Humboldt (16 page)

O
ne March evening in 2011, when the rain fell in steady sheets, Emma Worldpeace slid an apple crisp into the oven at her home in Chico. Ethan sat at the desk in the living room, where the bluegrass music of Gillian Welch played on the stereo. Emma pecked her boyfriend on the cheek and then bent over him to quickly check her e-mail. A message from the Chico State University admissions office awaited in her in-box. A couple of months earlier, Emma had applied to the school's master's of social work program. In her application, she wrote that she saw social workers as agents of change who worked to create peaceful communities.

“I can see myself thriving as a high school counselor, a youth caseworker, or a program facilitator,” Emma wrote. “I would love to return and practice social work in a rural community, like the one where I grew up in southern Humboldt County, or another part of Northern California.”

In the bio section of the application, Emma wrote about her past with her typical unflinching honesty.

“My childhood was anything but idyllic. My father was a stubborn alcoholic, in and out of jail and absent for most of my foundational years. My mother struggled to raise six children on her own, relying on meager welfare checks and the illegal cultivation of marijuana to keep the rent paid and put food on the table,” she wrote.

“I benefited greatly from the care and attention of my teachers and other caring adults who encouraged me to apply to college, connected me with services, and acknowledged my hardships without making me feel alienated; skills I have employed myself when working with the disadvantaged.”

The Chico State School of Social Work apparently liked what they read.

“Hey, I got in!” she told Ethan. “They just sent the message.”

“Sweet!” said Ethan, as he brought his hand down playfully on her butt.

“Emma's going to grad school. You can be the breadwinner, and I'll retire.”

“Yeah, I'm going to be rolling in it as a social worker,” she said, laughing.

Over the course of the following year, Emma returned to Humboldt for Mother's Day, the annual Summer Arts and Music Festival, and to participate in a hundred-mile bike ride along the coast. In September, around the time Emma started back to school, Mike's preliminary hearing was held in Eureka, and was covered by the press. It was the first anyone had heard from the men who were in the garden that day. Emma read the news coverage when she returned home in the evening. The testimonies were quite vivid. One of the men whom Mike allegedly shot, a Guatemalan named Fernando Lopez, described the events leading up to the shooting, how their work plans had changed and they wanted to leave, and how Mike had shown up and started shooting. Lopez had a scar the size of a nickel in his right cheek, from where the bullet entered him. He described how he and his friend Mario Roberto Juarez-Madrid ran for the woods after the shots were fired, and how he heard his friend scream and fall, and then pick himself up and continue running. It was the last time Lopez ever saw his friend.

“He was a good man,” Lopez said in Spanish, through an interpreter. Then he broke down crying. The good man left behind a wife and two children back in Guatemala. A Sheriff's Department detective testified during the hearing that Juarez-Madrid had been shot in the back, and then in the head at point-blank range.

Lopez spent the night on the run in the woods while Mike hunted him, Lopez said, by the light of the full moon. He prayed for his survival to the tiny Virgin Mary figurine he carried in his hand. Lopez's story then took on elements of myth. Sometime during the night, he said, he stumbled upon a group of eight bears and threw rocks at them so they wouldn't approach him. Just after dawn, he reached the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection base in Kneeland, where firefighters are housed during the wildfire season. There, Lopez collapsed on the ground and called for help.

Emma read the stories filled with both sadness and horror. So much of what she read sounded so earnest. One part that didn't sit well with her, though, was the part about the eight bears, since she didn't really know them to travel in packs. She also wondered who the hell the other people were who were mentioned in the news coverage. Who was this guy named Tom Tuohy, who seemed to have connected Mike with the workers? Would this Tuohy character be charged with human trafficking?

Emma felt really hopeless about the situation. At this point, she thought if Mike were found guilty, it looked like he would be spending his life in prison, which was really sad.

As much as she cared about Mike as a person, Emma hoped the legal system would work as it was supposed to and that if Mike had committed the crimes he was accused of, he would be brought to justice and would serve time.

Mike's trial was set to begin in early 2012. The Humboldt County D.A., Paul Gallegos, had dropped the marijuana cultivation charges to focus on the murder and attempted murder charges, for which Mike faced twenty-five years to life.

Meanwhile, Emma was busy with her classes and internship. At the same time, her mother, Sage, had finally separated from Mike's father, Jim, and was in the process of buying a house when she went through a very public mental health breakdown. Sage was in and out of Sempervirens, the county psychiatric health facility. Emma was so preoccupied with her mother that she didn't hear anything else about Mike until early March, when her sister Aia told her over the phone that the Feds had taken over Mike's case. Emma didn't really understand the ramifications of this until she Googled it after she hung up the phone. Under federal law, Mike now potentially faced the death penalty.

Emma was shocked. She was against the death penalty in general. She thought it was a big waste of money to keep people on death row. Maybe, she thought, it should be reserved for the worst of the worst, people with a long history of violent crime, but that isn't Mike. Later, after Emma had spoken to more people about the case and given it some more thought, it made sense that the Feds had gotten involved. She figured that Mike's case would be used as fodder in the larger political conversation taking place about marijuana legalization in the state and beyond. On one hand, there were the pro-marijuana people, who say it's harmless and point out that people don't die from smoking it; and then you have the people who think marijuana is a dangerous drug, and that bad things happen because of it. The shooting was marijuana-related violence. Emma figured the Feds would take Mike's case and hold it up and say, “Look at how horrible these violent pot growers are.” “Here was this big-time grower with pit bulls who hired undocumented immigrants,” they could say, “and then this heartless monster couldn't afford to pay them, so he allegedly shot them, and then he allegedly hunted them through the night to try to make sure they were dead.” Emma figured the Feds would use Mike's case as an example of why marijuana is bad and why we needed to keep investing money in arresting people and locking them up for growing and using it.

A couple of weeks later, in an interview with the Bay Area radio station KQED, Melinda Haag, the U.S. attorney for California's Northern District, referred to Mike's case in that very way.

“We indicted a case two weeks ago in Humboldt County. There's a grower there who allegedly had a fifteen-hundred-plant grow operation. He allegedly hired undocumented workers from Central America, and the indictment alleges that when those workers came to him and asked to be paid, he instead pulled out a gun, shot and killed one of them, and chased the other one through the woods, shooting,” Haag said.

“I believe there's this notion out there that the marijuana industry is just full of organic farmers who are peacefully growing an organic, natural plant and that there's no harm associated with that. And what I hear from people in the community is that there is harm.”

The focus of the interview was on a larger issue of a series of actions Haag and three other California U.S. attorneys had recently taken to try to rein in the state's medical marijuana industry. The press dubbed it the “Cannabis Crackdown.” It angered people who saw it as a move by the Obama administration to backtrack on a promise to respect states' rights when it comes to medical marijuana. As part of the crackdown, letters were sent to dispensaries around the state threatening their landlords with property seizure if they didn't shut their doors. Hundreds closed. On April 2, 2012, one hundred DEA agents raided Oaksterdam University, while an angry crowd of protestors outside chanted, “DEA, go away!” and “Go after real criminals!” Afterward, under what could only have been a serious threat, Richard Lee, the school's founder and the man who had bankrolled Prop 19, relinquished ownership of his school. Another symbolic federal raid occurred a few months earlier, when the DEA busted a high-profile Mendocino County medical pot grower named Matthew Cohen. If there was a teacher's pet among pot growers, it was Cohen. He was one of the most law-abiding growers around. Cohen registered his plants with the Sheriff's Office for a fee; he even taxed his trimmers. He lived in an area filled with illegal grows, but by raiding him and chopping down his plants, the Feds sent a clear message to lawmakers attempting to regulate the industry and to anyone trying to work within the state law, that they didn't consider any of it legal and could crack down on anyone at any time.

On a sunny day in October, Emma Worldpeace stood outside the Glenn E. Dyer Detention Facility in downtown Oakland and stared up at the hulking concrete building. Somewhere inside sat Mike, and after all this time, Emma was finally going to see him. She had tried once before, on the Thanksgiving just after the shooting. Mike was still in the Humboldt County jail then, but he had already had a visitor that day, so Emma wasn't allowed in. Then, somehow, with school, work, and life, two years passed.

Once inside, Emma signed in and then took a seat in the busy visitors' waiting area. She scanned the room and realized that she was the only white person. Most of the others were Latino families, mothers and beautiful children whom they had dressed up like dolls. Emma smiled at a little girl across from her and practiced her basic Spanish while she waited for her name to be called. Then she passed through metal detectors and locked doors, and rode an elevator that reeked of cheap perfume and floor cleaner, until she reached the visiting area.

The windowless room was cold and bleak. The inmates sat in a long line behind thick glass, just like in the movies. There were little cubby-type partitions between them to give the illusion of privacy. Since Emma didn't know where Mike was, she had to walk down the entire row, peering into each cubby and making uncomfortable eye contact with the stranger sitting on the other side. A man at the very end of the row with slicked-back hair and a moustache called out her name.

When he beamed at her, she realized it was Mike.

She pulled up a chair and sat down.

“I almost didn't recognize you,” she told him. The hair and moustache made him look a bit like a Latino gangster. He just laughed and then asked what she was doing in town.

Emma and Ethan had come to see a concert and were staying nearby.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

Over the course of the next forty minutes, Emma and Mike began to catch up, all the while avoiding the reason they were talking to each other through glass. In March, Mike had pled not guilty to the charges against him, but he wasn't allowed to discuss the case.

One of the first things Emma noticed about Mike, besides his new look, was that his skin was so pale he looked almost gray. It turned out that he was considered a violent, high-security-level inmate and was kept in isolation in his own cell. He was separated from other inmates by thick concrete walls, not bars. There were no cracks for Mike to whisper through when he felt starved for human contact. He was allowed into the common area for only forty-five minutes to an hour every day, and into the exercise area just once a week. The exercise area wasn't even outside, hence the sun-starved pallor.

The visiting area was full of people struggling to make themselves heard through thick plate glass, and Emma had a hard time hearing Mike above the din. Particularly after a woman a few seats down started yelling at a prisoner who appeared to be her boyfriend.

“Can you hear me?” Emma asked Mike.

He told her he could hear her just fine, and that sensory deprivation worked wonders.

They both smiled. Emma took it as a good sign that he was able to crack a joke. Mike asked about their brothers and sisters. Emma told him about her master's program, and Mike told her how much he admired her for still being in school. He remembered all of those years she studied hard at Berkeley. He had recently been working through some educational packets the jail provided, and found them really challenging. He told Emma that when he thought of her, he felt inspired to keep studying.

He also told her that he had seen her dad: EZ Out had spent a weekend in the Humboldt jail while Mike was there.

“Oh, my dad,” Emma said, and started to feel embarrassed. She didn't know why he had gone to jail.

Mike reassured her that it was good to see her dad. It was as though someone he knew had shown up on his desert island. Mike said that he and EZ had spent the weekend playing cards and cribbage together.

Mike had been reading a lot. He was currently engrossed in a book on abnormal psychology and was working through the educational packets. Like many prisoners, he helped pass some of the endless downtime working out in his room. He also told Emma that he had been trying to meditate.

When it was time for her to go, Mike told her that he'd love to see the other siblings, too. Emma promised to send some photos, and to write.

Back in the fresh air and bright sunlight outside, Emma felt a little dizzy and sat down for a moment to collect her thoughts and await Ethan, who was coming to pick her up. She took some deep breaths and worried that she might break down and cry, but as she sat there, and the rays of the autumn sun warmed her face, she realized that she felt oddly reassured. Mike appeared somewhat healthy, and he seemed to be using his time to reflect. The hardest part of the whole visit, she realized, not taking into account Mike's uncertain future, was that she couldn't hug him. He looked so much like he could use a comforting hand placed gently on his shoulder.