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| The Eel River in Humboldt County, CA, was the site of a tragic cannabis-related shooting in October 1970. |
Everything
seemed to be looking up for Patrick John Berti in the fall of 1970. The
23-year-old native of Ferndale, California graduated near the top of his class
at Chicago State University the previous fall, and had just spent the summer
touring Alaska and Canada. He had applied to law school at San Diego State
College and was waiting for a reply.[1]
On
October 4, Berti's father, John, enlisted his son to help him carry debris from
an old, wrecked store in nearby Waddington. On that Sunday afternoon, Patrick and
Jack McCanless, another 23-year-old from Ferndale, took some debris out to be
burned on a gravel bed in the Eel River, just east of Waddington near Grizzly
Bluff Road.[2]
Two
days earlier, Roscoe Rich was following his cows near the same spot on the Eel
River when he noticed two four-foot marijuana plants growing in containers on
the bed. Rich showed the plants to Humboldt County sheriff deputies Mel Ames
and Larry Lema. Ames set up a stakeout to see who would come tend the plants.
Two days later, Lema was crouched behind some bushes watching the plants when
McCanless and Berti happened upon the containers and began examining them. Like
many small-town Americans, Berti knew members of the local police force,
including Lema. Berti's back was turned and Lema did not immediately recognize
him. But he recognized McCanless, and figured he had caught the youth and a partner
cultivating marijuana.[3]
His
revolver drawn, Lema stepped out and called to the young men that they were
under arrest. Berti, who was crouching next to one of the plants, stood up and
turned around. He had taken a small twig from the plant. Lema mistook it for a
weapon and fired a single shot into Berti's chest.[4]
It
was only after Berti had uttered his final words - "Christ, Larry, you shot
me!" - that Lema recognized him. As Berti lay dying on the gravel bar,
Lema began handcuffing McCanless, who pleaded with the deputy to let him go get
help. They went to the Rich house, where McCanless called an ambulance and Lema
told Rich's son, John, to notify the sheriff's department. Berti was dead when
Lema and McCanless returned to the gravel bed.
Earlier
that day, Lema had witnessed his own child's baptism; his actions that
afternoon ensured someone else’s would have a funeral. Presumably from Berti's
limp hand, he took the six-inch marijuana twig as evidence.[5]
To
understand how a sheriff's deputy could gun down a young man for simply
checking out a potted plant, one has to understand the political and cultural
context of California, and to some degree the nation as a whole, in the late
sixties and early seventies.
California
in the late 1960s was a hotbed of drug use and cultural dissent. Yet it was
governed by Ronald Reagan, the popular conservative who would win the White
House in a little more than a decade and then unleash the U.S. military on
cannabis growers in his former home state. Marijuana had been popular among the
state’s youth, especially those in southern California and in the cities, since
the late 1940s.[6]
In January 1967, pot-smoking beat activist Allen Ginsberg, who coined the term
“flower power” to describe the aura of the drug-influenced counterculture,
joined some 20,000 other hippies who smoked pot openly in San Francisco’s
Golden Gate Park at a festival known as the Human Be-In.[7] In
the following “Summer of Love,” more than 500,000 young people put the hippie
lifestyle on display and smoked marijuana in the streets of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury
neighborhood.[8]
In
California, law enforcement had been battling marijuana longer than almost
anywhere else, but five decades after the state’s first anti-marijuana laws
were passed it could not stop the flow of cannabis into, around, and through
the Golden State. In 1971, for example, federal officials took five tons of
marijuana valued at $1.4 million - the largest such seizure in U.S. history at
the time - off a shrimping boat in San Francisco bay.[9]
Weed
grew through the cracks of law and order, but that didn’t mean officers were
powerless. To the contrary, their attitude toward drug offenders was more like
a vendetta than dutiful law enforcement. For example, when Humboldt deputy Ames
and others set fire to a pile of marijuana three years after Berti was killed, they
cracked jokes about hippies gathering to smell the burning weed and openly mocked
the Humboldt residents whose property they defiled as they took the plants.[10] Such
an event demonstrated what had been true for decades in California and
elsewhere – when it came to cannabis and other drugs, officers had the full
power and support of the state behind them, and they hardly missed a chance to
slap the cuffs on anyone associated – or suspected of being associated – with marijuana.
“Flower power” was by no means restricted to the
Golden State. In 1968, a seed-sprinkling hippie nicknamed “Johnny Potseed”
crisscrossed the nation planting cannabis.[11]
Maps made by hippies pointed the way to dozens of wild cannabis patches in Iowa.[12] In
1970, a hippie by the pseudonym Alicia Bay Laurel penned “Living on the Earth,”
an illustrated bible for back-to-the-landers that showed and told them “how to plant,
nurture, cultivate and cure a [cannabis] plant.”[13] Despite
an aggressive joint effort by U.S and Mexican officers, thousands of pounds of
marijuana and heroin crossed the border from Mexico and disembarked from ships
in the nation’s ports.[14] Meanwhile,
American troops in Vietnam smoked so much pot that the military declared a war
zone within a war zone: It asked commanders to devote planes, jeeps, and other
resources to locate marijuana plants, although “the responsibility for
destroying these crops” lay with South Vietnamese officials.[15]
So by the late sixties and early seventies,
according to law enforcement even northern California – a sparsely populated
region that, compared to southern parts of the state, had been relatively
drug-free ten years before – was a cannabis war zone. All this contextual
evidence comes to show that in 1970 on a creek bed in Humboldt County, the
young, college-educated Berti fit the stereotype of a marijuana user, an identity
police hated for decades. Even though Lema knew Berti, Berti was seen examining
a marijuana plant and so his identity as a criminal trumped his identity as a well-known
local citizen. This explains why Lema, despite personally knowing both men, was
quick to draw and fire his gun – to the deputy, the presence of marijuana meant
he was in the presence of dangerous criminals, no matter the actual situation.
It wasn’t just police officers who felt this way. Berti
had been shot where he stood, unarmed, but the presence of marijuana was enough
to convince some local residents that the college-educated youth had it coming.
A letter to the editor of the Eureka
Times Standard on November 4, after deputy Lema had been reassigned to
prison duty at the county courthouse, questioned “what a good guy” Berti was: “This
may be so,” the anonymous writer quipped, “but what was he doing out by this
marijuana at the time of the shooting? What is our law supposed to be for, if
the public does not support it?”[16]
Following the incident, a grand jury investigated
the case and declared Berti’s death to be a “justifiable homicide.”[17] Then,
in a special meeting of the Ferndale City Council on December 1, Don
Richardson, a local Vietnam veteran, admitted the plants were his. "I
brought the seeds from Vietnam," he told a stunned mayor and council.[18]
After he shot Berti, Lema was briefly reassigned
from the field to jail duty at the county courthouse.[19]
But at the time of Richardson’s confession, he was about to be restored to his
former job.[20]
California in the 1970s was far removed from the “shoot first, ask later” West,
but the fact that Berti was shot over a cannabis plant allowed the sheriff’s department
to successfully protect its guilty deputy for months after the killing.
The story, however, was far from over. Even though
Richardson admitted ownership of the plants, McCanless was still going to go on
trial as planned for marijuana cultivation. Berti’s family, meanwhile, apparently
did not take the brushing-aside of their son’s murder lightly, and the family’s
lawyer demanded the case be reopened the following February.
This story will be
continued in a later post.
[1] "Berti's Killing Probed;
Rites On Tomorrow," Eureka Times Standard, October 6, 1970.
[2] "Lema: Weed Looked Like
Gun," Eureka Times Standard, October 22, 1970.
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid
[6] “July Near Record in Drive on
Narcotics Violators,” Bakersfield
Californian, July 3, 1948.
[7] Martin A. Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social History of
Marijuana: Medical, Recreational, and Scientific (New York: Scribner,
2012), 105.
[8] Martin Booth, Cannabis: A History (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 2003), 266.
[9] "Largest Pot Seizure in
U.S. on Shrimp Boat," Eureka Times
Standard, May 5, 1971.
[10] Harold Kitching, “For a high
time, try burning green pot,” Eureka
Times Standard, August 24, 1973.
[11] “Johnny Pot Sows Marijuana,” Eureka Times Standard, October 21, 1968.
[12] “Hippy ‘Treasure Maps’ Show Iowa Marijuana
Patches,” Oakland Tribune, October
13, 1967.
[13] Wally Lee, “The Lamplighter,” Eureka Times Standard, April 3, 1971.
[14] “Border Drug Crackdown Said
Success,” Eureka Times Standard,
October 7, 1969; Dick Werkman, "State Labeled Dumping Site For
Marijuana," Pasadena Independent, January 19, 1967; “Ban Eases, Traffic Up
At Border,” Eureka Times Standard,
October 14, 1969.
[15] “War on Drugs in US Forces,” Eureka Times Standard, January 6, 1971.
[16] “About
Larry Lema,” Eureka Times Standard,
November 4, 1970
[17] “Lema
House Bomb Threat Over Phone,” Eureka
Times Standard, October 30, 1970.
[18]
Andrew Genzoli, “Ferndale Confession! Resident Says He Grew Marijuana, DA Knew
It,” Eureka Times Standard, December
2, 1970.
[19] “Lema
House Bomb Threat…”
[20]
Genzoli, “Ferndale Confession!…”