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DA DISMISSES FATAL ASSAULT CHARGE AFTER JURY DELIVERS NO CONVICTION
Healdsburg, California Healdsburg, California
November 14, 2024 Date, Date, 20202020
11-1 JURY VOTE FOR ACQUITTAL CAUSES DA TO DROP CHARGES IN ABEL GARZA’S DEATH By Christian Kallen
➝ Hung Jury, 4
Photo by Rick Tang
A violent morning drama unfolded on the streets of Healdsburg the day before Independence Day 2023. It resulted in the death of Abel Garza, a 41-year-old resident of Santa Rosa. Last week, more than a year after the incident, the criminal case against his accused killer, Romario Cisneros, was dismissed by the Sonoma County District Attorney. The dismissal followed a week-long trial that resulted in a hung jury, with 11 of the jurors voting for a not-guilty verdict. Only one held out for a conviction. T h e m o r n i n g , Ju l y 3, began as two Hotel Healdsburg workers challenged Garza, who was near the swimming pool, for not being a guest. In response, Garza reportedly threw toilet paper in the pool, struck a bellhop and took a hotel worker’s tools, reportedly a nail gun or something similar, and temporarily left the scene. Witnesses said that Garza, shirtless, was carrying a skateboard. As it later turned out, he was also under the influence of alcohol, fentanyl and methamphetamine, according to the results of a post-mortem. Less than an hour later, at 10:20am, Garza returned to the area to resume his physical confrontation with hotel grounds staff, now including maintenance manager Daniel Guzman outside the hotel. He was carrying a hammer and what was described as “an unknown metal object” that some reports characterized as a gardening stake.
WITNESSES An array of 108 small student desks, representing lives lost in school shootings since 2018, with the current art class that completed this installation
at Healdsburg High. From left: Yaretzy Lopez, Wendy Garcia, Tristan Jensen, Amelia Low, Andrea Zamudio, Justus Scarioni and Venessa Vazquez.
108 ‘Tiny Desks’ Represent Lives Lost LINUS LANCASTER’S TWO-YEAR ART PROJECT APPEARS AT HHS, ONLY TO DISAPPEAR THE NEXT DAY By Christian Kallen
Three years ago, when it seemed that school shootings “were happening every other day,” Linus Lancaster brought a notion to his art class. What can we do to recognize, to feel the loss of fellow students in school shootings? Inspired in large part by the Raven Players’ production of If I Don’t Make It, I Love You, based on a book composed of messages from children, students and their family members in the grip of mass shootings, the class decided to go from there. That book and play covered narratives of shootings from 1966 at the University of Texas’ Austin Tower, through May 2018’s Santa
A Cemetery of Desks
Fe High School shooting. Heartbreaking communications from those at emotional extremes struck a chord with the audience, Lancaster and his students included. Lancaster and six students in his 2023 art class, which graduated over a year ago, decided to build small replica school desks to represent each student killed since the If I Don’t Make It timeline, after Santa Fe. Now, 20 months later, the project is done. “I wasn’t sure when we would ever finish, but it looks like we now have 108 desks, one for every student killed in a school shooting since 2018,” Lancaster said on the last day of October. “Having planted them around town during the past two years, we are now planning to put all of them together in front of the school just for a day,” he added. That reveal took place last week, Thursday afternoon at Healdsburg High School.
The desks are small, even tiny, measuring six by six by five inches, made of 1/8th-inch varnished plywood. There’s a seat with a back and a wrap-around writing desk, old school. Small finishing nails secure the structures. In the seat of each one sits a single marigold. They are arrayed on the narrow strip of grass in regular rows and lines, 108 of them, the marigolds glowing in the afternoon sun. The desks face the high school where students move from class to class. Taken together, the nine dozen fragile desks take on an accumulated force. After an intervening year, another six members of his second art class took an interest, and gathered a task force to finish the project. Now they stand arrayed around the grassy graveyard—it suddenly becomes clear the desks
MEASURE O DEFEAT SHOWS SPLIT IN CITY CITY COUNCIL’S EFFORTS THWARTED BY NEIGHBORHOOD OPPOSITION By Christian Kallen
Photo by Christian Kallen
PUBLIC STATEMENT Signs in a front yard, as at this
house in Healdsburg, communicate the residents’ preferences to all who drive or walk by.
When the sound and the fury, the smoke and the flames dispersed, Measure O went down to a definitive defeat, roughly at a 60-40 split. Clearly this was not what the Healdsburg City Council intended when in June they rationalized themselves into putting it on the General Election ballot.
have another dimension of meaning—exchanging ideas on what the project meant to them. Andrea Zamudio, a soft-spoken girl, is nonetheless the first to speak. “I think the whole project is very meaningful and worth the time on making this,” she says. “I just hope that this makes a difference.” She forces herself to continue. “I think it’s important to think about this and plan ahead for this. Students and teachers, I know they practice how to hide and stuff.” She laughs nervously. “My mom has always kind of been an advocate for gun violence, and so I guess she kind of passed that on to me,” says a more confident Amelia Low, surely meaning gun violence awareness. “Just bringing awareness to the fact that it’s way too common in America is kind of important to me.” She doesn’t smile when she says, “You can see, with this art project, the amount
of people who have died. I mean, 108 people is about the amount of people in my class of 2026.” The art class of 2026 working on this project consists of one boy, Justus Scarioni, and five girls—Andrea, Amelia, plus Wendy Garcia, Yaretzy Lopez and Venessa Vazquez. Standing out from the rest, not only because he’s a head taller than any of the other students, is a seventh, Tristan Jensen, class of 2027. “When I was doing this project, I really dug deep within myself and found a passion for resisting guns and gun violence,” Jensen says. “All these kids have fallen from the tragedy of guns … And I just find it like, like, almost like my call to arms, to help out where I can for defending kids in schools.” There is a slight intake of breath at the unintentional simile. Then his
The measure question was straightforward: “To encourage creation of middle class and workforce housing on underutilized parcels, should the City of Healdsburg exempt multifamily housing along certain portions of the Healdsburg Avenue corridor from the Growth Management Ordinance?” To arrive at the borders of the geographic exemption proposed, the city authorized some studies of resident preferences on expanding multi-unit housing, including surveys, then put the results on a map and put it to a vote. The zone snakes down from the Healdsburg Community Center along Healdsburg Avenue to North Street. This was a bigger bite than the city’s own consultants in this measure, FM3, had recommended, and in the end that may have proven a crucial factor.
A total of 488 likely Healdsburg voters were polled, and while they favored using a “geographic exemption” to encourage creation of workforce housing, the definition in the exempted area in the survey was “within Two Blocks of Downtown – the area bounded by Grant Street to the north, Mill Street to the south, East Street to the east, and Vine Street to the west.” By the time Measure O reached the ballot, Grant Street had become North Street, jumping over Piper to include a big chunk of what many residents consider downtown. Their downtown: a drug store, a donut shop, a health-food grocery, Healdsburg Pilates and Casa del Mole, among others. To look at it a bit more legalistically, “According to the Citywide Design Guidelines, the downtown core’s ‘identifiable’ northern and eastern boundaries
➝ Art Project, 3
➝ Measure O, 4