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• Lawsuit Accuses Humboldt Sheriff’s Deputy of Assault, Battery and Excessive Force in Arrest of Unhoused Man

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The Humboldt County government has agreed to pay $150,000 and provide additional training to Sheriff’s Office patrol deputies to settle a lawsuit that accused Deputy Sheriff Ryan Campadonia of using excessive force during the traffic stop and arrest of an unhoused man in Garberville last year.

As part of the settlement, Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal issued a letter to the plaintiff, Darrin Dickson, in which he acknowledges that Campadonia “escalated the situation … without attempting any initial de-escalation measures” when he broke the driver’s side window with his baton. Dickson had been living in his vehicle at the time of the incident.

The suit, which was filed on Nov. 1, alleged that while breaking the window, Campadonia’s baton struck Dickson in the face, and glass from the shattered window got in his right eye, causing a corneal abrasion and bleeding cuts on his face and scalp. It further accused Campadonia of grabbing Dickson by the throat, elbowing him in the face and having his vehicle impounded, against office policy, as retaliation against Dickson for exercising his constitutional rights.

“This incident did not meet the high standard of conduct we uphold at the Sheriff’s Office,” Honsal says in his letter, which quotes from his office’s use-of-force policy and mentions only the window-breaking, not the other allegations.

Dickson’s attorney, Benjamin Mainzer, said this settlement, including the public acknowledgement from Honsal, represents a significant step forward.

“The HCSO has now committed to implementing corrective measures intended to prevent what happened to Mr. Dickson from happening to anyone else,” Mainzer said in an emailed statement. “As a direct result of this lawsuit, Deputy Campadonia and all members of the patrol division will now receive additional training. This commitment to improvement and accountability would not have been possible without Mr. Dickson coming forward.”

Earlier this year the Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury recommended that the county establish a civilian oversight board for the Sheriff’s Office, saying such independent review “promotes good management, fiscal responsibility, transparency, and accountability without interfering with the Sheriff’s Office’s enforcement and investigative functions.”

But Honsal opposes the call for civilian oversight, saying the community can always hold him accountable at the ballot box.

“The Sheriff is elected by the people to provide the oversight over all the duties and responsibilities of the Sheriff’s Office,” he argued.

Honsal was hand-picked as the undersheriff and de-facto successor of former Sheriff Mike Downey in 2013 and then elevated by the Board of Supervisors to the role of interim sheriff in 2017. He ran unopposed in 2018 and 2022.

Humboldt County was also named as a defendant in the suit, alongside Campadonia and the Sheriff’s Office. The county rejected a claim for damages that Mainzer’s office submitted on behalf of Dickson in March.

Campadonia, a four-year veteran with the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, earned just shy of $158,000 in pay and benefits last year, according to data collected by Transparent California. The $150,000 settlement will be paid from the county’s risk management fund.

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DOCUMENT: Honsal’s letter to Campadonia

As LoCO prepares to release you all for the long Thanksgiving weekend, we thought we’d share something with y’all that will hopefully elicit a similar smile as it did for us. 

Earlier today in Old Town, the fine folks from The Artist Corner at Gaining Ground staged their second annual Thanksgiving Parade, which starred members of Humboldt’s disabled community. After a tour of duty that took them from the Gazebo and back again, the marchers settled down for a noon pizza party to celebrate getting their steps in. 

Good weather, pizza and community. There is much to be thankful for. Have a nice, restful weekend, friends. 

Rotary Club of Eureka release: 

For the 8th consecutive year, the Rotary Club of Eureka donated turkeys to local homeless shelters, food banks, schools and other non-profits.

This year we donated 240 turkeys and two hams to local non-profits, such as the Eureka Rescue Mission, Betty Chinn Foundation, Food for People, Redwood Adult & Teen Challenge, Salvation Army, Boys & Girls Club of the Redwoods and Northern United Humboldt Charter School.

Last week, readers of the Outpost may have noticed that a bridge in Fieldbrook was renamed to a word in the Wiyot language, Soulatluk. Turns out, that’s not a one-off event — the Wiyot Tribe runs an as-yet unnamed program that names or renames some places they agree needs a touch-up. 

If someone has a place they’d like named or renamed, they pitch it to Ben Brown, the director of the Wiyot Tribe’s cultural department. Brown takes it to a committee, and if they think it’s worthy of a name, it goes before the Wiyot Tribal Council for final approval. Then it gets kicked to the tribe’s linguists.

Some places have historical Soulatluk names that the linguists can find in Wiyot ethnographies, like the 1918 Ethnography and Archaeology of the Wiyot Territory by L.L. Loud. Other places require a little more creativity. Researchers look for historical activities that took place in the area, or what kind of flora and fauna live there. 

“There was recently a Marine Protected Area [who] were redoing their signage,” Brown said. “They wanted a place name for their area in Samoa, and the cultural committee came up with the word — basically, [it translates to] ‘Across the bay, in a place where people used to live,’ or something like that. That’s Soulatluk; it’s not usually, like, valhuk equals ‘salmon,’ it means ‘feasting food,’ and Western society defines it as salmon, and that’s not generally how they approach defining their Soulatluk. It’s descriptive.”

New names are purposefully vague to avoid tempting potential grave diggers or artifact stealers. 

So far, the cultural committee has named or renamed about six different places in the four months since the project began. They’re unlikely to run out of work any time soon, though; Brown says the backlog of requests is long, and the process requires at least three to four months. 

The services rendered by the tribe aren’t free. The cultural committee charges $100 an hour, and if someone wants a sign in Soulatluk, the committee in charge of that runs $400 an hour total. The Fieldbrook bridge renaming only ran the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors $200, but that process was simple because a historic Soulatluk name for Fieldbrook already existed. 

The program’s ideal candidate is a place with an offensive name, like the recently renamed bridge in Fieldbrook. Others are places named after colonizers. 

“There’s a lot of power in language,” Brown said. “When you have places named after all of these mass murderers, they were celebrated in the past, but we’re revisiting that history and seeing these people with our modern eyes.”

Brown specifically mentioned the locality of Larabee, a mile from Redcrest — a town named after a man who killed Native Americans during the 1860 Tuluwat Island Massacre. 

“That needs to change,” Brown said. “We can’t celebrate these people from that part of history. We know that history has dark and difficult parts to it. But the way to combat that is to bring it into the light … It’s like in Nazi Germany; they didn’t try to sweep it under the rug. There’s memorials for what took place. And as a country, they accepted their role and made amends. They continue to learn from it and move forward. And that’s the exact same thing that needs to take place here — recognize what happened in the past and do whatever we can to make it right.”

UPDATE, 1:52 p.m.: Brian Wilson, pollution control officer with the North Coast Unified Air Quality Management District, gets back to tell us that our original hypothesis was most likely correct — that the smoke warning was probably due to wood stoves firing up across the town.

The slash pile burn up near Headwaters Forest that we write about below — and which Wilson confirmed — couldn’t have contributed much to the smoke given weather patterns at the time, he said.

Wilson added that the private weather/smoke apps like PurpleAir or the built-in iPhone weather app generally average their air quality numbers over a very short period of time — 10 minutes, say. So while people with conditions like COPD might indeed feel the smoke, it’s unlikely to have immediate, serious health consequences. The governmental standard is to average those numbers over 24 hours.

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ORIGINAL POST:

Earlier this morning, many people were warned, via their various weather apps, that the air quality in Eureka today was extremely poor — up into the “unhealthy for sensitive groups” category.

Why would that be?

Our first thought was that perhaps this was just an effect of people firing up their wood stoves for the crisp weather last night. Perhaps some of those wood stoves were close to air quality sensors. It didn’t seem particularly smoky, to our noses.

But then looking around at some of our usual fire resources, we see that a couple of the usual satellites did detect a pretty wide set of hotspots on the ground up in the hills between Headwaters Forest and Kneeland, near logging roads. That’s Humboldt Redwood Company land.

These hotspots were detected in the middle of the night, which seems like a strange time for a prescribed burn, or the burning of this year’s logging slash.

But that’s what we must suppose it to be. That’s what Calfire Division Chief Paul Savona supposed it to be, when we reached him a few moments ago. Calfire has not responded to any wildfire incidents in a while. 

Reached at their Scotia headquarters, the person who answered the phone for Humboldt Redwood Company said that anyone who would be able to answer the question was already out of the office for the holidays. 

We’ve left messages with the North Coast Unified Air Quality Management District — the agency that would be in charge of large-scale burn permits at this time of year — but haven’t heard back yet. 

Did these Elk River fires contribute to our poor quality this morning? Seems likely, though I suppose we still can’t say for sure. In any case, the smoke seems to have died down. Apps like PurpleAir currently show us in the “acceptable” range for particulate matter. Mostly.

We’ll update if we hear back from Air Quality.

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Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

On Nov. 16 at about 9 a.m., Humboldt County Sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to a call for service regarding theft of fencing from a private property on Central Ave. in McKinleyville.

A concerned citizen reported to the Sheriff’s Office dispatch center that they observed a male and female stealing the fencing from the property and placing it into a tan pickup truck on Nov. 16. Security video footage from a nearby home corroborated the witness statement. Deputies responded to the scene of the theft and contacted the victim. The deputies confirmed that the theft was greater than $950, and a felony theft investigative report was taken.  

Based upon the witness statement and the video evidence, deputies followed up on this investigation by searching various locations in McKinleyville. The deputies subsequently located the suspect’s vehicle at a private residence.  The two suspects caught in the video were contacted and apprehended on scene without incident. The stolen property was recovered and returned to the owner.  

Aaron Gamble, age 39, of McKinleyville, and Lindsey Kauffman, age 39, of McKinleyville, were booked into the Humboldt County Correctional Facility around 12:15 p.m. on Nov. 16 for Grand Theft (PC487(a)) and Conspiracy to Commit Crime (PC182(a)(1)). Kauffman had an additional charge for Probation Violation (PC 1203.2(a)(2)). 

This case is still under 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.

As we head into the Humboldt holidays, there is plenty to give thanks for. For one, we seem to have more Brett McFarland music videos than we know what to do with! Our cup truly runneth over. 

Speaking of runneth, that is something the Klamath River is doing again after the completion this year of the removal of several dams that have long impeded its flow. To mark these historic events, the latest high-budget McFarland clip — for the song “Klamath” — celebrates the tireless efforts of local tribes to remove the dams in the hopes that salmon runs would return to their historic levels. 

Watch the video above, and read more about the inspiration for the song in the release from McFarland’s camp below: 

Northern California Tribes have collaborated with local farmer, Brett McFarland, to release a new music video celebrating the historic undamming of the Klamath river. The video, Klamath, tells the powerful story of the river’s demise and the multi-tribe led effort to un-dam and restore what was once the third largest salmon producing river in the continental US.

This video comes just months after the last of the four dams were removed on the Klamath to reopen more than 400 miles of fish habitat. For the first time in over a century, salmon are returning to Oregon to spawn. The sheer numbers of fish have exceeded fisheries biologists’ expectations. For the Yurok, Karuk, Hoopa, Klamath and Shasta tribes the homecoming represents the culmination of a decades long battle. “We’ve been fighting for dam removal for over twenty years and the day has finally come,” says Annelia Hillman, Yurok Tribal member, community organizer and river advocate.

The undamming of the Klamath marks the largest dam removal in world history and was made possible by people working together across cultural, state, and party lines to do what was right for the planet. The music video for Klamath celebrates this historic achievement and aims to inspire others.

PREVIOUSLY: 

• (VIDEO) ‘Humboldt’ Singer Brett McFarland is Back With a Snappy New Song and Video About How Everything is Going to Hell
• (VIDEO) Everyone in Humboldt County is Required to Watch This Music Video Now