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LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – A man who was fatally shot by two deputies last weekend after he charged them with a knife had seven gunshot wounds, according to an autopsy conducted Thursday.
Christopher Keith O'Neal, 56, of Lucerne died early on Sunday morning, as Lake County News has reported.
Deputies responded to O'Neal's home on 16th Avenue in Lucerne shortly after 12 a.m. on the report of a domestic disturbance in which O'Neal was said to have been assaulting his wife, according to District Attorney Don Anderson, whose office is conducting the shooting investigation.
O'Neal confronted two Lake County Sheriff's deputies with a knife in his front yard. Both deputies shot O'Neal, said District Attorney Don Anderson.
The names of the deputies have not yet been released.
On Thursday, an autopsy of O'Neal's body was conducted in Ukiah, Anderson said.
Anderson said the autopsy revealed that O'Neal was hit a total of seven times – twice in the leg and five times in the chest.
“One deputy shot four times, the other shot six,” Anderson said, who noted that, “they both would have had to hit him.”
On Friday, Anderson did not yet have the full details of O'Neal's criminal history.
However, he said the investigation so far has revealed that O'Neal had a previous armed encounter with sheriff's deputies.
In 1997, O'Neal confronted deputies with a knife in downtown Upper Lake, Anderson said.
In that incident, Anderson said deputies pepper sprayed O'Neal before taking him into custody.
Two separate investigations are under way at this point, Anderson said.
His investigators are working on the case as part of the county's critical incident protocol, which requires Anderson's office to conduct the inquiry into officer-involved shootings.
He must determine if the shooting was justified or if there was any criminal wrongdoing.
At the same time, the sheriff's office is conducting an internal affairs investigation, which is confidential. As a result, Anderson said the results of it won't be communicated to his office.
“They'll get a copy of our report but we won't get a copy of theirs,” he explained.
So far, he said his investigators have completed interviews with several witnesses.
Those interviewed include the two deputies and O'Neal's wife, who were the witnesses to the shooting.
O'Neal's wife is the only witness to the domestic violence incident, but Anderson said there were witnesses his investigators have interviewed who saw what led to O'Neal's reported assault on his wife.
The final autopsy report also must still be completed, along with the toxicology report, which will determine if any substances were in O'Neal's system, Anderson said.
The California Department of Justice will be involved, with Anderson explaining that the agency is going to conduct testing on the deputies' guns.
“We will take the bullets and try to match them with which gun they came from,” he said.
Anderson estimated it will take about two months to complete the investigation.
“I think this should go fairly quick,” he said.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – A new grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety will assist the Lake County District Attorney's Office in creating a highly trained, specialized team to prosecute individuals arrested for DUI – especially repeat offenders and those involved in fatal or injury crashes.
The $228,737 grant to the Lake County District Attorney’s Office will fund a vertical prosecution team that will work cases from arrest through sentencing.
Funding from this DUI Prosecution Grant will aid the District Attorney’s Office in handling cases throughout each step of the criminal process, prosecuting both alcohol and drug-impaired driving cases.
In fatal and major injury DUI vehicle collisions, members of the team may respond to the crash scene to be part of the investigation.
Prosecution team members will work with the state’s Traffic Safety Resource Prosecutor Program to expand knowledge and resources in the office by obtaining and delivering specialized training, including training in the emerging problem of drug-impaired driving.
Team members will share information with peers and law enforcement personnel throughout the county and across the state.
The purpose of the program is to prevent impaired driving and reduce alcohol and drug-impaired traffic fatalities and injuries.
In 2012 there were five deaths and 55 serious injuries as a result of alcohol DUI collisions in Lake County, officials said.
“California’s roadways are still among the safest in the nation,” said OTS Director Rhonda Craft. “But to meet future mobility, safety, and sustainability objectives, we must create safer roadways for all users. The Lake County District Attorney’s Office will be using these and other resources to reach the vision we all share – toward zero deaths, every one counts.”
Funding for the program comes from a grant by the California Office of Traffic Safety, through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – This week local officials offered their thanks to the community for the assistance in providing educational materials aimed at increasing children's safety.
Chief Brad Rasmussen and the Lakeport Police Department along with Chief Craig Clausen and the Clearlake Police Department thanked local area businesses and community organizations for their support and donations, in their communities, which is funding the next year’s local law enforcement agencies partnership with the National Child Safety Council’s children’s safety educational materials program.
The National Child Safety Council is a nonprofit organization whose mission is dedicated to the safety of children.
The council provides more than 300 pieces of educational material about child safety, drug abuse prevention and missing children which are used by approximately 6000 public safety agencies in 40 states.
Examples of the educational books used locally for elementary through high school age children include drug abuse resistance education, school violence prevention, gang prevention, gun safety, Internet safety, stranger danger, inappropriate touching, home safety and safe walker-safe rider tips.
For detailed information about the NCSC and it’s mission or materials go to www.nationalchildsafetycouncil.org .
Local law enforcement agencies use the materials to promote child safety and educate children in our schools and throughout our communities.
Rasmussen said law enforcement is proud to work in partnership with the National Child Safety Council, local businesses, community organizations and local school districts in protecting our youth.
The following local organization and business partners in this year’s local law enforcement and National Child Safety Council program are listed below.
Officials thanked and commended them for their outstanding support and dedication to their communities and in turn ask community members to shop local to support these businesses.
Paul Vartabedian, D.D.S., Lakeport
Kathy Fowler Chevrolet, Lakeport
Gary Butrick Carlton Tire, Lakeport
Davebilt Co. Nut Pickers & Nut Crackers, Lakeport
Lee’s Sporting Goods, Lakeport
Robert R. Taylor DPT, Lakeport
Blair Drywall & Painting, Lakeport
Lakeport Camper & Truck, Lakeport
Main Street Veterinary Clinic, Lakeport
Morgan Lane Real Estate, Hidden Valley Lake
Kiwanis Club of Lakeport, Lakeport
Epidendio Construction, Lower Lake
Jerry Waddington DVM, Animal Hospital of Lake County, Clearlake
Melissa Fanning, CPA, Clearlake
Tire Pros, Clearlake
Alexander R. McGeoch, DDS, Lakeport
Lannette R. Huffman, Lakeport
Anchorage Inn, Lakeport
Clearlake Ready Mix, Lakeport
Fastop Food Store, Lakeport
Stokes Ladders, Kelseyville
Notts Mini Mart & Gas, Clearlake
Brian L. Grey, DDS, MSD, Lakeport
Lucky 4 Trailer Resort, Lakeport
Robertson & Associates CPAs, Lakeport
Running Springs Heating & Air, Lakeport
Judgment Recovery Group, Lakeport
Lake County Tribal Health Consortium Inc., Lakeport
Peggy C. Campbell, CPA, Lakeport
Jimmy’s Deli, Lakeport
J. McCormack, Lakeport
David Browning, O.D. Eye Care Optometric, Lakeport
Guy Strohmeier’s Auto Center, Lakeport
Levi S. Palmer DDS Inc., Lakeport
Savings Bank of Mendocino County, Lake County
Lakeport Tire & Auto Service, Lakeport
Tom Cariveau, Fiduciary Services, Lakeport
Cheryl Smith, Lakeport
How important to preserve one’s original estate planning documents? Where should one keep these documents?
Let us examine how this applies to different types of documents.
A decedent’s original will is required to commence probate. Without the original it may be difficult to impossible to probate the decedent’s estate according to the terms of the missing will.
When the terms of a missing will can be established, such as through a copy or a duplicate original, then one may try to probate the lost will.
However, if the original was last in the possession of a deceased testator who was competent until the time of death, then the missing will is presumed to have been revoked by the testator.
Proper custody of an original will is, therefore, very important.
Keeping the original in a bank safe deposit box is a good approach provided someone has a key to the box or is named as a co-owner or co-signatory.
With a key to the decedent’s bank deposit box, the decedent’s death certificate, the key holder, upon identification, can access the safe deposit and take possession of any original will and trust documents.
A copy of the will must be left in the safe deposit box (along with the rest of the contents), the original lodged with the superior court in the county where the decedent resided at death and a copy mailed to the person named in the will as executor – all within 30 days of the decedent’s death.
A decedent’s original trust document (and amendments) is neither required to be recorded with any county nor required to be submitted to the court where the decedent resided at death, unlike a will. Nonetheless, it is best to safeguard the original trust, and all amendments.
Normally, the trust and will are kept together. The same applies to any original trustee affidavits and trustee resignations documents.
The original power of attorney to manage property, financial, and legal affairs must be maintained. The original is required to be presented for the power to be recorded at a county recorder’s office.
Other recipients may accept a certified copy of the original, but that process requires presenting the original document to a notary public or a licensed attorney for copying and certification.
Except for the county recorder’s office, the necessity to always present the original power of attorney can be greatly reduced by the power of attorney providing that an unverified photocopy is as good as the original.
If the power of attorney provides that it is immediately effective when signed, the original document should be kept safe against abuse until such time as its proper use is needed.
That is, one may wish to keep the original power of attorney with a trusted person other than the agent with instructions to provide the agent with the power of attorney in the event of the principal’s incapacity.
The advance health care directive or durable power of attorney is entirely different than the other documents. A photocopy of the complete document is as good as the original!
Originals to any real property deeds that have been recorded with the county recorder’s office should be maintained but can easily be replaced by a copy of the recorded deed obtained from the county recorder’s office.
Original bank and brokerage account statements should be maintained but can be replaced by certified copies from the relevant institution if lost.
Attorneys often prefer to give the originals of all these documents to their client for safekeeping, and to keep copies. Keeping original documents places a significant responsibility on the attorney.
The best course of action is to keep these documents, except for advance health care directives, in one’s safe deposit.
Dennis A. Fordham, attorney (LL.M. tax studies), is a State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Probate and Trust Law. His office is at 870 S. Main St., Lakeport, California. Fordham can be reached by e-mail at
The normally bland face of Uranus has become increasingly stormy, with enormous cloud systems so bright that for the first time ever, amateur astronomers are able to see details in the planet's hazy blue-green atmosphere.
“The weather on Uranus is incredibly active,” said Imke de Pater, professor and chair of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and leader of the team that first noticed the activity when observing the planet with adaptive optics on the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
“This type of activity would have been expected in 2007, when Uranus's once-every-42-year equinox occurred and the sun shined directly on the equator,” noted co-investigator Heidi Hammel of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. “But we predicted that such activity would have died down by now. Why we see these incredible storms now is beyond anybody's guess.”
In all, de Pater, Hammel and their team detected eight large storms on Uranus’s northern hemisphere when observing the planet with the Keck Observatory on Aug. 5 and 6.
One was the brightest storm ever seen on Uranus at 2.2 microns, a wavelength that senses clouds just below the tropopause, the lower boundary of the stratosphere – where the pressure ranges from about 300 to 500 mbar, or half the pressure at Earth's surface.
The storm accounted for 30 percent of all light reflected by the rest of the planet at this wavelength.
When amateur astronomers heard about the activity, they turned their telescopes on the planet and were amazed to see a bright blotch on the surface of a normally boring blue dot.
‘I got it!’
French amateur astronomer Marc Delcroix processed the amateur images and confirmed the discovery of a bright spot on an image by French amateur Régis De-Bénedictis, then in others taken by fellow amateurs in September and October.
He had his own chance on Oct. 3 and 4 to photograph it with the Pic du Midi one-meter telescope, where on the second night, “I caught the feature when it was transiting, and I thought, ‘Yes, I got it!’” said Delcroix.
“I was thrilled to see such activity on Uranus. Getting details on Mars, Jupiter or Saturn is now routine, but seeing detail on Uranus and Neptune is the new frontier for us amateurs and I did not want to miss that,” said Delcroix, who works for an auto-parts supplier in Toulouse and has been observing the skies – Jupiter in particular – with his backyard telescope since 2006 and, since 2012, occasionally with the Pic du Midi telescope. “I was so happy to confirm myself these first amateur images on this bright storm on Uranus, feeling I was living a very special moment for planetary amateur astronomy.”
Interestingly, the extremely bright storm seen by the 10-meter Keck II telescope in the near infrared is not the one seen by the amateurs, which is much deeper in the atmosphere than the one that initially caused all the excitement.
De Pater’s colleague Larry Sromovsky, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, identified the amateur spot as one of the few features on the Keck Observatory images from Aug. 5 that was only seen at 1.6 microns, and not at 2.2 microns.
The 1.6-micron light is emitted from deeper in the atmosphere, which means that this feature is below the uppermost cloud layer of methane ice in Uranus’s atmosphere.
“The colors and morphology of this cloud complex suggests that the storm may be tied to a vortex in the deeper atmosphere similar to two large cloud complexes seen during the equinox,” Sromovsky said.
Such vortices could be anchored much deeper in the atmosphere and extend over large vertical distances, as inferred from similar vortices on Jupiter, including its Great Red Spot.
An expanded team of astronomers led by Kunio Sayanagi, an assistant professor at Hampton University in Virginia, leveraged the amateur observations to activate a “target of opportunity” proposal on the Hubble Space Telescope, which imaged the entire planet on Oct. 14.
Observing at a variety of wavelengths, HST revealed multiple storm components extending over a distance of more than 9,000 kilometers (5,760 miles) and clouds at a variety of altitudes.
De Pater, Sromovsky, Hammel and Pat Fry of the University of Wisconsin will report the details of their observations on Nov. 12 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences in Tucson, Ariz.
Ice giant
Uranus is an ice giant, about four times the diameter of Earth, with an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, with just a bit of methane to give it a blue tint.
Because it is so distant – 19 times farther from the sun than Earth – astronomers were able to see little detail on its surface until adaptive optics on both Keck Observatory telescopes revealed features much like those on Jupiter.
De Pater and her colleagues have been following Uranus for more than a decade, charting the weather on the planet, including bands of circulating clouds, massive swirling storms and convective features at its north pole.
Bright clouds are probably caused by gases such as methane rising in the atmosphere and condensing into highly reflective clouds of methane ice.
Because Uranus has no internal source of heat, its atmospheric activity was thought to be driven solely by sunlight, which is now weak in the northern hemisphere. Hence astronomers were surprised when these observations showed such intense activity.
Observations taken with the Keck telescope by Christoph Baranec, an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii on Manoa, revealed that the storm was still active, but had a different morphology and possibly reduced intensity.
“If indeed these features are high-altitude clouds generated by flow perturbations associated with a deeper vortex system, such drastic fluctuations in intensity would indeed be possible,” Sromovsky said.
“These unexpected observations remind us keenly of how little we understand about atmospheric dynamics in outer planet atmospheres,” the authors wrote in their paper.
Robert Sanders writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – With one in five combat troops coming back from the Middle East suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, there’s a need for new treatments.
Svetlana Petrowizky and those schooled in her specialty are providing it – oddly enough, with an ancient medical discipline that people used to get arrested for practicing.
Acupuncture.
“I have seen quite a few veterans from a long time ago (Vietnam), but I also recently saw a young woman who was a soldier,” said Petrowizky, whose Lakeport Acupuncture office is located at 912 S. Main St. in Lakeport. “She came for acupuncture, but she actually needed surgery that she wasn’t able to get.
“The acupuncture was given during a kind of waiting game until the approvals she needed happened,” Petrowizky added. “We were able to keep her pain somewhat manageable and we were happy to give her more treatments because they were helping during the several months we waited for her approval.”
Petrowizky was actually on a team of medical professionals including the young woman vet’s orthopedist who were waiting out the go-ahead for surgery.
Not long ago that would have been impossible because acupuncturists were not recognized as health care givers.
“Now it’s being accepted by insurance and is a lot more welcome,” Petrowizky said. “There has been progress. Before we couldn’t get a license and were arrested for practicing without a license.”
Petrowizky, who has practiced acupuncture for 13 years, considers herself fortunate to have been completing studies in Chinese medicine while attitudes about acupuncture were changing.
Asked about the progress for acupuncture, she said it's happening “in a big way.”
“Ever since I graduated a lot more insurance companies are covering it. That’s good because there’s so much stress-related stuff,” she said.
For those unschooled in acupuncture it is a technique in which practitioners stimulate specific points on the body – most often by inserting thin needles into the skin.
The practice can serve innumerable purposes, including matters as basic as smoking cessation and weight control, although neither are offered by Petrowizky.
“Most of my clients come in for headaches, emotional concerns and a lot of stress-related problems,” she said. “Who I see are a lot of are people who need relief right away.”
She provides physical relief for weekend warriors as well as construction workers who, she said, “work hard with their bodies.”
Petrowizky was born in the Ukraine when it was part of Soviet Union. She came to the United States with her parents when she was 13 and later earned her master's degree in traditional Chinese medicine at Yo San University in China. In addition, she holds a degree in Tuina, Chinese healing massage.
She has practiced in Lake County for five years.
Her major concerns are:
– Patients getting off medication. “It’s a tough battle; they want to get off of it,” she said. “One young woman had been on (medication) since she was a child. I think it’s kind of a trend. A lot of times people need medications but sometimes they don’t.”
– Misconceptions about acupuncture. “People have this black and white approach to it. Acupuncture is a therapy, not a miracle cure. People come in with some kind of chronic condition. They’ve been on drugs, cortisone injections, everything and then they expect acupuncture to work for them in one or two treatments. So it’s black and white with them. (They say) ‘I don’t expect it to work, but I’ll try one treatment.' They think of it as this magic thing. You try to tell them, ‘Look, you've had this pain for a long time ...’”
– Unqualified practitioners administering acupuncture. “To renew your license every year you must attend workshops and clinics and have a master's in acupuncture earned over four years. The problem is doctors performing acupuncture that they learned over the weekend. They learn a few points and then start poking people and hurting them. People have had their lungs punctured with that kind of stuff.”
Even babies can be treated, said Petrowizky. And for anything from tummy aches to attention deficit disorder.
“ … But we don’t have to stick needles in them,” she said. “There are a lot of different ways to treat kids. You just press on the points of pressure. A lot of times acupressure is very effective. It helps (children) sleep and then we teach the parents to do something they can do every day.
“There are all kinds of problems,” she added. “But kids are not the bulk of my practice. I just see them sometimes.”
Svetlana Petrowizky can be reached by calling 707-843-9368 or visit her practice online at www.lakeportacupuncture.com .
Email John Lindblom at
