A week after learning about the shooting Mike was allegedly involved in, Emma Worldpeace started up her black Subaru Impreza and began the four-hour drive from Chico back to Humboldt. She drove down a busy I-5, the interstate that bisects California, and then through oak forest and farmland on a tiny state route, before connecting with Highway 101 in Mendocino County, and pushing north, back behind the redwood curtain. Emma was on her way to meet both of her sisters at Aia’s house in Eureka. The girls were going to get together and talk about what had happened with Mike, who was sitting downtown in the Humboldt County jail charged with murder, attempted murder, and marijuana cultivation.
The weekend after she learned about the shooting, Emma and her boyfriend, Ethan, had been riding through Chico on their bikes when a friend drove by them and stopped to say hello.
“Hey, did you hear about that shooting that went on in Humboldt?” the friend asked. They knew that Emma was originally from there.
Emma got a huge lump in her throat and wanted to tear up. She was unable to say, “Yes, that was my brother.”
Emma hadn’t seen much of Mike in recent years, and when she did, it was painfully obvious that they inhabited different worlds. When Emma was at Berkeley, Mike used to tease her about how broke she was, and how spending thousands of dollars on her education was a major waste of money. Here he was, she remembered him telling her, making $100,000 a year growing pot. He had just bought his own home, and he hadn’t even graduated from high school.
During her junior year at Berkeley, Emma went up to visit Mike and her older sister, Aia, who was living with him at the time. It was Halloween, and as the girls were putting the finishing touches on their costumes and preparing to go out for the evening, Emma started talking about a class she was taking that she was excited about. She expected Mike to shoot it down as usual, but instead, he listened and looked thoughtful. It was as though something inside him had changed. At twenty-six, he was now struggling to make his loan payments on his house. He’d never had a legal job and didn’t really have anything to show for all his hard work that wasn’t fake or made up in some way.
Following Mike’s arrest, Aia took in his pit bulls, Alou and Lola. Emma always found them to be sweet, nice dogs, but they had been pepper-sprayed by the authorities, and for six days after Aia picked them up, they were unable to eat and were edgy and would bark aggressively at anyone who came to the door. Lisa knew the dogs well; she had lived with Mike most recently, and knew what food to buy for them and how to get them to eat again.
The sisters gathered around a laptop in Aia’s living room and pored over the coverage of the shooting. In the days following Mike’s arrest, more news had come out about the incident. In a bizarre coincidence, it turned out that Humboldt County sheriff’s deputies had already been investigating Mike and were in the process of preparing a warrant to search his property on the morning of the shooting. His garden was big enough to attract attention during a sheriff’s helicopter flyover.
The sisters clicked through the news coverage and were shocked by some of the readers’ comments. Some made fun of the hippie spelling of Mike’s name. Others called for his blood. “He deserves nothing more than a bullet in the back of his head, and to be hung from a tree for vultures to eat,” wrote one reader on a Mendocino news site.
Most sickening to Emma was the racism toward the Guatemalan men who had been shot.
“How come no one’s saying anything about these guys being illegal immigrants?” asked a commenter at The North Coast Journal, as if the men’s immigration status had anything to do with their being shot.
“What were these men doing in Humboldt County?” asked another.
Eventually the sisters just had to stop reading. It was too upsetting.
Sometimes Emma would go back and forth between calling Mike her stepbrother or her brother, but the truth was that she loved and cared about him as a brother. She didn’t want him to rot in jail, but if he did shoot those men in cold blood, she knew that justice needed to be served.
On her long drive back to Chico a few days later, Emma reflected on everything that had happened. She thought about the legalization measure, and how excited she had been when she first heard about it. She always thought that pot should be legal, especially when compared with alcohol. It just made sense. If pot were legal, sure, there would be less money in the black market, but the region would adjust eventually and then there would be less fear and shame in the community, and greater tax revenue for the schools. Not to mention that business-related violence would come to an end, just like it had at the end of alcohol prohibition.
Emma was still living in Humboldt when the news broke about the upcoming legalization vote, and she heard the undercurrent of opposition in the community from people who were scared it would threaten their economic security. She also knew people who were preparing to adapt, like her best friend’s mother, whom she rented a room from at the time. The woman grew a few plants in a spare room to supplement her full-time work at the local health food store. She told Emma that she thought maybe she’d rent out the room to make up for the loss in income after legalization. Throughout the summer, the measure was ahead in the polls, and looked pretty inevitable.
After a yearlong courtship, Emma had moved to Chico that spring to live with Ethan. The couple had met through the cycling community, and shared a mutual love of the sport. Emma hoped to get into graduate school in Chico and study social work, but in the meantime, she found a job at the bike shop.
The couple thought about maybe returning to Humboldt together someday. Ethan loved the natural beauty of the area and would move there in a heartbeat if he could find a decent job that wasn’t in the marijuana industry. Emma had her doubts. She so loved the place and thought about how fulfilling it would be to be a counselor at her old high school, to be able to talk to kids about their situations, and to have her own children attend the same sweet hippie schools she once did. But then she’d return home over the summer to visit, and she’d see all these strange, shady people in town, people drawn to the area not for the community, but to grow and make money and live as outlaws. She’d read about all the spooky crimes in the local paper, and she’d recall all the sad-ass stories of her youth and she’d have second thoughts about moving back. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a great place to start a family. Or maybe if pot did become legal, it would even the playing field, and the people who lived in Humboldt would be there because they loved the place and wanted to participate in the community, and not just because they wanted to benefit from the pot economy.
Then this thing with Mike happened, and Emma was reminded once again that people were killed over pot. She was just so ready for the drama, and the violence, and the excessiveness to end. If she held out any hope for the situation, it was that others would learn from Mike’s story, that he would serve as a kind of cautionary tale. So many of the boys she grew up with had just stayed and grown pot, and seemed headed in the same direction as Mike. Emma had heard so many people say that if someone stepped on their property and tried to steal their shit, they would shoot the person. Emma thought that kind of behavior needed to be condemned. She didn’t think that was what her parents and the hippie settlers who stumbled across pot as a way to make money and support their families would have wanted. The hope for most people was that it never got to the point where they had to pull a trigger, but maybe if Mike were found guilty, his story would serve as a reminder that if you took someone else’s life, you were taking your own life in a way, too.
The men who were shot in Mike’s garden were people with families who loved them, people who had had hopes and dreams of their own. It was Emma’s wish that the fact the men were undocumented immigrants from another country wouldn’t lessen Mike’s punishment if he were found guilty, because that would be valuing one type of human life over another, and that, she thought, would be disgusting.
Little did she know that the vote and what happened afterward would delay the justice process in Mike’s case for a long time to come.