Counties

A jail guard was arrested in early October as police busted a group growing marijuana in Sacramento. Eddie Lay, 32, was arrested Oct. 8 on suspicion of cultivating weed for sale. The bust was the culmination of an eight-month investigation into pot-growing in the city. Sacramento police launched the investigation when the department’s South Area Gang Enforcement Team got a ...

A wildfire raging for more than two weeks had firefighters in Mendocino County battling to prevent deaths and save property. But there’s one thing they had no intention of saving from the blaze: weed. Mendocino County is located in Northern California’s famed Emerald Triangle, the biggest pot-producing region in the United States. Supposedly, almost everyone in the Triangle – which ...

Authorities in San Bernardino County raided a marijuana grow site in August, seizing more than 5,000 plants and multiple guns, the county sheriff’s department said. Fourteen people were arrested. Sheriff’s deputies, part of a marijuana enforcement team, served nine search warrants Aug. 20 and 21 on several properties in unincorporated San Bernardino County. The sites included the communities of Landers, ...

Border patrol officers discovered more than 3,000 pounds of marijuana hidden inside a shipment of Christmas package bows, officials said. On the afternoon of Aug. 28, a 28-year-old Mexican national tried to drive a 1998 Kenworth tractor across the border at Tijuana, officials said. The tractor pulled a trailer full of boxes masked as holiday bows. The tractor and trailer ...

Five California high school students got sick after eating marijuana brownies they bought at school, authorities said. A 17-year-old senior at a Richmond, Cal., high school allegedly sold pot brownies to other students Sept. 4 at De Anza High School. She charged $3 per brownie or $5 for two. Five younger students, between 14 and 16 years old, ate the ...

Weed will now be free in Berkeley. For some people, anyway. The Berkeley City Council voted unanimously in early September to require that the city’s medical marijuana dispensaries set aside 2 percent of their product for people who can’t afford it. The council cast an initial vote on the cannabis plan in July. It’s a novel idea: Make sure everyone ...

Managers of a private California security company insist they’re not behind a rash of midnight marijuana raids from helicopters above Mendocino County. Armed men in camouflage gear have been spotted descending into pot gardens in the Emerald Triangle. Locals say the men are cutting down their weed in the dark of night. Susan Schindler, a resident whose legal cannabis garden ...

A gunfight during a robbery at a Fresno marijuana grow site left two suspects dead while their accomplices took a 15-year-old girl hostage. Seven men, armed and dressed as police, burst into a home in south Fresno in an attempt to rob the residents of cash and weed, police said. They pistol-whipped one man inside the house and then started ...

Police found as many as 4,000 marijuana plants growing in a public park in Orange County in August. Narcotics investigators uprooted the plants Aug. 15. A parks worker spotted the plants “a few weeks back” and called the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, Lt. Jeff Hallock said. The plants were growing in the Muddy Canyon portion of the Laguna Coast Wilderness ...

A California driver attempting to flee police crashed through the wall of a Los Angeles warehouse, exposing what police called an illegal marijuana garden inside. The driver was paralyzed in the Aug. 15 collision, and police hauled away 800 plants from the site, though they were mum about the extent of the operation inside. Neighbors told reporters they knew the ...