Report clears deputies who shot pot growers

Three sheriff’s deputies who shot and killed two marijuana growers in a raid near Feather Falls Sept. 19 have been cleared of any wrongdoing and are back at work after an inquiry into the incident showed their actions were in response to a potentially deadly threat.

At a press conference Sept. 30, Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey detailed the incident as chronicled by the region’s Officer-Involved Shooting Protocol team. Ramsey explained that the shooting took place in a remote, forested site that had been transformed by growers—thought to be employed by a Mexican drug cartel—into a veritable “marijuana jungle.” The area had been under surveillance by the Sheriff’s Department for several weeks prior to the raid, and the plan was to enter the growers’ campsite early in the morning and arrest the men before they began their day’s work.

But when members of the sheriff’s Special Incident Response Team, wearing camouflage uniforms and toting machine guns, crept into the campsite around 7 a.m., they found it empty. Thinking that their presence had been discovered, the team split into two groups and took separate trails toward the grow site. One team, led by Deputy James Dimmit and including Deputies Jason Dodd, Todd Booth and Neil Simpson, heard voices coming toward them down the trail and quickly hid themselves in the dense marijuana thicket.

As soon as the group of suspects—now known to have been three Mexican nationals who police say were tending the more than 11,000 marijuana plants found at the site—made their way past the hiding deputies, Dimmit emerged from his hiding spot and commanded the suspects to stop, freeze and raise their hands. Dimmit told investigators that he used the Spanish words “Policia! No se mueva! Manos arriba!”

At that point, Ramsey said, one of the suspects, Martin Baez, 40, “stopped [and] turned toward the officers with a fully loaded AK-47 assault rifle.” Ramsey then showed the weapons the suspects were said to be carrying. Two suspects, he said, had shoulder-slung assault rifles but only Baez was able to bring his weapon into a “firing position,” holding it at waist level with the barrel pointing toward the officers.

“The deputies that were there also described him starting to fumble for the trigger area as if he was attempting to fire at that moment,” Ramsey said. “The officers did what they were trained to do, which was to eliminate the threat.”

The other rifle-toting suspect, identified as Valentine Guizar Mora, 24, was apparently disabled by Dimmit, who used a leg-sweep to bring him to the ground. At the same time, the third suspect, José Guadalupe Castaneda-Castillas, 22, ran behind Baez and was struck by two stray bullets. He was later found to be carrying a .38 caliber revolver in his back pocket. All told, the deputies fired 17 shots, hitting Baez 11 times and Castaneda-Castillas twice. Both men died at the scene without firing a shot.

The surviving suspect, Mora, told investigators he had been in the United States for about five months before meeting up with Castaneda-Castillas in Los Angeles. Mora, who was working as a day laborer at the time, jumped at the chance to make a reported $250 a day working in the marijuana field, where he helped water, fertilize and protect the plants. A few weeks before the raid, he told police, two field workers had quit the operation after being scared off by overhead flights of California Department of Forestry planes.

He later told investigators that when he heard Dimmit ordering him to stop, he could not understand the words but knew the men were police by the yellow lettering on their uniforms. When he saw Baez unsling his weapon, Ramsey relayed, “Mr. Mora said two things. He said he that thought maybe Mr. Baez was attempting to get rid of the weapon. But he also said that he could not definitely tell one way or the other because it was at that time that he got hit from behind and thrown on the ground.”

Mora will be tried on drug and weapons charges by federal prosecutors, who are scheduled to take him into custody sometime next week. He faces a probable sentence of between 10 and 20 years in a U.S. prison.