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LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Lake County got a bit of a break from the heat on Saturday thanks to a summer rainstorm that moved over the area.
The National Weather Service had warned of dry thunderstorms over Lake County and other areas of Northern California due to a low pressure system.
After a cool, overcast afternoon, rain was reported throughout most of the county Saturday evening, with some areas also reporting thunder and lightning.
Dozens of people reported weather conditions in their neck of the woods on Lake County News’s Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/pages/Lake-County-News/143156775604 , and through Twitter.
Lightning was reported in areas including Hidden Valley Lake, Clearlake, Spring Valley, Upper Lake and Lakeport.
The Lakeport Speedway’s Saturday night racing at the Lake County Fairgrounds was halted early due to the shower, according to McKenzie Paine of Velocity Video, who does videography for the races.
Roger Kinney of Clearlake Oaks reported lightning started around 9 p.m. in his area, with six lightning strikes to the north followed by a light rain that lasted more than two hours.
Rick Hamilton reported rain on and off in Loch Lomond between 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m., varying from sprinkles to heavy rainfall.
The National Weather Service said Lake County will remain under a red flag warning – issued as a result of critical fire weather conditions – until 11 a.m. Sunday due to the possibility of additional thunderstorms.
The agency said the threat of thunderstorms will diminish Sunday from south to north as the low pressure area moves north.
The county’s seven day forecast doesn’t include any more rain, but hot weather is due to return. Daytime temperatures over the coming week are expected to be in the mid to high 90s, hitting the century mark next weekend.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
LAKEPORT, Calif. – A new group of dogs – including a variety of working breeds – are waiting for new home at the county's animal shelter this week.
Labrador Retriever, shepherd, boxer and kelpie mixes are among the breeds available.
Thanks to Lake County Animal Care and Control’s new veterinary clinic, many of the animals offered for adoption already are spayed or neutered and ready to go home with their new families.
Dogs that are adopted from Lake County Animal Care and Control are either neutered or spayed, microchipped and, if old enough, given a rabies shot and county license before being released to their new owner. License fees do not apply to residents of the cities of Lakeport or Clearlake.
If you're looking for a new companion, visit the shelter. There are many great pets hoping you'll choose them.
The following dogs at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption (additional dogs on the animal control Web site not listed are still “on hold”).
Male pit bull mix
This male pit bull mix is 3 years old.
He has a long brown and white coat, weighs 62 pounds and has not been neutered.
Shelter staff said he may have a case of mange.
Find him in kennel No. 3, ID No. 33777.
'Valentine'
“Valentine” is a 1 year old female shepherd mix.
She has a short black and brown coat, weighs about 40 pounds and has been spayed.
She is in kennel No. 8, ID No. 33775.
'Coco'
“Coco” is a 10 month old female Labrador Retriever mix.
She has a short chocolate-colored coat, weighs 62 pound and has been spayed.
She's in kennel No. 13, ID No. 33780.
'Slick'
“Slick” is a 3 year old Australian Kelpie mix.
He weighs 42 pounds and has a short coat.
He's in kennel No. 22, ID No. 33397.
Male boxer
This male boxer mix is 2 years old.
He has a short brown coat and a short tail.
He's in kennel No. 23, ID No. 33691.
Adoptable dogs also can be seen at http://www.co.lake.ca.us/Government/Directory/Animal_Care_And_Control/Adopt/Dogs_and_Puppies.htm or at www.petfinder.com .
Please note: Dogs listed at the shelter's Web page that are said to be “on hold” are not yet cleared for adoption.
To fill out an adoption application online visit http://www.co.lake.ca.us/Government/Directory/Animal_Care_And_Control/Adopt/Dog___Cat_Adoption_Application.htm .
Lake County Animal Care and Control is located at 4949 Helbush in Lakeport, next to the Hill Road Correctional Facility.
Office hours are Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday. The shelter is open from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and on Saturday from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.
Visit the shelter online at http://www.co.lake.ca.us/Government/Directory/Animal_Care_And_Control.htm .
For more information call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
When Curiosity enters the Martian atmosphere on Monday, Aug. 6 – setting in motion “the seven minutes of terror” that people around the world have anticipated since launch a year ago – the intrepid rover will actually be performing the mission’s second daredevil stunt.
The first was completed in July.
For the past nine months, Curiosity has been acting as a stunt double for astronauts, exposing itself to the same cosmic radiation humans would experience following the same route to Mars.
“Curiosity has been hit by five major flares and solar particle events in the Earth-Mars expanse,” said Don Hassler of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “The rover is safe, and it has been beaming back invaluable data.”
Unlike previous Mars rovers, Curiosity is equipped with an instrument that measures space radiation. The Radiation Assessment Detector, nicknamed “RAD,” counts cosmic rays, neutrons, protons and other particles over a wide range of biologically-interesting energies.
RADs prime mission is to investigate the radiation environment on the surface of Mars, but NASA turned it on during the cruise phase so that it could sense radiation en route to Mars as well.
Curiosity’s location inside the spacecraft is key to the experiment.
“Curiosity is riding to Mars in the belly of the spacecraft, similar to where an astronaut would be,” explained Hassler, RAD’s principal investigator. “This means the rover absorbs deep-space radiation storms the same way a real astronaut would.”
Even supercomputers have trouble calculating exactly what happens when high-energy cosmic rays and solar energetic particles hit the walls of a spacecraft. One particle hits another; fragments fly; the fragments themselves crash into other molecules.
“It’s very complicated,” said Hassler. “Curiosity has given us a chance to measure what happens in a real-life situation.”
Hassler says the walls of the Mars Science Lab spacecraft have performed as expected: Only the strongest radiation storms have made it inside.
Moreover, charged particles penetrating the hull have been slowed down and fragmented by their interaction with the spacecraft’s metal skin.
“It’s not only the walls that matter, however,” he pointed out. “The spacecraft’s hydrazine tanks and other components contribute some protection, too.”
Data from Curiosity will help sort out how different subsystems block and respond to cosmic rays and solar radiation. This is information designers of human-crewed spacecraft urgently need to know.
“We plan to publish results in a refereed journal later this year,” said Hassler.
RAD was turned off July 13 in preparation for landing. Mission controllers will turn it on again after Curiosity sets down in Gale crater. Then researchers will learn what radiation awaits astronauts on the surface of Mars itself.
“No one has ever before measured this kind of radiation from the surface of another planet,” said Hassler. “We’re just getting started.”
Dr. Tony Phillips works for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
LAKEPORT, Calif. – A forensic pathologist testified on Friday to the dozens of wounds a man suffered when his neighbor stabbed him to death in November 2007, believing wrongly that he was a child molester.
Michael Dodele, 67, would suffer more than 65 wounds, allegedly inflicted by Ivan Garcia Oliver, his neighbor of several weeks in the Western Hills Mobile Home Park outside of Lakeport.
Oliver, 34, is on trial for Dodele’s murder, with the prosecution alleging that the deadly confrontation arose after Oliver discovered that Dodele was on the Megan’s Law sexual offender registration Web site. Oliver misinterpreted Dodele’s listing as being for child molestation when in fact Dodele had done prison time for raping an adult female.
On the stand Friday were Dr. Thomas Gill, who conducted Dodele’s autopsy in 2007, as well as Cathleen Ferran, the mother of Oliver’s child, who described his erratic and bizarre behavior in the days leading up to Dodele’s death.
Dodele’s sister, Margaret Brooks, was the first to testify Friday. She was on the stand briefly to explain how her brother had been in Lakeport a short time after being released from prison.
She was emphatic that her brother had never been convicted of child molestation, and that he “owned up” to his rape convictions.
When he was released from prison at the send of September 2007, Brooks helped him find a place to live, working to get him settled into a trailer in Lakeport.
She said he applied for the trailer under the last name Salta, his last name at birth, as the Department of Motor Vehicles and Social Security told him he had to do when getting new identification. The siblings had used the surname Dodele beginning in childhood, adopting the last name of their mother’s new husband.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Richard Hinchcliff showed Brooks a picture of a pink and white throw blanket, which she identified as one she had given her brother. Oliver is alleged to have taken the blanket after Dodele’s killing.
Under cross-examination by defense attorney Stephen Carter, Brooks said her brother had raped several adult women, threatening them with a knife.
Gill’s testimony took most of the day. Now semi-retired and doing consulting, Gill was working at Forensic Medical Group in Fairfield in 2007 when he conducted Dodele’s autopsy.
In December 2010 his employment with the firm – which provided pathology services to a number of Northern California counties, including Lake – ended after he said the firm no longer had work to justify his position.
Several years earlier, after a mistrial in the murder trial of Petaluma resident Louis Pelfini, accused of killing his wife, Janet – who Gill had ruled was murdered – Sonoma County no longer wanted him working on their cases, he stated on the stand.
There were allegations that his testimony in the Pelfini case had been coached. Gill and a Sonoma County deputy district attorney were accused of wrongdoing and became the focus of a California Attorney General’s Office investigation, which he said ruled he hadn’t perjured himself. The deputy district attorney was briefly disbarred for failing to turn over the video of Gill working on his testimony.
Gill left the state to take another job and then returned to Forensic Medical Group in January 2007, he said Friday.
Independent news reports state that questions had been raised about Gill’s competence as a forensic pathologist and that several counties, in addition to Sonoma, had raised issues with having him work on their cases. He also was the focus of a National Public Radio, PBS Frontline and ProPublica news investigation in 2011.
Under cross examination Gill also acknowledged having been fired from a job he held in Indiana as the result of a drunk driving case in August 1994, when he was pulled over on his way to work. He said he was a recovering alcoholic, and called his behavior at the time “reprehensible.”
Numerous wounds described
Hinchcliff asked Gill to describe the numerous knife wounds on Dodele’s body. Gill had complete descriptions for 65 of them, with notations about two additional small wounds that he did not specifically number. The deepest among the main woulds was about three and a quarter inches.
The wounds primarily were found on Dodele’s left side, from his forehead, left cheek, left skull, on his jaw and neck, down his left shoulder and upper arm, near his armpit and on his chest.
His left clavicle also was fractured. Gill said that’s a large bone to have been broken by a knife blade.
Dodele also had four deep wounds that Gill said “stair stepped” down his left size, with the knife going between several ribs.
Those four stab wounds punctured the lower lobe of Dodele’s left lung, said Gill. When he examined the interior of Dodele’s chest cavity, he found little blood, which he said wasn’t normal for a wounded lung.
Dodele also had stab wounds in his abdomen, on both forearms and on the back of his neck, where the blade cut off one of the transverse processes on his C5 vertebra. “When this was cut it damaged the vertebral artery,” Gill said.
Gill said the wounds were consistent with a right-handed assailant. Hinchcliff established during testimony on Friday that Oliver is right-handed.
Dodele’s cause of death was multiple sharp force injuries, which Gill said caused Dodele to bleed to death.
He said the seven main wounds were the four that went between Dodele’s ribs, two deep wounds to his left side that pierced his spleen and the one that damaged his vertebral artery. Like his lungs, Dodele’s spleen didn’t show a lot of blood loss.
“This indicates that again there had been prior loss of blood that kept this down to a modest amount of bleeding in that location,” Gill said.
Under Carter’s questioning, Gill acknowledged that the wounds appeared consistent with having been received during grappling.
However, in response to Hinchcliff’s questions about the time frame of Dodele’s stabbing, Gill said he couldn’t tell.
He explained that if someone had been bleeding for some time, it would be expected that there would be less blood resulting from some of the internal wounds. The body also could experience hypotension, a shock-like state where the body starts to shut down.
“Do you think that Mr. Dodele could have been dead at the time any of those injuries were inflicted?” Hinchcliff asked.
While Gill said there was no way to be entirely sure, “It’s certainly possible,” he added. He said Dodele also could have been in a state of shock.
Strange, dangerous behavior
The day ended with Ferran’s testimony. She and Oliver shared a home at the time of the shooting, and had a young son, then 4. She was the one who called 911 that day after seeing her boyfriend with blood on his hand and acting strangely near Dodele’s trailer.
Oliver had told her that he thought Dodele was a child molester. But Ferran said she didn’t believe Dodele looked like the person on the Megan’s Law Web site printout Oliver showed her. She told Oliver not to assume anything, and to instead call law enforcement and notify the park owners.
She recalled telling Oliver that he needed to worry about her and their young son more than anything else.
On Nov. 19, 2007, the night before Dodele was killed, Ferran said she and Oliver argued throughout the evening. “He was just acting weird” and hyper, she said, and was speaking without making sense.
He wanted to go to Safeway to get cigarettes, and she had to wake her son to take him with them. “The whole ride up there was scary,” she said, with Oliver driving on the freeway late at night with the lights off, claiming they were being followed when no vehicles were behind them.
She said Oliver stayed up all night, going from room to room, looking for things. He kept telling her that he tried to do everything for her and their son.
Ferran said he had been seeing words in license plates, hearing things in music, mentioning things from the Bible in the week prior, with the behavior continuing that day.
She laid down for a few hours and got up to find a slender male running out of the home. She didn’t see Oliver hit the subject, Israel Bojorquez, who has since transitioned to a transgender woman and has changed her name to Monica. Bojorquez testified early in the trial that Oliver assaulted her that day.
Later, Ferran saw Oliver out crouching by Dodele’s trailer. She went to talk to him, he told her to get her stuff out of their. He was going in and out of their trailer, and Ferran said she tried to call his mother but couldn’t reach her, so she called 911.
He gave her a cell phone – which turned out to be Dodele’s – and she put it between the mattress and box spring of their bed.
Later, Ferran heard a knock at the door. Oliver told her not to answer it. About 10 minutes later, sheriff’s deputies broke down their door.
While Oliver had told investigators that Dodele had tried to touch his son, Ferran said Oliver never made that claim to her; neither did their son, who did mention his genitals being touched – in a way that Ferran decided was accidental – when a male neighbor picked the boy up.
During testimony, Ferran looked at a silver knife, one of two found outside of their home in a yard. She had previously told detectives that it was part of a set they had bought, but looking at it again Friday she didn’t remember if it was the same knife.
The trial will convene at 9 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 8, in Lake County Superior Court Department 1.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
SACRAMENTO – Gov. Jerry Brown on Friday pledged to work with the California State Legislature to direct millions of dollars in state funds to keep parks open, fix serious park maintenance problems and match donor contributions.
He also thanked all Californians who have contributed time and money to save state parks.
It recently was discovered that the state Department of Parks and Recreation had $54 million hidden in its coffers, at the same time that dozens of parks around the state – including Anderson Marsh State Historic Park in Lower Lake – were slated for closure and donations were being solicited from the public to preserve parks.
In the case of some parks, like Anderson Marsh, nonprofit groups are negotiating with the state to take over operations in order to keep the parks open.
“Much remains to be done to keep our parks open,” said Brown. “The disclosure that the Parks Department had millions in additional revenues is mixed – it’s better to have more money than less, but it’s totally unacceptable for parks personnel to squirrel away public funds. I extend my deepest appreciation for the donors who have come to the aid of our parks in this time of need. I ask for their patience as we take all necessary steps to make sure this never happens again.”
Specifically, Gov. Brown called for the $20 million from the State Parks and Recreation Fund (SPRF) to be used to make critically needed maintenance fixes to keep parks from closing – for example, fixing water and waste treatment facilities that, if left as-is, will cause park closures, and to establish a matching fund for contributions, so that donors know every dollar they give will go further.
The State Parks and Recreation Fund is one-time funding that can only be used for one-time costs.
The governor also is seeking a $10 million appropriation from Proposition 84 funds for immediate maintenance projects.
“We are grateful for our generous, committed donors. I can’t thank them enough,” said California Natural Resources Agency Secretary John Laird. “The good news is we will have more to spend on parks this year. The bad news is the problem is much bigger than that. State Parks will still have over $1 billion in deferred maintenance and ongoing costs.”
State Sen. Noreen Evans (D-Santa Rosa) – whose district includes Lake County – said she was pleased with the news that Brown committed to using $20 million to keep parks open and to reopen parks that have been partially closed.
Evans said that, in addition to keeping parks open, the state must address the serious backlog of maintenance that has accumulated at parks. She said she will be working with the governor on the Sustainable Parks Plan that she and Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) proposed earlier this year.
“Californians love their parks and their commitment is unwavering,” Evans said. “One of the positive things to come out of this crisis is the overwhelming response of Californians in support of their state parks. I’m committed to the recovery and sustainability of our entire state park system and am pleased that the governor is as well.”
To ensure more sound and accountable financial reporting, the Department of Finance is requiring all departments to follow new procedures to reconcile and confirm balances between the Controller’s Office and the governor’s budget.
In addition to implementing these new procedures, the Department of Finance’s Office of State Audits and Evaluations is conducting a thorough audit of all parks fiscal actions.
Investigations into the parks funds are ongoing, according to the Governor’s Office.
On July 20, the California Natural Resources Agency announced that the Parks Department had not reported $20 million in the State Parks and Recreation Fund, and $34 million in the Off-Highway Vehicle Fund, to the Department of Finance.
The Attorney General’s Office launched an investigation at the request of Gov. Brown, who ordered a full Parks Department audit by the Department of Finance.
The governor also accepted the resignation of then-Parks Director Ruth Coleman, appointed a new acting interim director and directed the dismissal of three senior parks employees.
Of the $54 million total, $20 million is eligible for appropriation by the Legislature for management, protection, planning and acquisition.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – The service of a search warrant by the Sheriff’s Narcotics Task Force has resulted in two arrests, the seizure of 1.5 ounces of methamphetamine and the recovery of stolen property.
Arrested in the case were Richard James Mills, 40, of Kelseyville and Trenton Lee Newton, 25, of Lakeport, according to Sgt. Steve Brooks.
On Thursday, July 26, narcotics detectives secured a search warrant for Mills’ person, home and vehicle, Brooks said. Later that day at approximately 4:10 p.m., narcotics detectives located Mills driving his vehicle on Parallel Drive in Lakeport.
With the assistance of a patrol deputy, detectives conducted an enforcement stop on Mills’ vehicle on Highland Springs Road. Mills and his passenger, Newton, were detained without incident, according to Brooks.
During an interview with detectives, Newton admitted to having narcotics concealed in his groin area, Brooks said.
Newton removed a black case and a translucent capped plastic canister from the front of his jeans. Brooks said the containers contained eight baggies of prepackaged methamphetamine, which had a combined weight of approximately 1.5 ounces of methamphetamine.
The containers also contained a digital scale, seven hypodermic needles, a glass pipe, two metal spoons coated with suspected methamphetamine and a sheet of paper with a list of pay/owes. Brooks said Mills admitted that the methamphetamine located on Newton belonged to him.
During a search of Mills’ vehicle, detectives located an iPad computer which was reported to be stolen, Brooks said. Detectives also located and seized $1,461 in US currency from Mills, which is pending asset forfeiture proceedings.
Mills was arrested for possession of a controlled substance for sale, transportation of a controlled substance, possession of stolen property, possession of hypodermic needles and for being under the influence of a controlled substance, Brooks said. Newton was arrested for possession of a controlled substance, under the influence of a controlled substance and concealing or destroying evidence.
The Sheriff’s Narcotics Task Force can be contacted through its anonymous tip line at 707-263-3663.
