An identity thief who has had success in San Bernardino County and Los Angeles County by confronting unsuspecting citizens while impersonating a law enforcement officer and then using an electronic device to capture personal data from the identification produced by his victims has been collared by members of the Fontana Police Department’s Multiple Enforcement Team.
Brian Hutchins appears to have obtained personal information on as many as several hundred people in Southern California. The degree to which he put that information to use in cleaning out the bank accounts of those whose identities he stole or utilized his victim’s credit accounts to make unauthorized purchases is publicly unknown at this point. Several Southern California law enforcement agencies are at work attempting to piece together the degree to which Hutchins’ operation extended.
Hutchins appears to have been able to elude capture for some time by maintaining a relatively low profile and by relocating from place to place. Over the last several years, he has lived variously in Victorville, Rancho Cucamonga, Upland, Adelanto, Highland, Fontana, Bloomington and Colton. His mode of operation has been variously described as “brilliant… daring… simple… and sophisticated.” Nevertheless, Hutchins used his own name in carrying out his impersonations, doing so in his security officer uniform, which was his main prop. That consideration and others, including that he did not appear to have a badge or other identifying credentials as a law enforcement officer or even calling cards, is perhaps an indication that the ruse Hutchins was engaged in was one of desperation rather than a well-planned and thought-through undertaking. Some have suggested that his boldness in carrying off his impersonations and information thefts were less an indication of criminal skill than a reflection of mental illness. Indeed, there is something to indicate that Hutchins may have gotten away with what he did because his action was so unorthodox, his behavior so dodgy, his appearance as a law enforcement officer so convincing and the performance of the law enforcement agencies in the jurisdiction where he functioned so unfocused.
What the Sentinel has learned about Hutchins is this:
He favored women over men as victims. He had access to some basic information about those he victimized, in particular their full names and residence or general whereabouts. Typically, he carried with him a laptop computer and would approach the women, who were usually alone at home or at work. He would then aggressively confront them, in the manner of a police officer, using each woman’s first and middle name but assigning her a different last name. When the woman would acknowledge her first and middle names but deny the last name Hutchins had selected for her, he would again, presuming upon the air of authority he had enveloped himself in, suggest that that the name the woman had given was an alias, demanding identification. In multiple cases the individuals complied with the demand, oftentimes producing driver licenses and even further documentation such as a credit cards or social security cards when Hutchins suggested that the driver licenses were forgeries.
Investigators believe Hutchins used the camera on his laptop or perhaps a scanning device within it to to photograph the identification provided to him or to pull data off of the driver licenses’ or credit cards’ magnetic strips.
After engaging in some further questioning, Hutchins would accept the victim’s assertion that she was not the person he had identified, and state his inquiry might have grown out of a simple misunderstanding because of the identical first and middle names of the victim and the individual Hutchins purported to be a person of interest in his “investigation.” Shortly thereafter, he would make his exit, armed, in most cases, with the personal information he had come to retrieve.
Hutchins was undone earlier this month when he approached a woman at her residence in the unincorporated west Fontana area.
There is evidence to suggest Hutchins was calculating in choosing his victims on the basis of where they lived. It seems he avoided carrying out his grift against those residing in cities which had police departments. Instead, Hutchins would target those who lived in unincorporated county areas in either San Bernardino County or Los Angeles County that were patrolled by the sheriff’s department or in cities in either county which contracted with the sheriff’s department for law enforcement services. His apparent belief was that neither sheriff’s department could be counted upon to be diligent and vigilant with regard to the type of nonviolent criminality he was engaged in.
If indeed that was the case, Hutchins’ calculation was correct. Unfortunately for him, despite the crime he engaged in having occurred within the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department’s bailiwick, the Fontana Police Department took an interest in the case when the matter was reported to it first.
The victim informed members of her family about the encounter with Hutchins. His approach to the home and his presence on its porch was captured by a security camera. Moreover, the victim, though she had been cozened into believing that she was dealing with a bona fide police officer while Hutchins was present and was intimidated by the implied threat of arrest that might follow if she did not establish her identity as being different from the woman Hutchins said he believed her to be, yet had the presence of mind to remember that his uniform bore his first initial and last name – B Hutchins. The woman’s grown son, assessing the situation, contacted the Fontana Police Department. A member of the Multiple Enforcement Team was immediately struck by the nature of what had occurred and sensed that the individual in question was likely not a law enforcement officer as he had maintained, and was quite likely fishing for personal information that was going to be put to some questionable or illegal purpose. Alas, the officer said, protocol dictated that the matter would have to be taken up by the sheriff’s department, which has jurisdiction in the unincorporated county area of Fontana.
The victim and her son went to the sheriff’s department to make a crime report. The sheriff’s department, however, was unwilling to rush to the assumption that the individual who confronted the victim was not an investigator with some agency or other, and was unwilling to take a crime report. Upon the insistence of the victim’s son, however, a sheriff’s deputy did write an incident report.
The sheriff’s department’s interest in the case ended there, with no further investigation.
Back at the Fontana Police Department, however, members of the Multiple Enforcement Team, intrigued by what had been reported to them, ran a check on B. Hutchins. A number of matches to the first initial and last name came back, but only a limited number in the Fontana area. Brian Hutchins, a parolee who had been convicted in 1997 for PC 459, felony burglary, for which he had been given a sentence of two years and eight months and convicted in 2011 of 451(B), felony arson of an inhabited structure, for which he had been given a sentence of ten years, was living in Fontana.
Convinced that the sheriff’s department was not going to act but equally convinced there was something to what the victim had experienced in her interaction with Hutchins, the Multiple Enforcement Team utilized its department’s access to Ring camera videos, security camera footage that offers constant surveillance of house entrances, in most cases front porches and front doors. The police department was able to utilize the sheriff’s department incident report and the evidence it had developed to obtain a warrant, with which it initiated surveillance of Hutchins. That surveillance provided the team with grounds to arrest Hutchins, who was taken into custody at his home.
At the time of his arrest, investigators – real ones – seized his laptop. A forensic examination of that device determined the laptop’s hard drive contained evidence showing multiple victims from San Bernardino County and Los Angeles County had their personal information stolen by Hutchins. He was booked on identity theft and a parole hold.
It is possible that the uniform Hutchins used was one he wore while working as a security guard at the Oasis Night Club. He did not have a badge nor any credentials in his possession that purported him as a police officer.
Hutchins has not yet been charged by the district attorney’s office with any crime. Investigators are still working to determine which and how many of his victims suffered monetary losses as a consequence of Hutchins’ possession of their personal information, and whether he was working alone or networking with others.
Governor Newsom Orders Special Counsel To Examine Evidence In Cooper Conviction
For the sixth time, a reexamination is to be done with regard to the still extant physical evidence related to Kevin Cooper’s 1985 conviction for the June 1983 murders of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter Jessica and 11-year-old neighbor Christopher Hughes in Chino Hills. The examination is to include the results of recent DNA testing of certain items tied to the crime.
Cooper in 1985 was convicted and then condemned to die in the gas chamber at San Quentin, where he has remained on Death Row for more than 36 years, having in the meantime launched a series of appeals, all of which were curtailed or failed to convince higher courts that he had been wrongfully convicted.
Like his predecessor Jerry Brown before him and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger prior to that, California Governor Gavin Newsom is calling for a very deliberative process with regard to Cooper, who remains in prison and unlikely to be executed by the state, which in the years since Cooper’s conviction has changed its means of putting the condemned to death and has not executed anyone since January 2006.
Initial efforts to prevent Cooper’s execution proceeded from the standpoint that his guilt was presumed but emphasized the lack of complete certainty thereto. Later efforts on his behalf have sought to propound that he is innocent. Most recently, Cooper has applied for clemency, and it is in accordance with that application that Newsom today, May 8, 2021, called for the review of the investigative and evidentiary record to aid him in his decision. The application for clemency appears to be a retreat by Cooper’s defenders from the somewhat problematic assertions of innocence that had been posited on his behalf, and instead consists of a return to the position that the case for his guilt is not airtight. That retreat was prompted by the consideration that DNA testing of evidence insisted upon by Cooper’s defense team produced results that did not, as his lawyers had hopefully insisted, indicate his innocence, and instead seemed to shore up an element of the prosecution’s case for Cooper’ guilt.
If Cooper is innocent, his timing was execrable, and by his own actions he entangled himself in a set of circumstances which lend themselves to a logical conclusion that he murdered the Ryens and Hughes.
Thrice convicted of burglary and imprisoned in Pennsylvania in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Cooper was released in 1982, to be shortly thereafter accused of kidnapping and raping an underaged girl who had interrupted him during yet another burglary. Confined to a Pennsylvania psychiatric facility, Mayview State Hospital, he escaped, fleeing to Southern California where he used the alias David Trautman. In Los Angeles County he was apprehended after committing two burglaries and was given a four-year prison sentence, which he began serving at the California Institution for Men in Chino in April 1983. Having been housed in the minimum security wing of that prison, Cooper on June 2, 1983 either scaled, or climbed through a hole in, the prison fence and made his way away from the prison west toward what was then the substantially rural and unincorporated community of Chino Hills. Cooper’s escape from the Chino Institution for Men came within the same approximate time frame that Michael “Fast Horse” Martinez, one of the wards at Boys Republic, an institutional all-boys home and school in Chino Hills for displaced, wayward and troubled youths, took flight from that facility.
There is no dispute that Cooper holed up in a Chino Hills home owned by Larry Lease and brothers Roger and Kermit Lang where a tenant, Kathleen Bilbia, a school teacher, had lived previously and had temporarily vacated when she went on holiday following the end of the school year shortly before the murders occurred. Cooper spent at least a day-and-a-half there, sleeping in a closet in one of the house’s bedrooms.
Late in the morning of June 4, Virginia Lang briefly came into the Lease/Lang house to get a sweater, but Cooper withdrew toward the back of the house and managed to avoid her seeing him. The Lease/Lang home was some 375 feet distant from the home of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter Jessica and their 8-year-old son Joshua. Phone records show that while at the Lease/Lang home Cooper made calls to two female acquaintances/friends, one in Pennsylvania and another in Los Angeles, in an effort to get them to provide him with money or otherwise assist him in getting farther away, the last of which was made around 8 p.m. on June 4. He also smoked prison-issued Role-Rite tobacco rolled in prison-issued rolling papers, the butts of which were left behind in the Lease/Lang house.
On June 5, 1983, Bill Hughes, came to the Ryen home to pick up his 11-year-old son Christopher, who had spent the previous evening with the Ryen family attending a barbecue at another location and was going to sleep over at the Ryen home the night of June 4 through until the morning of June 5. The Ryen family station wagon was gone. He went around to the back of the house and looked through a sliding glass door into the master bedroom of the house.
Visible were Douglas and Peggy and his son, all dead, and Joshua Ryen severely wounded. Hidden from his view was Jessica Ryen, who lay dead in a hallway. The four deceased – the husband and wife, their daughter and his son – had been chopped with a hatchet, cut with a knife, and stabbed with an ice-pick, having sustained mostly to their heads, upper torsos or extremities, 37, 33, 46 and 25 wounds, respectively. Joshua Ryen was yet alive, his throat having been cut. The house phone was inoperable and Bill Hughes left to summon help at once.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, after having Joshua Ryen transported to Loma Linda University Medical Center by helicopter, initiated an investigation that entailed deputies, detectives, sergeants, forensic specialists and department higher-ups including then-Sheriff Floyd Tidwell, traipsing all over the murder scene and its environs.
In his testimony at trial, Cooper stated that he had left the Lease/Lang house after sundown on June 4 and had hitchhiked to Mexico. It is established with certainty that Cooper checked into a hotel in Tijuana, just across the international border roughly 130 miles south of Chino Hills, at 4:30 pm on June 5, 1983.
A few days later, the Ryens’ station wagon was discovered in a church parking lot in Long Beach. Sheriff’s investigators, after missing them in an initial search, eventually extracted from that vehicle and logged in as evidence cigarette butts consisting of prison-issued Role-Rite tobacco rolled in prison-issued rolling papers indistinguishable from those found at the Lease/Lang house. An all points bulletin identifying Cooper as a suspect in the murders was issued.
From Tijuana, Cooper went to Ensenada, where on June 9 he made the acquaintance of an American couple, Owen and Angelica Handy of Humboldt County, who had come to Baja California on their 32-foot sailboat, the Illa Tika. Identifying himself as “Angel Jackson,” Cooper persuaded them to allow him to accompany them as a deckhand as they headed back north up the California Coast, eventually anchoring in Pelican Cove off of Santa Cruz Island. Some seven weeks after the Chino Hills murders, during the last week of July, 1983, a 26-foot sailboat anchored near the Handys’ boat. Its occupants, a couple from North Hollywood, invited the Handys and Cooper aboard their sloop to a fish fry, during which some alcohol consumption was involved. Well after midnight, Cooper returned to the 26-foot boat, where, armed with a knife, he raped the wife. Her husband reported the rape and accompanied his wife to Goleta Valley Hospital, where she was treated and released. The couple then went to the sheriff’s office to provide a statement with regard to the rape. There the woman saw a “Wanted for Murder” poster/flier in the detectives’ office bearing a photo of Cooper, whereupon Angel Jackson was identified as Kevin Cooper.
Cooper was taken into custody shortly thereafter by Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department deputies and Coast Guard personnel. Items from the Lease/Lang house were found by deputies searching the Handys’ sailboat in the follow-up to the arrest.
Then-San Bernardino County District Attorney Dennis Kottmeier prosecuted the case himself with the assistance of one of his deputy prosecutors, John Kochis. The case was tried not in San Bernardino County Superior Court but in San Diego Superior Court before Judge Richard C. Garner. Cooper was defended by San Bernardino County Public Defender David Negus. The trial lasted from September 1984 until June of 2005.
Kottmeier and Kochis, though handicapped by an absence of any direct evidence linking Cooper to the killings, were nevertheless able to build a strong circumstantial case against the defendant. Kottmeier entered into evidence partial shoe prints found at the murder scene and at the Lease/Lang house, where Cooper admitted he had hid after his prison escape. Kottmeier and Kochis further used the cigarette butts consisting of the Role-Rite prison-issue tobacco and prison-issued rolling papers found in the Lease/Lang house and in the Ryens’ abandoned station wagon to tie Cooper to the crime.
Another damning piece of evidence was a spot of blood on the hallway wall of the Ryen house that was consistent with Cooper’s blood profile.
A bloody shoeprint made by a Pro-Ked Dude shoe, matching the type of shoes issued to prison inmates, was demonstrated as having been impressed on a sheet in the master bedroom of the Ryen house, along with a matching shoeprint on a spa cover outside the Ryen house, and another in the pool room at the Lease/Lang house. This was augmented with positive Luminol tests, demonstrating the presence of a quantity of blood in a shower in the Lease/Lang house.
A bloodstained hatchet from the Lease/Lang house found near the Ryen home along with the sheath from the hatchet found on the floor of the bedroom that contained the closet where Cooper had slept were presented as evidence to the jury, along with a button found in the Lease/Lang house that matched a prison-issue jacket. Some hunting knives and at least one ice pick were missing from the Lease/Lang house. A strap fitting one of the missing knives was found in the same bedroom.
Another piece of evidence to suggest that Cooper had made his way from the Lease/Lang house to the Ryen residence consisted of an empty beer can in the field between the two homes matching beer in the refrigerator at the Lease/Lang house.
The prosecution demonstrated that there were two burrs adhered to the inside of Jessica Ryen’s nightgown approximately ten inches up from the bottom hem. Kottmeier asserted to the jury that because the top of Jessica’s nightgown did not have holes corresponding with some of Jessica’s post mortem chest wounds, at some point the assailant had raised Jessica’s nightgown, and, in the process of inflicting her chest wounds, deposited the burrs. The prosecution also presented evidence to show similar burrs were found on the inside of the Ryen station wagon and on a blanket found in the closet where Cooper slept on June 3. Plants producing the burrs grew in the field between the Ryen house and the Lease/Lang house.
There were a total of 141 witness called, many of whom offered contradictory testimony. Some of the most dramatic, meaningful and important elements of the trial consisted of testimony from sheriff’s investigators and hospital personnel at Loma Linda University Hospital where Joshua Ryen was flown by helicopter on June 5, 1983. Initially, in the presence of a sheriff’s detective and a social worker, the eight-year-old indicated his attackers were three white men. In a second interview an hour later, Dr. Mary Howell, Joshua’s grandmother, also testified that Joshua told Deputy Hector O’Campo that three Latinos were in the house when the family was killed. On June 15, Joshua told Reserve Deputy Luis Simo that Cooper was not the killer, saying “He didn’t do it,” upon seeing Cooper’s photo on television during a newscast.
Joshua Ryen’s testimony at trial was provided via videotape, during which he said he could not remember much about his attacker or attackers and did not see his attacker directly but as “a shadow on the wall.”
Cooper testified for five days under examination by Kottmeier, during which he admitted to being in the Lease/Lang house immediately adjacent to the Ryen property, but did not waiver in maintaining his innocence to the murders, while acknowledging that he had stolen a purse from a woman in San Ysidro after hitchhiking there to make his way into Mexico.
Cooper’s attorney, San Bernardino County Public Defender David Negus, put on testimony by Edward Lelko, the bartender at the Canyon Corral Bar, located not far from the Ryen home, that he had served beer to three men the night of June 4, 1983. The men were not among his regular set of customers, which generally consisted of cowboys and nearby residents. They never returned to the bar. One of those men was “extremely drunk” and was subsequently refused service. The three wore light-colored T-shirts, similar to a bloodstained tan T-shirt found on June 7, 1983, beside a road near the bar. That shirt bore the blood of Doug Ryen, it was later determined.
Based upon the circumstantial evidence he and Kochis had placed before the jury, Kottmeier convinced the jurors that there was full and convincing proof that Cooper committed the murders. Cooper was convicted on four counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. The jury recommended the death penalty and Judge Garner sentenced him to death in the gas chamber at San Quentin. There followed reviews by and appeals to state and federal courts for more than 18 years. Cooper was scheduled to be executed on February 10, 2004. On January 29, 2004, then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger denied a request that Cooper be granted clemency. On February 8, 2004, a three judge panel consisting of Judges Pamela Rymer, Ronald Gould and James Browning heard Cooper’s petition and rejected it by a vote of 2–1. Judge Browning, as the lone dissenter was able to assemble enough judges to get a judicial panel to block the execution to allow further DNA testing. Ultimately, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the stay, effectively blocking the execution of the death warrant.
The Campaign to End the Death Penalty, the ACLU and Death Penalty Focus took up Cooper’s cause. Over the years, Kottmeier was supplanted as San Bernardino County district attorney by Dennis Stout, followed by Mike Ramos, and currently by Jason Anderson. The San Bernardino County sheriff at the time of the murders, Floyd Tidwell, was succeeded by Dick Williams, Gary Penrod, Rod Hoops and now John McMahon, with each successive administration considering the upholding of the integrity of the Ryen/Hughes death investigation and Kevin Cooper’s conviction to be synonymous with the credibility of San Bernardino County law enforcement.
The sheriff’s department’s handling of the case, which was already subject to criticism given the fashion in which more than 70 individuals, many of them sheriff’s department personnel, had trampled evidence at the murder scene in the two days following the discovery of the bodies, had its reputation damaged further when what would later be represented as key evidence was mishandled or mislaid, lost or destroyed by the department. A tan-colored shirt with blood stains was found by sheriff’s personnel not very distant from the murder scene beside Peyton Road. That shirt was logged in as evidence and is yet preserved, and was subject to the DNA testing ordered by Governor Brown just before left office in 2018. Also alongside Peyton Road, a local resident, Laurel Epler, came across a blue shirt which she said she believed had blood on it. She called the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department and reported the find. The sheriff’s department misplaced that second shirt. A pair of bloody overalls alleged to have been worn by the man wearing the tan shirt, Lee Furrow, were thrown out without being examined by the sheriff’s department’s forensic experts, its scientific investigations division or its laboratory.
The blue shirt, the tan shirt and the bloody overalls became objects of acute scrutiny and speculation as the post trial examination and reexamination of Cooper’s guilt intensified. Those items and the goings-on at the Canyon Corral Bar became the core of an alternate murder suspect(s) theory centering around Furrow.
While the projection of Furrow as the possible perpetrator of the murders held promise for Cooper’s legal team and can be credited with having kept Cooper from being put to death more than 17 years ago, the succession of unlikely layers of happenstance this theory involves, when compared to the far more likely causal presumptions in the original prosecution’s theory has created a level of skepticism about the defense theories and the assertions of Cooper’s innocence, at both the governmental and public levels, that is militating against Cooper far more than in his favor.
Investigators working on behalf of the legal team seeking to keep Cooper from being executed explored in far greater depth the trail of testimony and evidence involving Edward Lelko, the bartender at the Canyon Corral Bar the night of the murders. Lelko’s information explored at the trial proved to be a cul-de-sac for the defense at that time. Many years later, however, it loomed as a major boulevard toward what Cooper’s advocates considered to be justice. Others in the Canyon Corral Bar who saw the three strangers that night were Shirley Killian, the bar manager; Pam Smith, a bar patron; Lance Stark, a bar patron whom the sheriff’s department tried to intimidate into not testifying in 2004; Christine Slonaker, a phlebotomist, who recognized blood on the strangers’ clothing; Mary Mellon Wolfe, who was with Slonaker and who, like Slonaker, testified to seeing the blood at Cooper’s evidentiary hearing in 2004; and Kathy Royals, a waitress who waited on the strangers.
Defense investigators learned that another convicted murderer, Clarence Ray Allen, who was himself executed in 2006, had become embroiled in a dispute with Doug and Peggy Ryen over a horse he had purchased from them. Among Allen’s employees was Lee Furrow, another criminal whom Allen had previously hired to kill Allen’s son’s 17-year-old girlfriend, Mary Sue Kitts. According to Furrow’s then-girlfriend, Diana Roper, Lee Furrow came home in the early morning of June 5, 1983 wearing bloody overalls and without the tan shirt he had been wearing earlier in the day. Lee Furrow changed out of the overalls and on June 9, Diana Roper called the sheriff’s department to report what had occurred and thereafter provided the overalls to the department. The sheriff’s department never had its scientific investigations division test the overalls for blood, never turned them over to Negus, Cooper’s defense attorney, and instead disposed of them on the day of Cooper’s arraignment. Internal sheriff’s department phone logs established that a deputy sheriff made multiple attempts to give the overalls to the lead investigator. This contradicted the deputy’s later claim, when the defense made an issue of the overalls, that he never considered the overalls of evidentiary value. A supervisor admitted to an investigator that he signed off on disposing of the overalls, thereby impeaching the deputy’s testimony at trial that he made that decision.
It is believed by some that Furrow is one of the three men who were unfamiliar to Lelko, the bartender at the Canyon Corral Bar working the night of June 4, 1983. Killian, Smith, Stark, Slonaker, Wolfe and Royals, all of whom were present at the bar that night, would eventually provide testimony with regard to the presence of the three men at the Corral Canyon Bar on the night of June 4. The Ryen family’s station wagon was found in Long Beach, within five miles of Furrow’s mother’s home. There was blood matched to the Ryen family on both the driver side and passenger side of the front seat as well as in the back seat, an indication, Cooper’s defenders say, that three men attacked the Ryen family and Christopher Hughes and then, splattered with blood, made their getaway in the station wagon.
Cooper’s defenders postulate that Furrow, who was part of a murderous gang that had murdered on behalf of Allen in the past, had been sent to Chino Hills to collect on a debt the Ryens owed Allen for the horse. Undercutting that theory is the consideration that by June 1983, Furrow and Allen were no longer on good terms. In 1977, Furrow had entered a guilty plea to killing Mary Sue Kitts at the bequest of Allen, who from prison sought to arrange to have another career criminal, Billy Ray Hamilton, murder Furrow and seven other witnesses to prevent them from testifying during the appeal process of Allen’s conviction in the Kitts murder.
By the early 2000s, Cooper’s legal team sought to have DNA testing carried out on several of the pieces of evidence used to convict him more than a decade-and-a-half after his trial. Evincing a rather curious attitude for those so confident in Cooper’s guilt, prosecutors resisted those requests. Eventually, after Cooper’s 2004 execution was narrowly averted, an order for DNA testing of some of the evidence was granted. Pointedly, the DNA test showed that the tan shirt had both Douglas Ryen’s and Cooper’s blood on it.
The presence of Cooper’s blood on the shirt delivered a seemingly irrefutable blow to the assertions of Cooper’s innocence. Nonetheless, Cooper’s defenders doubled down, saying they believed that Cooper’s blood, drawn from him after his arrest as part of the investigative process, was subsequently planted on the shirt. Furthermore, Cooper’s legal team staked the credibility of its case on a clump of blonde hair found in Jessica Ryen’s hand, maintaining it was indicative that she was murdered by someone other than Cooper, an African-American.
On Christmas Eve 2018, just prior to his leaving office, Governor Brown issued an executive order relating to the Cooper case calling for new testing, using up-to-date scientific standards to be applied on four pieces of evidence: the tan T-shirt found in a ditch off the side of the road near the Corral Canyon Bar, an orange towel found near the scene and the handle of the hatchet used in the murders and the hatchet sheath. “I take no position as to Mr. Cooper’s guilt or innocence at this time, but colorable factual questions have been raised about whether advances in DNA technology warrant limited retesting of certain physical evidence in this case,” Brown wrote in his executive order. Brown said that if the tests failed to turn up new DNA or some that did not lead to any identifiable individual, “this matter should be closed.”
Over the years, the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, district attorneys Kottmeier, Stout, Ramos and deputy district attorneys Grover Merritt and James Secord have insisted that Cooper was the killer, he was given a fair and adequate trial while represented by a competent attorney and that previous DNA tests and other scientific analyses point unerringly to his guilt.
In appeals to Governor Brown in 2017 and 2018 that led to Brown’s Christmas Eve 2018 order, Cooper’s defense team, led by attorney Norman Hile, insisted that Cooper had never worn the tan shirt and the person who was wearing it was the person who had murdered the Ryens and Hughes. Hile said modern DNA analysis is more sophisticated and exacting than what was previously available, extending beyond blood to sweat and skin particles absorbed into or adhering to cloth, allowing a determination to be made that it was not Cooper who was wearing the shirt. The testing would also bear out Cooper’s defense team’s suggestion that the case against Cooper has been tainted all along by law enforcement misconduct and efforts to load the dice against his client, most notably Hile said, by saturating the tan T-shirt with blood drawn from Cooper as part of the investigative process after his capture.
Brown’s order did not extend to DNA testing on the clump of hairs found clutched in Jessica Ryen’s palm. In the spring of 2019, however, Hile and Cooper’s advocates convinced Brown’s successor, Governor Newsom, to augment the testing on the shirt, the orange towel and the hatchet handle and hatchet sheath with DNA testing on the hairs in Jessica Ryen’s hand, other preserved blood evidence, fingernail scrapings from the victims and a green button found at the Lease/Lang house.
Bode Technology, a respected forensic laboratory, carried out that analysis. The results beyond what was already known, that the shirt bore Cooper’s blood and that of Douglas Ryen, were inconclusive. The hairs in Jessica Ryen’s hand were her own and non-human animal hair.
Both camps – those representing Cooper and the district attorney’s office – maintain the Bode Laboratories examination results support their positions with regard to Cooper’s innocence or guilt. The Bode results do nothing to add to the prosecution’s case that Cooper is the murderer, Hile and his team maintain. The Bode results confirm that Cooper’s blood was on the shirt along with Douglas Ryen’s, the district attorney’s office has countered, and there was nothing in the testing to suggest that anyone other Cooper murdered the Ryens and Hughes.
To resolve the dispute, Newsom’s order calls for an independent investigation of the evidence marshaled so far in the aftermath of Cooper’s conviction, one which is to be carried out by the law firm of Morrison & Foerster, which is to serve as a special counsel. Newsom considers Morrison & Foerster to be an independent trier of fact, with no interest in sustaining Cooper’s conviction nor in making a determination of Cooper’s innocence.
Under normal circumstances, an appeal of a conviction extends only to issues raised at trial. Newsom’s order gives Morrison & Foerster license to explore any issues relating to Cooper’s guilt or innocence, whether previously considered in the official record of the trial and the appeal process or not. The review will extend to the 1984-to-1985 trial, the sheriff’s department’s investigative file, evidence and testimony presented pre-trial and during appeals, and any material or evidence that did not make it into the trial or appellate record, along with all DNA testing results.
-Mark Gutglueck
Cooper in 1985 was convicted and then condemned to die in the gas chamber at San Quentin, where he has remained on Death Row for more than 36 years, having in the meantime launched a series of appeals, all of which were curtailed or failed to convince higher courts that he had been wrongfully convicted.
Like his predecessor Jerry Brown before him and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger prior to that, California Governor Gavin Newsom is calling for a very deliberative process with regard to Cooper, who remains in prison and unlikely to be executed by the state, which in the years since Cooper’s conviction has changed its means of putting the condemned to death and has not executed anyone since January 2006.
Initial efforts to prevent Cooper’s execution proceeded from the standpoint that his guilt was presumed but emphasized the lack of complete certainty thereto. Later efforts on his behalf have sought to propound that he is innocent. Most recently, Cooper has applied for clemency, and it is in accordance with that application that Newsom today, May 8, 2021, called for the review of the investigative and evidentiary record to aid him in his decision. The application for clemency appears to be a retreat by Cooper’s defenders from the somewhat problematic assertions of innocence that had been posited on his behalf, and instead consists of a return to the position that the case for his guilt is not airtight. That retreat was prompted by the consideration that DNA testing of evidence insisted upon by Cooper’s defense team produced results that did not, as his lawyers had hopefully insisted, indicate his innocence, and instead seemed to shore up an element of the prosecution’s case for Cooper’ guilt.
If Cooper is innocent, his timing was execrable, and by his own actions he entangled himself in a set of circumstances which lend themselves to a logical conclusion that he murdered the Ryens and Hughes.
Thrice convicted of burglary and imprisoned in Pennsylvania in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Cooper was released in 1982, to be shortly thereafter accused of kidnapping and raping an underaged girl who had interrupted him during yet another burglary. Confined to a Pennsylvania psychiatric facility, Mayview State Hospital, he escaped, fleeing to Southern California where he used the alias David Trautman. In Los Angeles County he was apprehended after committing two burglaries and was given a four-year prison sentence, which he began serving at the California Institution for Men in Chino in April 1983. Having been housed in the minimum security wing of that prison, Cooper on June 2, 1983 either scaled, or climbed through a hole in, the prison fence and made his way away from the prison west toward what was then the substantially rural and unincorporated community of Chino Hills. Cooper’s escape from the Chino Institution for Men came within the same approximate time frame that Michael “Fast Horse” Martinez, one of the wards at Boys Republic, an institutional all-boys home and school in Chino Hills for displaced, wayward and troubled youths, took flight from that facility.
There is no dispute that Cooper holed up in a Chino Hills home owned by Larry Lease and brothers Roger and Kermit Lang where a tenant, Kathleen Bilbia, a school teacher, had lived previously and had temporarily vacated when she went on holiday following the end of the school year shortly before the murders occurred. Cooper spent at least a day-and-a-half there, sleeping in a closet in one of the house’s bedrooms.
Late in the morning of June 4, Virginia Lang briefly came into the Lease/Lang house to get a sweater, but Cooper withdrew toward the back of the house and managed to avoid her seeing him. The Lease/Lang home was some 375 feet distant from the home of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter Jessica and their 8-year-old son Joshua. Phone records show that while at the Lease/Lang home Cooper made calls to two female acquaintances/friends, one in Pennsylvania and another in Los Angeles, in an effort to get them to provide him with money or otherwise assist him in getting farther away, the last of which was made around 8 p.m. on June 4. He also smoked prison-issued Role-Rite tobacco rolled in prison-issued rolling papers, the butts of which were left behind in the Lease/Lang house.
On June 5, 1983, Bill Hughes, came to the Ryen home to pick up his 11-year-old son Christopher, who had spent the previous evening with the Ryen family attending a barbecue at another location and was going to sleep over at the Ryen home the night of June 4 through until the morning of June 5. The Ryen family station wagon was gone. He went around to the back of the house and looked through a sliding glass door into the master bedroom of the house.
Visible were Douglas and Peggy and his son, all dead, and Joshua Ryen severely wounded. Hidden from his view was Jessica Ryen, who lay dead in a hallway. The four deceased – the husband and wife, their daughter and his son – had been chopped with a hatchet, cut with a knife, and stabbed with an ice-pick, having sustained mostly to their heads, upper torsos or extremities, 37, 33, 46 and 25 wounds, respectively. Joshua Ryen was yet alive, his throat having been cut. The house phone was inoperable and Bill Hughes left to summon help at once.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, after having Joshua Ryen transported to Loma Linda University Medical Center by helicopter, initiated an investigation that entailed deputies, detectives, sergeants, forensic specialists and department higher-ups including then-Sheriff Floyd Tidwell, traipsing all over the murder scene and its environs.
In his testimony at trial, Cooper stated that he had left the Lease/Lang house after sundown on June 4 and had hitchhiked to Mexico. It is established with certainty that Cooper checked into a hotel in Tijuana, just across the international border roughly 130 miles south of Chino Hills, at 4:30 pm on June 5, 1983.
A few days later, the Ryens’ station wagon was discovered in a church parking lot in Long Beach. Sheriff’s investigators, after missing them in an initial search, eventually extracted from that vehicle and logged in as evidence cigarette butts consisting of prison-issued Role-Rite tobacco rolled in prison-issued rolling papers indistinguishable from those found at the Lease/Lang house. An all points bulletin identifying Cooper as a suspect in the murders was issued.
From Tijuana, Cooper went to Ensenada, where on June 9 he made the acquaintance of an American couple, Owen and Angelica Handy of Humboldt County, who had come to Baja California on their 32-foot sailboat, the Illa Tika. Identifying himself as “Angel Jackson,” Cooper persuaded them to allow him to accompany them as a deckhand as they headed back north up the California Coast, eventually anchoring in Pelican Cove off of Santa Cruz Island. Some seven weeks after the Chino Hills murders, during the last week of July, 1983, a 26-foot sailboat anchored near the Handys’ boat. Its occupants, a couple from North Hollywood, invited the Handys and Cooper aboard their sloop to a fish fry, during which some alcohol consumption was involved. Well after midnight, Cooper returned to the 26-foot boat, where, armed with a knife, he raped the wife. Her husband reported the rape and accompanied his wife to Goleta Valley Hospital, where she was treated and released. The couple then went to the sheriff’s office to provide a statement with regard to the rape. There the woman saw a “Wanted for Murder” poster/flier in the detectives’ office bearing a photo of Cooper, whereupon Angel Jackson was identified as Kevin Cooper.
Cooper was taken into custody shortly thereafter by Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department deputies and Coast Guard personnel. Items from the Lease/Lang house were found by deputies searching the Handys’ sailboat in the follow-up to the arrest.
Then-San Bernardino County District Attorney Dennis Kottmeier prosecuted the case himself with the assistance of one of his deputy prosecutors, John Kochis. The case was tried not in San Bernardino County Superior Court but in San Diego Superior Court before Judge Richard C. Garner. Cooper was defended by San Bernardino County Public Defender David Negus. The trial lasted from September 1984 until June of 2005.
Kottmeier and Kochis, though handicapped by an absence of any direct evidence linking Cooper to the killings, were nevertheless able to build a strong circumstantial case against the defendant. Kottmeier entered into evidence partial shoe prints found at the murder scene and at the Lease/Lang house, where Cooper admitted he had hid after his prison escape. Kottmeier and Kochis further used the cigarette butts consisting of the Role-Rite prison-issue tobacco and prison-issued rolling papers found in the Lease/Lang house and in the Ryens’ abandoned station wagon to tie Cooper to the crime.
Another damning piece of evidence was a spot of blood on the hallway wall of the Ryen house that was consistent with Cooper’s blood profile.
A bloody shoeprint made by a Pro-Ked Dude shoe, matching the type of shoes issued to prison inmates, was demonstrated as having been impressed on a sheet in the master bedroom of the Ryen house, along with a matching shoeprint on a spa cover outside the Ryen house, and another in the pool room at the Lease/Lang house. This was augmented with positive Luminol tests, demonstrating the presence of a quantity of blood in a shower in the Lease/Lang house.
A bloodstained hatchet from the Lease/Lang house found near the Ryen home along with the sheath from the hatchet found on the floor of the bedroom that contained the closet where Cooper had slept were presented as evidence to the jury, along with a button found in the Lease/Lang house that matched a prison-issue jacket. Some hunting knives and at least one ice pick were missing from the Lease/Lang house. A strap fitting one of the missing knives was found in the same bedroom.
Another piece of evidence to suggest that Cooper had made his way from the Lease/Lang house to the Ryen residence consisted of an empty beer can in the field between the two homes matching beer in the refrigerator at the Lease/Lang house.
The prosecution demonstrated that there were two burrs adhered to the inside of Jessica Ryen’s nightgown approximately ten inches up from the bottom hem. Kottmeier asserted to the jury that because the top of Jessica’s nightgown did not have holes corresponding with some of Jessica’s post mortem chest wounds, at some point the assailant had raised Jessica’s nightgown, and, in the process of inflicting her chest wounds, deposited the burrs. The prosecution also presented evidence to show similar burrs were found on the inside of the Ryen station wagon and on a blanket found in the closet where Cooper slept on June 3. Plants producing the burrs grew in the field between the Ryen house and the Lease/Lang house.
There were a total of 141 witness called, many of whom offered contradictory testimony. Some of the most dramatic, meaningful and important elements of the trial consisted of testimony from sheriff’s investigators and hospital personnel at Loma Linda University Hospital where Joshua Ryen was flown by helicopter on June 5, 1983. Initially, in the presence of a sheriff’s detective and a social worker, the eight-year-old indicated his attackers were three white men. In a second interview an hour later, Dr. Mary Howell, Joshua’s grandmother, also testified that Joshua told Deputy Hector O’Campo that three Latinos were in the house when the family was killed. On June 15, Joshua told Reserve Deputy Luis Simo that Cooper was not the killer, saying “He didn’t do it,” upon seeing Cooper’s photo on television during a newscast.
Joshua Ryen’s testimony at trial was provided via videotape, during which he said he could not remember much about his attacker or attackers and did not see his attacker directly but as “a shadow on the wall.”
Cooper testified for five days under examination by Kottmeier, during which he admitted to being in the Lease/Lang house immediately adjacent to the Ryen property, but did not waiver in maintaining his innocence to the murders, while acknowledging that he had stolen a purse from a woman in San Ysidro after hitchhiking there to make his way into Mexico.
Cooper’s attorney, San Bernardino County Public Defender David Negus, put on testimony by Edward Lelko, the bartender at the Canyon Corral Bar, located not far from the Ryen home, that he had served beer to three men the night of June 4, 1983. The men were not among his regular set of customers, which generally consisted of cowboys and nearby residents. They never returned to the bar. One of those men was “extremely drunk” and was subsequently refused service. The three wore light-colored T-shirts, similar to a bloodstained tan T-shirt found on June 7, 1983, beside a road near the bar. That shirt bore the blood of Doug Ryen, it was later determined.
Based upon the circumstantial evidence he and Kochis had placed before the jury, Kottmeier convinced the jurors that there was full and convincing proof that Cooper committed the murders. Cooper was convicted on four counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. The jury recommended the death penalty and Judge Garner sentenced him to death in the gas chamber at San Quentin. There followed reviews by and appeals to state and federal courts for more than 18 years. Cooper was scheduled to be executed on February 10, 2004. On January 29, 2004, then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger denied a request that Cooper be granted clemency. On February 8, 2004, a three judge panel consisting of Judges Pamela Rymer, Ronald Gould and James Browning heard Cooper’s petition and rejected it by a vote of 2–1. Judge Browning, as the lone dissenter was able to assemble enough judges to get a judicial panel to block the execution to allow further DNA testing. Ultimately, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the stay, effectively blocking the execution of the death warrant.
The Campaign to End the Death Penalty, the ACLU and Death Penalty Focus took up Cooper’s cause. Over the years, Kottmeier was supplanted as San Bernardino County district attorney by Dennis Stout, followed by Mike Ramos, and currently by Jason Anderson. The San Bernardino County sheriff at the time of the murders, Floyd Tidwell, was succeeded by Dick Williams, Gary Penrod, Rod Hoops and now John McMahon, with each successive administration considering the upholding of the integrity of the Ryen/Hughes death investigation and Kevin Cooper’s conviction to be synonymous with the credibility of San Bernardino County law enforcement.
The sheriff’s department’s handling of the case, which was already subject to criticism given the fashion in which more than 70 individuals, many of them sheriff’s department personnel, had trampled evidence at the murder scene in the two days following the discovery of the bodies, had its reputation damaged further when what would later be represented as key evidence was mishandled or mislaid, lost or destroyed by the department. A tan-colored shirt with blood stains was found by sheriff’s personnel not very distant from the murder scene beside Peyton Road. That shirt was logged in as evidence and is yet preserved, and was subject to the DNA testing ordered by Governor Brown just before left office in 2018. Also alongside Peyton Road, a local resident, Laurel Epler, came across a blue shirt which she said she believed had blood on it. She called the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department and reported the find. The sheriff’s department misplaced that second shirt. A pair of bloody overalls alleged to have been worn by the man wearing the tan shirt, Lee Furrow, were thrown out without being examined by the sheriff’s department’s forensic experts, its scientific investigations division or its laboratory.
The blue shirt, the tan shirt and the bloody overalls became objects of acute scrutiny and speculation as the post trial examination and reexamination of Cooper’s guilt intensified. Those items and the goings-on at the Canyon Corral Bar became the core of an alternate murder suspect(s) theory centering around Furrow.
While the projection of Furrow as the possible perpetrator of the murders held promise for Cooper’s legal team and can be credited with having kept Cooper from being put to death more than 17 years ago, the succession of unlikely layers of happenstance this theory involves, when compared to the far more likely causal presumptions in the original prosecution’s theory has created a level of skepticism about the defense theories and the assertions of Cooper’s innocence, at both the governmental and public levels, that is militating against Cooper far more than in his favor.
Investigators working on behalf of the legal team seeking to keep Cooper from being executed explored in far greater depth the trail of testimony and evidence involving Edward Lelko, the bartender at the Canyon Corral Bar the night of the murders. Lelko’s information explored at the trial proved to be a cul-de-sac for the defense at that time. Many years later, however, it loomed as a major boulevard toward what Cooper’s advocates considered to be justice. Others in the Canyon Corral Bar who saw the three strangers that night were Shirley Killian, the bar manager; Pam Smith, a bar patron; Lance Stark, a bar patron whom the sheriff’s department tried to intimidate into not testifying in 2004; Christine Slonaker, a phlebotomist, who recognized blood on the strangers’ clothing; Mary Mellon Wolfe, who was with Slonaker and who, like Slonaker, testified to seeing the blood at Cooper’s evidentiary hearing in 2004; and Kathy Royals, a waitress who waited on the strangers.
Defense investigators learned that another convicted murderer, Clarence Ray Allen, who was himself executed in 2006, had become embroiled in a dispute with Doug and Peggy Ryen over a horse he had purchased from them. Among Allen’s employees was Lee Furrow, another criminal whom Allen had previously hired to kill Allen’s son’s 17-year-old girlfriend, Mary Sue Kitts. According to Furrow’s then-girlfriend, Diana Roper, Lee Furrow came home in the early morning of June 5, 1983 wearing bloody overalls and without the tan shirt he had been wearing earlier in the day. Lee Furrow changed out of the overalls and on June 9, Diana Roper called the sheriff’s department to report what had occurred and thereafter provided the overalls to the department. The sheriff’s department never had its scientific investigations division test the overalls for blood, never turned them over to Negus, Cooper’s defense attorney, and instead disposed of them on the day of Cooper’s arraignment. Internal sheriff’s department phone logs established that a deputy sheriff made multiple attempts to give the overalls to the lead investigator. This contradicted the deputy’s later claim, when the defense made an issue of the overalls, that he never considered the overalls of evidentiary value. A supervisor admitted to an investigator that he signed off on disposing of the overalls, thereby impeaching the deputy’s testimony at trial that he made that decision.
It is believed by some that Furrow is one of the three men who were unfamiliar to Lelko, the bartender at the Canyon Corral Bar working the night of June 4, 1983. Killian, Smith, Stark, Slonaker, Wolfe and Royals, all of whom were present at the bar that night, would eventually provide testimony with regard to the presence of the three men at the Corral Canyon Bar on the night of June 4. The Ryen family’s station wagon was found in Long Beach, within five miles of Furrow’s mother’s home. There was blood matched to the Ryen family on both the driver side and passenger side of the front seat as well as in the back seat, an indication, Cooper’s defenders say, that three men attacked the Ryen family and Christopher Hughes and then, splattered with blood, made their getaway in the station wagon.
Cooper’s defenders postulate that Furrow, who was part of a murderous gang that had murdered on behalf of Allen in the past, had been sent to Chino Hills to collect on a debt the Ryens owed Allen for the horse. Undercutting that theory is the consideration that by June 1983, Furrow and Allen were no longer on good terms. In 1977, Furrow had entered a guilty plea to killing Mary Sue Kitts at the bequest of Allen, who from prison sought to arrange to have another career criminal, Billy Ray Hamilton, murder Furrow and seven other witnesses to prevent them from testifying during the appeal process of Allen’s conviction in the Kitts murder.
By the early 2000s, Cooper’s legal team sought to have DNA testing carried out on several of the pieces of evidence used to convict him more than a decade-and-a-half after his trial. Evincing a rather curious attitude for those so confident in Cooper’s guilt, prosecutors resisted those requests. Eventually, after Cooper’s 2004 execution was narrowly averted, an order for DNA testing of some of the evidence was granted. Pointedly, the DNA test showed that the tan shirt had both Douglas Ryen’s and Cooper’s blood on it.
The presence of Cooper’s blood on the shirt delivered a seemingly irrefutable blow to the assertions of Cooper’s innocence. Nonetheless, Cooper’s defenders doubled down, saying they believed that Cooper’s blood, drawn from him after his arrest as part of the investigative process, was subsequently planted on the shirt. Furthermore, Cooper’s legal team staked the credibility of its case on a clump of blonde hair found in Jessica Ryen’s hand, maintaining it was indicative that she was murdered by someone other than Cooper, an African-American.
On Christmas Eve 2018, just prior to his leaving office, Governor Brown issued an executive order relating to the Cooper case calling for new testing, using up-to-date scientific standards to be applied on four pieces of evidence: the tan T-shirt found in a ditch off the side of the road near the Corral Canyon Bar, an orange towel found near the scene and the handle of the hatchet used in the murders and the hatchet sheath. “I take no position as to Mr. Cooper’s guilt or innocence at this time, but colorable factual questions have been raised about whether advances in DNA technology warrant limited retesting of certain physical evidence in this case,” Brown wrote in his executive order. Brown said that if the tests failed to turn up new DNA or some that did not lead to any identifiable individual, “this matter should be closed.”
Over the years, the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, district attorneys Kottmeier, Stout, Ramos and deputy district attorneys Grover Merritt and James Secord have insisted that Cooper was the killer, he was given a fair and adequate trial while represented by a competent attorney and that previous DNA tests and other scientific analyses point unerringly to his guilt.
In appeals to Governor Brown in 2017 and 2018 that led to Brown’s Christmas Eve 2018 order, Cooper’s defense team, led by attorney Norman Hile, insisted that Cooper had never worn the tan shirt and the person who was wearing it was the person who had murdered the Ryens and Hughes. Hile said modern DNA analysis is more sophisticated and exacting than what was previously available, extending beyond blood to sweat and skin particles absorbed into or adhering to cloth, allowing a determination to be made that it was not Cooper who was wearing the shirt. The testing would also bear out Cooper’s defense team’s suggestion that the case against Cooper has been tainted all along by law enforcement misconduct and efforts to load the dice against his client, most notably Hile said, by saturating the tan T-shirt with blood drawn from Cooper as part of the investigative process after his capture.
Brown’s order did not extend to DNA testing on the clump of hairs found clutched in Jessica Ryen’s palm. In the spring of 2019, however, Hile and Cooper’s advocates convinced Brown’s successor, Governor Newsom, to augment the testing on the shirt, the orange towel and the hatchet handle and hatchet sheath with DNA testing on the hairs in Jessica Ryen’s hand, other preserved blood evidence, fingernail scrapings from the victims and a green button found at the Lease/Lang house.
Bode Technology, a respected forensic laboratory, carried out that analysis. The results beyond what was already known, that the shirt bore Cooper’s blood and that of Douglas Ryen, were inconclusive. The hairs in Jessica Ryen’s hand were her own and non-human animal hair.
Both camps – those representing Cooper and the district attorney’s office – maintain the Bode Laboratories examination results support their positions with regard to Cooper’s innocence or guilt. The Bode results do nothing to add to the prosecution’s case that Cooper is the murderer, Hile and his team maintain. The Bode results confirm that Cooper’s blood was on the shirt along with Douglas Ryen’s, the district attorney’s office has countered, and there was nothing in the testing to suggest that anyone other Cooper murdered the Ryens and Hughes.
To resolve the dispute, Newsom’s order calls for an independent investigation of the evidence marshaled so far in the aftermath of Cooper’s conviction, one which is to be carried out by the law firm of Morrison & Foerster, which is to serve as a special counsel. Newsom considers Morrison & Foerster to be an independent trier of fact, with no interest in sustaining Cooper’s conviction nor in making a determination of Cooper’s innocence.
Under normal circumstances, an appeal of a conviction extends only to issues raised at trial. Newsom’s order gives Morrison & Foerster license to explore any issues relating to Cooper’s guilt or innocence, whether previously considered in the official record of the trial and the appeal process or not. The review will extend to the 1984-to-1985 trial, the sheriff’s department’s investigative file, evidence and testimony presented pre-trial and during appeals, and any material or evidence that did not make it into the trial or appellate record, along with all DNA testing results.
-Mark Gutglueck
Orange County Court Reverses Placement Of Convicted Child Rapist In Twentyine Palms
The Orange County Superior Court on May 27 reversed a March 12, 2021 relocation order that would have placed Lawtis Rhoden, a five-time convicted sex offender with a fixation on girls and young women, to Twentynine Palms.
Available information did not specify which judge or judges made the respective March 12 and May 27 rulings. The March 12 assignation of Rhoden, now 71, to Twentynine Palms was made despite his having no previous known connection with San Bernardino County.
His sex crimes span five decades. In 1969 in Cocoa Beach, Florida he lured a 13-year-old victim to his apartment and raped her on three separate occasions. For that he was convicted and sentenced to 14 months in a state mental hospital and 12 years in state prison. After his parole, Rhoden sexually assaulted four children in two states, including rape by force, forceful sexual penetration, sexual battery, and two counts of forcible rape stemming from crimes he committed in Orange County and Los Angeles County in April and June 1984. Those involved two 14-year-old girls and one 17-year-old girl. While those crimes were under investigation, Rhoden went to Nashville, Tennessee where he sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl in December 1984 and was subsequently convicted of rape and use of a minor for obscene purposes. The State of Tennessee sentenced Rhoden to 20 years in state prison, the Orange County Superior Court sentenced him to 12 years in state prison, and the Los Angeles County Superior Court sentenced him to six years in state prison.
From March of 1983 until his arrest in Tennessee, Rhoden also defrauded older women in California, Florida and Texas of approximately $440,000. After his 2004 prison release, Rhoden was detained in the Orange County jail based on a sexually violent predator petition filed by the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, and was found by an Orange County jury to be a sexually violent predator, which led to his commitment to the Department of State Hospitals for treatment.
On October 25, 2019, the Orange County Superior Court ordered Rhoden released into the community under the supervision of Liberty Healthcare. That led to the order for his placement in Twentynine Palms.
San Bernardino County District Attorney Jason Anderson assigned deputy district attorneys Dan Ross and Maureen O’Connell to oppose, after the fact, the Orange County Superior Court’s March 12 order. Ross’s and O’Connell’s filings and arguments led to yesterday’s outcome.
“It’s been a very long and uphill battle,” said O’Connell. “One of the underlying objectives as a prosecutor is to protect our community and to advocate for our victims. This case did just that.”
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Postmus Filtering Bribe Money To County Supervisors To Establish A Commercial Cannabis Monopoly For The Cartel He Represents
By Mark Gutglueck
In the sweepstakes between rival racketeers seeking to obtain a vice grip on San Bernardino County’s potential half billion dollar a year marijuana market, the cartel being represented by former Supervisor Bill Postmus is succeeding in squeezing out its far less politically sophisticated competition.
In recent months, Postmus and others within the political network he has set up to carry out political money laundering have succeeded in plying a host of politicians in San Bernardino County functioning primarily at the municipal level with a sufficient amount of money to get permits and licenses for the companies he and his associates represent or own in those cities. Simultaneously, Postmus has manipulated circumstances to induce San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon to carry out operations aimed at crippling marijuana industry operators who are competing against the “establishment” or “franchised” marijuana businesses that are kicking back to the county’s politicians.
Postmus has now stepped up his efforts on behalf of that part of the cannabis industry which recognizes that in the current milieu cutting governmental officials in on the vast profits that are to be reaped from making marijuana available to the masses is crucial to the establishment of dominance of the lucrative marijuana market.
In the most recent development, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors has appropriated $10.4 million to the sheriff’s department, earmarked for conducting further raids against unlicensed marijuana cultivation operations that are not affiliated with the entrepreneurs who have been and are yet paying off the politicians who have voted to provide them with the licensing and permits that allow for the growing, refinement, distribution, wholesale and retail sale of marijuana, along with its refinement or alteration into edible form or both healing and intoxicative salves and ointments.
In this way, with the cooperation of the highest ranking elements of county government, Postmus appears to be clearing the deck to allow a consortium of a relatively small number of cannabis-related companies to seize control over San Bernardino County’s marijuana market for the foreseeable future. With the competition soon to be out of the way, having been driven into a state of financial unsustainability by the sheriff’s department’s constant destruction of its product and inability to move that product to market, Postmus and the companies which so far have obtained operating permission with five of the county’s 24 incorporated municipalities are next poised to have the board of supervisors end its ban on marijuana in the 18,899-square mile expanse of the county’s unincorporated territory. This will give the cartel to be represented by Postmus and his various associates, including Dino DeFazio and Jeremiah Brosowske, a virtual monopoly.
Actively or passively, directly or indirectly involved in the effort to create a class of enfranchised marijuana operations are Curt Hagman, First District Supervisor Paul Cook, Second District Supervisor Janice Rutherford, Third District Supervisor Dawn Rowe, Fifth District Supervisor Joe Baca, Jr. County Sheriff John McMahon, Chief Executive Officer Leonard Hernandez, County Chief Financial Officer Matthew Erickson, County Counsel Michelle Blakemore and Chief Assistant County Counsel Penny Alexander-Kelley.
From 1907 until 1996, the use, possession, sale, cultivation, distribution or refinement of marijuana was strictly illegal in California. In 1996, the passage of Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use of Marijuana Act, by California’s voters made the sale and use of marijuana for medical purposes legal in the state, pursuant to the user having a medical prescription for it. Nevertheless, San Bernardino County and all 24 of its municipalities steadfastly refused to allow medical marijuana dispensaries to operate within their jurisdictions, until Needles in 2012 became the lone exception. Illicit dispensaries, nevertheless proliferated at locations that were too numerous to accurately count. In 2015, the political leadership in Adelanto as it was then composed sought to redress that city’s misfiring economic engine by moving to make marijuana cultivation to supply the state’s dispensaries legal. The passage of the Adult Use of Marijuana Act in 2016 , allowing those over 21 to partake of the drug for its intoxicative effect, spurred the cities of San Bernardino, Barstow, Adelanto and Needles to seek to cash in on the sale of the drug by allowing, variously or in combination the retail sale of the plant, the cultivation of the plant, the refinement of marijuana into edible or palliative products and in the case of Hesperia, the distribution of the drug. The remaining 19 San Bernardino County municipalities and the county itself are yet resisting allowing marijuana to be commercially available, although at least nine county cities are tolerating the sale of CBD oil, a palliative derived from marijuana oil. The county likewise bans any commercial activity relating to marijuana or its derivatives.
Since 1999, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department has been participating in and receiving federal money for the Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program. Even in the aftermath of the voters’ 2016 passage of the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, Sheriff John McMahon, with the consent of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors, applied for and continued to receive those grants, which he then used to offset some, though not all, of his department’s costs in going after marijuana cultivators. At present, the department is using $151,000 obtained through a Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program grant to offset the sheriff’s department’s costs in the anti-marijuana crusade. Marijuana remains classified by the federal government as a Schedule 1 Narcotic, considered in the same class as heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine.
Bill Postmus, who was convicted in 2011 of fourteen felony counts of soliciting and receiving bribes, fraud, conflict of interest, misappropriation of public funds and perjury relating to his actions while he was serving as the chairman of the board of supervisors and as chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Party and later as San Bernardino County Assessor, is no longer able to hold public office in California. Having learned the pitfalls of bribetaking and other forms of graft and corruption, Postmus has created a Wyoming-based corporation, Mountain States Consulting Group, which he wields as a political money laundering operation. By doing consulting work on behalf of those with business before the county, Postmus through Mountain States accepts money from those customers and then funnels, delivers by means of a back door or through someone else or some other entity funds to the politicians controlling local government, including members of the board of supervisors.
Postmus, who is closely affiliated with John Dino DeFazio, an Apple Valley landowner and developer and Jeremiah Brosowske, the former executive director fo the Republican Central Committee, whom Postmus helped establish as a Hesperia city council member in 2018, has as some of Mountain States major clients well-financed cannabis industry heads who have obtained permits and licenses to operate in Adelanto, San Bernardino and Needles. In both Adelanto and San Bernardino, several of the operations obtained those permits by bribing elected city officials. He has begun filtering money from that set of cannabis entrepreneurs money intended to grease the way for the companies he represents to take command of a lion’s share of the marijuana and cannabis-based product market in San Bernardino County.
Postmus has had, the Sentinel has learned, either or both public and private meetings with Supervisors Curt Hagman, Paul Cook and Dawn Rowe. These meetings have in major measure revolved around money, primarily money that Postmus is able to dig up for them. As a fundraiser, Postmus has begun funneling tens of thousands of dollars originating both from the cannabis industry and elsewhere to Hagman, Cook and Rowe for use in their future election campaigns. Simultaneously, he has put together a timetable by which the county will move to allow “established reliable growers” who have already obtained clearance to operate in Needles, Adelanto and San Bernardino to set up operations in the unincorporated portions of the county as well as within the twelve other municipalities in San Bernardino County other than Needles and Adelanto for which the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department provides contract law enforcement service.
Meanwhile hundreds of unlicensed and unpermited marijuana cultivation operations have sprouted up all over the Mojave Desert, the San Bernardino and San Gabriel Mountains and other remote reaches of the county. The plants grown at most, but certainly not all of those operations that are of moderate size and intensity are successfully harvested at the end of their optimum growing cycle by those that planted them. Other illicit cultivators have proven even more daring, growing marijuana out in the open or in greenhouses or in makeshift tents literal plantations of the weed, in a significant number of cases more than 10,000 plants. While early on in this cycle of bold efforts at raising that many plants successful harvesting occurred, it is estimated that at present, after the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department has intensified its lookout for and actions against such massive farms, fewer than 30 percent of those are able to remain in place long enough to be harvested by the growers.
Those operations in many cases involved minor, medium, larger and in some cases quite substantial environmental, health, safety and social hazards. Large scale use of pesticides and herbicides presented a host of problems, including directly poisoning nearby residents who in some cases breathed in those chemicals or experienced skin contact with airborne particles, not to mention the contamination of local water sources and wells. In addition, the operators of the farms in many cases took drastic measures to ward off poachers and those who might interfere with them, which included conspicuously arming themselves and sometimes intimidating neighbors or anyone who approached the cultivation sites, along with establishing booby traps and potentially deadly devices at the periphery of the property in question, including bear traps or coyote traps capable of injuring a person who happened upon them to the point of needing to have a leg or arm amputated. In at least some cases, those engaged in these unpermited and unlicensed agricultural operations utilized explosive devices and mines as barriers.
With illicit or unlicensed marijuana farms mushrooming all over the county and particularly in the Mojave Desert, the region’s residents over the last couple of years have called upon the sheriff’s department to act. While the department had been a continuous recipient of the Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program grants for close to two decades at that point, the sheer volume of marijuana being produced at innumerable cultivation sites presented a challenge such that in relatively short order the federal funds were consumed by the cost of the sheriff’s department’s operations. As late as October of last year, sheriff’s department personnel were disappointing a number of county residents in both the desert and mountain areas who were alerting the department to the illicit operations within close proximity to their property, bordering it or in some cases intruding onto their property.
Requests, indeed demands, by mountain and desert residents that the sheriff’s department abate the illicit operations were commonly met with responses that held that the department’s hands were tied, and that the Adult Use of Marijuana Act prevented the department from responding to the burgeoning number of complaints.
In January 2021, as if Sheriff John McMahon was making good on a New Year’s resolution he had made, his department became far more aggressive in locating and uprooting unlicensed marijuana plantations.
On January 6, 2021, the sheriff’s Marijuana Enforcement Team served a search warrant in the 2600 block of Parkdale Road in Adelanto, where they found, seized and ultimately destroyed 19,998 still-growing marijuana plants along with 186 pounds of partially-cured harvested marijuana.
On January 27, the task force located and seized another 1,903 marijuana plants and 306.5 pounds of harvested marijuana in Lucerne Valley and Johnson Valley.
On February 2, that team descended upon a massive unlicensed marijuana cultivation operation on property in El Mirage, some 12.5 miles northwest of Adelanto, where they found greenhouses in which 18,884 plants were growing, all of which were confiscated and destroyed.
On April 16 and 17, sheriff’s department operation carried out at Emerald Street and Pine Springs Avenue; Two Mile Road and Copper Mountain Road; Mesa Drive and Morongo Road; Nandina Street and Lupine Avenue; Rodgers Lane and Alfalfa Avenue; Canyon Road and Sunny Sands Drive; Sunny Sands Drive and Meldora Avenue; and within the 70300 block of Giant Rock Road in and around Twentynine Palms resulted in the location and destruction of 10,400 marijuana plants weighing more than six tons.
Thirteen days later, on April 29, sheriff’s personnel returned to the Emerald Street and Pine Springs Avenue cultivation site, and went to four others located in the Twentynine Palms and Desert Heights environs, including one in the 73500 block of Two Mile Road; a property at the intersection of Dunlap Road and Canyon Road, another property proximate to Dunlap Road and Canyon Road, and a site at the corner of Redhill Road and Bermuda Avenue, pulling up more than 2,300 marijuana plants in less than seven hours.
During operations in the greater Twentynine Palms area, Desert Heights and Landers on May 5 and May 7, raids were carried out on marijuana cultivation facilities on property near Sespe Street and Alta Avenue in Landers; Covela Avenue and Napa Road in Landers; property adjacent to Napa Road and Alta Avenue in Landers; at Covela Avenue and Sespe Street in Landers; at another site close to Covela Avenue and Sespe Street in Landers; at a site proximate to Kelsey Boulevard and Presswood Drive in Landers; on property at Kachina Drive and Shoshone Valley Road in Desert Heights and at a facility located on property in the 1200 block of Sunrise Avenue in Desert Heights. Those raids led to the seizure of 4,400 marijuana plants and over eight tons of uncured marijuana
On May 13, when the sheriff’s department’s Marijuana Enforcement Team along with personnel from the San Bernardino County Agricultural and Weights and Measures Department, and county code enforcement division converged on an outdoor cultivation site in the 35700 block of Granite Road in Lucerne Valley, where the operators had previously maintained that the farm was one for the cultivation of hemp to be used for the manufacturing of rope, cloth, paper and other materials. The 40-acre site hosted 199 greenhouses in which .76,118 plants, all of which personnel from the County Agricultural and Weights and Measures Department determined through field tests possessed THC content was at levels that would eliminate their official governmental status as hemp under any conditions. THC is the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. All of those plants were destroyed.
On May 20, the marijuana enforcement team and a member of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife served five search warrants at various locations in the Twentynine Palms area, including the 86200 block of Twentynine Palms Highway; at Monte Vista Drive and Waylyn; in the 25500 block of El Encanto; at Taco Road and Mojave; and at Bullion Mountain and Mesa Road. Deputies and detectives seized 3,901 marijuana plants and 652 pounds of processed marijuana.
Yesterday, on May 27, the sheriff’s department’s marijuana enforcement team serve multiple search warrants at locations in Lucerne Valley, including one within the 33200 block of Haynes Road, a location in the 33500 block of Haynes Road, another in the 15900 block of Verdugo Road and a property in the 33300 block of Desert Lane, where they seized 6,429 marijuana plants and five pounds of processed marijuana, together with guns.
Unknown or unrecognized by the general public was that McMahon’s newfound resolve corresponded with the overtures then being made by Mountain States Consulting Group to San Bernardino County’s political establishment to allow the “enfranchised marijuana entrepreneurs who have .
Crassly or delicately, subtly or unsubtly, directly or indirectly, implicitly or explicitly, Postmus’s message to the members of the board of supervisors was essentially this: Bow to the new order and end your blanket opposition to the commercialization of marijuana in the county, since eventually and inevitably, that change is going to come. If you do so, and if you abide by an arrangement that ensures that the companies I represent get in on the ground floor of the county’s marijuanification and its competitors are locked out, I will make it monetarily worth your while. I can assure you that as Mountain States Consulting Group’s clients capture a near monopoly on the San Bernardino marijuana market, so too will you profit.
Reportedly, Postmus has proposed a timetable to Board of Supervisors Chairman Curt Hagman and County Chief Executive Officer Leonard Hernandez that calls for the county initiating a transition to eventual full legalization of the cultivation, harvesting, processing, warehousing, distribution and sale of marijuana and its alteration into cannabis-based derivatives, chemicals and products to include the manufacturing and sale thereof by 2022. That proposed transition is to come after many of the companies Mountain States Consulting Group is now representing have fully established the cannabis-based and marijuana-based businesses they now have in place or are currently setting up have become fully operational and profitable, providing them with the capital to expand their operations into the unincorporated areas of the county, and cover Postmus’s commitments to bankroll Hagman’s, Cook’s and Rowe’s political and personal agendas into the future, chits worth in practical terms no less than several million dollars to be divvied up and placed into each of their campaign funds or, through creative means that Postmus is able to devise, into their personal bank accounts. In the last several months, Postmus has been coordinating fundraising efforts on behalf of Hagman, Cook and Rowe, garnering from Mountain States Consulting Group’s clients as well as other Republican Party donors actual donations and commitments of several hundred thousand dollars. Postmus’s fundraising effort on behalf of Supervisor Janice Rutherford, the other Republican on the board of supervisors in addition to Hagman, Cook and Rowe, has been less spirited than for the others largely because Rutherford is scheduled in 2022, because of term limits, to leave the board of supervisors. After that point, her position as one of the county’s key decision-makers will end, making her of virtually no use to Postmus and Mountain States Consulting Group’s clients who have substantial financial interests intertwined with county policy decisions current and future. Still, Postmus has an interest in remaining on her good side, and he stands ready to assist her in her fundraising effort if she decides to initiate a campaign for county assessor in 2022.
Postmus is interested in influencing the other member of the board of supervisors, Joe Baca, Jr., the only Democrat on the board. Baca’s political affiliation presents a complication for Postmus, who at one point, before he was felled by scandal, was the chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Party, proving himself in that role to be that entity’s most efficient fundraiser historically. Utilizing Mountain States Consulting Group or other cutouts, including those related to the Republican Party, to deliver money to Baca is out of the question because Baca cannot afford to be seen taking money from the Republican Party or Republicans in general, and Postmus cannot compromise his continuing affiliation with the Republican Party by providing financial assistance to an up-and-coming Democrat. Postmus is currently casting about for some means by which he can network with a chain of individuals, agents, shell companies, agencies or organizations to pass money along to Baca in a way that cannot be detected by outsiders but such that Baca knows the origin of the money.
There are Republicans in San Bernardino County, including some in the same political orbit as Hagman, Cook and Rowe, who have questioned the wisdom of the party and individual politicians such as Hagman, Cook and Rowe associating with Postmus, given his criminal history. The scandal that enveloped Postmus involved political corruption of a breathtaking scope that ultimately costed the the county at least $168 million in legal settlements and another $6.5 million in attorney’s fees. In his 2011 guilty pleas, Postmus acknowledged that he had sought and received bribes in return for votes that profited those who had bribed him or made campaign contributions to him, that he made decisions and took actions while he was a supervisor in which he had a conflict of interest, that he misappropriated public funds to an illegal use, that he engaged in fraud as well as the misuse of public property and governmental authority and that he perjured himself and falsified documents in an effort to keep his illegal activity from being discovered. Few of those who have misgivings over the GOP’s current crop of the county’s top officeholders such as Hagman, Cook and Rowe associating with Postmus have had the courage to speak up about their concerns in this regard. There is a determination among Hagman, Cook, Rowe and their respective chiefs of staff – Yekaterina Kolcheva, Timothy Itnyre and Matt Knox – as well as the political teams that surround them and their supporters that they can perpetuate their collective hold on the political power they now possess by casting their lot with Postmus and his superior fundraising ability and electioneering machinery. Collectively, the calculation is that Postmus’s fundraising activity on their behalves will remain largely hidden, that the vast majority of the public in San Bernardino County has long forgotten the misdeeds Postmus involved himself in and that if any flap does develop, the money that Postmus and his team will provide them with can be used to pay for electioneering and positive public relations efforts that will more than offset whatever negative publicity the Postmus association might entail.
Two months ago, when the Sentinel asked Cook if he thought it was a good idea to be utilizing Postmus as a fundraiser, given his history and Mountain States Consulting Group’s current association with entities that were seeking favorable treatment from the county with regard to their various proposals and projects , Cook shrugged and said, “That’s politics.”
Indeed, casual observers and more experienced ones alike have naively missed the full implication of the services that Postmus is able to offer politicians. Having been convicted of multiple levels of corruption, bribery, graft and violations of the public trust as a consequence of his time in office, Postmus is acutely conscious of which missteps he took and how it was that he was caught. Because of his political conflict of interest conviction, he is no longer able to hold elected office in California again. He has a determination to remain in the political game, and toward that end he created Mountain States Consulting Group. A Wyoming-based limited liability company, it is subject to fewer and less-exacting reporting requirements than California corporations. Those individuals or entities looking to influence politicians, elected officials and governmental staff members who directly ply those in the decision-making loop with money run the risk of being charged with bribing public officials. Those public officials who take money from individuals or corporations who have a financial interest in the decisions those public officials make run the risk of being charged with accepting bribes. Mountain States Consulting Group, by serving in an intermediary role between the donor and the politician, can prevent the politician from being accused of favoring a campaign donor with his or her votes. Such favoritism toward campaign donors is not illegal, but can come across as unseemly, and thereby represent political risk down the road. Mountain States can eliminate this politically problematic appearance.
More significantly, Mountain States Consulting Group exists as a tool to essentially legalize bribery. In California, elected officials are not prohibited from voting on matters that impact their campaign donors but they are strictly prohibited from receiving remuneration from, or being employed by, any individual or entity with a financial stake in the votes they make as elected officials. Postmus has designed, and has used, Mountain States Consulting Group to actually employ public officials directly or indirectly. This allows the public official to report the income received as an employee of Mountain States Consulting Group, thereby complying with income reporting requirements mandated by state law. This can occur without the official having to report that Mountain States Consulting Group is the recipient of money from the individual or entity favored by that official’s action or vote. The loose and vague reporting and disclosure requirements that Mountain States Consulting Group functions under as a consequence of being a Wyoming Limited Liability Company is of some consequence in this regard.
It is of further note that Postmus has a special and highly favorable relationship with Sheriff John McMahon.
Postmus was first arrested and charged in 2009 with criminal activity relating to his actions while he was serving as county assessor in 2007, 2008 and 2009. In 2010, he was criminally charged with a string of interrelated offenses that occurred while he was county supervisor in 2004, 2005 and 2006. After initially maintaining his innocence in the face of all of those charges, Postmus in 2011 entered guilty pleas to all 14 felony charges against him. His sentencing was deferred while the criminal cases against others alleged to have been involved with him in his crimes wended their way through the prosecutorial and judicial processes, and the court had an opportunity to determine if he made good on a key element in his plea arrangement, which was to cooperate with prosecutors, including testifying against his alleged co-conspirators before a grand jury and at trial. In November 2018, with all of those cases prosecutions and trials having concluded, Postmus came before San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Michael A. Smith, before whom he had entered his guilty pleas in 2011.
Judge Smith sentenced Postmus to three years in state prison. Though the prosecution wanted Postmus incarcerated at once, Judge Smith granted him 15 days to get his affairs in order, requiring that he report to the courthouse at 8:30 a.m. on November 30, 2018. Postmus did so, and was whisked away into confinement at that time.
By mid-December 2018, Postmus was housed at North Kern State Prison, a medium-security all-male prison facility located in Delano, which in addition to serving as the place of detention to close to 1,600 permanent or mainline inmates, also serves as a reception center for incoming inmates who are not destined to remain there for the entirety of their sentences.
Postmus’s confinement coincided with California’s effort at prison realignment, which made him eligible for being transferred back to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s criminal detention facilities to serve his sentence. Based upon the the nonviolent nature of his crimes, his lack of further criminal involvement, his behavior while incarcerated and his psychological evaluation, he was indeed sent back in the spring of 2019 to San Bernardino County to serve out the remainder of his sentence.
Under the policies that normally attend the incarceration of those convicted under California law, inmates must serve at least half of their sentence before becoming eligible for parole. Depending upon credits they get for good behavior and the recommendation of prison officials who have evaluated their progress toward rehabilitation, they can be released as early as half way through their sentence, pursuant to the determination of the California Division of Adult Parole Operations and the California Parole Board, or any time after serving more than half of their sentences. Thus, Postmus, whose prison sentence was to run to November 30, 2021, was eligible for release, at the earliest, on May 30, 2020.
As the spring of 2019 progressed to summer, a number of politicians in San Bernardino County were gearing up for the 2020 election season. Absent from the political playing field was Mountain States Consulting Group, since its principal was incarcerated and ot of commission.
In July 2019, Sheriff McMahon, himself a central part of the political establishment in San Bernardino County, in a highly unusual move arranged to release Postmus from custody 22 months prior to his then-scheduled release date, after having served fewer than eight of the 36 months of his sentence, and more than nine months prior to the half-way point in his sentence, which under normal circumstances would have been the earliest Postmus could have been released.
Postmus was released, conditional upon his wearing an ankle monitor, traveling no further than 50 miles from his registered place of residence, maintaining a curfew, reporting regularly to his parole officer and being subject to random drug screening. Postmus moved in, on a temporary basis, with this sister in Wrightwood. Almost immediately, he reinitiated Mountain States Consulting Group’s operations, and he was active and a key player in a multitude of political races in San Bernardino County in both the March 2020 and November 2020 primary and general elections.
On May 18 at a workshop pertaining to the county’s proposed 2021-2022 Budget, the board of supervisors telegraphed their intention to put $10.4 million into the spending plan for the upcoming year to deal address nettlesome land use and code enforcement issues in the county’s unincorporated areas, which primarily consist of unlicensed marijuana farms. Some of the money is to go toward other code enforcement efforts as well as ensuring compliance with the county’s ordinance pertaining to short-term rental units.
Sources close to Postmus say that the board of supervisors’ move to fund more sheriff’s department efforts against unlicensed marijuana cultivators was a signal that its members are agreeable to the timetable he has worked out with Board of Supervisors Chairman Curt Hagman and County Chief Executive Officer Leonard Hernandez to provide the marijuana-related business operations that are Mountain States’ clients with the limited number of permits the county will issue when it undertakes to legalize marijuana-related commercial activity less than two years hence. The arrangements Postmus is pursuing in getting his clients permits to operate at the county level, will ultimately give those entities an inside track in establishing cannabis-related businesses in the eleven other county municipalities besides Adelanto, Hesperia and Needles where the sheriff’s department fills the role of police department, Postmus believes, those being Chino Hills, Rancho Cucamonga, Grand Terrace, Loma Linda, Highland, Big Bear Lake, Yucaipa, Yucca Valley, Twentynine Palms, Apple Valley and Victorville.
The Sentinel’s efforts to obtain statements from Hagman, Cook, Rutherford, Rowe, Baca, McMahon, Hernandez, County Chief Financial Officer Matthew Erickson, County Counsel Michelle Blakemore and Chief Assistant County Counsel Penny Alexander-Kelley were unsuccessful.
The Sentinel’s phone calls to Blakemore and Alexander-Kelley to find out the degree to which Hagman and Hernandez have shared with them the timetable for permitting the sale of marijuana in San Bernardino County were intercepted by a secretary in the county counsel’s office. Initially, the secretary said that Blakemore would “not be the best person” to discuss marijuana-related issues, suggesting that such questions be routed to the attorney specially assigned to the county’s cannabis policy. She did not make clear whether that attorney was a member of county counsel or an outside attorney retained by the county. Upon determining she was speaking with a newspaper reporter, the secretary indicated that the county’s attorneys are not permitted to speak to the public.
In the sweepstakes between rival racketeers seeking to obtain a vice grip on San Bernardino County’s potential half billion dollar a year marijuana market, the cartel being represented by former Supervisor Bill Postmus is succeeding in squeezing out its far less politically sophisticated competition.
In recent months, Postmus and others within the political network he has set up to carry out political money laundering have succeeded in plying a host of politicians in San Bernardino County functioning primarily at the municipal level with a sufficient amount of money to get permits and licenses for the companies he and his associates represent or own in those cities. Simultaneously, Postmus has manipulated circumstances to induce San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon to carry out operations aimed at crippling marijuana industry operators who are competing against the “establishment” or “franchised” marijuana businesses that are kicking back to the county’s politicians.
Postmus has now stepped up his efforts on behalf of that part of the cannabis industry which recognizes that in the current milieu cutting governmental officials in on the vast profits that are to be reaped from making marijuana available to the masses is crucial to the establishment of dominance of the lucrative marijuana market.
In the most recent development, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors has appropriated $10.4 million to the sheriff’s department, earmarked for conducting further raids against unlicensed marijuana cultivation operations that are not affiliated with the entrepreneurs who have been and are yet paying off the politicians who have voted to provide them with the licensing and permits that allow for the growing, refinement, distribution, wholesale and retail sale of marijuana, along with its refinement or alteration into edible form or both healing and intoxicative salves and ointments.
In this way, with the cooperation of the highest ranking elements of county government, Postmus appears to be clearing the deck to allow a consortium of a relatively small number of cannabis-related companies to seize control over San Bernardino County’s marijuana market for the foreseeable future. With the competition soon to be out of the way, having been driven into a state of financial unsustainability by the sheriff’s department’s constant destruction of its product and inability to move that product to market, Postmus and the companies which so far have obtained operating permission with five of the county’s 24 incorporated municipalities are next poised to have the board of supervisors end its ban on marijuana in the 18,899-square mile expanse of the county’s unincorporated territory. This will give the cartel to be represented by Postmus and his various associates, including Dino DeFazio and Jeremiah Brosowske, a virtual monopoly.
Actively or passively, directly or indirectly involved in the effort to create a class of enfranchised marijuana operations are Curt Hagman, First District Supervisor Paul Cook, Second District Supervisor Janice Rutherford, Third District Supervisor Dawn Rowe, Fifth District Supervisor Joe Baca, Jr. County Sheriff John McMahon, Chief Executive Officer Leonard Hernandez, County Chief Financial Officer Matthew Erickson, County Counsel Michelle Blakemore and Chief Assistant County Counsel Penny Alexander-Kelley.
From 1907 until 1996, the use, possession, sale, cultivation, distribution or refinement of marijuana was strictly illegal in California. In 1996, the passage of Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use of Marijuana Act, by California’s voters made the sale and use of marijuana for medical purposes legal in the state, pursuant to the user having a medical prescription for it. Nevertheless, San Bernardino County and all 24 of its municipalities steadfastly refused to allow medical marijuana dispensaries to operate within their jurisdictions, until Needles in 2012 became the lone exception. Illicit dispensaries, nevertheless proliferated at locations that were too numerous to accurately count. In 2015, the political leadership in Adelanto as it was then composed sought to redress that city’s misfiring economic engine by moving to make marijuana cultivation to supply the state’s dispensaries legal. The passage of the Adult Use of Marijuana Act in 2016 , allowing those over 21 to partake of the drug for its intoxicative effect, spurred the cities of San Bernardino, Barstow, Adelanto and Needles to seek to cash in on the sale of the drug by allowing, variously or in combination the retail sale of the plant, the cultivation of the plant, the refinement of marijuana into edible or palliative products and in the case of Hesperia, the distribution of the drug. The remaining 19 San Bernardino County municipalities and the county itself are yet resisting allowing marijuana to be commercially available, although at least nine county cities are tolerating the sale of CBD oil, a palliative derived from marijuana oil. The county likewise bans any commercial activity relating to marijuana or its derivatives.
Since 1999, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department has been participating in and receiving federal money for the Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program. Even in the aftermath of the voters’ 2016 passage of the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, Sheriff John McMahon, with the consent of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors, applied for and continued to receive those grants, which he then used to offset some, though not all, of his department’s costs in going after marijuana cultivators. At present, the department is using $151,000 obtained through a Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program grant to offset the sheriff’s department’s costs in the anti-marijuana crusade. Marijuana remains classified by the federal government as a Schedule 1 Narcotic, considered in the same class as heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine.
Bill Postmus, who was convicted in 2011 of fourteen felony counts of soliciting and receiving bribes, fraud, conflict of interest, misappropriation of public funds and perjury relating to his actions while he was serving as the chairman of the board of supervisors and as chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Party and later as San Bernardino County Assessor, is no longer able to hold public office in California. Having learned the pitfalls of bribetaking and other forms of graft and corruption, Postmus has created a Wyoming-based corporation, Mountain States Consulting Group, which he wields as a political money laundering operation. By doing consulting work on behalf of those with business before the county, Postmus through Mountain States accepts money from those customers and then funnels, delivers by means of a back door or through someone else or some other entity funds to the politicians controlling local government, including members of the board of supervisors.
Postmus, who is closely affiliated with John Dino DeFazio, an Apple Valley landowner and developer and Jeremiah Brosowske, the former executive director fo the Republican Central Committee, whom Postmus helped establish as a Hesperia city council member in 2018, has as some of Mountain States major clients well-financed cannabis industry heads who have obtained permits and licenses to operate in Adelanto, San Bernardino and Needles. In both Adelanto and San Bernardino, several of the operations obtained those permits by bribing elected city officials. He has begun filtering money from that set of cannabis entrepreneurs money intended to grease the way for the companies he represents to take command of a lion’s share of the marijuana and cannabis-based product market in San Bernardino County.
Postmus has had, the Sentinel has learned, either or both public and private meetings with Supervisors Curt Hagman, Paul Cook and Dawn Rowe. These meetings have in major measure revolved around money, primarily money that Postmus is able to dig up for them. As a fundraiser, Postmus has begun funneling tens of thousands of dollars originating both from the cannabis industry and elsewhere to Hagman, Cook and Rowe for use in their future election campaigns. Simultaneously, he has put together a timetable by which the county will move to allow “established reliable growers” who have already obtained clearance to operate in Needles, Adelanto and San Bernardino to set up operations in the unincorporated portions of the county as well as within the twelve other municipalities in San Bernardino County other than Needles and Adelanto for which the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department provides contract law enforcement service.
Meanwhile hundreds of unlicensed and unpermited marijuana cultivation operations have sprouted up all over the Mojave Desert, the San Bernardino and San Gabriel Mountains and other remote reaches of the county. The plants grown at most, but certainly not all of those operations that are of moderate size and intensity are successfully harvested at the end of their optimum growing cycle by those that planted them. Other illicit cultivators have proven even more daring, growing marijuana out in the open or in greenhouses or in makeshift tents literal plantations of the weed, in a significant number of cases more than 10,000 plants. While early on in this cycle of bold efforts at raising that many plants successful harvesting occurred, it is estimated that at present, after the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department has intensified its lookout for and actions against such massive farms, fewer than 30 percent of those are able to remain in place long enough to be harvested by the growers.
Those operations in many cases involved minor, medium, larger and in some cases quite substantial environmental, health, safety and social hazards. Large scale use of pesticides and herbicides presented a host of problems, including directly poisoning nearby residents who in some cases breathed in those chemicals or experienced skin contact with airborne particles, not to mention the contamination of local water sources and wells. In addition, the operators of the farms in many cases took drastic measures to ward off poachers and those who might interfere with them, which included conspicuously arming themselves and sometimes intimidating neighbors or anyone who approached the cultivation sites, along with establishing booby traps and potentially deadly devices at the periphery of the property in question, including bear traps or coyote traps capable of injuring a person who happened upon them to the point of needing to have a leg or arm amputated. In at least some cases, those engaged in these unpermited and unlicensed agricultural operations utilized explosive devices and mines as barriers.
With illicit or unlicensed marijuana farms mushrooming all over the county and particularly in the Mojave Desert, the region’s residents over the last couple of years have called upon the sheriff’s department to act. While the department had been a continuous recipient of the Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program grants for close to two decades at that point, the sheer volume of marijuana being produced at innumerable cultivation sites presented a challenge such that in relatively short order the federal funds were consumed by the cost of the sheriff’s department’s operations. As late as October of last year, sheriff’s department personnel were disappointing a number of county residents in both the desert and mountain areas who were alerting the department to the illicit operations within close proximity to their property, bordering it or in some cases intruding onto their property.
Requests, indeed demands, by mountain and desert residents that the sheriff’s department abate the illicit operations were commonly met with responses that held that the department’s hands were tied, and that the Adult Use of Marijuana Act prevented the department from responding to the burgeoning number of complaints.
In January 2021, as if Sheriff John McMahon was making good on a New Year’s resolution he had made, his department became far more aggressive in locating and uprooting unlicensed marijuana plantations.
On January 6, 2021, the sheriff’s Marijuana Enforcement Team served a search warrant in the 2600 block of Parkdale Road in Adelanto, where they found, seized and ultimately destroyed 19,998 still-growing marijuana plants along with 186 pounds of partially-cured harvested marijuana.
On January 27, the task force located and seized another 1,903 marijuana plants and 306.5 pounds of harvested marijuana in Lucerne Valley and Johnson Valley.
On February 2, that team descended upon a massive unlicensed marijuana cultivation operation on property in El Mirage, some 12.5 miles northwest of Adelanto, where they found greenhouses in which 18,884 plants were growing, all of which were confiscated and destroyed.
On April 16 and 17, sheriff’s department operation carried out at Emerald Street and Pine Springs Avenue; Two Mile Road and Copper Mountain Road; Mesa Drive and Morongo Road; Nandina Street and Lupine Avenue; Rodgers Lane and Alfalfa Avenue; Canyon Road and Sunny Sands Drive; Sunny Sands Drive and Meldora Avenue; and within the 70300 block of Giant Rock Road in and around Twentynine Palms resulted in the location and destruction of 10,400 marijuana plants weighing more than six tons.
Thirteen days later, on April 29, sheriff’s personnel returned to the Emerald Street and Pine Springs Avenue cultivation site, and went to four others located in the Twentynine Palms and Desert Heights environs, including one in the 73500 block of Two Mile Road; a property at the intersection of Dunlap Road and Canyon Road, another property proximate to Dunlap Road and Canyon Road, and a site at the corner of Redhill Road and Bermuda Avenue, pulling up more than 2,300 marijuana plants in less than seven hours.
During operations in the greater Twentynine Palms area, Desert Heights and Landers on May 5 and May 7, raids were carried out on marijuana cultivation facilities on property near Sespe Street and Alta Avenue in Landers; Covela Avenue and Napa Road in Landers; property adjacent to Napa Road and Alta Avenue in Landers; at Covela Avenue and Sespe Street in Landers; at another site close to Covela Avenue and Sespe Street in Landers; at a site proximate to Kelsey Boulevard and Presswood Drive in Landers; on property at Kachina Drive and Shoshone Valley Road in Desert Heights and at a facility located on property in the 1200 block of Sunrise Avenue in Desert Heights. Those raids led to the seizure of 4,400 marijuana plants and over eight tons of uncured marijuana
On May 13, when the sheriff’s department’s Marijuana Enforcement Team along with personnel from the San Bernardino County Agricultural and Weights and Measures Department, and county code enforcement division converged on an outdoor cultivation site in the 35700 block of Granite Road in Lucerne Valley, where the operators had previously maintained that the farm was one for the cultivation of hemp to be used for the manufacturing of rope, cloth, paper and other materials. The 40-acre site hosted 199 greenhouses in which .76,118 plants, all of which personnel from the County Agricultural and Weights and Measures Department determined through field tests possessed THC content was at levels that would eliminate their official governmental status as hemp under any conditions. THC is the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. All of those plants were destroyed.
On May 20, the marijuana enforcement team and a member of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife served five search warrants at various locations in the Twentynine Palms area, including the 86200 block of Twentynine Palms Highway; at Monte Vista Drive and Waylyn; in the 25500 block of El Encanto; at Taco Road and Mojave; and at Bullion Mountain and Mesa Road. Deputies and detectives seized 3,901 marijuana plants and 652 pounds of processed marijuana.
Yesterday, on May 27, the sheriff’s department’s marijuana enforcement team serve multiple search warrants at locations in Lucerne Valley, including one within the 33200 block of Haynes Road, a location in the 33500 block of Haynes Road, another in the 15900 block of Verdugo Road and a property in the 33300 block of Desert Lane, where they seized 6,429 marijuana plants and five pounds of processed marijuana, together with guns.
Unknown or unrecognized by the general public was that McMahon’s newfound resolve corresponded with the overtures then being made by Mountain States Consulting Group to San Bernardino County’s political establishment to allow the “enfranchised marijuana entrepreneurs who have .
Crassly or delicately, subtly or unsubtly, directly or indirectly, implicitly or explicitly, Postmus’s message to the members of the board of supervisors was essentially this: Bow to the new order and end your blanket opposition to the commercialization of marijuana in the county, since eventually and inevitably, that change is going to come. If you do so, and if you abide by an arrangement that ensures that the companies I represent get in on the ground floor of the county’s marijuanification and its competitors are locked out, I will make it monetarily worth your while. I can assure you that as Mountain States Consulting Group’s clients capture a near monopoly on the San Bernardino marijuana market, so too will you profit.
Reportedly, Postmus has proposed a timetable to Board of Supervisors Chairman Curt Hagman and County Chief Executive Officer Leonard Hernandez that calls for the county initiating a transition to eventual full legalization of the cultivation, harvesting, processing, warehousing, distribution and sale of marijuana and its alteration into cannabis-based derivatives, chemicals and products to include the manufacturing and sale thereof by 2022. That proposed transition is to come after many of the companies Mountain States Consulting Group is now representing have fully established the cannabis-based and marijuana-based businesses they now have in place or are currently setting up have become fully operational and profitable, providing them with the capital to expand their operations into the unincorporated areas of the county, and cover Postmus’s commitments to bankroll Hagman’s, Cook’s and Rowe’s political and personal agendas into the future, chits worth in practical terms no less than several million dollars to be divvied up and placed into each of their campaign funds or, through creative means that Postmus is able to devise, into their personal bank accounts. In the last several months, Postmus has been coordinating fundraising efforts on behalf of Hagman, Cook and Rowe, garnering from Mountain States Consulting Group’s clients as well as other Republican Party donors actual donations and commitments of several hundred thousand dollars. Postmus’s fundraising effort on behalf of Supervisor Janice Rutherford, the other Republican on the board of supervisors in addition to Hagman, Cook and Rowe, has been less spirited than for the others largely because Rutherford is scheduled in 2022, because of term limits, to leave the board of supervisors. After that point, her position as one of the county’s key decision-makers will end, making her of virtually no use to Postmus and Mountain States Consulting Group’s clients who have substantial financial interests intertwined with county policy decisions current and future. Still, Postmus has an interest in remaining on her good side, and he stands ready to assist her in her fundraising effort if she decides to initiate a campaign for county assessor in 2022.
Postmus is interested in influencing the other member of the board of supervisors, Joe Baca, Jr., the only Democrat on the board. Baca’s political affiliation presents a complication for Postmus, who at one point, before he was felled by scandal, was the chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Party, proving himself in that role to be that entity’s most efficient fundraiser historically. Utilizing Mountain States Consulting Group or other cutouts, including those related to the Republican Party, to deliver money to Baca is out of the question because Baca cannot afford to be seen taking money from the Republican Party or Republicans in general, and Postmus cannot compromise his continuing affiliation with the Republican Party by providing financial assistance to an up-and-coming Democrat. Postmus is currently casting about for some means by which he can network with a chain of individuals, agents, shell companies, agencies or organizations to pass money along to Baca in a way that cannot be detected by outsiders but such that Baca knows the origin of the money.
There are Republicans in San Bernardino County, including some in the same political orbit as Hagman, Cook and Rowe, who have questioned the wisdom of the party and individual politicians such as Hagman, Cook and Rowe associating with Postmus, given his criminal history. The scandal that enveloped Postmus involved political corruption of a breathtaking scope that ultimately costed the the county at least $168 million in legal settlements and another $6.5 million in attorney’s fees. In his 2011 guilty pleas, Postmus acknowledged that he had sought and received bribes in return for votes that profited those who had bribed him or made campaign contributions to him, that he made decisions and took actions while he was a supervisor in which he had a conflict of interest, that he misappropriated public funds to an illegal use, that he engaged in fraud as well as the misuse of public property and governmental authority and that he perjured himself and falsified documents in an effort to keep his illegal activity from being discovered. Few of those who have misgivings over the GOP’s current crop of the county’s top officeholders such as Hagman, Cook and Rowe associating with Postmus have had the courage to speak up about their concerns in this regard. There is a determination among Hagman, Cook, Rowe and their respective chiefs of staff – Yekaterina Kolcheva, Timothy Itnyre and Matt Knox – as well as the political teams that surround them and their supporters that they can perpetuate their collective hold on the political power they now possess by casting their lot with Postmus and his superior fundraising ability and electioneering machinery. Collectively, the calculation is that Postmus’s fundraising activity on their behalves will remain largely hidden, that the vast majority of the public in San Bernardino County has long forgotten the misdeeds Postmus involved himself in and that if any flap does develop, the money that Postmus and his team will provide them with can be used to pay for electioneering and positive public relations efforts that will more than offset whatever negative publicity the Postmus association might entail.
Two months ago, when the Sentinel asked Cook if he thought it was a good idea to be utilizing Postmus as a fundraiser, given his history and Mountain States Consulting Group’s current association with entities that were seeking favorable treatment from the county with regard to their various proposals and projects , Cook shrugged and said, “That’s politics.”
Indeed, casual observers and more experienced ones alike have naively missed the full implication of the services that Postmus is able to offer politicians. Having been convicted of multiple levels of corruption, bribery, graft and violations of the public trust as a consequence of his time in office, Postmus is acutely conscious of which missteps he took and how it was that he was caught. Because of his political conflict of interest conviction, he is no longer able to hold elected office in California again. He has a determination to remain in the political game, and toward that end he created Mountain States Consulting Group. A Wyoming-based limited liability company, it is subject to fewer and less-exacting reporting requirements than California corporations. Those individuals or entities looking to influence politicians, elected officials and governmental staff members who directly ply those in the decision-making loop with money run the risk of being charged with bribing public officials. Those public officials who take money from individuals or corporations who have a financial interest in the decisions those public officials make run the risk of being charged with accepting bribes. Mountain States Consulting Group, by serving in an intermediary role between the donor and the politician, can prevent the politician from being accused of favoring a campaign donor with his or her votes. Such favoritism toward campaign donors is not illegal, but can come across as unseemly, and thereby represent political risk down the road. Mountain States can eliminate this politically problematic appearance.
More significantly, Mountain States Consulting Group exists as a tool to essentially legalize bribery. In California, elected officials are not prohibited from voting on matters that impact their campaign donors but they are strictly prohibited from receiving remuneration from, or being employed by, any individual or entity with a financial stake in the votes they make as elected officials. Postmus has designed, and has used, Mountain States Consulting Group to actually employ public officials directly or indirectly. This allows the public official to report the income received as an employee of Mountain States Consulting Group, thereby complying with income reporting requirements mandated by state law. This can occur without the official having to report that Mountain States Consulting Group is the recipient of money from the individual or entity favored by that official’s action or vote. The loose and vague reporting and disclosure requirements that Mountain States Consulting Group functions under as a consequence of being a Wyoming Limited Liability Company is of some consequence in this regard.
It is of further note that Postmus has a special and highly favorable relationship with Sheriff John McMahon.
Postmus was first arrested and charged in 2009 with criminal activity relating to his actions while he was serving as county assessor in 2007, 2008 and 2009. In 2010, he was criminally charged with a string of interrelated offenses that occurred while he was county supervisor in 2004, 2005 and 2006. After initially maintaining his innocence in the face of all of those charges, Postmus in 2011 entered guilty pleas to all 14 felony charges against him. His sentencing was deferred while the criminal cases against others alleged to have been involved with him in his crimes wended their way through the prosecutorial and judicial processes, and the court had an opportunity to determine if he made good on a key element in his plea arrangement, which was to cooperate with prosecutors, including testifying against his alleged co-conspirators before a grand jury and at trial. In November 2018, with all of those cases prosecutions and trials having concluded, Postmus came before San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Michael A. Smith, before whom he had entered his guilty pleas in 2011.
Judge Smith sentenced Postmus to three years in state prison. Though the prosecution wanted Postmus incarcerated at once, Judge Smith granted him 15 days to get his affairs in order, requiring that he report to the courthouse at 8:30 a.m. on November 30, 2018. Postmus did so, and was whisked away into confinement at that time.
By mid-December 2018, Postmus was housed at North Kern State Prison, a medium-security all-male prison facility located in Delano, which in addition to serving as the place of detention to close to 1,600 permanent or mainline inmates, also serves as a reception center for incoming inmates who are not destined to remain there for the entirety of their sentences.
Postmus’s confinement coincided with California’s effort at prison realignment, which made him eligible for being transferred back to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s criminal detention facilities to serve his sentence. Based upon the the nonviolent nature of his crimes, his lack of further criminal involvement, his behavior while incarcerated and his psychological evaluation, he was indeed sent back in the spring of 2019 to San Bernardino County to serve out the remainder of his sentence.
Under the policies that normally attend the incarceration of those convicted under California law, inmates must serve at least half of their sentence before becoming eligible for parole. Depending upon credits they get for good behavior and the recommendation of prison officials who have evaluated their progress toward rehabilitation, they can be released as early as half way through their sentence, pursuant to the determination of the California Division of Adult Parole Operations and the California Parole Board, or any time after serving more than half of their sentences. Thus, Postmus, whose prison sentence was to run to November 30, 2021, was eligible for release, at the earliest, on May 30, 2020.
As the spring of 2019 progressed to summer, a number of politicians in San Bernardino County were gearing up for the 2020 election season. Absent from the political playing field was Mountain States Consulting Group, since its principal was incarcerated and ot of commission.
In July 2019, Sheriff McMahon, himself a central part of the political establishment in San Bernardino County, in a highly unusual move arranged to release Postmus from custody 22 months prior to his then-scheduled release date, after having served fewer than eight of the 36 months of his sentence, and more than nine months prior to the half-way point in his sentence, which under normal circumstances would have been the earliest Postmus could have been released.
Postmus was released, conditional upon his wearing an ankle monitor, traveling no further than 50 miles from his registered place of residence, maintaining a curfew, reporting regularly to his parole officer and being subject to random drug screening. Postmus moved in, on a temporary basis, with this sister in Wrightwood. Almost immediately, he reinitiated Mountain States Consulting Group’s operations, and he was active and a key player in a multitude of political races in San Bernardino County in both the March 2020 and November 2020 primary and general elections.
On May 18 at a workshop pertaining to the county’s proposed 2021-2022 Budget, the board of supervisors telegraphed their intention to put $10.4 million into the spending plan for the upcoming year to deal address nettlesome land use and code enforcement issues in the county’s unincorporated areas, which primarily consist of unlicensed marijuana farms. Some of the money is to go toward other code enforcement efforts as well as ensuring compliance with the county’s ordinance pertaining to short-term rental units.
Sources close to Postmus say that the board of supervisors’ move to fund more sheriff’s department efforts against unlicensed marijuana cultivators was a signal that its members are agreeable to the timetable he has worked out with Board of Supervisors Chairman Curt Hagman and County Chief Executive Officer Leonard Hernandez to provide the marijuana-related business operations that are Mountain States’ clients with the limited number of permits the county will issue when it undertakes to legalize marijuana-related commercial activity less than two years hence. The arrangements Postmus is pursuing in getting his clients permits to operate at the county level, will ultimately give those entities an inside track in establishing cannabis-related businesses in the eleven other county municipalities besides Adelanto, Hesperia and Needles where the sheriff’s department fills the role of police department, Postmus believes, those being Chino Hills, Rancho Cucamonga, Grand Terrace, Loma Linda, Highland, Big Bear Lake, Yucaipa, Yucca Valley, Twentynine Palms, Apple Valley and Victorville.
The Sentinel’s efforts to obtain statements from Hagman, Cook, Rutherford, Rowe, Baca, McMahon, Hernandez, County Chief Financial Officer Matthew Erickson, County Counsel Michelle Blakemore and Chief Assistant County Counsel Penny Alexander-Kelley were unsuccessful.
The Sentinel’s phone calls to Blakemore and Alexander-Kelley to find out the degree to which Hagman and Hernandez have shared with them the timetable for permitting the sale of marijuana in San Bernardino County were intercepted by a secretary in the county counsel’s office. Initially, the secretary said that Blakemore would “not be the best person” to discuss marijuana-related issues, suggesting that such questions be routed to the attorney specially assigned to the county’s cannabis policy. She did not make clear whether that attorney was a member of county counsel or an outside attorney retained by the county. Upon determining she was speaking with a newspaper reporter, the secretary indicated that the county’s attorneys are not permitted to speak to the public.
Style
May 28 Sentinel Legal Notices
County Fire Department Now Armed With Arson Detecting Dog
Pyromaniacs might want to take note that the San Bernardino County Fire Protection District is now employing an arson detection canine.
The county fire department, after an interlude of more than two decades without such an asset, has acquired a four-year-old black Labrador, which goes by the name of Dinty, to revive its K-9 program. The county fire department formerly employed an arson canine, but that program lapsed sometime around the turn of the Third Millennium.
One of the department’s investigators, Shawn Reiss, is Dinty’s handler, which is to say he is the dog’s owner. Together, Reiss and Dinty recently completed a four-week, 200-hour training course at the Arson Dog Academy in Concord, New Hampshire.
The course was conducted by Paul Gallagher, the owner and trainer with Maine Specialty Dogs.
Arson dogs are also referred to as accelerant detection canines. They are trained to sniff out minute traces of accelerants that may have been used to start or rapidly spread a fire.
Virtually all arson K-9s are Labrador retrievers, which are deemed best suited to sniff out how a fire was intensified.
The program uses Labrador Retrievers for numerous reasons. Labradors have a superior ability to discriminate among scents at a fire scene, as their noses are sensitive to a level of parts per quintillion, a sense of smell that is 100,000 times more acute than a human’s.
Labs generally have a gentle and cooperative disposition, and are responsive to the food-reward method of training used to transform a dog into a firefighting asset.
Labradors have an ability to work within a fire scene, and are oftentimes most effective when a crowd is present. At such fire scenes, arsonists will sometimes linger, giving himself an opportunity to savor the public reaction to his work. Arson dogs, mingling among spectators, can give such a perpetrator a good sniff. If the arsonist is in the crowd watching, the accelerant detecting canine will alert to the smell of the acelerant on his or her clothes, shoes or body. If someone within the crowd has had contact with a flammable liquid or material, that individual will not escape the attention of the dog.
At the site of a fire, the dogs can often pinpoint the spot where the accelerant was used, which can in some instances lead to other evidence useful in an arson probe.
–Mark Gutglueck
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Enough Support To Consider But Not Pass SB Warehouse Moratorium
By Mark Gutglueck
In a temporary victory for San Bernardino City Councilman Ben Reynoso, in consonance with four of his council colleagues he has been able to direct city staff to prepare an urgency ordinance that could impose a moratorium of up to two years duration prohibiting the construction of new warehouses in the city.
Still, Reynoso’s suggestion that city officials suspend the construction of what serve essentially as distribution facilities for merchandise which largely originates in China and other Asian countries stands little chance of getting a final endorsement, since the required margin for the passage of a moratorium is so high.
Under state law, a moratorium cannot be put into place by anything less than a four-fifths vote of the elected decision-making panel of a given jurisdiction. San Bernardino has seven voting members on its city council. Thus, if all seven members of the panel participate in the vote, the temporary ban on warehouse construction in the city will need six votes to pass to meet the 80 percent or greater approval threshold for the temporary ban. .
Both Councilman Fred Shorett and Councilman Juan Figueroa appear philosophically opposed to preventing warehouse development to proceed.
Since 2015, 26 warehouse projects have been processed and approved by the city, entailing acreage under roof of 9,598,255 square feet, or more than one-third of a square mile, translating into 220.34 acres.
Councilman Reynoso has long questioned whether warehouses constitute the highest and best use of the property available for development in the city. He cites the relatively poor pay and benefits provided to those who work in them, the large diesel-powered semi-trucks that frequent them with their unhealthy exhaust emissions together with the bane of traffic gridlock they create in refuting the assertions of their sponsors and proponents that they constitute positive economic development.
As they have been developed over the last several years, Reynoso maintains, warehouses entail greater liabilities than benefits. Simultaneously, recent developments in terms of mechanisms for loading trucks, unloading them and the transition from fossil fuels to electricity in the powering of vehicles has created a circumstance in which many of the untoward environmental impacts traditionally associated with warehouses can be attenuated. San Bernardino currently has no guidelines to ensure the emission or pollution reductions that can be achieved are actually mandated into the conditions of approval for warehouses in the city going forward. Reynoso maintains the city should ensure such improvements are incorporated into the design and operation of any new warehouses or that the city forego such developments altogether unless substantial community benefit agreements from the developers proposing to build warehouses can be wrung from the project proponents to offset the downsides of such development
Accordingly, an attitude has grown in place around those politicians in Reynoso’s orbit that it would therefore be appropriate for the city to hold off on further warehouse construction while a comprehensive review of warehouses as a land use is conducted in conjunction with the reformulation of the city’s general plan, which has not been reviewed or revamped for more than a decade-and-a-half.
A general plan is the blueprint by which land use throughout a city is to be managed, and becomes the document by which a city’s broad planning guidelines are set and the city’s future development goals and standards are defined within the context of policy statements to achieve those development goals.
As the catalyst that has provoked the concept of imposing a moratorium to allow an assessment of the economic, environmental and social implications of allowing intensive warehouse development to occur, Reynoso has been thrown into a direct confrontation with San Bernardino Mayor John Valdivia, whose approach toward development is in large measure driven by the willingness of the development industry to provide hefty political contributions to the elected officials who act as the decision-makers determining whether development projects can proceed.
In this way, Valdivia, who holds the traditional post of political leader in the 218,000 population city, is strongly opposed to a moratorium, as this would likely reduce the level of donations into his electioneering fund.
In response to Reynoso’s request that the city consider such a moratorium, city staff sought to steer a middle ground between the two contrasting attitudes toward the advisability of warehouse development.
A staff report written prior to but dated the day of this week’s city council meeting, May 19, 2021, authored by Director of Community and Economic Development Michael Huntley that was passed to the council by City Manager Robert D. Field states, “Over the last two decades, the Inland Empire has grown as a key logistics hub on the West Coast. While there are economic benefits to the growth of this sector, there are also challenges that must be considered as we evaluate land use issues in the city moving forward, including traffic and safety, infrastructure, environmental and health issues. Over the last 16 years, since the city’s general plan was last updated, there has been a marked increase in industrial development including warehouse, distribution, logistics, fulfillment center, manufacturing and other similar development in the city’s industrial and heavy commercial zoning districts. Additionally there are several specific plans that allow for the establishment of heavy trucking and warehousing uses around the San Bernardino International Airport and along the Cajon corridor to the west of the I-215 Freeway.”
Noting that the term warehouse is used to refer to all of the previously described uses, Huntley’s report continues, “Since 2015, the city has processed and approved 26 warehouse projects equaling 9,598,255 square feet. The city is currently processing three warehouse projects and five truck storage facilities. As the planning division processes warehouse entitlements, staff has identified that the land use classifications, definitions, development standards, performance standards, and design guidelines are not adequate for ensuring quality development that is compatible with surrounding land uses. To address these concerns, the update to the city’s general plan and development code is currently underway and will include an evaluation of warehouse uses. The issues that will be addressed as part of this analysis include land use compatibility, traffic and safety, infrastructure, environmental and health. The update to the general plan and development code will include evaluating the positive and negative impacts associated with warehouse development and operations in the community.”
The city council had the option, Huntley pointed out, under California’s Government Code, of “changing direction and proceeding with a moratorium before the general plan and development code update are completed,” This would entail, he said, passing an urgency ordinance.
“An urgency ordinance could prohibit the establishment, expansion, or modification of a warehouse oriented use anywhere within the city, and prohibit the city from accepting any new application or issuing any permits or entitlements to those that submit applications following the posting of the agenda for the consideration of a moratorium,” according to Huntley. “Pursuant to Government Code Section 65858, an urgency ordinance establishing a moratorium requires an affirmative vote of four-fifths of the city council to be adopted. If adopted, the moratorium continues in effect for 45 days unless extended by council action. Depending on whether the original moratorium was noticed or not, the ordinance may be extended either: (1) by an additional 22 months and 15 days; or (2) by an additional 10 months and 15 days and subsequently by an additional 12 months. In no event may a moratorium last for more than two years. While the moratorium is in effect, city staff would be required to study the issue and bring back proposed standards for council consideration.”
Huntley avoided recommending one way or another that the urgency ordinance putting the moratorium in place be adopted. Rather he called upon the city council to make that decision and “provide direction regarding whether it wishes to consider warehouse development standards as planned (i.e., as part of the update to the general plan and development code) or if it wishes for staff to prepare an urgency ordinance for more immediate consideration.”
On Wednesday night, it became clear that a solid majority of the council falls within Reynoso’s camp in terms of believing that the city should not be embracing unregulated warehouse development. Nevertheless, it does not appear that the council majority in favor of the temporary ban is overwhelming enough to meet the four-fifths burden to pass the urgency moratorium ordinance.
In its discussion Wednesday night, a majority of the city council evinced an understanding that developers stood the opportunity to acquire property and convert it into a warehouse and make some relatively sure and fast money in doing so, leading to the assertion that warehouses represented so-called “economic development,” but that this then left the city with the burden of projects that did not provide the community with high-paying jobs or a substantial amount of income into governmental coffers through sales tax receipts or property tax enhancements. The same council members indicated their sensitivity to the consideration that warehouse operations themselves often involved levels of pollution and impact on the environment that were unacceptable and incompatible land uses with nearby existing homes and schools.
Seventh Ward Councilman Damon Alexander decried the poor quality and character of development that many developers attracted to the city engaged in, and he called for raising the standards the city imposes on developers. He said he wanted the development community to “stop bringing us us their ‘C’ grade paperwork all the time.”
Alexander said San Bernardino was in danger of being overwhelmed by inferior development that did not bring into the city adequate infrastructure needed to accompany it.
“Hopefully someplace down this line we can put in place ‘no more million square foot facilities.’ Million square foot facilities can’t be repurposed. We need to shrink the size of all these warehouses. as well as [have] a moratorium. We’ve got to think thirty years from now. My best friend has got a 3D printer and he can print anything. Thirty-five years from now that’s going to be the thing and what are we going to be stuck with in the City of San Bernardino? A bunch of large warehouses when everybody’s going to have 3D printers in their back yard, in their office.”
Those warehouses that have already come to exist and which are yet to be built needed to be using, Alexander said, “alternative fuel vehicles,”
Alexander embraced the development, environmental and alternative energy standards the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians had incorporated into its 1.1 million-square-foot Landings warehouse project proposal approved by the city council in March. He said those standards were not yet incorporated into the city’s development code, and that the moratorium would give the city the opportunity to become more exacting in its standards. He indicated he was in favor of a moratorium as long as it did not exceed the state’s two-year limit.
Councilwoman Sandra Ibarra said she too was in support of a warehouse project ban that went no longer than two years or the time it would take to put new warehouse standards into the city’s revamped general plan.
She said the proliferation of warehouses and the trucks that frequent them was damaging the city’s infrastructure.
“Up Waterman and Tippecanoe, near the warehouses, I see those streets, how they’re being damaged,” she said. “Small streets are also being damaged around the warehouses. We’re not maintaining them. Nobody is.”
She said she would vote to support a moratorium “if we can hold off on this for no more than two years [and] get on to the general plan. The problem is the developers. They are not going to be happy with us because they can’t build a warehouse in our city. Well, maybe they’re not meant to come into our city. If they want to, they should be patient until we finalize our general plan. It has not been updated in over ten years, and unfortunately, we’re just putting warehouses in small neighborhoods right now.”
Councilman Fred Shorett indicated his belief that any development is good development, and that the city would be shooting itself in the foot if it were to disallow further building of warehouses.
“I certainly support the idea of a clean environment, electrification and going forward in thinking,” he said. “I have to, with all due respect, disagree that you can’t repurpose a million square foot building down the road. The owner will certainly, if it is not being used or if it’s vacant, they will find a way to repurpose it. I can’t agree with my colleague that they’ll just have to wait two years or what have you.”
Shorett further enunciated his pro-development philosophy. He indicated the city had problems, and that there were dilemmas larger than having to accommodate warehouses.
“We need to change our image,” Shorett said. “Developers are not bad people. They create jobs. They create environment. We can hold their feet to the fire, and we can put high standards on them, but the word moratorium is pretty scary and we would perhaps miss some opportunities over the next two years if there were a moratorium in place. In the business world, in the development world, in the building and the jobs world, we have ebbs and flows, and you strike while the iron’s hot. One reason we have a lot of warehouses is because we’ve got an airport, and we’ve got an airport that generally speaking is going to be a logistics airport and not a passenger airport. Hopefully. We will come in with a few passenger routes or a few planes, but generally speaking that’s going to be a freight and logistics airport.”
It is not the city’s place to inhibit potential developers with environmental standards, Shorett opined, and he said the scientific world, industry, state and federal environmental authorities and the innovation of the private sector should be relied upon to make improvements and raise standards rather than the city. Diesel trucks are, he said, “if I’m not mistaken going over to clean gas [sic]. They’re not going to be spewing the…
“diesel particulate matter,” Councilman Ted Sancez interjected.
“the pollutants they have in the past,” Shorett continued. “We’re not going to stop the traffic on the 10 the 215, the 210 We are surrounded by a freeway.”
Shorett said, “I don’t support a moratorium but I do support the high standards and all the things that we need to with the tools we have, and I think we just have to make sure we’re using them to the utmost.”
Councilwoman Kimberly Calvin noted that recently approved warehouses were being located within one mile of existing schools.
“Where is the city going to place their expectations, raise the bar as far as that is concerned?” she asked.
She said the warehouses were not built to remain empty, and that when they were filled, they brought with them certain environmental, health and safety risks. She said that there are better developmental opportunities out there and that warehouses are “taking up space for something the community does need and want.”
Councilman Ted Sanchez said that warehouses do represent a form of economic growth that can lead toward prosperity, but that building must be balanced with environmental safeguards against the devastation from pollution that warehouse operations can bring. He predicted that there were not the requisite six votes on the council to put a moratorium in place.
In making his pitch for not going the moratorium route, Mayor John Valdivia told the council it could layer the environmental protections and other limitations on warehouse projects it collectively felt desirable into conditions of approval and the conditional use permits (CUPs) for the projects on a case-by-case basis.
“Consider the implementation of strong CUPs,” Valdivia said.
When the council considered Reynoso’s motion, seconded by Calvin that staff be directed to prepare an urgency ordinance for a moratorium on warehouse construction, it passed 5-2 with Shorett and Councilman Juan Figueroa, who in virtually every vote he has cast since he has been a member of the council has sided with Mayor Valdivia, dissenting.
Redlands Activists Gunning To Get High Rise Limitation Referendum On The Ballot
The controlled-growth advocacy group Friends of Redlands has found itself in a footrace against Village Partners Ventures, LLC and that company’s partisans on the Redlands City Council in seeing which entity will be able to slam shut or open the door on high-rise development in the city of 73,000. .
In September 2020, Friends of Redlands initiated a petition drive to gather signatures to force the city to conduct a referendum on whether structures of more than three stories can be erected in most of the city.
On April 27, 2021, the planning commission made a recommendation that Village Partners Ventures LLC be allowed to transform the largely vacant 11.15-acre Redlands Mall, which formerly hosted the Harris’ department store, into a melange of mixed-uses including residential, retail, office professional quarters, restaurants, recreational facilities and parking structures around a pedestrian plaza and swimming pool, with multi-story buildings of three, four and five vertical levels.
At present, Friends of Redlands appears to have gathered sufficient signatures to force a vote on what the allowable height limit on Redands buildings is to be, though that election would be likely to be held no earlier than the date of the California Primary election in 2022. The group is now heading into the clubhouse turn to see if it can, before the signature-gathering deadline elapses, gather more signatures and thereby force a circumstance in which the election would be held this year.
The Friends of Redlands’ initiative calls for disallowing buildings taller than two stories next to single-story homes without the consent of the owner of the single-story home, limiting the height of buildings in the downtown area, which involves the University of Redlands Transit Villages Area, to no more than 50 feet, and the permitting of buildings to a height of no more than 62 feet – tantamount to four stories – in the New York Street/ESRI Transit Village Area. The initiative would further require that the city council unanimously approve making any density intensifications on projects, and it would layer greater parking provision requirements on developers seeking project approvals. To qualify the initiative for the ballot in 2022, the petitioners needed ten percent of Redlands’ 42,000 voters to affix their signatures to the ballot application. To force the election to be held this year, within 109 days of the requisite number of signatures being verified, Friends of Redlands needs 15 percent of the city’s voters – 6,409 – to sign the petition. Indeed, at this point Friends of Redlands have more than 6,400 signatures, but as to whether an evaluation by the city clerk or the county registrar of voters will determine that all of the signatures are valid and that there are no other irregularities disqualifying some of the signatures to leave enough of the signatures intact for Friends of Redlands to have met the 6,409-signature burden is another question. Therefore, Friends of Redlands is pushing to get as many more signatures as it can to see if the election can be held later this year.
If the election were to be held this year, it could unravel Village Partners Ventures, LLC’s proposal to convert a portion of the Redlands Mall property to five-story apartments.
Village Partners Ventures, LLP is hoping to capture Redlands city officials’ enthusiasm for rejuvenation of the mall property after it has remained unproductive for more than a decade, and use that momentum to get permission to complete its energetic plan, which calls for a transit-oriented mixed use project built in phases. Village Partners Ventures is working from the premise that the mall redevelopment project can be considered to be in conformance with the Transit Villages Specific Plan, a subcomponent of the Redlands General Plan adopted in 2017 that envisions mixed uses including relatively high density residential units in the districts around the train stations to be built in Redlands as part of the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority’s “Arrow” light rail passenger line tentatively slated to begin operating in 2022, The density of projects approved under the Transit Villages concept is far greater than densities permitted elsewhere in the city. Approval of the Village Partners Ventures project would clear the way, according to the staff report accompanying the April 27 agenda, for Village Partners Ventures, LLC to “demolish existing on-site buildings and improvements; construct multiple mixed-use buildings with up to 3-, 4-, and 5-stories; construct up to 722 multifamily dwelling units to include live/work, studio, one-bedroom, two-bedroom, and three-bedroom units ranging between 475 and 1,500 square-feet each; construct an approximately 10,000 square-foot recreational amenity multi-story building including an exterior pool and resident areas; construct up to 73,000 square-feet of commercial floor area on ground floors to include retail and restaurant uses, as well as a rooftop restaurant; construct up to 12,000 square-feet of office space on upper floors; (complete a) pedestrian plaza totaling approximately 16,500 square-feet; construct a six-level parking structure with 780 spaces and two single-level subterranean parking structures each with approximately 240 spaces; construct a 14,600 square-foot single tenant retail building for a pharmacy on the south side of Citrus Avenue at Eureka Street; construct public and private open space areas to include landscaping, shade trees, street trees, and pedestrian improvements; and construct related site improvements to include sidewalks, driveways, landscape, lighting, flood prevention, and public and private utility connections.”
The pharmacy referenced pertains to the CVS drug store, one of the last remaining commercial operations yet open on the mall site. It will be relocated across Citrus Avenue onto 1.1 acres located at the southeast corner of Citrus Avenue and Eureka Street, which currently exists as a parking lot.
West State Street, which currently terminates at Orange Street, is to be extended through the project.
Another element of the Transit Villages Specific Plan relates to one of the other main concentrations of commercial uses in the city in a district west of downtown, the area surrounding a train station that is to be constructed proximate to the New York Street/Redlands Boulevard intersection.
The Friends of Redlands’ proposed initiative offers slightly different standards with regard to building elevation, permitting four stories in proximity to the New York Street/Redlands Boulevard District, which does not involve as may historic buildings as those in the downtown area.
The city staff report to the planning commission for its April 27 meeting stated that Village Partners Ventures, LLC was attempting to maneuver around the city’s restrictions banning projects involving structures higher than two stories or more than 18 units per acre. “The applicant is requesting a city council determination that the proposed project is exempt from Measure ‘U’ (which included provisions specifically exempting certain types of development),” the report states, identifying those as “Measure ‘U’ Section 2, (Exemptions). The applicant is requesting exemption based on category D, “Development directly related to proposed Metrolink stations in the City of Redlands….”
Given the methodical nature of both governmental and developmental processes, it is realistic to expect that the Redlands Mall conversion project will not have progressed to a point at which the four- and five- story elements of the project would be in place or even significantly toward completion by later this year. Accordingly, if the referendum is held this year and development more than three stories is banned downtown, the advent of four- and five-story structures beyond what already exists in the form of the Redlands Federal Bank Building built in 1981 will not be allowed to take place. The Redlands Federal Bank Building is now occupied by Citi Bank, which stands as the lone six-story structure in Redlands.
If the vote is delayed until 2022, Village Partners Ventures, LLC may at that point have made sufficient progress toward completing the four- and five-story components of the project to render any efforts to limit the project’s height moot.
The effort to limit building height in Redlands and the current initiative drive comes within a wider context a struggle over the intensity of development in Redlands, which has featured efforts by both sides to use the initiative process to define the community’s land use values and priorities.
Redlands, the third oldest of San Bernardino County’s cities, was the first primary destination of well-heeled Easterners to California, and thus became, prior to the turn of the 19th Century to the 20th Century, the earliest upscale residential community in what is now known as the Inland Empire. A degree of pride has accompanied this history right up the present, such that a significant level of active resistance to aggressive development exists within Redlands’ populace. An outcome of this resistance a generation ago was Measure U, a controlled-growth ordinance which remains in effect. In recent years, as developmental interests have sought to undercut the provisions of Measure U, a dedicated and heavy contingent of Redlands residents and activists – watchdogs who seek to ward off any efforts to compromise the principles of Measure U – have asserted themselves.
Last year, Redlands residents were called upon to consider Measure G, which was placed by the city council on the March 3, 2020 California Primary ballot. Measure G sought to undo all of the provisions of Measure U in the city’s 782-acre central corridor and make further general sallies against Measure U’s restrictions throughout the city, as well as against Measures R and N, two other controlled-growth initiatives previously put in place by Redlands’ voters. Specifically, Measure G called for eliminating the requirement that a four-fifths vote of the city council is needed to approve residential densities exceeding 18 dwelling units per acre, eliminate the current requirement that a four-fifths vote of the city council is needed to approve residential buildings exceeding two stories or 35 feet in height, eliminate the need for developers to ensure that the level of traffic flow that exists at the intersections proximate to their projects prior to the construction of their projects be maintained after the projects are completed, eliminate the requirement that the voters of the city rather than the city council be solely authorized to establish any new land use designations in the city, eliminate the requirement that the proponents of certain new development projects prepare a socioeconomic‐cost/benefit study before approval of those projects, eliminate the requirement that certain residential subdivision projects be subject to competitive review for issuance of building permits, and eliminate the requirement that the developers of new projects pay 100 percent of the development impact fees that are imposed on those projects. Measure G also called for rescinding the earlier voter‐approved measures R, N and U, which prohibit more than 400 residential dwelling units being constructed within the city in any year.
Measure G was soundly defeated, gathering 7,798 votes of support, or 35.12 percent of the ballots cast, while being met by 14,407 votes in opposition, equal to 64.88 percent rejection.
-Mark Gutglueck