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CLEARLAKE, Calif. – A Clearlake man was arrested on Thursday for allegedly kidnapping and assaulting a female acquaintance, and two other suspects in the case are still being sought by police.
Ike Frederick Mitchell, 43, was arrested for kidnapping, false imprisonment, assault with a deadly weapon, battery with serious injury and theft of an access card, according to Sgt. Nick Bennett of the Clearlake Police Department.
On Thursday, Clearlake Police officers responded to St. Helena Hospital Clear Lake in response to a female victim who was reporting she had been kidnapped and assaulted, Bennett said.
The subsequent investigation revealed that on Monday the female had been contacted by Mitchell, a casual acquaintance, in Clearlake Park, Bennett reported.
Bennett said Mitchell allegedly wanted the woman to help in a transaction involving marijuana. When she refused and left, Mitchell and two other individuals allegedly followed the woman, assaulting her and forcing her into the trunk of a vehicle.
The alleged victim was able to open the trunk and jump onto the roadway. She was recaptured and again placed into the trunk and driven to a residence on Third Street in Clearlake Park, where she was kept for three days while the suspects attempted to obtain information from her so they could access her ATM account, Bennett said. During this time she was periodically assaulted by the suspects.
Bennett said the woman finally was able to free herself and climb over fences and flee the immediate area where she had been held and obtain a ride to the hospital.
When officers arrived at the hospital and interviewed the alleged victim, they found her injuries were consistent with what she had described had occurred, Bennett said.
Officers responded to Third Street in Clearlake Park and contacted Mitchell, who they subsequently arrested.
Mitchell was booked in the Lake County Jail, with bail set at $300,000.
Bennett said police are still looking for the two additional suspects in this case.
Anyone with additional information in this case are requested to contact Officer Winslow at 707-994-8251.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – The fields for the fall city council races in Lakeport and Clearlake are now set, with 15 candidates running for a total of six open seats on the two councils.
The deadline for filing papers for both races was 5 p.m. Wednesday.
There are three seats on each council that will appear on the Nov. 6 ballot.
In Clearlake, nine community members are seeking election this fall, according to City Clerk Melissa Swanson.
They include Bunnie Carter; Gina Fortino Dickson, who serves on the Clearlake Planning Commission; Charles O’Neill-Jones, a retired facilities manager; small business owner Denise Loustalot; incumbent Joyce Overton; Bruno Sabatier, a data maintenance programmer; businessman Alvaro Valencia; Michael J. Walton; and business owner Melinda Young.
Swanson said Walton’s nomination signatures are still being verified.
Council members Judy Thein and Curt Giambruno decided not to run again.
In Lakeport, City Clerk Janel Chapman said six candidates have qualified to run for the council’s three open seats in the Nov. 6 election.
Qualifying candidates include incumbents Robert “Bob” Rumfelt and Suzanne Lyons, Kenneth “Kenny” Parlet, Marc Spillman, Mary Nolan and Martin Scheel.
Councilman Roy Parmentier is not seeking reelection.
To qualify, candidates had to have been nominated by not less than 20 voters registered and must reside within the city of Lakeport, Chapman said.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
LAKEPORT, Calif. – A Lakeport man convicted of stabbing his neighbor to death also is the first person to be convicted of using information from the state’s sex offender registration Web site in the commission of a crime.
Ivan Garcia Oliver, 34, was convicted of first-degree murder, burglary and special allegations including causing great bodily injury and personally using a deadly weapon for the Nov. 20, 2007, stabbing of 67-year-old Michael Dodele at Western Hills Mobile Home Park outside of Lakeport.
There also was another special allegation the jury found to be true – that Oliver had used information from the Megan’s Law sex offender registration Web site to commit a felony.
On Thursday, the California Attorney General’s Office – which administers California’s Megan’s Law Web site, www.meganslaw.ca.gov – confirmed to Lake County News that Oliver’s conviction on the special allegation involving the Megan’s Law information was a first in the state.
When Oliver is sentenced on Wednesday, Aug. 29, he faces 32 years to life in prison, according to Chief Deputy District Attorney Richard Hinchcliff.
“Vigilantism based on the Megan’s Law Web site is a really bad thing for the public,” Hinchcliff said Thursday after Oliver’s guilty verdicts had been returned.
Oliver’s defense attorney, Stephen Carter, said he plans to file an appeal of the conviction at the Aug. 29 sentencing.
Law establishes Web site
California – the first state in the nation to have a sex offender registration law – has required registration of convicted sex offenders since 1947, according to the California Attorney General’s Office. The agency reported that California has the most registered sex offenders of any state.
In 1996 California enacted Megan’s Law, named for 7-year-old Megan Kanka. The first grader was raped and murdered in 1994 by a known child molester who had moved into the New Jersey neighborhood where she lived with her family.
At that time, there were no requirements to notify families of the presence of sex offenders in their communities. Since then, various forms of Megan’s Law have taken root in every state.
AB 488 – authored by Assemblywoman Nicole Parra (D-Hanford) and sponsored by then-California Attorney General Bill Lockyer – authorized the Megan’s Law Web site listing of the state’s most serious sex offenders.
The bill was signed in September 2004; as a result, the new Penal Code Section 290.46 required the California Department of Justice to create the state’s Megan’s Law Web site on or before July 1, 2005.
In December 2004, Lockyer unveiled the new site six months ahead of the deadline, with 63,000 sex offenders listed, as well as the home address of the most serious offenders, which then numbered 33,500.
In addition to establishing the Web site, Penal Code Section 290.46 also set forth penalties for misuse of the site.
It states that any person convicted of using the information to commit a misdemeanor can face fines of between $10,000 and $50,000; for a felony, the penalty is five years in prison.
The Web site carries a disclaimer on the use of the information – which it warns may be incomplete or incorrect, with the potential for mistaken identities – and requires users to click on a box to acknowledge the disclaimer before moving into the main part of the site.
Once in the site, users can search by name, address, city, zip code and county, and proximity to parks and schools.
Misinterpreting information
Hinchcliff had presented evidence during the trial that, several days before Dodele was fatally stabbed more than 65 times, Oliver had gotten a printout of the Megan’s Law sex offender registration Web site from Lacey Kou, manager of the Western Hills Mobile Home Park.
Oliver had said on the stand that he had become fearful after seeing a stranger near the park calling to his son.
So he went to speak to Kou, who pulled up the Web site – which Oliver said he had never seen before – to determine if there were any sex offenders in the neighborhood. Dodele came up in the search.
Dodele’s entry included the wording of PC 288A(C), forced oral copulation. The statute reads: “Any person who commits an act of oral copulation upon a minor who is 14 years of age or older, when the act is accomplished against the victim's will by means of force, violence, duress, menace, or fear of immediate and unlawful bodily injury on the victim or another person, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for 6, 8, or 10 years.”
For someone not aware of the circumstances of Dodele’s conviction, it may have appeared that he had been convicted of molesting a child, however, he was registered for a 1980s rape of an adult female victim, who he had threatened with a knife. He also had several previous convictions for rape and attempted rape.
Oliver testified that he had not seen the conviction’s wording on the Web site, and claimed it was Kou who told him, incorrectly, that Dodele was a child molester.
Oliver used the printout – which he said on the stand did not include Dodele’s specific conviction information – to warn neighbors about Dodele, who was killed inside his trailer. During the trial that printout was presented as an exhibit.
At trial Oliver said when he spoke to neighbors about his concerns, they didn’t seem to care.
His girlfriend, Cathleen Ferran, also testified to telling Oliver that she didn’t think the listing was accurate, and that the matter needed to be left up to law enforcement.
Following Dodele’s fatal stabbing, Oliver told detectives that Dodele touched his son, an allegation he had never shared with his girlfriend or anyone else. He also made statements about his hatred of child molesters.
Hinchcliff said the Web site’s purpose is to assist the public in figuring out who their neighbors are.
He suggested that if more cases of vigilantism occurred, “the public is going to lose the Megan’s Law Web site.”
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LAKEPORT, Calif. – On Thursday, a former codefendant in a fatal June 2011 shooting returned to court, where a judge finished determining how much time he will spend in state prison based on his plea agreement.
Kevin Ray Stone, 30, will spend a total of about four years in prison when presentence and post-sentence time credits are applied, said District Attorney Don Anderson.
Stone originally was charged along with Clearlake Oaks residents Orlando Joseph Lopez Jr., 24, and 22-year-old Paul William Braden of the June 18, 2011, shooting that killed 4-year-old Skyler Rapp; injured his mother, Desiree Kirby; her boyfriend, Ross Sparks; his brother, Andrew Sparks; Ian Griffith; and Joseph Armijo.
Stone reached a plea agreement to lesser charges and testified against Braden and Lopez during their joint trial.
Last week they were given multi-century prison sentences, with Braden receiving 312 years and Lopez 311 years, as Lake County News has reported.
On Tuesday Judge Stephen Hedstrom sentenced Stone to 10 years and four months in prison and a $2,000 restitution fine for his no contest plea to conspiracy to commit robbery, accessory to murder and possession of a .22-caliber rifle by a prohibited person.
However, Stone’s sentencing hearing was continued to Thursday after questions arose about how credits would be applied, with those complications arising due to new rules connected with state correctional realignment.
Anderson explained that Stone received credit for the 405 days in the Lake County Jail that he served before sentencing, plus another 202 days of credit.
Counting those credits and what he can expect to receive during his time in prison, Stone will spend a total of about four years in prison, according to Anderson.
Anderson said Stone will serve his time in state prison, not in the Lake County Jail, where some people who previously would have gone to state prison are now serving time in some cases because of realignment.
During the Tuesday hearing, when issues about the sentence credits came up – with some of them different than defense attorney Komnith Moth had understood them to be – Moth had suggested that one option was to withdraw Stone’s plea. But that didn’t happen on Thursday.
Considering the huge sentences that Braden and Lopez received, “He should be happy with what he got,” Anderson said of Stone.
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CLEARLAKE OAKS, Calif. – After another day on the fire lines, firefighters were able to keep the acreage on the county’s major wildland fire from growing further while they gained greater containment on the incident.
Cal Fire reported Thursday night that the Wye Fire had stayed at 7,934 acres, with containment rising to 85 percent.
Officials had anticipated full containment by next Monday, but progress over the past few days indicates they are ahead of schedule.
The Wye Fire includes two incidents – the Wye Fire near Highway 20 and Highway 53 and the Walker Fire, burning near Walker Ridge Road in Lake and Colusa counties.
Both began burning on Sunday afternoon and are now being managed as one incident by Cal Fire Incident Management Team 4.
The number of personnel on the fire was rolled back by nearly half by Thursday evening. Cal Fire reported that there were 755 personnel, 82 engines, 24 fire crews, two helicopters, seven dozers and nine water tenders.
Officials said Highway 20, while open to traffic in both directions, has a strictly enforced speed limit of 45 miles per hour through the fire area.
The fire’s cause remains under investigation.
The Wye Fire Call Center can be reached at 707-967-4207 or 707-967-4208.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
KELSEYVILLE, Calif. – A young soldier from Kelseyville was among 11 people killed in southern Afghanistan on Thursday when the Black Hawk helicopter they were riding in crashed.
Richard Essex, 23, was among the casualties who died in the crash, according to his aunt, Mayme Dyslin of Kelseyville.
Dyslin said Thursday evening that her family was notified just a few hours earlier during a visit from two members of the military.
The International Security Assistance Force said in a brief statement that the Thursday crash killed four of its members, three U.S. service members, three members of the Afghan national security forces and an Afghan civilian interpreter.
The cause of the crash is under investigation, and none of the casualties were named in the statement.
Media reports have stated that the Taliban has claimed credit for shooting down the helicopter in Kandahar province, whose time zone is 11 and a half hours ahead of Kelseyville.
Dyslin said her nephew was the helicopter’s gunner.
Essex was a 2008 graduate of Kelseyville High School who had always wanted to go into the U.S. Army, Dyslin said.
“It’s just what he always wanted to do,” she said. “He wanted to help people.”
She recalled her nephew as being a “laid back kid” who never caused problems or got into trouble. “He was just a free spirit,” Dyslin said.
He played the bass guitar, was an artist and a published poet, with one book of poetry to his credit and another ready to be published soon, she said.
Essex had been in Afghanistan for about a year, Dyslin said. His Facebook page – where he kept up with family and friends – showed numerous pictures of the barren landscape where he was serving. His profile stated he was a 91B Wheeled Vehicle Mechanic.
Dyslin said she and other family members had just spoken to him over the last few days. On Tuesday she and Essex had spoken over Facebook.
“He said he was doing good and he would be home in November,” she said.
But she said his family became alarmed when they didn’t hear any more from him.
“We all just knew when he didn’t call yesterday,” she said. “He always calls or Facebooks and he didn’t get a hold of anybody yesterday.”
Dyslin said her family is still trying to find out what happened and is set to meet with a military chaplain. They’ve not yet been notified of when Essex’s body will be returned home.
In addition to his aunt, Essex is survived by his parents, Marion and Brett Hopkins of Kelseyville; sisters, Stacey Hopkins and Jennifer Williamson; and brother, Michael Essex.
Lake County News will publish additional details about this story as they become available.
Elizabeth Larson at