K9 Unit Cain and his haul | Humboldt County Drug Task Force
Humboldt County Drug Task Force release:
On July 15, 2025, Humboldt County Drug Task Force (HCDTF) agents served a search warrant on Zachary Jade Caso, 32, from Arcata. During the months of June and July, the HCDTF received information that Caso was trafficking large quantities of narcotics to and from Humboldt County for the purpose of sales.
HCDTF agents observed Caso traveling from Humboldt County to Los Angles, California. Upon Caso’s return, agents, with the assistance of the Fortuna Police Department, conducted a traffic stop on Caso as he entered Humboldt County.
Caso was detained without incident and his vehicle was searched. HCDTF K9 Cain alerted agents to the presence of narcotics inside of Caso’s vehicle. Agents searched the vehicle and located a large quantity of Ketamine and several thousand dollars in US currency.
After the search of the vehicle was complete, HCDTF agents responded to Caso’s residence, located in the 1400 block of Janes Road in Arcata. Upon HCDTF’s arrival at the residence, agents detained Tobias Uwe Schneer, 41, from Arcata. Agents searched the residence and located large quantities of several different types of illegal drugs and several thousand dollars in US currency. In total, from the search of Caso’s person, vehicle, and residence, HCDTF Agents seized:
$138,833 in US Currency
2.3 pounds of Cocaine
4.1 pounds of Ketamine
4.4 pounds of Concentrated Cannabis
8 pounds of Psilocybin Mushrooms
2.2 pounds of DMT
1.5 pounds of MDMA
119 Xanax bars
151 DMT vape pens
13.5 Suboxone pills
4 grams of MDA
1 gram of Valium
Digital scales, packaging materials, pay/owe sheets
Lab equipment/facilities for the manufacturing of liquid hallucinogenic substances
Caso was transported to the Humboldt County Correctional Facility where he was booked on the following charges:
11379.6 HS Manufacturing a controlled substance
11379 HS Transportation of narcotics for the purpose of sales
11378 HS Possession of a controlled substance for the purpose of sales
1359 HS Marijuana for sales
11351 HS Possession of narcotics for the purpose of sales
11366 HS Operating/maintaining a drug house
Shneer was transported to the Humboldt County Correctional Facility where he was booked on the following charges:
11379.6 HS Manufacturing a controlled substance
11378 HS Possession of a controlled substance for the purpose of sales
1359 HS Marijuana for sales
11351 HS Possession of narcotics for the purpose of sales
11366 HS Operating/maintaining a drug house
Anyone with information related to this investigation or other narcotics-related crimes is encouraged to call the Humboldt County Drug Task Force at 707-267-9976.
UPDATE, JULY 18, 4:05 p.m.: The Division of Environmental Health has some happy news from the wars. The rats have been beaten back! Mrs. Fields and Pretzelmaker are free to reopen. Find their clean bills of health here and here.
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A new front has opened up in the war between the rats and Humboldt County food establishments, and that front is smack-dab down the middle of that one corner of the mall where you get your Mini-Dog Pretzel Bites and/or your White Chocolate Macadamia Nibblers.
This is according site inspection at the Bayshore Mall yesterday afternoon, at which health inspectors report that they have noted the unmistakable presence of the vile pests at two Mall mainstays. These have been closed until such time as humans can regain the upper hand.
The report on Mrs. Fields Cookie Store states that the inspector:
Observed rodent feces in multiple cabinets, on syrup boxes, in packaged food containers, on to-go single-use cups and to-go bags, on lidded containers of baking supplies and in storage of reusable plastic bins, as well as various locations on the floor perimeter.
The situation over at Pretzel Time #3579 (DBA Pretzel Maker) was no happier:
Observed rodent feces in areas that include the following locations: On glove boxes in back room, drink container sleeves, to-go containers and cup sleeves, cheese bags, tops of syrup boxes, in cabinets, on floors, pretzel mix overpack. Observed chewed plastic Google Street View image.
on cup sleeves in front counter.
Also, Pretzelmaker was determined to have too strong of a chlorine mixture for cleaning purposes … which maybe you’d think would ameliorate matters? Guess not.
Photo of helicopter flying over Forks Spike Camp. Photo: Adam Forsell
Butler Fire: Firefighters spent most of July 15 addressing the fire activity that had picked up along the southern corners of the Butler Fire the evening before. Two noticeable smoke plumes appeared over the fire throughout the day, but were the result of interior burning and didn’t pose a threat to containment lines.
In the southeast corner of the fire, three hot shot crews, supported by aerial resources, kept the fire from crossing the Salmon River around Nordheimer. Its southern advance, however, prompted additional evacuation orders from the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office, particularly for the town of Forks of Salmon.
Along the southwest perimeter, fire spilled over Butler Creek near Orleans Mountain. Crews were able to construct handline around it, bolstered by water drops from supporting aircraft.
Firefighters began the methodical work of searching for and extinguishing isolated heat sources along the fire’s northern perimeter around Butler Flat and portions of Salmon Creek Road. A pronounced smoke column was seen in the vicinity of Butler Flat, but it was the result of vegetation burning well within the fire’s interior. A similar column was spotted outside of Nordheimer, but again, nothing close enough to compromise the fire’s boundaries.
The southernmost edge of the fire in the upper elevations outside the Nordheimer area remained hemmed in by Nordheimer and Granite creeks. Crews began reopening roads, dozer lines, and handlines previously used in last year’s Boise Fire and the 2020 Red Salmon Fire to serve as indirect control lines.
Red Fire: Containment of the Red Fire remained at 95 percent as crews worked the remaining section of uncontained perimeter to locate and extinguish insolated hot spots.
Evacuations:
Butler Fire: Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office expanded its evacuation orders July 15 to include FRK-1709 (Forks of Salmon), SIS-1707-B, SIS-1708, SIS-1804 and SIS-1805. They join the following zones already under an evacuation order: SIS-1703, SIS-1704 (Butler Creek, Lewis Creek, Bloomer Mine residents and Nordheimer Campground), SIS-1707-A and SIS-1803-A.
Zones SIS-1705, SIS-1710, SIS-1802, SIS-1808 and SIS-1906 are under an evacuation warning, where residents are advised to be prepared to evacuate if conditions become more threatening. The latest evacuation information can be found at https://protect.genasys.com.
Closures:
Butler Fire: The road between Butler Flat and Nordheimer Campground remains closed as rocks and burning debris continued to fall into the roadway. Nordheimer and Oak Bottom campgrounds are also closed.
Weather and Fire Behavior: Temperatures are expected to be slightly cooler today with highs in the upper 90s. Winds will mostly come out of the northwest with occasional gusts up to 20 miles an hour.
Fire Safety and Prevention:
Persistently high temperatures will keep fuels dry and increase potential fire danger. Individuals seeking relief from the heat by recreating in streams or rivers or in the forest need to be mindful of their vehicles’ condition or where they park. Roadside sparks or dried vegetation against the heated undercarriage of a vehicle could quickly result in a wildfire.
The Six Rivers and Klamath National Forests are not currently in fire restrictions. However, campfires should never be left unattended and should be dead out and cool to the touch before leaving. Remember, drown, stir, feel, REPEAT. Please report suspected wildfires by calling 911.
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Helicopter flying over the Orleans Complex. | Photo: Abel Mattson.
Students take notes during Dr. Adam Kaiserman’s English class at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita on May 6, 2025. Photo by Jules Hotz for CalMatters
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Students don’t have the same incentives to talk to their professors — or even their classmates — anymore. Chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude have given them a new path to self-sufficiency. Instead of asking a professor for help on a paper topic, students can go to a chatbot. Instead of forming a study group, students can ask AI for help. These chatbots give them quick responses, on their own timeline.
For students juggling school, work and family responsibilities, that ease can seem like a lifesaver. And maybe turning to a chatbot for homework help here and there isn’t such a big deal in isolation. But every time a student decides to ask a question of a chatbot instead of a professor or peer or tutor, that’s one fewer opportunity to build or strengthen a relationship, and the human connections students make on campus are among the most important benefits of college.
Julia Freeland-Fisher studies how technology can help or hinder student success at the Clayton Christensen Institute. She said the consequences of turning to chatbots for help can compound.
“Over time, that means students have fewer and fewer people in their corner who can help them in other moments of struggle, who can help them in ways a bot might not be capable of,” she said.
As colleges further embed ChatGPT and other chatbots into campus life, Freeland-Fisher warns lost relationships may become a devastating unintended consequence.
Asking for help
Christian Alba said he has never turned in an AI-written assignment. Alba, 20, attends College of the Canyons, a large community college north of Los Angeles, where he is studying business and history. And while he hasn’t asked ChatGPT to write any papers for him, he has turned to the technology when a blank page and a blinking cursor seemed overwhelming. He has asked for an outline. He has asked for ideas to get him started on an introduction. He has asked for advice about what to prioritize first.
“It’s kind of hard to just start something fresh off your mind,” Alba said. “I won’t lie. It’s a helpful tool.” Alba has wondered, though, whether turning to ChatGPT with these sorts of questions represents an overreliance on AI. But Alba, like many others in higher education, worries primarily about AI use as it relates to academic integrity, not social capital. And that’s a problem.
Jean Rhodes, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, has spent decades studying the way college students seek help on campus and how the relationships formed during those interactions end up benefitting the students long-term. Rhodes doesn’t begrudge students integrating chatbots into their workflows, as many of their professors have, but she worries that students will get inferior answers to even simple-sounding questions, like, “how do I change my major?”
A chatbot might point a student to the registrar’s office, Rhodes said, but had a student asked the question of an advisor, that person may have asked important follow-up questions — why the student wants the change, for example, which could lead to a deeper conversation about a student’s goals and roadblocks.
“We understand the broader context of students’ lives,” Rhodes said. “They’re smart but they’re not wise, these tools.”
Rhodes and one of her former doctoral students, Sarah Schwartz, created a program called Connected Scholars to help students understand why it’s valuable to talk to professors and have mentors. The program helped them hone their networking skills and understand what people get out of their networks over the course of their lives — namely, social capital.
Connected Scholars is offered as a semester-long course at U Mass Boston, and a forthcoming paper examines outcomes over the last decade, finding students who take the course are three times more likely to graduate. Over time, Rhodes and her colleagues discovered that the key to the program’s success is getting students past an aversion to asking others for help.
Students will make a plethora of excuses to avoid asking for help, Rhodes said, ticking off a list of them: “‘I don’t want to stand out,’ ‘I don’t want people to realize I don’t fit in here,’ ‘My culture values independence,’ ‘I shouldn’t reach out,’ ‘I’ll get anxious,’ ‘This person won’t respond.’ If you can get past that and get them to recognize the value of reaching out, it’s pretty amazing what happens.”
Connections are key
Seeking human help doesn’t only leave students with the resolution to a single problem, it gives them a connection to another person. And that person, down the line could become a friend, a mentor or a business partner — a “strong tie,” as social scientists describe their centrality to a person’s network. They could also become a “weak tie” who a student may not see often, but could, importantly, still offer a job lead or crucial social support one day.
Daniel Chambliss, a retired sociologist from Hamilton College, emphasized the value of relationships in his 2014 book, “How College Works,” co-authored with Christopher Takacs. Over the course of their research, the pair found that the key to a successful college experience boiled down to relationships, specifically two or three close friends and one or two trusted adults. Hamilton College goes out of its way to make sure students can form those relationships, structuring work-study to get students into campus offices and around faculty and staff, making room for students of varying athletic abilities on sports teams, and more.
“We understand the broader context of students’ lives. They’re smart but they’re not wise, these tools.” — Jean Rhodes, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston
Chambliss worries that AI-driven chatbots make it too easy to avoid interactions that can lead to important relationships. “We’re suffering epidemic levels of loneliness in America,” he said. “It’s a really major problem, historically speaking. It’s very unusual, and it’s profoundly bad for people.”
As students increasingly turn to artificial intelligence for help and even casual conversation, Chambliss predicted it will make people even more isolated: “It’s one more place where they won’t have a personal relationship.”
In fact, a recent study by researchers at the MIT Media Lab and OpenAI found that the most frequent users of ChatGPT — power users — were more likely to be lonely and isolated from human interaction.
“What scares me about that is that Big Tech would like all of us to be power users,” said Freeland-Fisher. “That’s in the fabric of the business model of a technology company.”
Yesenia Pacheco is preparing to re-enroll in Long Beach City College for her final semester after more than a year off. Last time she was on campus, ChatGPT existed, but it wasn’t widely used. Now she knows she’s returning to a college where ChatGPT is deeply embedded in students’ as well as faculty and staff’s lives, but Pacheco expects she’ll go back to her old habits — going to her professors’ office hours and sticking around after class to ask them questions. She sees the value.
She understands why others might not. Today’s high schoolers, she has noticed, are not used to talking to adults or building mentor-style relationships. At 24, she knows why they matter.
“A chatbot,” she said, “isn’t going to give you a letter of recommendation.”
Demonstrators protest against ICE immigration raids in downtown Los Angeles on June 8, 2025. Photo by J.W. Hendricks for CalMatters
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California saw a 3.1% drop in private-sector employment the week immediately after the Trump administration stepped up its immigration raids in the state, according to a new analysis of U.S. Census data.
UC Merced researchers said the steep drop is second only to the unemployment surge the state experienced during the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, and greater than the immediate decline during the Great Recession in 2007 and 2008.
This appears to be the first analysis of the data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey from the time when federal agents’ focus on the state became clear in early June, when a raid at a garment factory in downtown Los Angeles preceded weeks of sweeps and unrest.
The Census Bureau surveys Americans every month about whether they worked the week before. The UC Merced researchers compared survey results from the week of May 11 to the week of June 8, and found that in California, more citizens than non-citizens reported that they did not work the week after that first raid.
The percentage decline would equate to a loss in California of 271,541 jobs from citizens and 193,428 non-citizens, the report said.
“What we know from previous research is that the work that undocumented immigrants or non-citizens do does not exist in a vacuum,” Edward Flores, lead author of the report, told CalMatters. “If there’s disruptions to the work that undocumented immigrants do, it has ripple effects. A slowdown in one industry could cause slowdowns in other industries.”
That’s consistent with other studies that have shown that mass deportations of undocumented workers reduces job opportunities for U.S.-born workers, and studies that have shown the raids’ negative effects on local economies.
Flores, the faculty director of the UC Merced Community and Labor Center, said he plans to keep tracking and analyzing the Census data and will release similar reports as the federal immigration crackdown continues. He said he expects further escalations of raids because a new federal spending bill substantially increased funding for immigration enforcement.
The effects of the enforcement may continue to be felt more strongly in California. The report also showed that the number of male citizen workers slightly increased in the rest of the U.S. compared with California during the same periods.
White and Latino workers in California were the most affected, the researchers found. The number of Latinos in California who reported work between May and June declined 5.6%, while the number of whites in the state who reported work during the same period decreased 5.3%, according to the report.
The researchers recommended that state policymakers consider “significant action” that may include economic stimulus and disaster relief, similar to what was available during the pandemic.
Flores pointed out that undocumented immigrants lack a financial safety net, such as access to unemployment benefits. As they continue to lose work, that’s not just a problem for them and their families, but for the state.
“When low-income people spend money, they spend it on things they immediately need, which can stimulate the local economy,” he said.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has twice vetoed California lawmakers’ attempts to extend unemployment benefits to undocumented workers. In addition, the state just cut Medi-Cal benefits to undocumented immigrants and froze new enrollments because of budget constraints.
The governor’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.
The California Finance Department closely monitors demographic and economic trends as it shapes state spending. When asked to comment about the UC Merced report, Finance Department spokesperson H.D. Palmer pointed to the “downside risk” mentioned in the state’s most recent economic forecast in the revised May budget. It stated that the Trump administration’s large-scale deportation program could “significantly degrade the state’s labor force.”
The above parcel is one of two that will be up for discussion. The other is presumably adjacent, but its lines do not appear in the Outpost’s database for some reason.
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The City of Arcata just added an item to its closed session meeting tomorrow night, and moved the start time of that meeting up until 5:15 p.m. to accommodate that item.
What is the item? It’s the potential purchase of private property adjoining the Arcata Community Forest and Redwood Park, which happens to contain a few holes of the historic disc golf course behind Cal Poly Humboldt — according to many, one of the first in the state.
Previous landowners have tolerated the existence of the disc golf course on the vacant, forested land for decades. That changed a year or two ago, when the current landowner cut off access. But now the land is up for sale, and city government is set to take a look at whether it makes sense to acquire the property, which consists of two separate parcels, in order to preserve the course.
“It’s an opportunity for the city to look at the property, to continue the fact that we have a lot of active sports within Arcata,” said Arcata Mayor Alex Stillman, reached this afternoon shortly after the change in tomorrow night’s agenda was announced. “Our disc golf course is the second in California, so it’s just sort of a cool thing.”
City Manager Merritt Perry told the Outpost that the possible purchase was in its very preliminary stages. The point of tomorrow night’s meeting would be to gauge whether there is council interest in pursuing a purchase of the property, as well as the potential costs of doing so.
Press release from the Six Rivers National Forest:
Butler Fire: 8,156 acres; 0% containment
Red Fire: 116 acres; 95% containment
Operational Updates:
Butler Fire: Structure protection measures held for a second day July 14 as the fire continued its progression into the Butler Flat and Nordheimer areas. Temperatures again hit 110 degrees, but this time accompanied by increased winds, sometimes up to 25 miles an hour. The fire made a notable push to the southeast around the Nordheimer area, where aircraft and firefighters concentrated their efforts to minimize its advance.
Crews and aircraft will focus on the southern perimeter of the fire, where winds shifting out of the south should aid their efforts.
Red Fire: Containment of the Red Fire jumped to 95 percent, which will allow a portion of firefighters and resources to be redirected to the Butler Fire.
Evacuations:
Butler Fire: Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office has issued evacuation orders for the following zones impacted by the Butler Fire: SIS-1703, SIS-1704 (Butler Creek, Lewis Creek, Bloomer Mine residents and Nordheimer Campground), SIS-1707-A and SIS-1803-A.
Zones SIS-1705, SIS-1707-B, SIS-1708, and SIS-1802 are under an evacuation warning, where residents are advised to be prepared to evacuate if conditions become more threatening. The latest evacuation information can be found at https://protect.genasys.com.
Closures:
Butler Fire: The road between Butler Flat and Nordheimer Campground remains closed as rocks and burning debris continued to fall into the roadway. Nordheimer and Oak Bottom campgrounds are also closed.
Weather and Fire Behavior:
Temperatures are expected to be slightly cooler today with highs near 100 degrees. Winds will mostly come out of the southwest with occasional gusts up to 15 miles an hour.
Fire Safety and Prevention: Persistently high temperatures will keep fuels dry and increase potential fire danger. Individuals seeking relief from the heat by recreating in streams or rivers or in the forest need to be mindful of their vehicles’ condition or where they park. Roadside sparks or dried vegetation against the heated undercarriage of a vehicle could quickly result in a wildfire.
The Six Rivers and Klamath National Forests are not currently in fire restrictions. However, campfires should never be left unattended and should be dead out and cool to the touch before leaving. Remember, drown, stir, feel, REPEAT. Please report suspected wildfires by calling 911.
