Murder Mountain (2018) s01e03 Episode Script
Frontier Justice
A lot of angst in these woods.
I don't know.
It's like something with the energy.
So, where do you think that angst comes from? Honestly, probably, you know, a lot of spirits, like, just people killed and there's all kinds of crazy stories.
This one guy, he was doing a 20-pound deal, and instead of bringing money to the deal, these guys brought a hammer and pounded the guy's skull in pretty much.
It happens a lot.
When it comes time to reap what you sow, things always seem to get a little shady.
Welcome to Murder Mountain.
III.
Frontier Justice What has happened, what I've seen, is that the ethos of the previous generation, which was tied to environmentalism and hippie ideals, has gone out the window.
There's no doubt that recently there's been an influx of violent crime in Humboldt County with the biggest spike in armed robberies.
We're seeing a rise in violence already.
There are the ultimate violence of murders going on that's always kind of been, but it's definitely got a rise going.
I mean, there was always violence.
You just didn't always hear about it.
More money.
When you get, like, real money at stake, there is definitely that element.
There's a dark underbelly, and I think that part of it is who you hang out with, whether you invite that into your environment.
They met the wrong people.
Honestly, would you ever go into the woods with a stranger? Maybe you shouldn't do that.
Maybe you should have friends of a friend or have a reference.
That's common sense.
We're seeing more people robbing each other, neighbors robbing each other, workers robbing their employers, um, because people aren't making as much money, and they want a grandiose piece of the pie.
As reported in last week's news, Garret Rodriguez has been reported missing by his father.
Garret's friends and family refuse to give up searching for him.
I just want to find out where my son is, because I haven't heard from him, and he normally stays in contact with me.
We felt a little bit of relief that at least we were on the trail to find Garret.
We spent the first few months getting nowhere.
When you have an industry that their product is illegal, they don't want to bring attention to themselves, and talking to an investigator is part of that.
Well, Alderpoint has always been known to be a outlaw town.
No better way to put it.
And people living up here, they pretty much stick together on things.
Mind your own business, they say.
You gotta have a certain mentality up here to kind of survive and it is, I'd say, you know, kind of corresponds to that of a soldier.
Living up here you'd better be tough.
Let me tell you, they're like, if you don't got friends or if you don't know people, then it'll get really tough.
Me? I keep to myself.
It's the best way to be, you know.
The first time I seen a paper saying that he was missing and had a picture of him, I seen him at the bottom of Rancho Road, and I knew that it was the boy I had seen.
His truck was in the pictures also.
His truck was still around.
I was driving down the road, and I seen that very same truck.
I said, "Who's driving that truck?" Someone who shouldn't have had the truck.
Well, I went and told Cherie.
She was my best friend.
Right off the bat, we were in it together.
We talked about it, trying to find things out.
Cherie and I, we were gonna find out where this boy was.
Are you guys good? You good? You can keep these yellow leaves out of the trim.
Sounds good.
I'm building a company Dookie Brothers.
People want this brand, and it's gonna happen.
I wake up and I need two cups of chamomile and about eight bong hits to just get normal.
Little bit older, man.
People try to tell me, and I doubt myself every once in a while, but I'm like it's this car that I'm driving.
I'm not steering it, it feels like.
It feels like I'm just in the car and it's going.
So I'm gonna keep going on this ride.
Oh.
Okay.
How's it going? Come on in.
Okay.
The amount of mold in here this should be destroyed.
Here.
That's not cool, man.
We work all the year and you don't want to pay us.
You guys fucking molded my shit.
And you molded two of my greenhouses.
- That was your fault.
- My fault? 'Cause you didn't do the job like I asked you to do.
Tell the truth.
You don't want to pay us.
I don't want, you're right.
You guys are losers, dude.
You guys are losers that don't even have a real job.
Look, why you smiling, you motherfucker? You're a fucking asshole.
I'm getting heart palpitations talking to you guys about it.
Your problem is to make me pay you, so how are you gonna do that? - So you are gonna rip us off.
- I'm gonna rip you off? I'm gonna give you what you deserve.
Look, they're heading to the truck.
I need a bong hit.
I'm trying to be professional in this business, but I guess that's what you get when you don't hire professional people either, and I'm not very professional.
I'm striving to be professional, too, so So J.
, there's broken glass in here.
I guess there's a rock through the window here.
This is tough.
It's tough and that is another reason I'm glad for regulation, and that's why I'm doing everything with contracts through my lawyers.
This was the last of the black market kind of coughed its way out.
So I'm done with it.
I actually have a property on Murder Mountain.
I have ten acres up there.
I'm very familiar with that property and the rumors are true.
Murder Mountain, it's fucked up.
Cherie, she was feisty.
She was the first person that ever spoke to me in Rancho.
She came over to my house to welcome me, which nobody did back then.
Cherie didn't care if people got mad at her about snooping around where she didn't belong.
She didn't give a shit what people thought.
She's a mother, me and her.
That's all we could think about was that boy going home to his family.
He needed to go home to his family.
He didn't need to be up here.
We got a call that someone had seen Garret's truck in Southern Humboldt.
That was the first big break, because now I have a truck.
It was still registered to him.
That was interesting part.
Somebody had a vehicle registered to Garret Rodriguez.
According to DMV's records, it was still in his name.
So I thought, okay, law enforcement has to be interested in this.
They weren't.
We tried to get law enforcement involved in it.
Our goal was to get law enforcement to take the truck and process it as evidence.
But they considered it not a law enforcement issue.
I believe also the issue was that it was in private hands.
It was on private property at the time.
So we actually went out to Rancho and took pictures of the truck to verify that, yes, this is the location of the truck, and we got clearance to turn the truck back over to the family.
It was totally trashed.
It was practically a brand-new truck.
I remember Cherie told me that she talked to the family's investigator over the phone.
She said that the investigator had called the detectives or whatever and they showed such a little amount of interest.
Cherie was pissed off.
She was gonna do something about it.
You got some work to do here.
I had some squatters come in during the winter, and they trashed this place.
Yeah, we have another couple days of cleaning up to do.
I was growing in Ventura County in 2000, and the cops came, and they kicked my door down.
Did six months in jail, and I had four to five years probation.
Stayed straight and narrow for four years, got my record expunged.
The day I got expunged, I went back to smoking again.
It's starting to look like I'm the only legal grow up here.
It's creepy.
I don't see any cars.
I hear neighbors shooting guns.
That's about it.
That's an everyday occurrence.
It's probably a .
22.
If I see anybody walking on my soil-- when we get this in here, I have boards and stuff, nobody can walk on my beds.
If you walk on my beds, then you have to get in here with a tiller or a hoe and fluff it up again.
When you pull that up, you'll find some creatures underneath it.
-Yeah.
-I found two gopher snakes mating underneath the plastic.
Well, that's interesting.
Do they lock, too, like other animals? Yeah.
Huh.
There's no money now that I'm legal.
All that money that I thought I could put in the bank just doesn't exist.
I legally packaged my pot into little nitrogen-sealed eighths through a distribution company.
Currently, 90% of my inventory is still sitting in there.
Yeah, it's a hard pill to swallow, but the future is not the black market.
The future is the white market.
That was a higher caliber.
That's higher caliber.
That's probably a nine.
It's not closer, it's just higher caliber.
I have a lot to protect, and I don't want to lose all I've gained in quitting my freedom, so So you've grown here before.
-Yeah, five years.
-Five years.
-Yeah.
-All right.
I never got invited up here before.
Before this regulation happened, this place was pretty wild.
There was tweakers up and down the road all the time.
-Phew.
-It wasn't a good place to be.
You've got characters of all walks of life here, and they're all, like, badass motherfuckers.
Me and Cherie started snooping around.
We called everybody's house on the mountain I know of.
But we couldn't find out anything.
I'm telling 'em, "What if it was your kid? Wouldn't you want your kid to come home?" It made a lot of people pick up the phone that would not have otherwise done so.
And people started calling.
As we started tracking down the story basically over and over again, people were telling the same story.
My buddy comes over and tells me, "Oh, yeah, you know that Garret Rodriguez kid?" I'm like, "Yeah," and he's like, "Well, there's a guy that lives up the road, you know, up on top of the mountain that starts bragging about, you know, killing the guy.
" Cherie, she went to this one person and she said, "How come Garret's truck showed up on Jewett Ranch?" And this guy said, "Oh, you mean the dead boy?" It was just like, what? Supposedly, like, his foot-- you know, like, the guy made a comment saying that the guy's, you know, Garret's foot was still sticking out of the grave or something.
His foot was sticking up out of the ground.
That's insane.
It made me sick, actually.
It got a lot of people pissed off, you know? They were like, you know, everybody was shocked that this guy said that, that he did that, and was bragging about it.
The dead boy.
At that point, we didn't know he was dead for sure.
But when that was said, that pretty much closed it right there.
When I heard that someone potentially killed Garret, I was just-- almost didn't even want to think about the fact that he really wouldn't ever come back.
And I feel like that's something that my brain still kind of doesn't fully accept.
It's the worst feeling I think I've ever had.
It's-- I even had to start taking medication because of it.
I couldn't even get out of bed.
I didn't want to see anyone, talk to anyone, be around, or do anything.
Something I never could have even dreamed of happening.
Who killed my son? There are missing people in Humboldt County every year, and frequently, they will turn up in a day or two but sometimes it ends up in violence.
Unfortunately, it seems like this is where it happened to Garret.
Obviously, you're dealing with horrendous things that you would never want to wish on your enemy.
I heard the man that allegedly shot Garret.
Garret was owed money that the guy that owed it didn't want to pay.
What I heard is that he owed the kid 50 grand and decided to, you know, just kill him instead of paying the kid.
I guess the kid invested his money.
Being a worker, you know, for you to come up here and work hard and give your all to something and then for somebody to just, like, take you out because they owe you money, that's like chicken shit.
It's fucked up.
We heard this guy was using people to guard his property that were using methamphetamine and possibly himself.
His behavior was somewhat consistent with methamphetamine use.
He was extremely erratic.
He was temperamental.
He was paranoid.
This individual seemed to have a history of threatening people with violence.
We had heard from people that had worked for him as trimmers, people that expressed a fear of being around this person ever again.
We dug around, found another young man who knew something about the Rodriguez boy coming up missing.
I wasn't there that day, but Cherie called me and had said, "Get your ass over here!" And I said, "What's up?" And this is when she had been told by this other young man what had happened.
Was there when Garret was killed, according to him.
That night, the witness was with Garret.
According to this witness, Garret went to ask him for his money.
A rather sizable sum of money.
There were several reasons to think that that was a legitimate issue.
After an argument, the guy told him, "I'll go get it.
" He went in the house, and he came back out with a gun.
Aimed at Garret.
Shot him.
The alleged murderer, he looked at this guy and told him, "You work here.
Get this shit cleaned up.
" Of course, it was a bloody boy that he was getting cleaned up.
And they loaded him up in the murderer's vehicle and was taken out to Jewett Ranch.
This witness, he didn't want to be a part of it.
He was scared.
And he told this to Cherie? Yeah, he said he was scared, and he had to help move the body 'cause he was scared.
He figured he would just get shot, too.
At that point, we had had enough corroborating evidence to know the name of the person who allegedly shot Garret.
So I took everything to law enforcement, and my confidential informant, I told her, "You need to call the sheriff's department.
" And she did.
But the sheriff's department, Sheriff Downey, didn't seem to be making an effort at all on this case.
In the Garret Rodriguez case, if there is not enough probable cause to link this subject to, let's say, a murderer or to a crime, the deputies don't have the authority to make an arrest or even a detention for a long period of time.
And you know, we talk about hearsay and people talking to other people, but you can't base your probable cause on hearsay.
Murder Mountain, as long as I've been with the sheriff's office, was always the outlaw place.
When we would go out and patrol, we would encounter verbal threats.
They don't want law enforcement in the area.
So it's really difficult to effectively do your job.
I have vowed not to end this case until there's some justice for Garret and his family.
We need to have some answers.
The sheriff's department was focusing on finding Garret's body.
But to my knowledge, they've never talked to the witness.
He was the person-- I felt that this guy was the most critical person to interview.
Someone needs to talk to him.
If you wanted to find him, do you think you could? I can find anyone.
This is the big drumroll.
We're gonna find out what they give me.
So we'll see.
I'm excited to get in.
Let's go.
Having to come here and actually report to people and-- It's a job now.
I've never had to do paperwork before.
I don't want to do this.
This sucks.
I hate paperwork.
I'd rather be in my garden watering my plants, leafing, just being there with them.
This fucking sucks.
All right, here we go.
Wish me luck.
I try not to smell like pot when I go in there, so I don't take a bong hit right before I go in there is the only thing I don't do.
I have a lot of really good genetics that I want to develop and I want to hoard to myself and maybe sell to the highest bidder kind of stuff.
So this means a lot to me.
This is a big deal today.
Hi.
I'm Jason, Dookie Brothers.
Thanks, guys.
Whoo! Hey, Floyd.
We got a lot of work to do, buddy! What'd they give us? They gave us not a lot, but gave us some square footage that we gotta fucking plant.
-A nursery? -And a nursery.
Boom.
Bong hits.
They gave us the interim permit.
Now the rest is up to us to actually make it happen.
Woo-hoo.
This is huge.
This is all in-house.
I can make seeds.
I can sell my genetics to other people.
I get 100% of the profit.
I don't have to go into partners with the nursery.
I don't need anybody.
I can get my own employees.
I can get my own team.
I can get my own shit.
This is it! I hate that bong.
My foot's in the door and it's not getting out of the door.
They're gonna have to cut it off.
We're about to take over the world.
Let's get the whole mountain.
We found tidbits of information about the person in question that killed Garret.
This guy was a real scumbag.
We learned that he was from Indiana.
People in Indiana wanted to tell me about his past.
Stories about the crimes he's committing there.
He's pulled this time and time again, and he keeps doing it.
He's getting away with it.
I called the police department, told them where Garret's body was buried.
What we heard was that Garret was buried on the Jewett Ranch.
The police department, they said that they cannot go on that property.
It's private property.
It's guarded.
That was one of the excuses they gave me for not pursuing anything.
The sheriff's response-- "Well, it's a big area," you know, "Where do we look? This is just hearsay.
" I mean, they didn't seem to be interested.
Um, and I kept trying to reason with them and deal with them, and it just got to the point to where they just started ignoring my phone calls and they wouldn't call me back.
So let's say you have information, you're non-law enforcement, but I have information, I've heard the talk around town, some people have told me this happened, and everyone knows, everyone knows.
I'll tell you right now, you'll never stand in a court of law with that type of information.
Initially, the person of interest left the area and then he came back.
People were calling me and telling me of sightings.
Someone would call me and say, he's back on his property.
Someone would say, we saw him driving around.
I was getting calls from Indiana, "When are you guys gonna pick him up? When's the warrant coming out? What the heck's going on?" They felt that he was almost boastful about, "Hey, I could come back here anytime I want.
I'm invincible.
" Cops weren't doing anything.
We've gotta do something.
And the longer, you know, the time draws out here, the less they're gonna do.
I felt that, "Okay, I'm gonna hear any minute that they have a good statement, there was arrests being made.
" It was the waiting game.
I was really hopeful something was going to happen, but nothing did.
And I think the family was more than patient.
So I don't know what else could be done.
I know that the community, some of the people who live there, finally had enough.
The police knew who killed Garret, but they did nothing.
They did nothing about it.
The cops, they just think, you know, let 'em all kill themselves.
That's the feeling that I get.
People kill each other up here, it's just, you know, it's a couple gangsters dead.
I mean, you know, they don't-- not only do they not care, they actually look at it as a good thing.
I think they think we're stupid, quite frankly.
Who was Garret? He was nobody to them.
It's bullshit! The code of the mountain take the law into your own hands.
Murder Mountain, I'd say the majority of the population are isolationists.
After Vietnam, I moved up here.
I didn't want any part of the city anymore, or society.
I live on on 20 acres that, up until ten years ago, my nearest neighbor was a mile away.
When was the last time you were in a restaurant? To sit down and eat? Nineteen seventy-nine.
That's what war does.
It changes people.
Garret I didn't know him very well.
He worked for my neighbor.
Those are rifle holes, except for on the rear quarter panel there.
That's shotgun.
It's a different world out here.
It's in the wind up here.
Murder.
It's contagious.
The guy who stole from me, it was an apprenticeship to see if he was gonna work out.
And obviously, it didn't work out.
The guy stole 150 plants, and now, I'm losing 1/4th of a greenhouse.
I would say it's at least 25 if not 30, 40 pounds.
Once I found out he was stealing from me, I started slapping him and punching him.
He's moving and bobbing his head.
I end up punching him in the back of the head a few times and breaking my hands.
Then he pressed charges.
It was a mistake.
I shouldn't have laid my hands on him.
I got frustrated.
Whatever the consequences are, I'll face up to them.
You know, whatever.
And as I was hitting him, he was like, "You're the fourth boss to hit me.
" So this is the next generation.
It being almost July 1st, I'm way behind.
These things should already be up to my waist.
Started way late because of the regulations.
I wanted to make sure I wasn't breaking the law and jeopardizing the future of me growing up here on this mountain.
Started late, but better late than never.
And there it is.
I have to try to take care of these puppies.
They're my babies.
Let's do one right here.
I'm very competitive.
I won the Golden Tarps 2016.
Then I won the Emerald Cup after that.
Other growers were buying my product.
They were coming over, and they saw the Zkittlez I grew and they were buying ounces and 1/4 pounds.
That's how I knew it was special.
I already knew it was special, but that's how I really knew it was-- when other growers are buying your shit.
Leave the bong.
I absolutely know I'm gonna win awards this year.
I wanna win Tommy Chong's Blazer Cup.
He's always been an idol of mine.
I grew up watching his movies.
I'd like to win it, and I'd like him to approach me and be like, "Hey, man, can I get a bag of that?" And I'd be like, "This one had your name on it, bro.
" He's coming back around.
If that's Officer Leed, he's wasting people's money.
I'm doing this.
If you want to come up here and get me, then here I am.
Come bust me with a helicopter, I'd sue 'em.
The whole plan of doing something about Garret Rodriguez's death started with, you know, Neil.
Neil was a very funny guy.
Like, he had jokes-- Well, he had, like six jokes.
And he told them all the time.
But he was easy to like.
He was a strong arm kind of character, but he was a gentle guy.
He really was.
Teddy bear kind of stats, but he didn't get stoned ever.
When he did, he would just laugh and he was funny as hell.
Neil had a soft spot about Garret.
Neil had just recently lost his son.
He was told that his son decided to play Russian roulette, and he always knew in his heart that that wasn't true, that there was something else that had happened.
He knew he probably wasn't ever gonna get the truth about it either.
That's what he was told and that's all he was gonna get, and he just hated it.
He put himself in Garret's parents' shoes, you know, and he didn't like the way that felt at all.
One night he told me, he said, their parents need to know where their son's at.
They need to know so they can put him to rest.
They've gotta be able to find their kid.
Scott was Neil's best friend.
They did everything together.
Scott was a good person.
A lot of kids called Scott "Dad.
" He was the dad of the mountain.
He was one of the leaders of this community.
In a place with no authority, he took it upon himself to get all the parties involved and to get to the bottom of things.
Scott used to say, "Do what's right, not what's easy.
" They pretty much kept the peace for everybody, you know.
If somebody had a problem, they'd go to Scott and he would handle it.
They really helped this community, and even if they were outlaws, they were good, honest people.
I mean, they made other people around them good, honest people.
It was Thanksgiving.
We were still cooking dinner.
Turkey and potatoes.
We had pies in the oven.
I'm sitting there in the room watching TV and Scott comes in the room, sits right next to me, and he didn't say a word, you know.
He just sits down next to me, and then shortly after, Neil comes in and sits on the other side of me, you know.
So they're both talking with me in between 'em.
Neil goes, "I'm going to do something about Garret Rodriguez.
" And Scott was like, "Okay.
Well, let's go.
" Neil thought that he was probably gonna be going to prison.
He was okay with that, as long as the parents knew where their kid was.
There was, like, a whole group of people.
We egged them and dug at them, got a couple of them drinking.
And a bottle of vodka and it's easy to egg guys on, you know? You get a bunch of mountain boys.
The alleged murderer, he knew where the body was and he wasn't gonna tell nobody.
Well, he was gonna tell these boys.
Guaranteed.
Thanksgiving.
Just about the time when everybody would be sitting down to their dinners a plethora of vehicles went past my place.
We're always aware when somebody comes up the hill.
We're hyper-alert.
Everybody drives up.
- Did you have a mask on? - Yes.
I think the only people that didn't actually wear masks were Scott and Neil.
It was curious because it was late, there had been some rip-offs.
So I followed them up.
It's dark, I don't want to be shot, so I'm quiet.
There's a couple people that are coming outside of the house.
And one of them's this big guy, you know.
Neil was just, like, yelling, "What did you do with Garret?" And this guy's not wanting to tell us.
They were looking like they were gonna square up with each other, and then Neil's like, "Fuck this!" Bob comes up, you know, pistol-whips him.
The gun ends up going off.
Shot his ear, just like a flesh wound.
Neil, he let out this big, like "whoo.
" Walking up, I could hear yelling.
There had been a couple of shots.
That's nothing new.
I got closer.
I'm in back of the whole group.
The alleged was shot three times.
Calf, breast, crease.
Being a father, I felt strongly for Garret's father.
I'd like to see justice, and that means somebody has to pay for the murder.
They asked him point blank, they said, "Where's the body buried? Everybody knows now.
You can't deny it anymore.
It's out.
Where's the body?"
I don't know.
It's like something with the energy.
So, where do you think that angst comes from? Honestly, probably, you know, a lot of spirits, like, just people killed and there's all kinds of crazy stories.
This one guy, he was doing a 20-pound deal, and instead of bringing money to the deal, these guys brought a hammer and pounded the guy's skull in pretty much.
It happens a lot.
When it comes time to reap what you sow, things always seem to get a little shady.
Welcome to Murder Mountain.
III.
Frontier Justice What has happened, what I've seen, is that the ethos of the previous generation, which was tied to environmentalism and hippie ideals, has gone out the window.
There's no doubt that recently there's been an influx of violent crime in Humboldt County with the biggest spike in armed robberies.
We're seeing a rise in violence already.
There are the ultimate violence of murders going on that's always kind of been, but it's definitely got a rise going.
I mean, there was always violence.
You just didn't always hear about it.
More money.
When you get, like, real money at stake, there is definitely that element.
There's a dark underbelly, and I think that part of it is who you hang out with, whether you invite that into your environment.
They met the wrong people.
Honestly, would you ever go into the woods with a stranger? Maybe you shouldn't do that.
Maybe you should have friends of a friend or have a reference.
That's common sense.
We're seeing more people robbing each other, neighbors robbing each other, workers robbing their employers, um, because people aren't making as much money, and they want a grandiose piece of the pie.
As reported in last week's news, Garret Rodriguez has been reported missing by his father.
Garret's friends and family refuse to give up searching for him.
I just want to find out where my son is, because I haven't heard from him, and he normally stays in contact with me.
We felt a little bit of relief that at least we were on the trail to find Garret.
We spent the first few months getting nowhere.
When you have an industry that their product is illegal, they don't want to bring attention to themselves, and talking to an investigator is part of that.
Well, Alderpoint has always been known to be a outlaw town.
No better way to put it.
And people living up here, they pretty much stick together on things.
Mind your own business, they say.
You gotta have a certain mentality up here to kind of survive and it is, I'd say, you know, kind of corresponds to that of a soldier.
Living up here you'd better be tough.
Let me tell you, they're like, if you don't got friends or if you don't know people, then it'll get really tough.
Me? I keep to myself.
It's the best way to be, you know.
The first time I seen a paper saying that he was missing and had a picture of him, I seen him at the bottom of Rancho Road, and I knew that it was the boy I had seen.
His truck was in the pictures also.
His truck was still around.
I was driving down the road, and I seen that very same truck.
I said, "Who's driving that truck?" Someone who shouldn't have had the truck.
Well, I went and told Cherie.
She was my best friend.
Right off the bat, we were in it together.
We talked about it, trying to find things out.
Cherie and I, we were gonna find out where this boy was.
Are you guys good? You good? You can keep these yellow leaves out of the trim.
Sounds good.
I'm building a company Dookie Brothers.
People want this brand, and it's gonna happen.
I wake up and I need two cups of chamomile and about eight bong hits to just get normal.
Little bit older, man.
People try to tell me, and I doubt myself every once in a while, but I'm like it's this car that I'm driving.
I'm not steering it, it feels like.
It feels like I'm just in the car and it's going.
So I'm gonna keep going on this ride.
Oh.
Okay.
How's it going? Come on in.
Okay.
The amount of mold in here this should be destroyed.
Here.
That's not cool, man.
We work all the year and you don't want to pay us.
You guys fucking molded my shit.
And you molded two of my greenhouses.
- That was your fault.
- My fault? 'Cause you didn't do the job like I asked you to do.
Tell the truth.
You don't want to pay us.
I don't want, you're right.
You guys are losers, dude.
You guys are losers that don't even have a real job.
Look, why you smiling, you motherfucker? You're a fucking asshole.
I'm getting heart palpitations talking to you guys about it.
Your problem is to make me pay you, so how are you gonna do that? - So you are gonna rip us off.
- I'm gonna rip you off? I'm gonna give you what you deserve.
Look, they're heading to the truck.
I need a bong hit.
I'm trying to be professional in this business, but I guess that's what you get when you don't hire professional people either, and I'm not very professional.
I'm striving to be professional, too, so So J.
, there's broken glass in here.
I guess there's a rock through the window here.
This is tough.
It's tough and that is another reason I'm glad for regulation, and that's why I'm doing everything with contracts through my lawyers.
This was the last of the black market kind of coughed its way out.
So I'm done with it.
I actually have a property on Murder Mountain.
I have ten acres up there.
I'm very familiar with that property and the rumors are true.
Murder Mountain, it's fucked up.
Cherie, she was feisty.
She was the first person that ever spoke to me in Rancho.
She came over to my house to welcome me, which nobody did back then.
Cherie didn't care if people got mad at her about snooping around where she didn't belong.
She didn't give a shit what people thought.
She's a mother, me and her.
That's all we could think about was that boy going home to his family.
He needed to go home to his family.
He didn't need to be up here.
We got a call that someone had seen Garret's truck in Southern Humboldt.
That was the first big break, because now I have a truck.
It was still registered to him.
That was interesting part.
Somebody had a vehicle registered to Garret Rodriguez.
According to DMV's records, it was still in his name.
So I thought, okay, law enforcement has to be interested in this.
They weren't.
We tried to get law enforcement involved in it.
Our goal was to get law enforcement to take the truck and process it as evidence.
But they considered it not a law enforcement issue.
I believe also the issue was that it was in private hands.
It was on private property at the time.
So we actually went out to Rancho and took pictures of the truck to verify that, yes, this is the location of the truck, and we got clearance to turn the truck back over to the family.
It was totally trashed.
It was practically a brand-new truck.
I remember Cherie told me that she talked to the family's investigator over the phone.
She said that the investigator had called the detectives or whatever and they showed such a little amount of interest.
Cherie was pissed off.
She was gonna do something about it.
You got some work to do here.
I had some squatters come in during the winter, and they trashed this place.
Yeah, we have another couple days of cleaning up to do.
I was growing in Ventura County in 2000, and the cops came, and they kicked my door down.
Did six months in jail, and I had four to five years probation.
Stayed straight and narrow for four years, got my record expunged.
The day I got expunged, I went back to smoking again.
It's starting to look like I'm the only legal grow up here.
It's creepy.
I don't see any cars.
I hear neighbors shooting guns.
That's about it.
That's an everyday occurrence.
It's probably a .
22.
If I see anybody walking on my soil-- when we get this in here, I have boards and stuff, nobody can walk on my beds.
If you walk on my beds, then you have to get in here with a tiller or a hoe and fluff it up again.
When you pull that up, you'll find some creatures underneath it.
-Yeah.
-I found two gopher snakes mating underneath the plastic.
Well, that's interesting.
Do they lock, too, like other animals? Yeah.
Huh.
There's no money now that I'm legal.
All that money that I thought I could put in the bank just doesn't exist.
I legally packaged my pot into little nitrogen-sealed eighths through a distribution company.
Currently, 90% of my inventory is still sitting in there.
Yeah, it's a hard pill to swallow, but the future is not the black market.
The future is the white market.
That was a higher caliber.
That's higher caliber.
That's probably a nine.
It's not closer, it's just higher caliber.
I have a lot to protect, and I don't want to lose all I've gained in quitting my freedom, so So you've grown here before.
-Yeah, five years.
-Five years.
-Yeah.
-All right.
I never got invited up here before.
Before this regulation happened, this place was pretty wild.
There was tweakers up and down the road all the time.
-Phew.
-It wasn't a good place to be.
You've got characters of all walks of life here, and they're all, like, badass motherfuckers.
Me and Cherie started snooping around.
We called everybody's house on the mountain I know of.
But we couldn't find out anything.
I'm telling 'em, "What if it was your kid? Wouldn't you want your kid to come home?" It made a lot of people pick up the phone that would not have otherwise done so.
And people started calling.
As we started tracking down the story basically over and over again, people were telling the same story.
My buddy comes over and tells me, "Oh, yeah, you know that Garret Rodriguez kid?" I'm like, "Yeah," and he's like, "Well, there's a guy that lives up the road, you know, up on top of the mountain that starts bragging about, you know, killing the guy.
" Cherie, she went to this one person and she said, "How come Garret's truck showed up on Jewett Ranch?" And this guy said, "Oh, you mean the dead boy?" It was just like, what? Supposedly, like, his foot-- you know, like, the guy made a comment saying that the guy's, you know, Garret's foot was still sticking out of the grave or something.
His foot was sticking up out of the ground.
That's insane.
It made me sick, actually.
It got a lot of people pissed off, you know? They were like, you know, everybody was shocked that this guy said that, that he did that, and was bragging about it.
The dead boy.
At that point, we didn't know he was dead for sure.
But when that was said, that pretty much closed it right there.
When I heard that someone potentially killed Garret, I was just-- almost didn't even want to think about the fact that he really wouldn't ever come back.
And I feel like that's something that my brain still kind of doesn't fully accept.
It's the worst feeling I think I've ever had.
It's-- I even had to start taking medication because of it.
I couldn't even get out of bed.
I didn't want to see anyone, talk to anyone, be around, or do anything.
Something I never could have even dreamed of happening.
Who killed my son? There are missing people in Humboldt County every year, and frequently, they will turn up in a day or two but sometimes it ends up in violence.
Unfortunately, it seems like this is where it happened to Garret.
Obviously, you're dealing with horrendous things that you would never want to wish on your enemy.
I heard the man that allegedly shot Garret.
Garret was owed money that the guy that owed it didn't want to pay.
What I heard is that he owed the kid 50 grand and decided to, you know, just kill him instead of paying the kid.
I guess the kid invested his money.
Being a worker, you know, for you to come up here and work hard and give your all to something and then for somebody to just, like, take you out because they owe you money, that's like chicken shit.
It's fucked up.
We heard this guy was using people to guard his property that were using methamphetamine and possibly himself.
His behavior was somewhat consistent with methamphetamine use.
He was extremely erratic.
He was temperamental.
He was paranoid.
This individual seemed to have a history of threatening people with violence.
We had heard from people that had worked for him as trimmers, people that expressed a fear of being around this person ever again.
We dug around, found another young man who knew something about the Rodriguez boy coming up missing.
I wasn't there that day, but Cherie called me and had said, "Get your ass over here!" And I said, "What's up?" And this is when she had been told by this other young man what had happened.
Was there when Garret was killed, according to him.
That night, the witness was with Garret.
According to this witness, Garret went to ask him for his money.
A rather sizable sum of money.
There were several reasons to think that that was a legitimate issue.
After an argument, the guy told him, "I'll go get it.
" He went in the house, and he came back out with a gun.
Aimed at Garret.
Shot him.
The alleged murderer, he looked at this guy and told him, "You work here.
Get this shit cleaned up.
" Of course, it was a bloody boy that he was getting cleaned up.
And they loaded him up in the murderer's vehicle and was taken out to Jewett Ranch.
This witness, he didn't want to be a part of it.
He was scared.
And he told this to Cherie? Yeah, he said he was scared, and he had to help move the body 'cause he was scared.
He figured he would just get shot, too.
At that point, we had had enough corroborating evidence to know the name of the person who allegedly shot Garret.
So I took everything to law enforcement, and my confidential informant, I told her, "You need to call the sheriff's department.
" And she did.
But the sheriff's department, Sheriff Downey, didn't seem to be making an effort at all on this case.
In the Garret Rodriguez case, if there is not enough probable cause to link this subject to, let's say, a murderer or to a crime, the deputies don't have the authority to make an arrest or even a detention for a long period of time.
And you know, we talk about hearsay and people talking to other people, but you can't base your probable cause on hearsay.
Murder Mountain, as long as I've been with the sheriff's office, was always the outlaw place.
When we would go out and patrol, we would encounter verbal threats.
They don't want law enforcement in the area.
So it's really difficult to effectively do your job.
I have vowed not to end this case until there's some justice for Garret and his family.
We need to have some answers.
The sheriff's department was focusing on finding Garret's body.
But to my knowledge, they've never talked to the witness.
He was the person-- I felt that this guy was the most critical person to interview.
Someone needs to talk to him.
If you wanted to find him, do you think you could? I can find anyone.
This is the big drumroll.
We're gonna find out what they give me.
So we'll see.
I'm excited to get in.
Let's go.
Having to come here and actually report to people and-- It's a job now.
I've never had to do paperwork before.
I don't want to do this.
This sucks.
I hate paperwork.
I'd rather be in my garden watering my plants, leafing, just being there with them.
This fucking sucks.
All right, here we go.
Wish me luck.
I try not to smell like pot when I go in there, so I don't take a bong hit right before I go in there is the only thing I don't do.
I have a lot of really good genetics that I want to develop and I want to hoard to myself and maybe sell to the highest bidder kind of stuff.
So this means a lot to me.
This is a big deal today.
Hi.
I'm Jason, Dookie Brothers.
Thanks, guys.
Whoo! Hey, Floyd.
We got a lot of work to do, buddy! What'd they give us? They gave us not a lot, but gave us some square footage that we gotta fucking plant.
-A nursery? -And a nursery.
Boom.
Bong hits.
They gave us the interim permit.
Now the rest is up to us to actually make it happen.
Woo-hoo.
This is huge.
This is all in-house.
I can make seeds.
I can sell my genetics to other people.
I get 100% of the profit.
I don't have to go into partners with the nursery.
I don't need anybody.
I can get my own employees.
I can get my own team.
I can get my own shit.
This is it! I hate that bong.
My foot's in the door and it's not getting out of the door.
They're gonna have to cut it off.
We're about to take over the world.
Let's get the whole mountain.
We found tidbits of information about the person in question that killed Garret.
This guy was a real scumbag.
We learned that he was from Indiana.
People in Indiana wanted to tell me about his past.
Stories about the crimes he's committing there.
He's pulled this time and time again, and he keeps doing it.
He's getting away with it.
I called the police department, told them where Garret's body was buried.
What we heard was that Garret was buried on the Jewett Ranch.
The police department, they said that they cannot go on that property.
It's private property.
It's guarded.
That was one of the excuses they gave me for not pursuing anything.
The sheriff's response-- "Well, it's a big area," you know, "Where do we look? This is just hearsay.
" I mean, they didn't seem to be interested.
Um, and I kept trying to reason with them and deal with them, and it just got to the point to where they just started ignoring my phone calls and they wouldn't call me back.
So let's say you have information, you're non-law enforcement, but I have information, I've heard the talk around town, some people have told me this happened, and everyone knows, everyone knows.
I'll tell you right now, you'll never stand in a court of law with that type of information.
Initially, the person of interest left the area and then he came back.
People were calling me and telling me of sightings.
Someone would call me and say, he's back on his property.
Someone would say, we saw him driving around.
I was getting calls from Indiana, "When are you guys gonna pick him up? When's the warrant coming out? What the heck's going on?" They felt that he was almost boastful about, "Hey, I could come back here anytime I want.
I'm invincible.
" Cops weren't doing anything.
We've gotta do something.
And the longer, you know, the time draws out here, the less they're gonna do.
I felt that, "Okay, I'm gonna hear any minute that they have a good statement, there was arrests being made.
" It was the waiting game.
I was really hopeful something was going to happen, but nothing did.
And I think the family was more than patient.
So I don't know what else could be done.
I know that the community, some of the people who live there, finally had enough.
The police knew who killed Garret, but they did nothing.
They did nothing about it.
The cops, they just think, you know, let 'em all kill themselves.
That's the feeling that I get.
People kill each other up here, it's just, you know, it's a couple gangsters dead.
I mean, you know, they don't-- not only do they not care, they actually look at it as a good thing.
I think they think we're stupid, quite frankly.
Who was Garret? He was nobody to them.
It's bullshit! The code of the mountain take the law into your own hands.
Murder Mountain, I'd say the majority of the population are isolationists.
After Vietnam, I moved up here.
I didn't want any part of the city anymore, or society.
I live on on 20 acres that, up until ten years ago, my nearest neighbor was a mile away.
When was the last time you were in a restaurant? To sit down and eat? Nineteen seventy-nine.
That's what war does.
It changes people.
Garret I didn't know him very well.
He worked for my neighbor.
Those are rifle holes, except for on the rear quarter panel there.
That's shotgun.
It's a different world out here.
It's in the wind up here.
Murder.
It's contagious.
The guy who stole from me, it was an apprenticeship to see if he was gonna work out.
And obviously, it didn't work out.
The guy stole 150 plants, and now, I'm losing 1/4th of a greenhouse.
I would say it's at least 25 if not 30, 40 pounds.
Once I found out he was stealing from me, I started slapping him and punching him.
He's moving and bobbing his head.
I end up punching him in the back of the head a few times and breaking my hands.
Then he pressed charges.
It was a mistake.
I shouldn't have laid my hands on him.
I got frustrated.
Whatever the consequences are, I'll face up to them.
You know, whatever.
And as I was hitting him, he was like, "You're the fourth boss to hit me.
" So this is the next generation.
It being almost July 1st, I'm way behind.
These things should already be up to my waist.
Started way late because of the regulations.
I wanted to make sure I wasn't breaking the law and jeopardizing the future of me growing up here on this mountain.
Started late, but better late than never.
And there it is.
I have to try to take care of these puppies.
They're my babies.
Let's do one right here.
I'm very competitive.
I won the Golden Tarps 2016.
Then I won the Emerald Cup after that.
Other growers were buying my product.
They were coming over, and they saw the Zkittlez I grew and they were buying ounces and 1/4 pounds.
That's how I knew it was special.
I already knew it was special, but that's how I really knew it was-- when other growers are buying your shit.
Leave the bong.
I absolutely know I'm gonna win awards this year.
I wanna win Tommy Chong's Blazer Cup.
He's always been an idol of mine.
I grew up watching his movies.
I'd like to win it, and I'd like him to approach me and be like, "Hey, man, can I get a bag of that?" And I'd be like, "This one had your name on it, bro.
" He's coming back around.
If that's Officer Leed, he's wasting people's money.
I'm doing this.
If you want to come up here and get me, then here I am.
Come bust me with a helicopter, I'd sue 'em.
The whole plan of doing something about Garret Rodriguez's death started with, you know, Neil.
Neil was a very funny guy.
Like, he had jokes-- Well, he had, like six jokes.
And he told them all the time.
But he was easy to like.
He was a strong arm kind of character, but he was a gentle guy.
He really was.
Teddy bear kind of stats, but he didn't get stoned ever.
When he did, he would just laugh and he was funny as hell.
Neil had a soft spot about Garret.
Neil had just recently lost his son.
He was told that his son decided to play Russian roulette, and he always knew in his heart that that wasn't true, that there was something else that had happened.
He knew he probably wasn't ever gonna get the truth about it either.
That's what he was told and that's all he was gonna get, and he just hated it.
He put himself in Garret's parents' shoes, you know, and he didn't like the way that felt at all.
One night he told me, he said, their parents need to know where their son's at.
They need to know so they can put him to rest.
They've gotta be able to find their kid.
Scott was Neil's best friend.
They did everything together.
Scott was a good person.
A lot of kids called Scott "Dad.
" He was the dad of the mountain.
He was one of the leaders of this community.
In a place with no authority, he took it upon himself to get all the parties involved and to get to the bottom of things.
Scott used to say, "Do what's right, not what's easy.
" They pretty much kept the peace for everybody, you know.
If somebody had a problem, they'd go to Scott and he would handle it.
They really helped this community, and even if they were outlaws, they were good, honest people.
I mean, they made other people around them good, honest people.
It was Thanksgiving.
We were still cooking dinner.
Turkey and potatoes.
We had pies in the oven.
I'm sitting there in the room watching TV and Scott comes in the room, sits right next to me, and he didn't say a word, you know.
He just sits down next to me, and then shortly after, Neil comes in and sits on the other side of me, you know.
So they're both talking with me in between 'em.
Neil goes, "I'm going to do something about Garret Rodriguez.
" And Scott was like, "Okay.
Well, let's go.
" Neil thought that he was probably gonna be going to prison.
He was okay with that, as long as the parents knew where their kid was.
There was, like, a whole group of people.
We egged them and dug at them, got a couple of them drinking.
And a bottle of vodka and it's easy to egg guys on, you know? You get a bunch of mountain boys.
The alleged murderer, he knew where the body was and he wasn't gonna tell nobody.
Well, he was gonna tell these boys.
Guaranteed.
Thanksgiving.
Just about the time when everybody would be sitting down to their dinners a plethora of vehicles went past my place.
We're always aware when somebody comes up the hill.
We're hyper-alert.
Everybody drives up.
- Did you have a mask on? - Yes.
I think the only people that didn't actually wear masks were Scott and Neil.
It was curious because it was late, there had been some rip-offs.
So I followed them up.
It's dark, I don't want to be shot, so I'm quiet.
There's a couple people that are coming outside of the house.
And one of them's this big guy, you know.
Neil was just, like, yelling, "What did you do with Garret?" And this guy's not wanting to tell us.
They were looking like they were gonna square up with each other, and then Neil's like, "Fuck this!" Bob comes up, you know, pistol-whips him.
The gun ends up going off.
Shot his ear, just like a flesh wound.
Neil, he let out this big, like "whoo.
" Walking up, I could hear yelling.
There had been a couple of shots.
That's nothing new.
I got closer.
I'm in back of the whole group.
The alleged was shot three times.
Calf, breast, crease.
Being a father, I felt strongly for Garret's father.
I'd like to see justice, and that means somebody has to pay for the murder.
They asked him point blank, they said, "Where's the body buried? Everybody knows now.
You can't deny it anymore.
It's out.
Where's the body?"