PREVIOUSLY

• SHERIFF’S OFFICE: Today’s Shooting at Bear River Was Witnessed by Several and Captured on Body Cam Footage; Investigation Underway

• (UPDATE: SHERIFF PRESS CONFERENCE) Officer-Involved Shooting Near the Bear River Recreation Center

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Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

Update for Officer Involved Shooting on 06/05/2025, near the Bear River Family Entertainment Center in Loleta.

On 06/05/2025 at approximately 1620 hours, 29-year-old Nicholas David Anderson (DOB 05/02/1996) succumbed to the injuries he sustained during the critical incident which occurred earlier that afternoon at about 1531 hours near the Bear River Family Entertainment Center in Loleta.

During this incident, Anderson charged a Deputy Sheriff with a knife in a threating [sic] manner. As a result, one deputy fired his service weapon striking Anderson in the chest. The incident was witnessed by bystanders and captured on body cameras worn by the deputies.

Preliminary information indicates Nicholas Anderson is not a Humboldt County resident and the circumstances surrounding his presence in the Loleta area are currently under investigation. Investigators are continuing to establish a timeline regarding Nicholas Anderson’s whereabouts and actions in the days prior to his involvement in the critical incident. License Plate Recognition (LPR) cameras indicate a vehicle associated with Nicholas Anderson arrived in Humboldt County from the Simi Valley, CA area on June 3, 2025. It appears while in Humboldt County, Nicholas Anderson utilized an alias to receive medical treatment at a local medical facility for a previously existing injury.

Two Humboldt County Sheriff’s Deputies involved in the incident have been placed on routine paid leave pending the outcome of the investigation.

More information will be made available once a forensic autopsy is completed, which is anticipated to occur in the coming days.

This case is still under investigation by the multi-agency Humboldt County Critical Incident Response Team (CIRT), led by the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office and the Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office.

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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A few months ago, Luci Ramirez and Thomas Carter, owners of Humboldt Bay Coffee Company and Familia Coffee, flew to Tanzania, where they attended the weeklong African Fine Coffees Association Conference and Exhibition. While there, they spoke with farmers about the crazy weather conditions they’ve been dealing with: torrential rains at abnormal times, unexpected hail and sudden freezes.

They also went to Uganda, where they experienced some of this schizophrenic weather for themselves. 

“It was February, sunny and hot, and then all of a sudden there was a torrential downpour,” Ramirez recalled. “The native people there say this has been happening more and more.” During such downpours, flowers get knocked off the glossy, dark leaves of the coffee plants. Those dropped blooms will never mature into drupes (or “cherries”), each of which holds a pair of the seeds we know as coffee beans. 

Ramirez and Carter buy beans from a farm in Uganda whose owners expected to produce 15 containers of beans for the year, but due to the chaotic weather — which scientists attribute to human-caused climate change — they wound up with only seven, less than half of what they’d anticipated.

“If you’re a farmer in that situation, you have to feed your family by selling your crop, so the cost has to go up,” Ramirez said. 

This climate-induced jolt to the global coffee trade’s supply and demand is not just happening in Africa. Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer, is suffering its worst drought in 70 years. That combined with frost and wildfires have damaged as much as one-fifth of arabica coffee producers’ growing areas in the country, Colorado economist Billy Roberts recently told the Associated Press. Extreme weather has also led to poor harvests in Colombia and Vietnam, the latter of which is the world’s second-largest coffee producer. The resulting global coffee shortage has led to the highest wholesale prices in 13 years, according to the International Coffee Organization.

“Everybody in the coffee business is dealing with this; it doesn’t matter how big or small you are,” Ramirez said. “One of the biggest things happening is that the back stock in Brazil is being bought out by huge producers doing commercial coffee. When those [reserves] start to go down, it creates a panic in the market, which makes prices go up [even more].” 

Chris Nichols, owner of Muddy Waters Coffee Company

Chris Nichols, owner of Muddy Waters Coffee Company in McKinleyville, said the price of coffee has increased by 40 percent this year, mostly due to the effects of climate change and drought in Brazil and Vietnam. The coffee he buys doesn’t come from either of those countries, but the global scarcity impacts wholesale costs across the entire market. 

“I’m doing my best to keep our price as low as possible,” Nichols said. But he’s been forced to raise consumer prices by about $1 to $1.25 per pound, and he’s now charging 25 percent more on sales to Costco, which carries Muddy Waters coffee in 30 of its warehouse locations. 

Tariffs

In the midst of these global market pressures, the Trump administration has enacted a 10 percent tariff on nearly all coffee imports, with even steeper rates for some countries — including a 46 percent hike for Vietnam — though there’s currently a 90-day pause on those higher rates.

“We already got a tariff bill,” Ramirez said. “It’s the reality of what we’re dealing with.” The coffee she buys at four dollars per pound now costs $4.40, plus freight, importers’ fees and other costs. Twenty percent of the raw beans’ weight is then lost during the roasting process, making each bean even more expensive. 

“Our base cost was around four dollars [per pound] a year ago; we’re now looking at seven dollars [per pound] because everything’s getting exponentially more expensive,” Ramirez said.

It’s a lot to explain to the customers who balk at the increased cost of a 12-ounce pour-over at Familia, the gourmet coffee cafés Ramirez and Carter own in Arcata and Eureka. The cafés have been suffering more than the wholesale coffee business as coffee drinkers deal with inflation and increased food prices.

“I feel like we’re all just hanging on, trying to figure out what will happen,” Ramirez said in reference to both her own company and other Humboldt County’s coffee roasters.

Chocolate

Meanwhile, another tropical commodity crop is also suffering the effects of global climate change: cacao trees, which grow the cocoa beans used in chocolate production. 

“Sixty to seventy percent of the cocoa in the world is grown in the Ivory Coast and Ghana,” said Adam Dick, co-owner of Eureka-based Dick Taylor Craft Chocolates. “So if you have a climate problem in that very small area of the globe, it throws cocoa in particular into a huge upheaval.”

That’s exactly what’s been happening in recent years, as rising temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns have led to heat stress and disease, resulting in smaller pods and decreased yields. As with the coffee market, the shortage is causing prices to skyrocket. They quadrupled last year and recently reached a 50-year high. 

“When we first were buying cocoa and getting started, the commodity price was trading at about $2,500 a ton, and we were paying probably close to $6,500 for the [specialty] stuff that we were buying,” Dick said. “Now, the most recent orders from Belize, with the tariff on top of it, of course, it’s gonna be just above $18,000 a ton. … It’s pretty hard to fathom those numbers. Every time I buy cocoa, it’s like the same price as buying a car.”

Asked how the company can absorb such steep cost increases without a similar near-tripling of prices for consumers, Dick said that’s a good question.

“Honestly, this feels like such uncharted territory,” he said. “You’re forced to look at all other areas of the business and [find] ways that you might be able to cut costs.”

Dustin Taylor (left) and Adam Dick, co-owners and founders of Dick Taylor Craft Chocolates.

Dick and his business partner, Dustin Taylor, contacted their bank to arrange longer-term financing for the more expensive bulk purchases. Earlier this year they also raised prices on their line of craft chocolate products, and they’ve worked to reduce labor and packaging costs — for example, by redesigning their cases so each one has less material and is easier to assemble. Boxes that used to take 45 seconds to put together can now be assembled in less than five, which adds up over the course of thousands and thousands of units. Labor is Dick Taylor’s second-most expensive part of the business.

“I don’t want to get rid of employees, but I want to make sure that the employees that I do have are working as efficiently as possible so that we can stretch those hours further and further,” Dick said. And unlike Ramirez, whose cafés are struggling, the espresso and treats counter at Dick Taylor’s relatively new chocolate factory on First Street has helped to offset the increased wholesale costs.

Still, Dick said that the double-whammy of cost hikes and tariffs have slowed the business’s momentum.

“This feels like we’ve had, like, fetters put on our legs,” he said. 

The tariffs in particular don’t make sense to Dick because, as with coffee, there’s not nearly enough domestic supply to replace imports for the industry. (Hawaii and Puerto Rico produce both cacao and coffee, but its production represents a tiny fraction of domestic demand.)

“And so, really, by putting a tariff on cacao you’re just shooting the whole chocolate industry in the foot,” Dick said, “because I couldn’t find an alternate U.S. source that would be viable or price competitive.”

Map of global average surface temperature in 2024 compared to the 1991-2020 average, with places that were warmer than average colored red, and places that were cooler than average colored blue. | NOAA Climate.gov, using NOAA NCEI data.

Long-term outlook

The impacts of human-caused climate change are only expected to worsen, with longer, more intense heat waves along with ​​droughts, wildfires and extreme rainfall. Ramirez said she doesn’t expect wholesale coffee prices to decline anytime soon.

“There’s part of me that wants to believe they’ll go down but I don’t believe they will. I really don’t,” she said. “Another thing to factor in coffee farming: the kids of these farmers are no longer interested in farming because there’s no money in it. It’s a lot of work, and most of them are not getting the satisfaction of knowing where the product goes.”

The average age of coffee farmers in Mexico is 54, and in Africa it’s around 60. 

“I am worried about it, by a lot … ,” Ramirez said. “We’ve always been very committed to making a great cup of coffee in the morning accessible to people. I want them to be able to Frankenstein to the coffee pot and still have a great cup.”

She’s also worried about the retirees on fixed incomes who come in to buy their pound of coffee each week. “I have to figure out how to get them their coffee … but I can’t go out of business, either,” Ramirez said.

Dick said he expects the price of cacao to come back down some, though he doesn’t expect the commodity price to ever return to what it was. In the chocolate industry, farmers are typically “the ones that lose,” getting paid the least out of anyone in the supply chain, he said. But for Dick Taylor’s specialty suppliers, the recent price hikes have actually been beneficial. The suppliers the company purchases from documents payment amounts all the way back to the gate price — the “cash on the barrelhead” paid to farmers. 

“The price that they’re paid … it is astronomical right now, which is wild,” Dick said. But it’s good for the industry. “That incentivizes them to grow more cocoa, which will alleviate the supply shortage.”

Not immediately, though. Cacao trees take about three years to start producing. Still, Dick expects prices to come down, and he’s thankful that they probably won’t go as low as they used to be.

“It’ll still stay, you know, higher than it was, which will be better for the farmers,” he said. “And we’ll just have to figure out, cost-wise, how to make that work.”

Meanwhile, for the next few years at least, global temperatures are expected to remain at or near record highs. 

Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

Between May 19th and May 30th, 2025, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office conducted a sex offender registration compliance sweep throughout the County of Humboldt. Representatives from the Arcata Police Department, Rio Dell Police Department, Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office and State Parole assisted during the operation.

During compliance sweeps, law enforcement attempts to contact registered sex offenders in Humboldt County to ensure each offender is following their registration requirements. Pursuant to California Penal Code 290, sex offender registrants are required to register in person with the law enforcement agency that has jurisdiction where they reside. The registrants must also comply with several registration requirements, such as updating their registration annually and informing law enforcement when any changes have been made to their address or registration information. Failure by a sex registrant to keep law enforcement notified of an address change or registration information is a crime and can be punished as a felony or misdemeanor.

As of June 6th, 2025, there are 375 registered sex offenders in Humboldt County. Of the 375 registered sex offenders in Humboldt County, 46 of those offenders are registered as transient. During the compliance sweep, 317 registrants were determined to be in compliance, 23 registrants were suspected of being out of compliance, 28 were unable to be contacted, 2 offenders were currently incarcerated and 4 were discovered to be deceased. Additionally, 7 arrests were made during the operation. Investigators are completing follow up investigations into those found to be out of compliance and anticipate additional arrest warrants to be submitted to the Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office. Please keep in mind, those that were unable to be contacted do not necessarily mean they are out of compliance. Often, the compliance sweep takes place on weekdays during work hours, and it is expected that some registrants may not be home during those times.

The annual sweep is a collaborative effort to reduce violent sexual offenses in the county through proactive monitoring of sexual offenders, and strict enforcement of state registration requirements. 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.

The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office would also encourage members of the public to research Megan’s Law, which is a set of state and federal laws that require sex offenders to register with law enforcement and make information about their registration and whereabouts public. The primary purpose is to protect communities, particularly children, from potential harm by sexual offenders. This is achieved by providing the public with access to information about registered sex offenders and allowing law enforcement to notify communities about their presence. Megan’s Law website can be accessed at this link. Anyone with questions or possible concerns about a sex registrant should contact their local law enforcement agency.

For more information regarding the sex offender registration compliance sweep, contact Investigator Jenn Taylor at (707) 268-3642.

Additional Information on Megan’s Law and ways to protect yourself and your family at this link.

(AUDIO) Eureka Friday Night Market Chat on KSLG

The excitement is palpable around tonight’s Eureka Friday Night Market, the first of the season!

The FNM is put on by Humboldt Made, a community collaboration organization that brings together the magic of makers and entrepreneurs here on the North Coast.

Earlier today, Rosa Dixon, Executive Director of Humboldt Made, and local musician Brett McFarland (who takes the Gazebo Stage tonight), stopped by the KSLG studio in Old Town to regale DJ Dale Cooper with all the details about tonight’s festivities and the fun times to come over the next few weeks! (Tune in above!)

From the new “Non-Profit Takeover” to Brett McFarland’s locally-made cider from Crazy Ranch River and Cider Co., there’s a lot to check out at this year’s markets!

Eureka Friday Night Market runs from June 6 to August 29 and goes from 5:30 - 8:30 p.m.

Caltrans release:

As of Friday morning, Route 36 remains fully closed east of Swimmer’s Delight (PM 15.7-16.3) in Humboldt County due to an active slide and will not reopen this weekend.

Ongoing hazard surveys have identified additional trees and debris that need to be addressed prior to reopening the roadway. Site activity has hindered access to some locations. Work to complete a full site assessment is scheduled for Monday, June 9. Route 299 is available as a detour.

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

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In the battle over how to pay for damage wrought by climate change, California lawmakers had an idea: Create a “superfund” that makes big polluters pay.

The Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act of 2025 would make the world’s largest sources of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels financially responsible for the damage caused by wildfires, droughts and other events exacerbated by the warming climate.

The idea adopts the “Superfund” model — created by Congress in 1980 to clean up the nation’s worst toxic waste sites — and applies it to greenhouse gases, aiming to hold companies financially accountable for emissions that drive climate change.

New York and Vermont have already enacted similar measures despite massive opposition from the oil and gas industry.

But the proposed California legislation has stalled since April, even as environmental groups — galvanized by the death and destruction of the January Los Angeles wildfires — have made it a top priority.

Identical versions in both legislative houses have sat idle in Assembly and Senate committees despite a full-court press by supporters framing the superfund as a solution to California’s $12 billion budget deficit. The bills passed out of their first committees but have not advanced further.

“Nobody can afford the kind of financial crisis that the climate crisis has caused,” said Assemblymember Dawn Addis, a Democrat from San Luis Obispo, one of the authors, told CalMatters. “Oil caused the climate crisis, in large part … they lied about it as they caused the damages, and it’s time for them to come to the table and create more affordability for the very people that they’ve harmed.”

The funds would be earmarked for paying for community disaster preparedness, such as evacuation planning and emergency housing, as well as energy efficiency, zero-emission fleets and charging, and natural resource protection, among other projects, according to the bill.

Opposition includes oil companies and major business groups. In addition, despite worsening wildfires and floods, many Californians have been increasingly voicing concern that the state’s climate policies are driving up gas and electricity costs.

“At a time when Californians are struggling with a cost-of-living crisis, these bills will likely result in massive price increases for gasoline, diesel, natural gas, electricity and consumer goods.”
— Jim Stanley, Western States Petroleum Association.

Oil and gas industry lobbying has been fierce. Jim Stanley, a spokesman for the Western States Petroleum Association, the industry’s top lobbying group in the West, said in a statement that the measures were “misguided proposals to retroactively punish companies for providing a legal product that was, and remains, critical to our state’s economy.”

He said that “at a time when Californians are struggling with a cost-of-living crisis, these bills will likely result in massive price increases for gasoline, diesel, natural gas, electricity and consumer goods.”

The climate superfund also faces resistance from a powerful ally of Big Oil: California’s State Building and Construction Trades Council, a key union that has repeatedly backed the industry’s positions, as CalMatters has previously reported.

Earlier this year, the council also opposed legislation by state Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco, that would have allowed residents to sue oil companies for climate damages.

In April, Keith Dunn, a lobbyist for the trades union, told an Assembly committee that the climate superfund would drive up energy prices, kill middle-class jobs and act as a stealth tax on working families. “The affordability gap is widening,” Dunn told lawmakers. “It’s not by chance, it’s by choice.”

Both measures include “urgency” provisions, which allow them to take effect immediately if passed by a two-thirds vote and signed by the governor. That higher threshold makes them less vulnerable to certain legal challenges and exempts them from the usual legislative deadlines. (Most bills must clear their house of origin by today.)

“There was quite a bit of opposition earlier in the year so we’re continuing those conversations,” Addis said. “We have time to have those conversations.”

The bill would make companies pay for emissions from “the extraction, production, refining, sale, or combustion, including by third parties, of fossil fuels or petroleum products,” which includes oil, gas and coal.

Bill targets multinational corporations

The bill applies to companies that emit more than a billion metric tons of global emissions from 1990 through 2024 — that means multinational oil and gas corporations. Within three months of the law taking effect, the agency would publish a list of companies that would pay into the fund.

There are no official estimates as to how much companies would pay. The legislation would require the California Environmental Protection Agency to estimate costs from past and projected climate damages to people, governments, ecosystems and infrastructure every five years through 2045, using peer-reviewed science.

“It is imperative that we make polluters that caused a large percentage of the climate crisis pay for the thing that they knowingly caused,” said Maya Golden-Krasner, an attorney with the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity, which has sponsored the California bills. “They’ve known that this would cause damage since at least the 1950s, they knew that these greenhouse gases would be regulated since the 1990s and they’ve been gaslighting us all the way and blocking climate regulation.”

“It is imperative that we make polluters that caused a large percentage of the climate crisis pay for the thing that they knowingly caused.”
— Maya Golden-Krasner, Climate Law Institute

The climate superfund fight is part of a broader national movement against major oil companies that is playing out in legislatures and courtrooms across America.

California is leading efforts to hold oil companies accountable in court for climate change, recycling a legal strategy deployed during the 1990s, when states alleged that tobacco companies knew cigarettes cause cancer.

Trump-era politics have also been at issue. In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting state climate programs, specifically calling out Vermont’s and New York’s polluter-pays laws and threatening legal action against California’s landmark cap-and-trade program.

Backers say the climate superfund is a fair solution to California’s budget crunch as well as a long-overdue reckoning for an industry that knowingly caused the climate crisis.

But the plan — which could cause oil and gas companies to pay billions for emissions over the last three decades — faces an uphill battle in Sacramento.

Last year, Californians voiced strong opposition to plans to overhaul one of its cornerstone climate programs, the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which could push gasoline prices higher. Last week, Assemblymember Jasmeet Bains, a Democrat from Bakersfield, called for California Air Resources Board Chair Liane Randolph, who led the board in its passage of that measure, to resign over cost concerns.

Likely to trigger a legal onslaught

If enacted, the climate superfund would almost certainly trigger a wave of legal challenges. Donald Sobelman, a San Francisco environmental attorney, told CalMatters that the bill is legally ambitious — and is almost certainly headed for a courtroom challenge if it passes.

The Trump administration, for instance, sued New York and Vermont over their climate superfund measures, arguing they are unconstitutional.

Another potential legal argument, Sobelman said, is that the measure could charge companies now for pollution emitted years or even decades ago. Another is that the measure could act like a tax, which could make it easier to challenge in California court without two-thirds approval by the Legislature.

And some judges may question whether the science linking the emissions to worsening fires and other climate events is strong enough to single out specific companies for climate damage, leading to the “classic battle of the experts,” Sobelman said.

In addition, courts could determine that consumers hold some responsibility for their actions, such as driving cars and trucks powered by fossil fuels, and that other industries around the world, such as power plants and farms, also emit a lot of greenhouse gases.

A spokesman for Gov. Gavin Newsom declined to tell CalMatters whether he supports the measure.

In his May budget proposal, the governor adopted “polluters pay” language to rally support for an existing California climate program, cap-and-trade, which raises money by selling pollution credits to companies.

The debate is unfolding amid a worsening budget crisis in which lawmakers are under pressure to find new revenue sources — especially ones that don’t involve tax hikes on Californians. Supporters of the Superfund Act argue that the bill offers a “polluter-pays” principle rather than new taxes.

Newsom’s budget proposal said extending cap and trade “aligns with the polluter-pays principle in which carbon emitters will fund the state’s world-class forestry and fire protection programs in the face of wildfires that have become increasingly destructive because of climate change.”

Savanah Nicole McCullough
March 21, 1993 – May 26, 2025

We lost our dear, beautiful “Savy” much too soon at the age of 32. She was a wildflower that grew by the river, blossomed in the sunshine and walked the mountain roads. She was a self-proclaimed Indian Tracker with a way of looking at life that was powerfully unique, rugged and full of soul. She was spiritual and loved God in her own special way.

Savanah was born in Eureka on March 21st, 1993. She was raised in Salyer, attending Trinity Valley Elementary school until 6th grade, when she moved to Redding. In Jr. High she enjoyed playing basketball and was known for toughness, fouling out of every game. Savanah loved and appreciated art and music and was herself very artistic. One of her accomplishments was completing her High School Graduation later in life.

Her life was not easy. God’s perfect child, she was brilliant, beautiful and active. She was struck with epilepsy at the ripe age of just eight years old. Her life would become a battle that was fraught with pain and suffering. As she would often say, “it is what it is.” She also had many life adventures that were rare and exciting in ways we can’t even imagine. She was loved, cared for and continually supported by her parents, family and close friends.

What we remember is her distinctive sense of humor, independence, creative style and resilient outlook. We will miss her quips, her stories and her individualism. Her wry smile, silly chuckle and bold comments will stay with us. Savanah will be in our hearts forevermore and loved eternally. She is in Heaven now, without struggles or pain, complete, whole and perfect with God and family gone before.

Savanah is survived by her parents Troy McCullough & Brenda Grant and Stefani & Todd Clark. Her siblings Lily & Art Mastel, Jedidiah McCullough and Olivia McCullough and step brothers Dylan Clark and Ty Clark. Her Grandpa Stephen Wahl, aunts and uncles Penny and Harv Grant, Nicole McCullough and Erick Ammon, Macky and Dena McCullough, Michael Hyatt and Michele Ray, and her many cousins, her nieces Tayler Davaris and Elizabeth McCullough.

A service will be held for Savanah at the Salyer Wayside Chapel, conducted by Toni Burchard at 1 p.m. on Saturday, June 21. In lieu of flowers, any donations can be made to Mountain of Mercy Rehabilitation Center, 50525 Mattole Rd.., Honeydew, CA 95542 or the Salyer Wayside Chapel.

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The obituary above was submitted on behalf of Savanah McCullough’s loved ones. The Lost Coast Outpost runs obituaries of Humboldt County residents at no charge. See guidelines here. Email news@lostcoastoutpost.com.