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LUCERNE, Calif. – A man was injured on Friday evening when his motorcycle went off a Lucerne roadway and hit a power pole.
The crash occurred shortly before 6 p.m. on Country Club Drive at 16th Avenue, according to the California Highway Patrol.
CHP Officer Ryan Erickson told Lake County News that the motorcyclist was traveling westbound on Country Club Drive at an unknown speed when he failed to negotiate a curve in the roadway at 17th Avenue.
The motorcycle went off the roadway and hit a small culvert. Erickson said witnesses reported that the motorcycle then became airborne.
Erickson said the motorcycle landed and hit a power pole on the side of the roadway between 15th and 16th avenues.
Initial reports indicated that the rider was trapped under the motorcycle.
He said the rider was conscious and talking after the wreck.
The rider was transported via Northshore Fire ambulance to a landing zone set up at Lucerne Harbor Park.
There, a REACH air ambulance picked up the injured man and transported him to an out-of-county trauma center.
Erickson remained on scene for some time afterward as he documented the crash site. The motorcycle appeared to have sustained major damage.
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California law protects a spouse’s undivided one-half interest in Community Property assets from wrongful actions taken by their other spouse. The same rules apply to registered domestic partners.
What is community property? Property acquired while married and living together – excluding gifts and inheritances – is presumed to be community property and not either spouse’s separate property. Each spouse has an equal undivided one-half interest in community property assets.
Even when title is in one spouse’s name only, an asset remains community property. This can happen when one spouse uses marital earnings to purchase an asset. Only if the other spouse voluntarily and knowingly signs an express declaration to relinquish their community property interest does the asset become separate property of one spouse.
Generally speaking either spouse acting alone can control and manage community property assets. A spouse’s management and control of community property is subject to a fiduciary duty to act in the “highest good faith and fair dealing.” A spouse who takes any unfair advantage of the other spouse has breached the fiduciary duty.
Section 1101 of the Family Code allows a spouse to bring suit against the other spouse, or estate, for a breach of the fiduciary duty to not impair their spouse’s undivided one-half interest in community property assets.
A spouse cannot gift the couple’s community property assets without the written consent of the other spouse. Gifts by one spouse alone can be revoked by the nonconsenting spouse.
The nonconsenting spouse has three years from discovering the gift to bring legal action if pursued during the marriage while both spouses are alive.
However, as discussed below, the three year limitation does not apply when the nonconsenting spouse sues after the death of their spouse or in a marital dissolution proceeding.
In Francine S. Yeh v. Lie-Cheng Tai et. al. (December 2017), the California Second District Court of Appeal decided a case brought by a surviving wife against the trustees of her deceased husband’s trust estate for his breach of the fiduciary duty.
While alive the husband had persuaded his wife to transfer title to a residence they had purchased into his name only on the grounds that he could then obtain lower interests rates on the mortgage using his credit alone.
The husband promised that the wife would maintain her one-half interest in the residence and later be restored to title. The loan was paid-off using the couple’s community property money.
Three days prior to his death, the husband assured his wife that her name was on the title and that the property would be all hers.
In fact, however, Mr. Lie had secretly transferred title to the residence into a living trust naming other persons as beneficiaries. Thus the husband had taken away the wife’s one-half undivided community property interest.
The defendants claimed that the wife’s lawsuit was untimely because it was brought more than one-year after the husband’s death. Generally speaking most claims against a decedent’s estate must be filed within one year of the decedent’s death.
The court, however, instead agreed with the wife: The general rule did not apply because Section 1101 specifically allows a spouse to bring a claim for breach of the fiduciary duty either at the time of a dissolution proceeding or, as in this case, after the other spouse’s death. Only if the case was so delayed to cause an unfair prejudice to the defendants could the defendants object based on timeliness.
Furthermore, even a spouse who has silently suffered a wrong to his or her community property interest during the marriage – but has not voluntarily and knowingly signed an express written declaration to relinquish her rights – may still bring a timely action either after their spouse has died or during marital dissolution proceedings; provided that such delay is not unfair to the opposing side.
Dennis A. Fordham, attorney, is a State Bar-Certified Specialist in estate planning, probate and trust law. His office is at 870 S. Main St., Lakeport, Calif. He can be reached atThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and 707-263-3235. His Web site is www.DennisFordhamLaw.com.
What is community property? Property acquired while married and living together – excluding gifts and inheritances – is presumed to be community property and not either spouse’s separate property. Each spouse has an equal undivided one-half interest in community property assets.
Even when title is in one spouse’s name only, an asset remains community property. This can happen when one spouse uses marital earnings to purchase an asset. Only if the other spouse voluntarily and knowingly signs an express declaration to relinquish their community property interest does the asset become separate property of one spouse.
Generally speaking either spouse acting alone can control and manage community property assets. A spouse’s management and control of community property is subject to a fiduciary duty to act in the “highest good faith and fair dealing.” A spouse who takes any unfair advantage of the other spouse has breached the fiduciary duty.
Section 1101 of the Family Code allows a spouse to bring suit against the other spouse, or estate, for a breach of the fiduciary duty to not impair their spouse’s undivided one-half interest in community property assets.
A spouse cannot gift the couple’s community property assets without the written consent of the other spouse. Gifts by one spouse alone can be revoked by the nonconsenting spouse.
The nonconsenting spouse has three years from discovering the gift to bring legal action if pursued during the marriage while both spouses are alive.
However, as discussed below, the three year limitation does not apply when the nonconsenting spouse sues after the death of their spouse or in a marital dissolution proceeding.
In Francine S. Yeh v. Lie-Cheng Tai et. al. (December 2017), the California Second District Court of Appeal decided a case brought by a surviving wife against the trustees of her deceased husband’s trust estate for his breach of the fiduciary duty.
While alive the husband had persuaded his wife to transfer title to a residence they had purchased into his name only on the grounds that he could then obtain lower interests rates on the mortgage using his credit alone.
The husband promised that the wife would maintain her one-half interest in the residence and later be restored to title. The loan was paid-off using the couple’s community property money.
Three days prior to his death, the husband assured his wife that her name was on the title and that the property would be all hers.
In fact, however, Mr. Lie had secretly transferred title to the residence into a living trust naming other persons as beneficiaries. Thus the husband had taken away the wife’s one-half undivided community property interest.
The defendants claimed that the wife’s lawsuit was untimely because it was brought more than one-year after the husband’s death. Generally speaking most claims against a decedent’s estate must be filed within one year of the decedent’s death.
The court, however, instead agreed with the wife: The general rule did not apply because Section 1101 specifically allows a spouse to bring a claim for breach of the fiduciary duty either at the time of a dissolution proceeding or, as in this case, after the other spouse’s death. Only if the case was so delayed to cause an unfair prejudice to the defendants could the defendants object based on timeliness.
Furthermore, even a spouse who has silently suffered a wrong to his or her community property interest during the marriage – but has not voluntarily and knowingly signed an express written declaration to relinquish her rights – may still bring a timely action either after their spouse has died or during marital dissolution proceedings; provided that such delay is not unfair to the opposing side.
Dennis A. Fordham, attorney, is a State Bar-Certified Specialist in estate planning, probate and trust law. His office is at 870 S. Main St., Lakeport, Calif. He can be reached at
Three billion miles away on the farthest known major planet in our solar system, an ominous, dark storm – once big enough to stretch across the Atlantic Ocean from Boston to Portugal – is shrinking out of existence as seen in pictures of Neptune taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
Immense dark storms on Neptune were first discovered in the late 1980s by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft.
Since then, only Hubble has had the sharpness in blue light to track these elusive features that have played a game of peek-a-boo over the years.
Hubble found two dark storms that appeared in the mid-1990s and then vanished. This latest storm was first seen in 2015, but is now shrinking.
Like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot (GRS), the storm swirls in an anticyclonic direction and is dredging up material from deep inside the ice giant planet’s atmosphere. The elusive feature gives astronomers a unique opportunity to study Neptune’s deep winds, which can’t be directly measured.
The dark spot material may be hydrogen sulfide, with the pungent smell of rotten eggs. Joshua Tollefson from the University of California at Berkeley explained, “The particles themselves are still highly reflective; they are just slightly darker than the particles in the surrounding atmosphere.”
Unlike Jupiter’s GRS, which has been visible for at least 200 years, Neptune’s dark vortices only last a few years. This is the first one that actually has been photographed as it is dying.
“We have no evidence of how these vortices are formed or how fast they rotate,” said Agustín Sánchez-Lavega from the University of the Basque Country in Spain. “It is most likely that they arise from an instability in the sheared eastward and westward winds.”
The dark vortex is behaving differently from what planet-watchers predicted. “It looks like we’re capturing the demise of this dark vortex, and it’s different from what well-known studies led us to expect,” said Michael H. Wong of the University of California at Berkeley, referring to work by Ray LeBeau (now at St. Louis University) and Tim Dowling’s team at the University of Louisville. “Their dynamical simulations said that anticyclones under Neptune’s wind shear would probably drift toward the equator. We thought that once the vortex got too close to the equator, it would break up and perhaps create a spectacular outburst of cloud activity.”
But the dark spot, which was first seen at mid-southern latitudes, has apparently faded away rather than going out with a bang.
That may be related to the surprising direction of its measured drift: toward the south pole, instead of northward toward the equator.
Unlike Jupiter’s GRS, the Neptune spot is not as tightly constrained by numerous alternating wind jets (seen as bands in Jupiter’s atmosphere). Neptune seems to only have three broad jets: a westward one at the equator, and eastward ones around the north and south poles. The vortex should be free to change traffic lanes and cruise anywhere in between the jets.
“No facilities other than Hubble and Voyager have observed these vortices. For now, only Hubble can provide the data we need to understand how common or rare these fascinating neptunian weather systems may be,” said Wong.
The first images of the dark vortex are from the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, a long-term Hubble project that annually captures global maps of our solar system’s four outer planets.
Only Hubble has the unique capability to probe these worlds in ultraviolet light, which yields important information not available to other present-day telescopes.
Additional data, from a Hubble program targeting the dark vortex, are from an international team including Wong, Tollefson, Sánchez-Lavega, Andrew Hsu, Imke de Pater, Amy Simon, Ricardo Hueso, Lawrence Sromovsky, Patrick Fry, Statia Luszcz-Cook, Heidi Hammel, Marc Delcroix, Katherine de Kleer, Glenn Orton, and Christoph Baranec.
Wong’s paper appears online in the Astronomical Journal on Feb. 15, 2018.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington, D.C.
For additional imagery, visit: http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2018-08. For NASA’s Hubble web page, visit www.nasa.gov/hubble.
Ray Villard works for the Space Telescope Science Institute of Baltimore, Maryland.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Lake County is home to many talented female high school wrestlers, with the group putting on strong performances in the weekend’s North Coast Section championships.
Wrestlers from Kelseyville, Lower Lake and Upper Lake had top placements at the event.
They included:
– 116-pound champion Bailey Huggins of Kelseyville;
– 121-pound champion Adriana Lopez of Upper Lake;
– 131-pound fourth-place finisher Lily Wetmore of Lower Lake;
– 101-pound eighth-place medalist Kylie Marlin-Ambriz of Kelseyville;
– 131-pound runner-up Christina Wilson of Upper Lake;
– 160-pound seventh-place medalist Rebecca Harper of Upper Lake;
– 143-pound eighth-place medalist Vanessa Gonzalez of Kelseyville;
– 189-pound champion Jasmin Clarke of Kelseyville.
Huggins, Lopez, Wilson and Clarke all advance to the state meet on Feb. 23 and 24 in Visalia.
LAKEPORT, Calif. – A Clearlake Park man has reached a plea agreement with the District Attorney’s Office for the December 2015 murder of a Middletown man and the nonfatal shooting of the man’s fiancée.
District Attorney Don Anderson said Javier Martinez Cachu, 22, has pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder of 25-year-old Luis Pimentel-Arroyo, the attempted murder of Pimentel-Arroyo’s fiancée, Eva Prado, and special allegations of being armed with a shotgun on the night of Dec. 30, 2015.
Anderson said the case involved drugs and insurance money.
Prado and Pimentel-Arroyo lost their Middletown home in the September 2015 Valley fire. Anderson said Martinez Cachu was able to get $40,000 in insurance money from Prado, which he then used to buy marijuana to sell.
However, Anderson said the marijuana was stolen, and Martinez Cachu wasn’t able to pay back Prado.
While Prado and Pimentel-Arroyo were in a vehicle on Butts Canyon Road in Middletown on the night of Dec. 30, Martinez Cachu shot and killed Pimentel-Arroyo. Prado was hit and injured by buckshot from the shotgun blast, according to the District Attorney’s Office.
Following the shooting, Martinez Cachu fled the scene in another vehicle before he turned himself in at the Clearlake Police Department about two hours later.
Martinez Cachu was arrested early on the morning of Dec. 31, according to case records. He has remained in custody ever since.
When Chief Deputy District Attorney Richard Hinchcliff originally charged Martinez Cachu in the case, he included two special allegations, murder for financial gain and murder by lying wait, which he said at the time made Martinez Cachu eligible for the death penalty or life without parole.
Under the plea agreement, Anderson said Martinez Cachu will serve 90 years to life in state prison.
Anderson said that, based on the law, someone who is under the age of 25 at the time of the crime – even one as serious as a homicide – may be eligible for parole. Martinez Cachu was 20 at the time of the murder.
Martinez Cachu is scheduled to be sentenced on April 3.
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UPPER LAKE, Calif. – One person was injured in a single vehicle rollover crash on Highway 20 near Blue Lakes on Thursday afternoon.
The crash occurred just before 4:30 p.m. at Highway 20 and Blue Lakes Road, blocking the westbound lane, according to the California Highway Patrol.
The driver, the only person reported to be in the vehicle, was pinned when the crash occurred, and had to be extricated, a process that took more than a half-hour to complete, according to reports from the scene.
The air ambulance REACH 6 responded to transport the patient to a trauma center, scanner reports indicated.
The CHP said the driver suffered minor injuries.
Email Elizabeth Larson atThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
The crash occurred just before 4:30 p.m. at Highway 20 and Blue Lakes Road, blocking the westbound lane, according to the California Highway Patrol.
The driver, the only person reported to be in the vehicle, was pinned when the crash occurred, and had to be extricated, a process that took more than a half-hour to complete, according to reports from the scene.
The air ambulance REACH 6 responded to transport the patient to a trauma center, scanner reports indicated.
The CHP said the driver suffered minor injuries.
Email Elizabeth Larson at