Republican Establishment’s Bête Noire Gomez Convicted Of Obstructing Public Proceedings

Following a more than three-year delay after the initial events in question, Victorville councilwoman Blanca Gomez was subjected to trial of four days’ duration earlier this month at Rancho Cucamonga’s West Valley Justice Center on charges relating to disturbing a public assembly, a count of conspiring to create a public disturbance and two counts of resisting arrest.
After deliberating for less than one-hour and 15 minutes, the jury that heard the case returned guilty verdicts on everything except the conspiracy charge.
As with virtually every aspect of Gomez’s public life, however, it is difficult to discern the legitimacy of the outcome of the trial, the validity of the charges against her, the motive of the social, political and legal establishment that brought the charges, as well as her guilt or innocence with regard not only to the charges against her but her provocation of a circumstance rife with mistrust, misunderstanding and false accusations.
While much remains shrouded in uncertainty when it comes to Gomez, a few facts can be discerned: Misunderstanding and overreaction are general features of her interaction with the establishment she has come to loathe and which loathes her in equal or greater measure. Moreover, Gomez carries around with her a megasized chip on her shoulder which is continually getting knocked off. Who, precisely, cast the first stone in the back-and-forth between her and the political establishment is at this point lost to history; what is unmistakable is that the flow of airborne rocks and stones between them is now constant.
There is a paradox with regard to Gomez that will likely never be resolved.

While she is sophisticated with regard to the use of social media, such that she outpaces her political rivals in using internet-based platforms and video streaming to depict those she has differences with in the most negative of light, when it comes to functioning within the confines of governmental procedure and bureaucratic manipulation to advocate on behalf of herself or her perceived constituents, she is at a complete loss.
In 2016, Gomez, a political neophyte with an imperfect understanding, at best, with regard to the function of local government, was elected to the Victorville City Council. In very short order, things got testy.
A Democrat and social activist convinced that Hispanics have been historically oppressed by the white population in California and elsewhere in the United States, she was intent on crusading for the enablement and ascendancy of Latinos and Latinas at each turn. When confronted by those who question the premise at the core of her activism – that the predominant holders of political office are Anglos inveterately intent on exploiting Hispanics at every opportunity, she routinely takes recourse in accusing those taking issue with her efforts and approach of having racist motivation. Complicating the situation in general is that the position to which she was elected – the Victorville City Council – is a panel of relatively modest authority in comparison to her grand political objectives, one that is dedicated to overseeing municipal government in Victorville, with its most notable reach being its ultimate authority on local land use decision, its management of Southern California Logistics Airport and having last say with regard to the city’s budget. Gomez’s focus was elsewhere, as she was intent on promoting the interests of Hispanics, and crusading against the injustices – within the legal system, economically and at large – she was convinced were being perpetrated against disadvantaged minorities by the white establishment.
Victorville was a poor venue for such a crusade. Together with the City of Colton, Victorville stood as one of two of San Bernardino County’s 24 municipalities historically – at least going back over the previous 45 years – in which not only had the sleeping Hispanic political giant awakened but where the community at large had embraced and enabled its Latino element to be assimilated into the governmental and larger social structure. Neither Gomez nor anyone else could credibly assert that Hispanics in Victorville had been politically disenfranchised. In the 28 years between 1992 and 2020, 20 people served on the Victorville City Council, of whom eight were Latinos and two were African American.
Indeed, once she was established on the Victorville City Council, Gomez, a Democrat, would find herself repeatedly and virulently at odds with the two other Hispanic members of the council who had been there before she arrived, Gloria Garcia and Eric Negrete, both of whom were Republicans.
Nearly from the outset of her tenure in office, Gomez clashed with all of her fellow and sister officeholders. The situation was exacerbated by Gomez’s oftentimes antagonistic and contentious style frequently aimed at goading her colleagues, as when she draped herself in a Mexican flag during a council meeting.
Less than two months after she was elected and roughly three weeks after she had been sworn into office, in late December 2016, Gomez, wearing a shirt/blouse that was provided to her by the City of Victorville which an embroidered/printed emblem on it identifying her and her status as a Victorville Councilwoman, showed up at a rally in Rialto that was being put on by another Hispanic politician who had just been voted into office, Rialto Councilman Rafael Trujillo. Trujillo’s rally, which was being coordinated in conjunction with the League of United Latin American Citizens and the Training Occupational Development Educating Communities Organization, was intended to whip up support for officially declaring Rialto as a sanctuary city. Trujillo was calling upon his council colleagues and Rialto’s residents to have the city adopt a policy of holding undocumented immigrants immune from prosecution for violating federal immigration laws.
Trujillo’s crusade was unpopular with a segment of the population on a number of grounds, not the least of which was that the then-president-elect, Donald Trump, who had come into office during the same election in which Trujillo and Gomez were elected, had indicated he would withhold federal funding from any cities which took on the sanctuary mantle. In no time, Gomez found herself at loggerheads with all of the members of the Victorville City Council, including the two white men on the panel – Jim Cox and Jim Kennedy – as well as Garcia and Negrete.
As a consequence of Gomez’s lack of understanding with regard to the limitations of municipal authority and the requirements of protocol and parliamentary procedure, she found herself in almost weekly clashes with Garcia, who was then serving as the appointed mayor. For Garcia, Gomez’s motions and requests at inopportune times were distracting, improper and out of keeping with Roberts’ Rules of Order. Garcia found herself gaveling Gomez down on a constant basis. On occasion, Garcia would have Gomez removed from the meeting with the latter became argumentative.
Councilman Cox labored to remain, for the most part successfully, aloof from the contretemps of Gomez’s creation. Cox, however, occasionally clashed with Gomez. The difficulties between Gomez and both Cox and Garcia, however, were mild compared to the deep personal enmity that developed between Gomez and Negrete.
While most white or Anglo officials generally sought to simply ignore Gomez’s frequent suggestions that they, as the recognized majority, were by definition racists, Gomez’s characterizations in this regard were particularly nettlesome to the Latino officeholders who were making a go of abstracting themselves into the American, California and local political mainstream. They found Gomez’s automatically defaulting to attributing any resistance to her ideas, suggestions or motions to racism to be both counterproductive and embarrassing.
With the exceptions of when Garcia’s patience was tested to its limit and she expelled Gomez from the council dais in the middle of meetings, Victorville officials endeavored to live with the situation. When Gomez sought to stage forums for her particular brand of activism elsewhere, she invited upon herself an even more serious form of opprobrium. In May 2018, then-Hesperia Mayor Russell Blewett died. At Blewett’s funeral, Gomez used her cellphone to take photographs of the open casket, prompting charges that Gomez was being purposefully disrespectful of the late councilman and his family as well as the entire community of Hesperia. Later that year, as Hesperia readied for what was to be its first by-district city council elections,
The lawsuit further cited an incident that took place in Hesperia on August 2, 2018, when Gomez had gone to Hesperia City Hall to assist in registering two Hispanic candidates, Gonzalo Gurrola and Robert Lucero, for a city council run in that year’s election. Gomez’s intent, as someone who had successfully run the gauntlet of getting the requisite paperwork to run for political office in the white-dominated atmosphere of governance in California, was to make sure that Gurrola and Lucero were not bounced out of being able to run in that year’s election on some trumped-up technicality or technicalities. In making that attempt, however, Gomez wandered, Hesperia city employees said, into an area off-limits to the public, whereupon the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, which provides contract law enforcement service to the City of Hesperia just as it does to the city of Victorville, was summoned. Gomez grew confrontational, maintaining she was simply seeking to make sure that Gurrola and Lucero properly filed their candidate applications. Ultimately, Gomez was arrested for trespassing. The incident was captured on video, both by hand-held cellphones wielded by Gomez, those with her and the city’s security cameras. Gomez released that footage to the media to cast the arrest as being one that was an unjustifiable intrusion upon her rights as a citizen, whereupon the city also made still photos from its security videos available to justify the official action. Ultimately, in that case, the district attorney’s office made a decision not to prosecute her.
In the meantime, Gomez’s relationship with Victorville’s officialdom continued to deteriorate, with Garcia publicly stating that Gomez was “a criminal on welfare” and Negrete openly decrying her as the single most counterproductive public official he had ever encountered. At the same time, however, Gomez appeared to be making progress in the realm of general public perception, as she found herself in the role of the lone dissident on the city council. Thus, gravitating in her direction were many of the critics of local government and its excesses, among whom were individuals far more knowledgeable and sophisticated with regard to the operation of government than she was. In this way, she became the mouthpiece for the opposition, such as it was, in Victorville. To the extent that she was being enabled by this dissident brain trust, on occasion she was able to make grounded, well-reasoned and articulate arguments with regard to certain policies. This enhanced her standing with an important segment of the population.
This factor redounded to Gomez’s political favor later in 2018, when Negrete was displaced in the November election by Rita Ramirez-Dean, a Democrat Gomez had endorsed. Also elected in that contest was Debra Jones, a Republican, who replaced Kennedy, who did not seek reelection. Two years later, when both Gomez and Garcia were scheduled to stand for re-election, for a combination of reasons, at least one of which extended to the degree to which Gomez had stirred up interest in the goings-on at City Hall, 22 candidates qualified their candidacies. Gomez, who was reelected, achieved the last laugh over Garcia, who was turned out of office when she finished ninth in a contest where the top three were victorious. Similarly, Negrete, who had attempted to stage a comeback, was able to manage only a 14th place showing.
The 2020 Victorville election represented a serious turnaround, one which should have provided Gomez with substantially more clout than it did. Like Kennedy in 2018, Cox opted out of running for reelection that year. Victorious in the 2020 race, besides Gomez, were Liz Becerra, a Republican, and Leslie Irving, a Democrat. With Gomez, Ramirez-Dean and Irving on the council, for the first time in more than a generation, the Victorville City Council had a Democratic majority. Moreover, Gomez, after just four years on the council, had become its senior member, with Garcia, Negrete, Kennedy and Cox having departed. Victorville does not have a directly elected mayor. Instead, the council chooses from among its five members an individual to serve as mayor, generally for a period of two years. Traditionally, the city has made a practice of rotating the mayoralty to an individual with at least two-year’s experience on the panel who has not previously served in the capacity of mayor, based upon the appointee’s willingness to accept the post. In 2016, for example, the mayoral appointment had been offered to Negrete, who declined it, based upon his belief that his professional responsibilities and commitments outside the city would not allow him to properly represent the city at groundbreakings, ribbon cuttings and such. For that reason, Garcia had remained in the mayoral role.
While logic and tradition dictated that following the 2020 election, Gomez as the most experienced member of the council who had not yet served as mayor should have that honor bestowed upon her, city officials managed to cut Gomez out of the process when the council met not in person on December 8, 2020 to swear in the new members and elect council officers to serve over the next two years. In addition to Gomez, through some never-explained technical glitch being locked out of the electronic hook-up among various city officials participating in the meeting, the two Republicans on the council – Jones and Becerra – cut a backroom deal with the newly elected Irving to deny Gomez that opportunity. Instead, Jones was made mayor and Ramirez-Dean mayor pro tem.
Within a span of less than two months in 2021, officials in Victorville escalated the struggle to contain Gomez from political maneuvering and using bureaucratic means of attenuating her influence to utilizing the justice system against her, albeit her comportment on occasion made doing so rather easy.
On June 2, 2021, Gomez and her significant other, now her husband, Robert Rodriguez, were lunching at the Panera Bread Bakery cafe in Victorville when Rodriguez had a confrontation with cafe employees over Rodriguez’s insistence on vaping within the establishment. The sheriff’s department was called and in the contretemps that followed, Gomez was charged with one misdemeanor count of PC148(a)1, resisting, obstructing or delaying of a peace officer and one misdemeanor count of PC242 – battery. Rodriguez was likewise charged.
A month and four days later, during the July 6 Victorville City Council meeting, a fracas broke out when city officials became warily regardful of Rodriguez, who was in the citizen gallery, and Mayor Debra Jones called for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s deputies, who were on standby to maintain order at the council meeting, to take action, to which Rodriguez reacted vocally and loudly. As a consequence, he was forcefully removed from the council chambers by the deputies on the scene. No charges ensued from that encounter, but it did set up what occurred at the next victorville
At the July 20, 2021 Victorville City Council meeting, Rodriguez was using his cell phone to video the proceedings. Also present at the meeting was Mayor Jones’ husband, Gene Jones. Like Rodriguez, Gene Jones was using his cell phone to video the council’s action and interaction with the public. When Mayor Jones demanded that Rodriguez desist in his videotaping without issuing a similar order to her husband and deputies approached Rodriguez to enforce the mayor’s order, Gomez came out of her chair behind the dais and went into the gallery. A tussle between Rodriguez and Gomez on one end and the deputies on the other ensued, with Rodriguez and Gomez being arrested.
Rodriguez, who did not waive his right to a speedy trial, went before a jury in December 2021, enduring an 18-day trial between December 2 and December 28. Conspiracy to disturb a public meeting and two resisting arrest charges against him were dropped. On December 29, 2021, he was convicted on the charge of disturbing the July 20 meeting, but was acquitted on the charge of disturbing the July 6 meeting. With regard to the yet remaining interfering with a business charge against him stemming from the June 2, 2021 incident at Panera Bread Cafe, that was converted to trespassing and he was convicted on that count. He was sentenced to 270 days in county jail on the misdemeanor convictions.
To some people, at least, the treatment accorded to Rodriguez came across as harsh and a bit out of proportion, with more than a few saying they believed he was being punished for his association with Gomez, which was seen as a warning to others that they might want to think twice about supporting her on any grounds and to any degree.
Gomez, waived her right to a speedy trial and the criminal matter continued to hang over her.
On February 21, 2023, Gomez was involved in yet another incident wherein she would eventually be accused of interrupting or disturbing a public meeting. After the city council on that day adjourned into a closed, executive meeting from which the public was excluded and then regrouped in public for the open session of the meeting, Gomez came down from the council dais and went to the podium provided to the public to address the council during the course of meetings.
Jones, who was then still the mayor, interrupted Gomez when she began speaking about a matter which she said had been discussed by the council during the just-concluded closed session. Jones interrupted her to tell her that matters discussed in an executive session of the council, outside the earshot or scrutiny of the public, are considered confidential. Gomez, asserting that the principle of “freedom of speech” warranted her being able to address the matter, managed to accuse another member of the city council and a San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department captain of conspiring against her. The scene devolved from there, with Jones cutting off the podium microphone and ordering the deputies on hand at the meeting to keep order to remove Gomez from the meeting, resulting in the councilwoman’s arrest. The district attorney’s office, in reaction to a report on the incident filed by the sheriff’s office, filed a further charge against Gomez of disturbing a public meeting. Ultimately, that charge was consolidated with the existing charges against her.
The criminal cases against Gomez were not the only legal proceedings involving her and the Victorville/San Bernardino County political and social establishment. A succession of attorneys who took it upon themselves to go to bat for Gomez in both criminal and civil court would learn that she was a problematic client. As early as 2018, Gomez was shopping around to find legal representation to challenge Victorville and Hesperia city officials and the county over the treatment she had been accorded. In 2020, she convinced San Diego-based attorney Marc Applbaum and his La Jolla-based law partner Bryan Gonzales to file a federal civil rights lawsuit on her behalf.
On December 21, 2020, Applbaum and Gonzales filed that lawsuit, with Gomez as the plaintiff, in Riverside Federal Court, naming The City of Victorville, Victorville City Manager Keith Metzler, former Victorville Mayor Gloria Garcia, former Victorville City Councilman Jim Cox, Victorville Mayor Debra Jones, the Victorville City Council, Victorville City Attorney Andre deBortnowsky, Victorville Assistant City Manager Sophie Smith, Victorville City Clerk Charlene Robinson, Victorville Assistant City Clerk Marcia Wolters and Victorville Spokeswoman Sue Jones, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department and Hesperia City Manager Nils Bentsen.
In the suit, Applbaum and Gonzales asserted that Gomez had been disenfranchised by current and former city officials “as a result of her alliances with pro-immigration and homeless nonprofit organizations” and that Gomez “is not allowed to either object or cast her vote in favor or in opposition to city council matters.” According to the suit, Gomez “is locked out of city council meetings and denied access to city business and documents in an arbitrary and capricious manner.”
In addition, the lawsuit took issue with Gomez’s August 2, 2018 arrest at Hesperia City Hall, stating that she had been  “wrongfully arrested” on that date and that Hesperia City Manager Nils Bentsen, “used his personal cell phone to take plaintiff’s picture” as she was being arrested “for purely political reasons, capturing and publishing her illegal arrest on the internet …to embarrass [Gomez] for political reasons.” Bentsen’s action, according to the lawsuit, displayed his “intent on harming [Gomez] in retaliation for being independent and honest.” The suit claimed that a video of her arrest at Hesperia City Hall established she did not resist arrest. The suit dwelt on the consideration that the district attorney’s office declined to press charges against Gomez relating to the August 2, 2018 incident, proof, Applbaum and Gonzales maintain, that the arrest was invalid and malicious.
In relatively short order, however, Applbaum and Gonzales would learn how difficult of a personage Gomez can be and that her overreaction to the overreaction of the governmental officials around her had led to a cycle of escalation in which it was impossible to say that Gomez did not have a hand in, or was at least partially responsible for, the untoward incidents involving her.
As Applbaum and Gonzales delved deeper into the facts surrounding Gomez’s interactions with officialdom, it became apparent to them that Gomez’s difficulties were in large measure a byproduct of her extremely unconventional and oftentimes self-defeating political approach. At once, it was clear that while Gomez was, arguably, a victim of governmental overreach and a misapplication of authority, she had on occasion after occasion made up the bed in which she was being forced to lie. Her experience in dealing with the government was, the lawyers found, a paradoxical amalgamation of Gomez’s own status as a privileged elected official contrasted with her characterization of herself as a disenfranchised member of the community, her naive or virtually nonexistent command of procedure, protocol and the law coupled with her contradictory use of sophisticated cutting edge electronic devices in documenting her public interactions, which inevitably provoked officials and eventually, after she made the mistake of using her phone camera to video court proceedings during one of her appearances, the court to physically seize those devices.
On January 11, 2021, less than a month after he had filed suit on Gomez’s behalf, Applbaum filed a request to withdraw as her counsel of record, leaving the matter to be handled by Gonzales. Gonzales filed the following day, January 12, to be released as Gomez’s attorney. On January 25, 2021, Federal Judge Jesus Bernal granted the requests terminating both Applbaum and Gonzales as her legal representatives.
It then fell to Gomez to serve as her own attorney. Her absolute inability to function within the parameters of any semblance of the procedural structure imposed by government was put on display when she made no further filings and was unable to meet even the minimal requirement that a copy of the lawsuit be served upon all of those named in the complaint. Nor were other notices of milestones and hearings in the case served upon the defendants. On February 1, 2022, in response to Gomez having made no filings for over a year and no response to opposing motions, Judge Bernal dismissed the entire action.
Very quickly after her July 20, 2021 arrest at the Victorville city Council meeting, Gomez succeeded in getting San Diego-based attorney Brian Pease, on August 8, 2021 to file a complaint naming the County of San Bernardino and Sheriff’s Detective Tyler McGee, deputies John Cahow, V. Quiroz T. Gagne and Sheriff’s Captain John Wickum, who heads the sheriff’s department’s operation in Victorville, over her arrest and what followed thereafter.
According to that lawsuit, after the July 20 incident, the sheriff’s department engaged in an illegitimate effort to justify the action taken at the council meeting. At issue, according to Pease, was that both Gomez and Rodriguez were videorecording the meeting, their videos demonstrated that neither of them had disrupted the meeting, and that the disruption occurred when the mayor called for the sheriff’s officers to interact with Rodriguez to prevent his videorecording of the meeting. The suit alleges that McGee, acting in his capacity as a San Bernardino County Sheriff’s detective, obtained a search warrant from San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Kyle Brodie to search Gomez’s and Rodriguez’s homes, including “all rooms, closets, attics, garages, storage areas, patios, vehicles, RV in the back yard, including any safes, vaults, miscellaneous locked containers as well as all person’s [sic] present.” According to the suit, “The property to be searched for was listed as: ‘cell phones possessed by Gomez and Rodriguez.’”
The theory McGee used in obtaining the warrant, according to the lawsuit, was that Gomez and Rodriguez had conspired to interrupt and disturb the July 20 meeting. In actuality according to Pease, the disturbance at the meeting evolved as a consequence of the city’s action, specifically that of Mayor Jones, and no such conspiracy existed, a fact known and understood by McGee and the sheriff’s department when the warrant was being prepared. “This warrant was obtained on false pretenses, as it is legal to record city council meetings, and no crime was committed other than by [the] defendants,” the lawsuit states.
Though the conspiracy element of the criminal cases against both Gomez and Rodriguez were dropped, the case that Pease made on Gomez’s behalf has stalled out, at least partially because Gomez’s actions have allowed the county’s defense attorneys to portray her in an unfavorable light.
In her criminal case, Gomez had the unbelievable fortune of being able to attract two of the more well established, respected and successful members of the San Bernardino County criminal defense bar – David Goldstein and Raj Maline – to defend her. Yet her unwillingness or inability to cooperate with either in the defense they were seeking to construct for her ended up exasperating both, and they, in time, ditched her as a client.
That, ultimately, resulted in Gomez having to go to trial, represented by an attorney, Vonya Quarles, a Riverside County and Los Angeles County-based attorney far less steeped in the ins and outs of San Bernardino county’s criminal courts than Goldstein or Maline. Gomez’s actual trial commenced on October 2 and played out over five days – October 2, October 3, October 7, October 8 and October 14 – in the Rancho Cucamonga Courthouse before Judge Michael Camber. Deputy District Attorney Zachery Mehr prosecuted the case. After the close of the trial on October 14, the matter was sent to the jury, which commenced deliberations at 9:11 a.m. 42 minutes later, at 9:53 a.m., the jury announced it had reached a verdict on all counts. After a break in the proceedings, the jury returned at 10:59 and the proceedings were reconvened. At 11:02 the verdict was read. The jury had found Gomez guilty as to counts 1 and 2, PC148(A)(1)-M: obstructing or resisting a public officer and guilty as to counts 3 and 5, PC403-M: disturbing a public assembly. She was found not guilty of Count 4, PC182(A)(1)-M: conspiracy to commit a crime.
Gomez’s patented ability to antagonize her council colleagues and other elements of the governmental and political establishment is undisputed. That the very obvious personality differences that exist between her and those officials actually constitute criminal offenses is a doubtful proposition, however, and Victorville and county authorities have been struggling to come to terms with the difficulty that Gomez and a handful of other public issue activists have presented with their tactics that include, prominently, videotaping their interactions with officials and officeholders and then livestreaming them on social media. The county’s unconstitutional and deeply ingrained policy of seizing personal electronic devices containing video footage or what many consider to be evidence incriminating public officials in ill-advise actions or even outright illegal activity which some county officials desire to control the dissemination of has convinced at least some members of the public that it is Gomez who is on the side of right, truth and justice rather than her antagonists and officialdom that she has been at war with for nearly eight years.
Despite the outcome in the courtroom of Judge Camber, many feel the verdict that was rendered failed to meet the rigors of true justice. Indeed, with the prosecution’s accusations angled at Gomez and Gomez alone, there were circumstances at the July 2021 council meeting that were not considered by the jury, in particular the behavior of Mayor Jones’s husband, who was like Mr. Rodriguez videotaping the proceedings but was not subject to the mayor’s orders that he stop videotaping and was not subjected to arrest when he did not discontinue videotaping. There is a further suggestion by some that the political establishment misused the justice system against Councilwoman Gomez because of her stances on public issues that are at a variance with their positions. There is no doubt in the minds of those who inhabit the political establishment and only slightly less doubt in the minds of those who have seen Gomez in action that she is one irritating personage. To a good number of people, Gomez illustrates as few others can the flaws in democracy that Plato envisioned nearly 2,400 years ago. Yet, the question remains whether the City of Victorville and its officials, with the assistance of the district attorney’s office, criminalized what should have been protected activity, within our vaunted political system, on Ms. Gomez’s part.

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