Hank sims north coast journal

More Short Stories ». Showing 1- 2 of 2. Add a comment. Switch to the mobile version of this page. North Coast Journal. Pin It. Favorite Saving…. Highway Robbery By Hank Sims. Comments 2.

Showing 1- 2 of 2 Add a comment. Subscribe to this thread:. This cover story brought the attention of the Church of Scientology and a lawsuit threat that never materialized. A few miles outside of this coastal community, a massive foot subterranean vault constructed of steel and concrete lies beneath a peaceful knoll overlooking the Pacific.

The breadth and dimension of the vault stagger the imagination: feet longer than a football field and 20 feet in diameter, the two-story sarcophagus is almost complete. It is designed to withstand the ravages of nature as well as man-made destruction.

Humboldt County is now home to one of the most impregnable storage repositories known to man. Its prime purpose is to hold the teaching, philosophy and enlightenment of a single man: L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, one of the most contentious, controversial religions ever founded.

A majority of those claims were settled out of court The cost of attorney fees and the risk of losing a jury trial are weighed against the cost of immediate settlement. A quick settlement, even if it's up into six digits, is often cheaper than extended litigation. The most recent settlement involved four protesters who were arrested during last July's Redwood Summer activities. The four sued the county in federal court because their heads were shaved during their stay in the Humboldt County Jail.

The Humboldt County Sheriff said the shaving was done to prevent the spread of lice. The protesters say there was no lice and if there had been, the problem could have been solved with a lice-killing shampoo rather than forcible shaving.

Gravelle took the story one important step further by developing a chronology of claims filed against jail personnel involved alleged inmate abuse over the previous five years. She discovered inmates were suing and receiving larger sums of money due to a pattern of abuse, including one specific correctional officer who was involved in several injury incidents inside the jail.

Like windrows swept by a giant broom, rows of dead sea urchins, mussels and sea snails lie along a stretch of beach a few miles north of the tiny town of Petrolia, stark reminders of earthquakes that jolted this region in late April. Sitting above the most seismically active area in the nation, this section of California known as the Lost Coast recently became a magnet for geologists, marine biologists and just plain curiosity seekers.

They are flocking to the beach to see and study California's first recorded coastal uplift. Scientists now believe that a mile stretch of coastline, from Sea Lion Gulch north to Cape Mendocino, was pushed up as much as four feet by the original earthquake and aftershocks that followed earlier this year.

Gravelle wrote a separate piece about Indian legends surrounding earthquakes and tsunamis, including a story from the early s that most likely originated with Tolowas:. Standing on rocks above the river mouth, a man felt the ground move suddenly. Trees swayed, some fell and the shaking seemed to go on forever. If it's sinking, get up on the reefs and run for high ground. Local police enjoy a good laugh and Ricky Spahn has certainly provided one.

He'll be remembered as the burglar who rummaged through a vehicle, found a Polaroid camera and took his own mug shot. Then he fled, leaving behind both camera and incriminating evidence. You might say the year-old Eurekan is a little dumb. He once tried to get a stolen television set home by wheeling it down the street in a shopping cart -- in broad daylight.

If convicted this time, Spahn's luck will have run out. He'll be the first Humboldt County resident to be sentenced under California's new Three Strikes law. And he'll go away for a long, long time. South of Fields Landing where Highway turns inland from Humboldt Bay, lies an abandoned dredge from another era, mud-bound near a grove of tall, pale eucalyptus and dark pines. The dredge's long boom hangs useless, her cables turned to rust, her cabins atwit with barn swallows, her bottom rotting in an ancient channel where Salmon Creek flowed before it was diverted by cattlemen.

In early Humboldt County residents were reeling with the news that one of its most beloved priests was being accused of molestation.

Claims were trickling out from what seemed like unreliable "victims" decades after the fact. Popular native son The Rev. Gary Timmons had been stationed in Humboldt County more than once in his year tenure as a priest. He founded Camp St. Michael while still in the seminary. In the introduction, we wrote, "If the allegations are true [they were], Timmons has been sexually assaulting children for more than two decades, mostly the children of his church. Once upon a time there was a year-old boy whose father was a judge.

The boy idolized his father and liked nothing better than to be with him, but his father worked hard and was very, very, busy. So the boy was happy when a priest at his church started spending time with him, and he was very happy, too, when the priest invited the boy to summer camp. At the summer camp, however, the priest did some things to the boy that made the boy feel bad. And when the priest invited the boy to go camping again, the boy didn't want to go.

But his parents thought the priest was a good man. They thought the camp was good for their son. So the told him to go with the priest. May For months Chris Arnold had been telling people she was job hunting and would submit her resignation in the spring.

The budget brawls, finger pointing over accounting snafus and surprise surpluses, and battles with other department heads had taken a toll on the county administrative officer. Supervisor Bonnie Neely had criticized Arnold for years -- often in public.

And newly seated Roger Rodoni Arnold still had the support of three board members while she was job-hunting -- up until Feb. It was in a follow-up interview with the Journal that Kirk unwittingly said on tape that he and his fellow supervisors had been holding closed meetings on replacing Conlon and inviting builders and developers into those personnel sessions for advice -- a clear violation of the Brown Act.

The Journal filed a lawsuit against the county and endured two years in court. The Journal eventually won.

It was a rare Brown Act conviction, and the county paid all legal fees. The story and numerous editorials won state and national awards and the Democracy in Action award from the League of Women Voters. December On Oct. Environmentalists are charging that they were assaulted with pepper spray.

Police say it was effective crowd control. Whatever it was, the confrontation itself is preserved on videotape. CBS' John Blackstone has the tape and the story.

It was the lead story in major newspapers across the nation the next morning. Before the week was out the heavily edited tape with audio was posted on the Internet and newspaper editorial writers from coast to coast began excoriating local law enforcement for using a chemical weapon again nonviolent protestors. Condemnation was quick and universal outside of Humboldt County -- even from law enforcement leaders. The Journal shot and printed still images of the video from a television screen to show the entire confrontation as it unfolded in the Eureka office of Rep.

Frank Riggs. The stills show the eyelids of the protesters being pulled open and pepper spray applied with Q-tips by officers.

The only things missing that would turn it into a classic whodunit are sex and murder most dire -- and even they turn up on the periphery at least. The story generated a backlash from readers. The Journal was criticized for printing the story about a lawsuit filed by heirs of HAF founder and patron saint Vera Vietor, and what had happened since her death in The story stood up under scrutiny and heated debate.

Later, spotters posted across the street from the apartment could see and identify the flare gun through the windows, as Moore pointed it toward her front door, out toward the street and occasionally at herself.

Eureka Police Chief David Douglas testified that he believed the combination of Moore's erratic behavior and the unknown quantity the flare gun represented posed a serious threat to the building, and to another resident down the hall who would not or could not evacuate. As Craig Pasquini, an employee at Humboldt County's Mental Health Department, had testified, Moore had told him she was prepared to burn down the building; Douglas had received that information, he said, and he took her threat seriously.

While at the scene, Douglas said, he learned that there was a vacant space above the ceilings in the apartment; he said he feared that the building would quickly catch fire if a flare were lodged up there, out of the fire department's reach.

When the police arrived, they set up a command post in the Heuer's Florist office, which was located on a half-level in between the ground floor and the second floor.

Four key people were stationed at the post: Douglas, Soderberg, Lt. Tony Zanotti the overall commander and Ofc. During this time, several plans for ending the standoff were discussed, according to the testimony of several of these officers.

There was the chance that negotiations would succeed, and Moore would be talked down. There was a plan to tackle Moore and take her into custody in the event that she opened her door. There was a plan to charge the apartment in the event the flare gun was fired. Eventually, according to Zanotti, Wilcox developed an intermediary plan — to charge the room in the event that one of the two spotters stationed across the street saw Moore at a window with her hands empty. There was no testimony that revealed the existence of a contingency plan — what the team should do if Moore picked the gun up in the time it took for the SWAT team to bust down the door and run down the hall.

This was a strange omission, considering that it would have taken only a moment to pick the gun up again, and that Moore had threatened to shoot at the police if they forced entry into her apartment. Minutes after the spotters were given the order to radio in if she had both her hands free, one of them did.

The SWAT team, as per instructions, charged the door at that moment. The police department had stationed two of its officers across the street from Moore's apartment to watch her movements and report them to everyone else at the scene. One of them, Det. Ron Harpham, was positioned on the second floor of the Vern's Furniture building directly across G Street from Moore's apartment. He had a straight view into Moore's apartment. The other, Ofc. Robert Mengel, was on the roof of the building just south of Vern's, and was looking at Moore's apartment from above and at an angle.

Nevertheless, it was Mengel who gave the signal saying Moore's hands were empty, triggering the SWAT team to enact the "hands-free" strategy just moments after it had been put into place. Mengel has since moved to Idaho and could not appear at the inquest. Instead, Jim Dawson, chief investigator for the District Attorney's office and the head of the multi-agency team that investigated the shooting, read the interview he conducted with Mengel on the afternoon of April Mengel had told Dawson that he had seen Moore pull back a curtain with one hand, while she reached to open a window with another, and so sent the "hands-free" signal.

For reasons that are unclear, Mengel, at least at some point during the morning, had been watching Moore down the sights of his rifle, which he kept trained on her windows. The rifle was not equipped with a scope. Remarkably, though Harpham was on the stand for nearly 40 minutes, Hickock did not ask him what he had observed at the moment Mengel sent word to the SWAT team.

That took a follow-up question from the jury. At the moment he heard "Go," he saw Moore turn in the window, raising her right hand above the ledge and into his line of sight.

She was holding the flare gun. Harpham's younger brother Rocky, a member of the SWAT team, testified that he saw her pick up the gun. Johnson, who was right behind Rocky Harpham, said that Moore had the gun in her hand when he first spotted her in the apartment. One of Det. Ron Harpham's first duties at the scene of the standoff was to deliver ballistic shields to the beat officers then stationed in the hallway — Quigley, Lawson and Bolton see sidebar.

Those shields stayed put when the officers were relieved by the SWAT team. But when the team stormed Moore's apartment, the shields were left where they were. Several of the officers testified that there were two reasons for this. First, the shields were bulky, and the team believed that they would be a hindrance. The SWAT team had surveilled a neighboring apartment, and saw that the hallway leading from the door to the front room, where Moore would be, was very narrow.

It was thought that the shields would slow the team's movement down the hall, ruining the element of surprise that the "no-hands" plan depended on. Also, SWAT members testified that they were uncertain how useful the shields would be against a flare pistol.

Though the shields were designed to stop bullets, they didn't know what effect they would have against a burning flare. They said that they had no experience with marine flares being used as weapons.