “a statistically relevant number of cases to be investigated annually.”

The team charged with overseeing the law reviewed over 1,500 settlement agreements and assessed the deals on criteria to get at legality, fairness, and robustness. They assigned failing or marginally passing grades to 75% of the agreements, “reflecting the failure of many private plaintiff’s attorneys to fully protect the interests of the aggrieved employees and the state,” according to a review summary in the document.

On average, the attorneys’ share of settlements under the law is about $406,000, and the average award per employee is around $2,000, according to an analysis of settlements conducted by two former labor agency officials and paid for by the Alliance. The report also found that workers received around $4,000 on average in the rare instances that the labor agency pursued the cases itself, though the payouts went to fewer workers per case on average.

“It’s a law that enriches lawyers, not employees,” said Len Welsh, a former head of California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, and one of the study’s authors.

“I think everyone would want all lawyers to work for free,” but that’s just not reality, said Yoshihara, with the employment lawyers association. “If we want to incentivize attorneys to take cases where there are workplace-wide violations, then we have to award attorneys fees.”

“If we want to incentivize attorneys to take cases where there are workplace-wide violations, then we have to award attorneys fees.”
— Mariko Yoshihara, legislative counsel and policy director for the California Employment Lawyers Association

A ballot initiative backed by business groups in the works that would repeal the law, as well as create new penalties for labor law violations to be enforced by the labor department and create a team to handle employer and worker questions about possible violations. It would also require the state to fund the labor commissioner’s office to fully carry out its duties. The measure is currently collecting signatures but hasn’t yet qualified for the ballot.

If the Supreme Court decides that workers who sign arbitration agreements can’t bring claims under the Private Attorneys General Act to court, Dave Cortese, a Democratic state senator from Campbell and chair of the senate’s labor committee, said he thinks the Legislature will take action. The Supreme Court may offer a roadmap of sorts in its decision, pointing to alternative policies that would be legal.

“Once we have those instructions from the court, the legislation will be crafted to align California law with the best worker protections we can come up with,” Cortese said.

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

Theresa Leanne Freeman Emmons Cooper was born in Eureka in December of 1972, to parents Gary Freeman and Pamela Schopper Freeman. She was raised in Eureka her whole childhood, attending several local schools. She explored the woods and gulches with her brother and sister. As an adult, she went on many adventures in far away places.

She and Michael Emmons were married in Eureka in 1991. As Mike’s wife she got to travel, since he was a soldier in the Army. He was stationed in Georgia, and then Germany, where their son Trenten was born. While living there she earned a GED, and took college classes through the University of Maryland. After a few years, Theresa returned to Eureka. Her marriage to Mike ended, but they remained friends.  

Some time after, Theresa met Keith Cooper. They married in 2001. They lived in Eureka, and had a son together, Miles. They bought her Grandma Freeman’s house and hosted many family events and parties there. After a few years they moved to McKinleyville, when they bought Keith’s grandma’s house and lived there. 

Loving to bake, and try new recipes, Theresa was part of a Christmas cookie exchange club for years with her mother-in-law Andra Cooper, often hosting the exchange party. She was an amazing baker. Her blackberry cobbler was served at the county fair for several years at Cooper’s Hot Dogs. She loved family get-togethers and parties, and would carefully plan all the entrees and desserts she was preparing. Her joy of feeding people and entertaining was obvious.

She also enjoyed fishing, and would often try to talk her brother into taking her out on his boat. But only in the bay, not past the jetties. She inherited her grandma’s love of Bingo, playing at the Moose, the casinos, or wherever Bingo could be found. She was quite lucky with the game, as well as winning raffle prizes and drawings at fundraisers and events.

During her marriage to Keith they were able to travel extensively, to Mexico several times, and also Alaska, Jamaica, Hawaii. Theresa also loved going on cruises, dressing up in beautiful gowns for dinners on board. They went on family camping trips, in the local hills, boating and jet skiing at Ruth and Trinity lakes. She and Keith were married several years, and then sadly, went their separate ways.

Theresa was an employee of the USPS for 20 years, and was very proud of that accomplishment. She loved her rural route delivering mail in the Fieldbrook area especially. She enjoyed visiting with customers on her route, and making friends with neighborhood dogs along the way, often handing out treats. She was happy to see the wildlife during the drive on her route, and would share pictures of deer and other animals in the area.  

Theresa loved her sons very much, and was proud of them both. She was very happy to become a grandma. 

Theresa passed away in Eureka on April 3 of 2022 at the age of 49. She is preceded in death by her father, Gary Freeman. She is survived by her son Trenten Emmons (Hayley), her son Miles Cooper (Lacey), her grandchildren from Trent: Jackson & Elayna, mother Pamela Freeman MacMillen and stepfather Donald MacMillen, sister Lesa Freeman Churchill Holt (Dale), brother Robert Freeman (Stephanie), nieces & nephews: Rachel Freeman Butt (Andy), Ehlana Churchill Kirkpatrick (Roger), Katelyn Keffer, Sean Freeman and Justin Keffer, her great nieces and nephews, and numerous uncles, aunts and cousins. 

Theresa fought illness valiantly, but was taken from us too soon. She will always be our beloved mother, grandma, daughter, sister, aunt, niece and cousin. A Celebration of Life is being planned, and will be announced on Facebook for friends and family. In lieu of flowers, a donation honoring Theresa can be made to Miranda’s Rescue.

Peggy Smith, 69, of Carlotta, went to be with the lord after a short and sudden struggle with cancer, surrounded by her children at the hospice house in Eureka on January 18, 2022. She was preceded in death by her mother Mary Lee Samms. Peggy was survived by husband Douglas Smith and her children Kevin Smith, Donna and Jeff McWilliams, Robert and Frieda Smith, John and Lynette Smith. Her grandchildren, Ginny, Lacy, Jennifer, Isaiah Smith, Aaron and Justin Colby, Mariah, Travis, Colton, Brittany, Bethany, Geneieve Smith. Grate grandchildren Braxton, Aiden, Areana, Sylvies, Rawland and Trinity Bones. Aleigha McGregor. Lance, Ezra, Kai Smith. Everleigh, Barbara Jean Colby.

Peggy was born in Tacoma, Washington in 1953. Her father, Lee Roy Samms, was in the service, so they moved Japan, where she learned to speck and count in Japanese. When they moved back to the States they lived in Michigan. From there they moved to California and then Texas. Then moved back to Marysville, California, where she finished high school. She loved riding horses and spending time with her friends and family. After high school in June of 1971 she married “a real cowboy” and moved to Alderpoint. She continued to ride horses and lived the country life. In her words she began the “greatest achievement of her life, raising her children.”

She was the most amazing mom and grandma anyone could ever ask for. She was a strong Christian women. She loved God and her family. Throughout life she taught us everything she knew. She loved spending time with her family, gardening, shopping, traveling with her dear friend Linda and her cousin Darlene. She was always there for us when we needed anything. We could always count on her. She loved watching her grandchildren and everything they did; she never turned down a minute to spend with them. We know everything we do she’s there watching over us. She will always be loved and missed by everyone.

A celebration of life will be held at the Calvary Chapel in Fortuna on May 14 at 1 p.m. for friends and family.

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The obituary above was submitted by Peggy Smith’s family. The Lost Coast Outpost runs obituaries of Humboldt County residents at no charge. See guidelines here. Email news@lostcoastoutpost.com.

Luella L. Poczulp
July 16, 1922 – February 25, 2022

Luella L. Poczulp was born in Mapleton, Maine on July 16, 1922. She finished her journey here on earth on February 25, 2022 in Eureka, where she was a resident for five and a half years.

Mom grew up on State Road in Presque Isle, Maine where her family owned Jones Bros. potato farm. Mom attended college at the University of Maine in Orono, Maine. Before Mom finished college, she met my dad, Edward D. Poczulp, who was in the army. They met at a United Service Organization (USO) dance, fell in love and married in Chicago in 1943. Mom finished college in 1964 at San Jose State College in San Jose and taught elementary school until she retired.

After Mom and Dad retired, they traveled extensively with their 5th wheel across the United States. She enjoyed walking, dancing, reading, traveling, playing cards, dice games, scrabble, knitting and gardening.

They were blessed with five kids: Robert Poczulp, Barbara Arneson, Patricia Halstead, Eddie Poczulp Jr. and Kenny Poczulp. They also had 15 grandchildren, 26 great-grandchildren, 7 great-great-grandchildren and numerous nieces and nephews.

Mom is preceded in death by her husband of 62 years, Edward D. Poczulp, her dad Llewellyn M. Jones, her mom Julia May Bagley Jones, her stepmom  Priscilla Higgins Jones, her brother Malcolm Jones, and two of her sons Eddie Jr. and Kenny.

Our heartfelt thanks go out to all the caregivers at Humboldt House Lodge and Cleo’s Home. Thank you to all the doctors and wonderful staff at Open Door and Hospice that cared for Mom and also my sister Patty. Without them I would have been lost.

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The obituary above was submitted by Luella Poczulp’s family. The Lost Coast Outpost runs obituaries of Humboldt County residents at no charge. See guidelines here. Email news@lostcoastoutpost.com.