Officers shoot, kill man near pot farms threatened by Lava Fire in Northern California

Four officers shot and killed a man after he fired a gun at them as they tried to stop a vehicle at the entrance to a large complex of cannabis farms under evacuation Monday evening from the 13,330-acre Lava Fire in Siskiyou County, the sheriff said Tuesday.

The officers tried to stop a man at the Mount Shasta Vista subdivision after the fire crossed Highway 97 north of Weed, Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue said. The 1,641-lot subdivision has been converted into a massive network of marijuana grows run primarily by Hmong families.

“They made contact with the driver. And at some point, the driver exhibited a firearm, a handgun, and pointed it at the officers,” LaRue told The Sacramento Bee.

“Based upon preliminary information, it appears that there might have been a couple rounds fired from the suspect’s firearm.”

The officers, which included a sheriff’s deputy and local police officers, returned fire, killing the man, LaRue said. The dead man’s name wasn’t released, but community members said he was a Hmong man in his late 30s and that his family had been notified about the shooting.

A firefighter at the scene told The Sacramento Bee on Tuesday that the shooting occurred as the man was trying to drive out of the fire zone.

The man was trying to turn to the right as authorities were directing traffic to turn left, and a game warden hit the truck’s hood to direct him to the left.

“I think he popped on the gas a little bit and it just went all bad,” said the firefighter, who asked not to be named.

The firefighter said he could not see whether the man had a weapon, but saw officers open fire.

Some of the officers involved were from the rural Etna Police Department, which has four sworn officers serving a community of about 700 people roughly 30 miles southwest of Yreka.

Etna police posted a Facebook statement saying its officers were assisting with evaucations and road closures” Monday night.

“While in the performance of those duties, officers from the Etna Police Department and allied agency personnel were involved in a shooting with an armed subject,” the post said. “The subject was mortally wounded and died at the scene.”

The department referred further questions to the Siskiyou County District Attorney’s Office, which did not immediately respond to a message Tuesday.

“This is a tragic event for all parties involved and the department will be as transparent and forthcoming as possible,” Etna police wrote in the post. “Please be patient as additional details and information maybe released by the District Attorney’s Office as it becomes available.”

The shooting threatens to escalate an already tense situation between the growers and local authorities who have been aggressively cracking down on the cannabis operations for months.

On Monday, as the fire raged into the subdivision, the growers were hostile to first responders, LaRue said.

“It prevented fire(fighters) from going in there, because the firefighters didn’t feel very safe due to some of the comments that were made,” LaRue said. “So it’s kind of a mess.”

LaRue said he didn’t know how many buildings burned inside the subdivision or if anyone had been hurt.

Darren Duck, who lives across Highway A-12 from where the officers shot the suspect, said he heard close to 60 rounds fired.

“You heard everybody go to hollerin’ and then rapid gunfire for 30 seconds it seemed like,” Duck told The Bee. “So much gunshots it wasn’t funny.”

Thousands of cannabis greenhouses in the area

The shooting comes in the wake of the sheriff’s office aggressively enforcing local ordinances seeking to eliminate the massive proliferation of marijuana farms in the rural county along the Oregon border. Siskiyou County has banned large-scale cannabis cultivation.

Authorities estimate there are 5,000 to 6,000 greenhouses growing pot in the Big Springs area. Almost all of the greenhouses have shown up within the last three years. As many as 4,000 to 8,000 people may be tending them.

The county has prohibited water trucks from delivering water to the grow sites, many of which don’t have wells, electricity or sewage service.

The county also has enlisted the help of local volunteer bulldozer operators to tear down the greenhouses during sheriff’s raids.

The growers, most of them of Hmong and Chinese descent, have accused local authorities of racial discrimination, and they’re pursuing a federal civil rights lawsuit.

The county disputes that their crackdown has been racially motivated, citing a rise of violent crime and unsafe living conditions inside the grows.

One of the growers in the Mount Shasta Vista subdivision told The Bee Tuesday, that the growers feel like they could have helped with the fire if they’d been allowed to use their water trucks.

“We had all the water trucks and s--- like that,” said the man who asked not to be identified. “But they wouldn’t let us do it.”

Raza Lawrence, a Beverly Hills attorney for the Hmong who has filed in federal court in Sacramento seeking an injunction against the water truck restrictions, also said he heard that members of the community had been stopped by authorities from trucking in water to help fight the fire.

“I heard that Hmong people were attempting to bring water trucks in to fight the fire and they were stopped,” Lawrence said.

He added that the man who was shot is not one of his clients, and in a court filing late Tuesday attorneys for the Hmong growers wrote that “law enforcement officers have blocked water trucks from entering the Shasta Vista Subdivision that were attempting to help eradicate the fire and prevent property damage in the subdivision.”

“This is consistent with plaintiffs’ earlier declarations suggesting that the Hmong people are being denied access to water for firefighting purposes,” the filing states, adding that lawyers for the Hmong growers “are currently investigating whether the shooting had any relation to attempts to bring water into the Hmong community, or attempts by Sheriff deputies to block access to water.”

Air tankers and helicopters grounded by high winds

Fueled by powerful, erratic winds, the lightning-sparked Lava Fire north of Weed grew substantially on Monday, forcing evacuations in the Big Springs area, as well as the community of Lake Shastina, home to close to 3,000 people.

In a briefing Monday evening, Forest Service officials said the winds were so powerful that air tankers and helicopters were grounded for much of that afternoon.

“We had a rough four or five hours there not being able to fly,” said Steve Watkins, the incident commander.

At the briefing, fire officials also fielded questions from the public about why the fire was allowed to grow from a small lightning strike Friday morning to the massive inferno that put up a plume of smoke that could be seen for miles.

Todd Mack, a local official with the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, described how the fire ignited in an area of heavy lava flows on the side of the Mount Shasta volcano, where it’s difficult for firefighters to access.

“They’re extremely tough to suppress fires in,” Mack said of the lava flows. “It’s really rugged country.”

He said that at one point, the fire crews thought they had the fire contained, but it flared back up.

“There’s no excuse, but it does happen,” Mack said. “We had crews on it and they did their best. That’s the honest answer.”

As of Monday afternoon, two firefighters were injured — one from a bee sting; the other suffered a broken thumb, officials said at the briefing. By Tuesday afternoon, officials said the fire remained at 20% containment.

The area had only recently recovered from the September 2014 Boles Fire, which burned more than 150 homes and buildings in the city of Weed. Ronald Beau Marshall was convicted for starting that fire. He was sentenced to three years in prison and was released in 2016.

Weed Mayor Sue Tavalero, who lost her home in the 2014 fire as her husband, Scott, a Cal Fire battalion chief at the time, was fighting another blaze, said the city was safe Tuesday. But she added that residents are on edge over the blaze burning 3.5 miles to the northeast.

“There’s still a lot of people in town that have a lot of PTSD, which is understandable,” Tavalero said, adding that Cal Fire has joined the U.S. Forest Service efforts to battle the fire.

There are currently no evacuation warnings in Weed, she said, but some residents are not confident in the air attack efforts that the Forest Service has put in so far.

“The city is fine, they’re not happy but they’re fine,” she said. “The area out in Lake Shastina where there’s a golf course and a bunch of houses, they have been evacuated.

“But so far Cal Fire has held it off, so it looks like they should be OK. It started out as a Forest Service fire, but right now Cal Fire is protecting the private lands. The U.S. Forest Service is not doing such a great job with their federal land. It’s burning.”

The blaze is burning in lava fields that Tavalero said are “almost ridiculously impossible to get to,” and she said Weed residents do not believe enough Forest Service aircraft have been dispatched to halt the blaze.

“So they’ve got air attack, but not enough, in my opinion and other people’s opinion,” Tavalero said.

Tavalero’s home and others in a cul-de-sac sitting on a ridge were destroyed in the Boles Fire, but she has since rebuilt and said she saw the lightning strike Friday night that started the Lava Fire.

“From my house I could see the lightning strike, and it hit a tree and 20 minutes late it was on fire,” Tavalero said. “They sent people in to put it out, and they didn’t put it out.

“By Saturday morning, it needed to be worked on.”

This story was originally published June 29, 2021 at 9:21 AM with the headline "Officers shoot, kill man near pot farms threatened by Lava Fire in Northern California."