Two Saturday nights ago, at about 10pm, Jaime Vasquez, 29, was taken from his car at gunpoint by four masked men. The abduction of the youthful farmworker occurred on a lonely dirt road less than a mile from the center of Boonville. There are lots of hidden places not far from the center of Boonville. […]
If there’s an old, old timer in the house who remembers Hannah Piggott nee Hori, we would like to know more about this most intriguing Fort Bragg woman. In broad and often confusing outline, she was Japanese married to a well known and much sought after American jockey named Harry Piggott, who raced at least […]
This Friday (December 15) expect retiring judge Vincent T. Lechowick to order the dissolution and sale of the disputed Pinoleville Tribal land as his final act as a Mendo judge. Lechowick did not run for re-election and is mercifully finito January 1st, not that we won’t be seeing him often as a “visiting judge,” the […]
Stop me if I’m whining, but as long-time readers are aware, quite a number of local tax funded agencies and quasi-public agencies avoid placing advertising with the AVA. That’s how they get their revenge. They think. It’s almost a full-time job tracking down these mini-retaliations but when they pile up I like to deconstruct them. […]
Monday’s story began, “A search was suspended Sunday night but is expected to resume today for Antonio Angulo, a North Coast resident who has been missing in the Lake Berryessa area since Wednesday, a spokesman for the Napa County Sheriff’s Office said Sunday night.” Antonio Angulo is a resident of Boonville. He and his wife […]
By the time you read this our resident deputy, Craig Walker, is already policing the sedate streets of Moraga. Deputy Walker’s departure is a big loss for the Anderson Valley where he’d become a crucial member of our wildly diverse community. A ten-year resident of Philo, the popular deputy sheriff had successfully filled the huge […]
I mentioned to a friend that I’d tried to get the Mateel Community Center to rent me space to present the Who Bombed Judi Bari Road Show, now in its third month of growing audiences but mixed reviews. He laughed. “You have about as much chance of getting into the Taj Mateel as a liberal […]
Not many people have hiked into Headwaters Forest, and not many people are likely to because the trek in is a grueler. The old logging road up (yes, I said “up”) to Headwaters western perimeter is much more difficult than is suggested in the uniquely vague Bureau of Land Management’s handout. What the BLM variously […]
A built-to-kill pipe bomb exploded beneath the driver’s seat of Judi Bari’s car in the noon-hour traffic of downtown Oakland on Friday, May 24th 1990. That there was an explosion in Judi Bari’s Subaru wagon while she was driving it and Darryl Cherney sat in the passenger’s seat is the only undisputed fact of that […]
Two nights after we’d established our raucous brood in Mendocino County’s serene summer hills, not far from the unsuspecting hamlet of Boonville, we got our first lesson in the psycho-pathology of the pre-pube criminal, the immutable psycho-pathology of the pre-pube criminal. The delinquents occasionally acted like the children they were, and when they did we […]
Arturo Flores might be Boonville’s least known serial killer. In 1987, Flores would tell his friends that “all anglos should be exterminated.” Then he exterminated one. Maybe he’d exterminated others, too, but we knew from the cold, dead fact of Gregory Evans, a 27-year-old softball player from Rohnert Park, that Flores exterminated Evans because two […]