Category Archives: Victimless Crime Files

Victimless Crime File: The Tim Lopez Murder

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What happens when “adults” refuse to stop using drugs even though they have children? They create a culture of crime tolerance, of course.

And what do we suppose happens to a kid who grows up in a town full of people who think the buying and selling of illicit drugs is no big deal?

He gets murdered by a drug dealing rival:

YELLOWS SPRINGS — The Town That Time Forgot. Little Moscow. Hippie Heaven. Tie-Dye Village.

Over the decades, Yellow Springs residents have learned to grin and bear the stereotypes about their charming community and long-time home to Antioch College.

But what residents won’t abide is the notion that there is any more drug use in their village of 3,700 than anywhere else in America.

“I’ve lived in Yellow Springs for 15 years, and I don’t see any drug activity at all,” said Vick Mikunas, a former radio personality on local station WYSO. “I saw more activity when I was living in Des Moines.”

Jennie Hudson, who has lived 17 years in Yellow Springs, agreed. “I don’t know anyone here who has said it’s OK for children to smoke pot and take drugs. No one has ever said, ‘They’re just experimenting.'”

But some Yellow Springs High School students tell a different story.

“I could walk from here (the high school) to High Street and I bet I could find cannabis (plants) growing in about a dozen backyards,” said freshman David Teyber.

Parents in Yellow Springs allow their kids to smoke marijuana “because they still want to do it themselves,” said junior Jake Auten.

Six years ago, when Yellow Springs High School senior Tim Lopez disappeared after signing out for lunch on Jan. 22, 2002, his principal and teachers never suspected he was selling marijuana nor that his classmate, Mike Rittenhouse, was a rival dealer with connections to a major drug ring in Yellow Springs.

Lopez’s body smoldered for nearly two weeks in Rittenhouse’s basement bedroom in his parents’ home, where he had bludgeoned his classmate with a baseball bat and stuffed the body in a large storage tub. He later moved the body to the garage. When his father asked about the smell, Rittenhouse told him it was “a science experiment gone bad” and set fire to it, according to court testimony.

Rittenhouse later buried the body in a shallow grave, underneath heavy brush, in his backyard. There it remained for two years until February of 2004, when 1999 Yellow Springs graduate Umoja “Iddi” Bakari (aka Elijah Smith) was arrested in Columbus on charges of shooting and abducting another man in a drug dispute. To save himself, Bakari told police where they could find Lopez’s body.

Gee, you think Rittenhouse’s dad likes the weed? It’s difficult to believe the scenario described in the article.

“Hey son, it smells like death in here” the father wheezes asthmatically while clutching his bong. “It’s my Science project dad, now get back in your room or I’ll cut you off!” little Mike Rittenhouse would shout, his booming voice sending his drug-addled tie-dye clad father scurrying back to his bedroom where he could type out another diary on DailyKos.

It’s incredible really. Rittenhouse killed a kid in his house and let the body rot there and his parents didn’t know. But they weren’t the only “adults” in Yellow Springs living in a hazy dreamland of drug use without consequences:

Yellow Springs police Chief John Grote called the task force’s investigation “a splash of cold water” for his department. “We’re giving a lot more attention to drug issues,” he said.

John Gudgel, who has been principal of Yellow Springs High for 14 years, said there was nothing about Lopez, Rittenhouse or Bakari to raise suspicions at the school. All three were average students, played school sports and appeared to be college bound. Bakari was the son of a respected massage therapist in town, Gudgel said. His younger brother is an accomplished singer and his younger sister excels academically.

“Those are all reasons why, as a school, we were shocked to learn these things,” Gudgel said. “You can hear a lot from people on the street, but you can work in a school setting as principal and think you’re on top of things when obviously you’re not.”

Jennie Hudson, who was Lopez’s nanny from age 11 until he turned 16 and could drive, said Lopez may have been selling marijuana, but Rittenhouse was known to be carrying a gun.

“That says so much more to me than, ‘Yeah, we got a dime bag (of marijuana) from him for the party on Saturday,’ ” Hudson said. “From my experience, marijuana dealers don’t have guns.”

That may have been true decades ago, but not any more, said Phyllis Coontz, an expert on the economics of drug trafficking who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. “I think (guns) are a necessary part of the job. In an underground economy, the only way you exert power is by using force or threatening people with force.”

With the advent of crack cocaine, she said, drug operations around the world consolidated into major cartels. “The drug industry today has become very sophisticated. The drug cartels control everything. You don’t have these kinds of mom and pop operations you had in the ’60s and ’70s.”

Hudson said she tried to warn Lopez that he was risking serious harm by selling drugs. She often watched over Lopez while his single mother, Barbara McQuiston, traveled on business. McQuiston, who now lives in California, did not return a phone call requesting an interview.

“We talked very openly about a lot of things, even drugs,” Hudson said. The summer before his junior year, “I told him how when you run with people like that… it’s a different world, it’s a drug world. They will kill you for 30 bucks.”

Way to go Jennie! That open honest talk about pot, the one where you no doubt relayed your “experience” with pot dealers being non-violent, was just what Tim needed. Not some sort of adult intervention, not for a person who was his “nanny” up until a couple of years before to pull rank and say “No more bullshit pot dealing kid.” No just a couple of conversations, maybe while sharing a spliff and instilling in him a total lack of boundaries.

The worst part of the case is that Hudson clearly did care about Tim and went looking for him when he disappeared. She got no answers from his classmates and peers, even though she believes they must have known what happened:

Gudgel said the best deterrent to drugs in the school are the students themselves “because kids are our best informants, and they don’t want to see drugs in the building.” He said that in a junior and senior high school of just 375 students, “these kids know each other to a fault. They’re not going to keep any secrets. They’re going to tell.”

But Hudson is not so sure. She said one of the most disturbing aspects of Lopez’s murder was that some students must have known what happened, or at least had an inkling, but not one spoke up for more than two years.

“After Tim went missing, I asked every teenager I knew — What could have happened? What could have happened?” she said. “It was only after he was found that it all came pouring out. Why didn’t more of it come out before then?”

Yeah. Weird, it’s like they were raised without morals. It’s almost like there is some dysfunction in their lives that keeps them from learning the difference between right and wrong:

As some students claim, there are parents whose recreational drug use sets a bad example for their children, Gudgel said. “We have heard statements from parents like, ‘I know my son or daughter gets high. But if they do it, I’d rather have them do it at home than out on the street.’ But I don’t think our community is any different from other communities that have that contingent. Look at what happened in Centerville” where a school board member recently resigned for having underage drinking parties in her home.

Is it any wonder an environment like that would produce a Mike Rittenhouse?

Victimless Crime Files: Grow Houses Destroying Property Values in Arcata California

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It’s definitely a buyer’s market out there, and the myth of a home as a financial investment has been thankfully put to rest. As property owners look for tenants in a highly competitive market the last thing they need is to end up renting to people who will decrease the value of the property, much less destroy it completely:

ARCATA, CALIF. — LaVina Collenberg thought she had ideal tenants for her tidy ranch-style home on the outskirts of this university town nestled in the redwoods of the North Coast. Then the 74-year-old widow received an urgent call last September from a neighbor, who said firefighters had descended on the house she had rented to a pleasant young man from Wisconsin.

Collenberg found her charred and sooty rental filled with grow lights and 3-foot-high marijuana plants. Seeds were germinating in the spa. Water from the growing operation had soaked through the carpeting and sub-flooring. Air vents had been cut into the new roof. A fan had fallen over, causing the fire.

“It was the first time I had been in a grow house,” Collenberg said. “I had heard about them but never thought I had one. I was completely shocked.”

Law enforcement officials estimate that as many as 1,000 of the 7,500 homes in this Humboldt County community are being used to cultivate marijuana, slashing into the housing stock, spreading building-safety problems and sowing neighborhood discord.

Indoor pot farms proliferated in recent years as California communities implemented Proposition 215, the statewide medical marijuana measure passed overwhelmingly a dozen years ago. A backlash over the effects and abuses of legally sanctioned marijuana growing has emerged in some of the most liberal parts of the state.

For example, in neighboring Mendocino County, a measure on Tuesday’s election ballot seeks to repeal a local proposition passed eight years ago that decriminalized cultivation of as many as 25 pot plants.

The experience of Arcata, a bastion of cannabis culture, reveals the unintended consequences of the 1996 Compassionate Use Act, designed to provide relief to AIDS patients, cancer victims and others.

“If the average citizen . . . could see what I see, they probably would vote against it now,” Police Chief Randy Mendosa said of Proposition 215. “We are seeing large-scale grow operations where greedy people are taking huge amounts of affordable housing and are using entire houses to grow marijuana. The going rate is $3,000 a pound [wholesale], and they are selling it and making a huge amount of money.”

State officials say such problems exist throughout the state, including Southern California, but are particularly prevalent in northwestern counties that have relatively liberal limits on possession and cultivation of medical marijuana.

“People who clearly are in it for profit see it as a loophole and have flooded into these areas from across California and the U.S.,” said Kent Shaw, assistant chief of the state Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement. “What comes along with it is criminal elements who want to come and steal marijuana,” sometimes through home invasion robberies.

Medical marijuana advocates say problems have been isolated, and they question the validity of attempts to link crime to a medicine. “Law enforcement sensationalizes a lot of the issues around growing and dispensaries,” said Kris Hermes of Americans For Safe Access.

A doctor’s recommendation is required for a medical marijuana patient to use, grow or acquire cannabis. Activists estimate there are more than 200,000 patients statewide.

In Arcata’s leafy neighborhoods, residents and officials say the telltale signs of grow houses are evident: no full-time dwellers, blacked-out windows, scruffy yards, comings and goings at night. Then there’s the skunk-like odor of marijuana and the whirring fans and electricity meters that generate thousand-dollar monthly power bills.

So many houses have been converted into pot farms that the availability of student rentals has been reduced and the community’s aura of marijuana is turning off some prospective students, said Humboldt State University President Rollin Richmond. “My own sense is that people are abusing Prop. 215 to allow them to use marijuana . . . as recreational drugs,” he said.

Arcata Mayor Mark Wheetley said marijuana growing has become a quality-of-life issue in the town of 17,000. “People from all camps say enough is enough,” he said. “It is like this renegade Wild West mentality . . . I think people want to see a greater level of control and oversight.”

Mark Sailors, 37, a medical marijuana patient and caregiver who moved here from Baltimore, said the community was overreacting. “They claim to support 215, and do not want you to have access to medicine,” he said. “It sounds like the older people . . . are afraid of the younger.”

Right Mark. They’re afraid of kids, not the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage to their property. I’d sayput the bong down but why bother?

And those high energy bills for cultivating pot hardly seems, dare I say, green? What’s more important than saving the Earth, man? Getting your weed I guess.

What bothers me is that these people could easily afford their own places to destroy, but they picked a elderly woman who will likely be unable to afford to repair the place and will thus lose what could be her only source of income. Not exactly a victimless crime.

Victimless Crime File: Convicted Sex Offender Uses Pot to Lure Boys

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In the occasional comment on a post the young pot head will find my harsh judgement of adults who get high (often with teens) perplexing. In fact one of the things I find most objectionable about drug culture, especially marijuana culture, is the lack of boundaries between adults and children leading to inappropriate relationships.

Though many of these adults are themselves stunted by their years of drug use, there are as many who have more sinister reasons to involve themselves in the drug culture. Take Michael Wayne Ingram:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – The Davidson County grand jury Friday returned a 45-count indictment against a convicted sex offender who was arrested during a traffic stop.

Five boys, ages 12 and 13, were in the car with Michael Wayne Ingram. Police stopped him in December after they said he was driving erratically.

Ingram was charged with contributing to the delinquency of minors, driving under the influence, possession of drug paraphernalia and violating the sex offender registry requirements, according to a Metro police news release.

Investigators said interviews with the boys led to other victims and the 45-count indictment. Among the 45 counts in the indictment are: Three counts of child rape, four counts of aggravated sexual battery, three counts of sexual battery, and two counts of attempted aggravated statutory rape.

He is also accused in 15 counts of giving marijuana to seven boys on different occasions. He is indicted on charges of DUI, violation of the open container law, possession of drug paraphernalia, reckless endangerment as well as contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and violation of the state’s sex offender registry requirements.

Ingram gained access to boys through smoking pot. He raped them. They continued to hang around him because he pumped them full of drugs, drugs that made them compliant.

That’s what most adults who are dispensing pot to young people have in mind, making them compliant. That’s one reason why legalized or not smoking pot will never be a 100% victimless crime.

Mom of 4 from The Dreamin’ Demon forums found this story.

Victimless Crime Files:Kevin Dummett and Kellin Hahn Leave Son Behind While Fleeing Home Invasion

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During a home invasion of their house, the two fled the residence when armed assailant shot one of their dogs. They left their 8-year-old son behind to fend for himself.

Yes, really:

An 8-year-old boy slept in his room Tuesday morning while gunmen forced their way into his house, shot and killed a family dog and sent his parents fleeing to the street.

Kevin Dummett, 35, and Kellin Hahn, 26, were the targets of two attempted robberies at their home Tuesday — both carried out by the same two men, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office said.

The men approached Dummett in his driveway and tried to rob him at 12:15 a.m. He didn’t call 911. When the gunmen returned at 6 a.m. and broke in through the back door, the family pit bull charged them and was immediately shot.

Hahn and Dummett fled the home, leaving their son asleep in his bedroom, the sheriff’s office said.

“We couldn’t get to him,” Dummett told WPEC Channel 12. He said the boy didn’t wake up until deputies arrived to rescue him, after the gunmen fled without taking anything.

“He’s absolutely fine. He’s a trouper.”

Another family dog in the house survived.

Neighbors along Gun Club Road in suburban West Palm Beach thought they lived on a quiet street until gunshots, a search helicopter and a dozen patrol cars woke them.

Dummett told investigators that the invaders apparently wanted drugs or money.

In the last few years, Dummett’s arrest history includes charges of burglary, battery, marijuana possession and driving with a suspended license.

By law, the state Department of Children and Families cannot comment on whether the parents could lose custody of their son after leaving him behind. But whenever the DCF hears about something of this magnitude, spokeswoman Laura Tingo said, the agency works with law enforcement to ensure that all children in the home are safe.

Dummett told the television reporter he didn’t report the first robbery because he didn’t think he could describe the men well enough to help law enforcement catch them.

Jackie Morrow, who has lived across the street for a year, said she thought she heard gunshots a few weeks ago and will continue to be cautious. “I’ll be very vigilant from now on,” she said.

So the real story here is that Dummett, a downward spiralling pot-head, was the target of two guys he either owed money to or who thought he had drugs and money in the house, meaning he’s a dealer. They also came back hours after their original attempt on Dummett, giving him ample time to get his family to a motel for safety, which he couldn’t be bothered doing. Either way another” victimless” drug crime.

Victimless except for the dog who died, who was the only being in the house that tried to do the right thing. And of course the little boy who is just now learning that he can’t count on his parents when the chips are down and he really needs them.

But other than that no one was hurt by their drug user lifestyle. Right?

Victimless Crime File: “Pot Pirates” Terrorized Innocent By-Standers

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Stories like this are why I rarely go hiking without some sort of protection. From The Lindsay Post:

A dozen armed men who were stealing marijuana from a grow operation north of Minden are responsible for taking six innocent passersby hostage last October, according to police.

At a press conference on Tuesday, Det. Insp. Ken Leppert from the OPP criminal investigations branch described the events that led to the arrest of 45 people and 173 charges being laid in connection to the Minden-area incident.

“The six civilians were taken hostage and forcibly confined and accosted at gunpoint and … in one instance they were shot at and pistol whipped, dragged along the ground and injured significantly as a result of the attack on them. After the culprits left the area the victims made their way out of the area along the hydro line north of Minden,” Leppert said.

“October 5, 2007 the profits were enormous and these six innocent civilians experienced first hand unimaginable fear and terror,” said OPP Chief Supt. Ken Smith.

The dozen men, masked and dressed in camouflage, escaped by car from Minden, although Smith confirmed that an aircraft was used at some point. He would not give further information on the plane.

According to police, the dozen men were on an ATV trail north of town stealing 1,800 pounds of marijuana from someone else’s grow operation. They were happened upon by a variety of people – some in the forest for work, some for pleasure, some hunting – and took them hostage. They later released their hostages after stealing their identification and cell phones and fled.

Police have not yet found the owners of the grow op.

Since that time, the OPP has been making arrests in the case and in another case on June 13, 2007 when a man was shot and his car stolen along Highway 401 near Belleville.

“What was observed in the hostage taking in October of 2007 was indicative of one part of their criminal enterprise,” Smith said.

“These criminals were amongst the most dangerous type of criminal because they would stop at nothing to steal from others. The greater the profit the more they were willing to do to get it.”

The investigation was dubbed ‘Project Pirate’ by police. Leppert said that a total of 2,200 pounds of marijuana valued at $8 million was seized along with various handguns, nearly $50,000 in cash, seven high-end vehicles, 159 grams of cocaine and more than 2,000 ecstasy pills. Police also confiscated handcuffs, an expandable baton, body armour, camouflage clothing, and electronic devices, including GPSs.

Drug labs in the woods, and now the people that prey upon them, are increasingly a concern for we rugged outdoors types who tend to do a little wandering in the far away places. Stumbling upon someone’s grow operation, or worse their meth lab, will almost always lead to violence. Hikers and others who prance about unarmed should be aware that crimes like this can happen to anyone. If your state allows you to carry a firearm where you like hiking I’d do so; if not try to at least have bear repellent and a good knife.

And never go to the woods without a cell phone, a first aid kit and most importantly without telling somebody where you are.