Body cameras recorded shooting of timid man in mental crisis
By Dave Waddell | Posted January 2, 2024
photo by Dave Waddell
At least one police bullet went into Tanabe Dermatology on Magnolia Street along the alley where Rubio died.
GRIDLEY — A year ago today, in the dawn of a new year, was it necessary for Gridley police to kill Baltazar Rubio, a smallish, timid man in acute mental crisis?
Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey, 365 days later, still hasn’t answered that question, though he issued a statement the day after the shooting giving the officers’ version of the deadly event. The three shooting officers – Sgt. Eva Smith and officers Anthony Lara and Garrett Mauldin — were soon returned to duty by the Gridley Police Department.
Body-worn camera videos of the killing of Rubio – recently released after denials and delays by the City of Gridley – raise questions about the tragedy. One critical question is how much danger police were in when, after pausing their gunfire, officers pulled their triggers a few final times.read more
I know Butte County has an elderly district attorney, but who knew Mike Ramsey’s thinking on mental illness was so prehistoric?
I am referring to a quote from Ramsey, Butte’s 35-year (!) DA, in Leslie Layton’s ChicoSol story about the difficult societal problems presented by Thomas David Bona.
Bona is a serial criminal living with schizophrenia and a multitude of delusions. He thinks he’s a member of the Sureńos gang, which he isn’t. He also seems to have violently acted out his perceived ties to “The Sopranos” television crime family.
Most recently, Bona is facing felony charges with hate crime enhancements in connection with two terrorizing graffiti incidents in Chico. He is accused of etching swastikas into the Murdered & Missing Indigenous Women mural at Cedar and Second streets and on a Congregation Beth Israel sign at the local synagogue, among other frightening acts. Bona is also charged with throwing a rock through a restaurant window, apparently because it displayed a San Francisco Giants sign. He is due back in Butte County Superior Court on Dec. 21 after a judge last month suspended criminal proceedings and ordered his psychological examination.read more
Stephen Vest slipped through the cracks, observers say
By Dave Waddell | Posted October 29, 2020
photo courtesy of Lisa Currier
Stephen Vest as a youngster in Paradise.
Chico police reform advocates are questioning the independence of the investigation underway into the killing of Stephen Vest, who was shot Oct. 14 by an officer and his sergeant after Vest’s behavior frightened motorists and passersby.
Reform advocates want a state investigation into the killing outside the local Petco store. Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey insists his system for investigating police shootings ensures impartiality and falls within the purview of his position.
Vest, 30, a Camp Fire survivor who grew up in Paradise, was described by friends as a sweet man who struggled with mental illness and by Ramsey as someone in need of drug rehabilitation. Vest was shot dead while advancing on several Chico officers with a knife in the Petco parking lot on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway.read more
Reports: Woman shot dead by Butte deputy had tried to help CHP officer
By Dave Waddell | Posted October 30, 2019
Hali McKelvie with her mother, Myra Micalizio, in 2014. Photo courtesy of family.
Not long after Myra Micalizio was shot five times in the back and killed last year by a Butte County sheriff’s deputy, District Attorney Mike Ramsey declared before television cameras that Micalizio had tried to attack deputies with her vehicle.
Micalizio’s family never bought that scenario, but Ramsey reaffirmed it many months later when issuing a report clearing deputies Charles Lair and Mary Barker of any criminal wrongdoing in the killing. Micalizio’s three children – Lisa Rutledge, Sean McKelvie and Hali McKelvie – recently settled a wrongful death suit against Butte County for $250,000, said County Counsel Bruce Alpert.read more
Unarmed Palermo woman in mental crisis reversed car
By Dave Waddell | Posted July 27, 2018
Myra Micalizio, about seven years ago with her nephew Justin Widener, who is a police officer in Aurora, Colo.
Above all else, her family says, Myra Micalizio of Palermo was a gentle woman who loved the Lord. And she got along really well with her imaginary friends as well.
Micalizio, 56, who lived with mental health issues, was shot dead April 26 in a hail of bullets from two Butte County sheriff’s deputies. On July 20, her family filed a federal civil rights complaint seeking a jury trial and unspecified damages from Butte County, sheriff’s deputies Charles Lair and Mary Barker, and Sheriff Kory Honea.
“It would have been apparent to any law enforcement officer adequately trained to contact and communicate with persons suffering from mental illness that … Micalizio was experiencing mental illness, as opposed to engaging in criminal conduct,” says the complaint, filed in the Sacramento Division of the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of California.read more
Desperate to get help for his mentally ill son, journalist Pete Earley told Chicoans Saturday he did things he never thought he’d do.
Earley said he lied about what his son had said, violated his own professional ethics by threatening to summon feared investigative reporter Mike Wallace of “60 Minutes” TV fame, and “literally went out and grabbed a doctor” from a crowded emergency room hallway to evaluate his delusional son.
Eventually, Earley’s wife advised him that he couldn’t help his son, Kevin, as a parent, but that he could as a journalist. “For once, I listened to her,” Earley said.
The product was his 2007 book, “Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness,” a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Earley, a former Washington Post reporter and author of 15 books, writes a weekly blog about mental health. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) of Butte County brought Earley to Chico, and he spoke May 5 to about 75 people at Sierra Nevada’s Big Room, bringing some to tears.read more
