It’s Wednesday, April 16, 2014, just after dawn in idyllic Southern Oregon. The sun struggles to ascend into a haze and over eastern valley walls, stray rays poking through the budding foliage and bouncing off the mountainside like sequins. These foothills are typically quiet, save for shrieks from wild animals and the rooster that cued morning an hour ago. Today however, a second wakeup call arrives in the form of an all-terrain tank marked “SHERIFF” in bold letters, which is grinding up Slate Creek Road toward a Christmas green treeline. The agile counter-attack vehicle, decked with a swiveling machine gun turret, is joined by an ominously tinted Tahoe from a K-9 squad. An artillery truck, a passenger van, and a pair of screaming patrol cars are close behind.
A member of the entourage, made up of SWAT and sheriff’s deputies from Josephine and Jackson counties, cuts through the padlocked gate that separates the paved stretch of Slate Creek Road from a private dirt path leading into the federal forest. Ahead of the motorcade, two camouflaged snipers wielding rifles with sound-muffling silencers lay in the thick brush, their sights trained on the doors and windows of a lean-to with a patchwork roof. The tank-on-wheels comes to an abrupt stop, and out pops a SWAT stud with a hulking pistol strapped to his thigh. As he hovers by the passenger side door, two more chiseled military types suit up by the rear hatch.
Alarmed by the intrusion, Jette Havens steps outside of her converted wood barn cottage and limps past her family’s garden. She’s with her son Vic, a product of the surrounding Rogue River valley who works seasonal field jobs, who is wielding a video camera behind her. A retired postal carrier and widow, Jette tells the officers they aren’t welcome on her private egress and repeatedly requests that they leave. Vic backs her up, “You are committing a crime trespassing on this property.” He asks which one of the uniforms compromised the gate, and a responding officer claims ignorance about the broken lock.
“Sir, we have a search warrant.” SWAT team members assure Vic and Jette that documents en route will show that authorities are permitted to enter the home of their Slate Creek neighbors, Tom Roach and his longtime partner Melinda Starba, and to cross the disputed driveway where they’re parked.
“We’re here to execute a lawful warrant … We’re here to make sure it’s a safe execution.”
In normal times, the evergreen banks that sweep through these Pacific Northwest highlands are infinitely peaceful, with jet black ravens piercing pillowy clouds that seem close enough to kiss. At the same time, the region has its share of crystal meth abuse and what some might call an epidemic of peculiar violence. Crime in general is often of the utterly demented television drama variety, from rampant instances of weapons in schools to a man who slaughtered his sleeping neighbor using a golf club.
Likely related to the troubling perp behavior, this remote heel of Oregon has seen its economy irreparably damaged by harvesting restrictions put on federal forests in the past several decades. Once the biggest producer of lumber on Earth, the region lost its only remaining commercial mill last year. Depending on who you ask, the blame for all resulting economic woes lies either with the environmental regulators and nature advocates who’ve pushed for logging moratoriums, or with the timber industry that spent more than a century clearcutting and cashing in on “old growth” forest reserves. Either way, there’s been a crippling erosion of the logging subsidies that once paid for public services, and with challenging results. According to the sheriff, from 2012 to 2013 the rates of auto theft, burglary, and domestic assault in Josephine all jumped more than 1,000 percent.
Since losing most of its sheriff’s budget three years ago, Josephine’s become a “zombie county,” as areas left lawless by local governments are sometimes called. Even Bill O’Reilly acknowledged the problem after a woman there was attacked in her home. She had phoned 9–1–1 for help, but was told by an emergency operator, “It’s unfortunate you guys don’t have any law enforcement up there.” Since forced cutbacks, the juvenile pen in the county seat of Grants Pass has been shuttered, while dozens of unhinged adult offenders have been prematurely paroled. Those desperate for protection have embraced mountainside militias, or in other cases have joined organized watch outfits formed to thwart crime vigilante-style.
The law enforcement that remains maintains a terse relationship with residents. Though some public factions have attempted to restore basic services by levying tax increases through ballot initiatives, voters weary of government waste have thrice rejected such referendums. As a result, Josephine has one of the lowest property tax rates in Oregon, which is appropriate for the terrain. It’s an area split raggedly across its belly by the fittingly named Rogue River, and natives have been proudly independent since the frontier days.
Even before the diminished police presence, families like the Roaches were often on their own when it came to protecting the mountainside boondocks cradling their rustic homes, which are vulnerable to mayhem brought by everyone from drug-cooking degenerates to irresponsible campers. As recently as 2012, a mysterious Labor Day brush fire incinerated 120 acres of federal land less than a mile from Slate Creek.
Despite fiscal restraints and swelling criminal activity, authorities in Josephine and surrounding counties have used their limited resources to aggressively facilitate foreclosures. The eviction on Slate Creek is authorized by the department of a Constitution-thumping Josephine County sheriff named Gil Gilbertson, who sees himself as a contemporary John Wayne, and has a portrait of the gunslinging icon of the Wild West hanging on the wall over his desk. A local hero of godly significance, Wayne sometimes vacationed on a famous ranch in the area, and played a sheriff in a town on the Rogue in the True Grit sequel Rooster Cogburn.
With the Havens still filming, a mustachioed colleague of Gilbertson’s arrives to read the terms of the search warrant. Standing in a bulletproof vest in front of the steel battering ram grill of his pickup, he ignores Vic and Jette’s pleas and repeats, “We are hereby authorized to search …” The residents reiterate their position that police have no authority to cross their property, but the men in Kevlar and camo flex the upper hand, and take the upper road to retrieve the Roaches.
A hundred or so yards up Slate Creek, more deputies creep over a 20-foot bridge that Tom Roach personally worked with contractors to build so that earth movers for mining and logging could access the timberlands above. That was when he had a friendlier relationship with government officials; today, Tom and Melinda are reeling in fear, facing eviction from the meager bungalow they’ve called home since 1990.
Asked why neighbors weren’t notified ahead of time, the sheriff’s deputy explains, “If we call somebody before we serve a search warrant, and those people are mean … don’t you think that’s going to give them a heads up to hurt us?” Nevertheless, no standoff ensues. The Roaches are handcuffed without incident and hauled off to jail, where Tom worries about the fate of his two dogs, and wonders why his plight took such a militant turn.
For months before the SWAT team physically removed them, Tom and Melinda petitioned county courts, arguing that a lengthy trail of mortgage fraud carried out against them warranted official intervention. They even met with Gilbertson in his office, where Sheriff Rooster Cogburn peered out from the print on the wall, his right hand hugging the barrel of his shotgun. But after being forced out of their residence, the Roaches were left homeless and in ongoing criminal and civil limbo.
Two months later in June, in the same SWAT team’s abutting home county of Jackson, a 74-year-old man also facing eviction would have an even more daunting experience. Like the Roaches, Earl Harris had been contesting the foreclosure of his Ashland land in court, but losing out to the bank that acquired the property. Unlike the Roaches however, Harris had a violent criminal record, having once brandished a pistol when police came to repossess an RV he owed money on. Expecting confrontation, Jackson SWAT showed up in combat gear. When Harris reportedly retrieved a shotgun, they forced their way into his home and shot him to death.
An autopsy revealed that Harris was hit three times, twice in the chest and once in the hand. After hearing testimony from seven law enforcement officers who were at the scene, experts from the state police, and a representative from the bank foreclosing on the property — a number of whom noted the small arsenal that Harris had amassed in his residence — a grand jury decided that officers were justified in their use of force. Citing an investigation by the county’s Major Assault and Death Investigation Unit (MADIU), a press release by the Jackson district attorney noted only one character reference for Harris, though the “civilian” did offer some insight into the dead man’s motives.
“He believed from his conversations with Mr. Harris that he was anti-bank rather than anti-government. He testified that Mr. Harris flew the United States flag upside down as a sign of distress.”
NEXT: A journey from Portland to Grants Pass surveying the unique culture and landscape of secluded Southern Oregon.
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