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The Redemption of Eric Magrini Part 1: The Truth About the Kropholler Whistleblower Complaint

District 1 Supervisor Kevin Crye, District 4 Supervisor Patrick Jones and retired Sheriff’s Captain Patrick Kropholler at last Thursday’s board meeting.

This story was made possible by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Last Thursday night, at the Shasta County Board of Supervisors’ final meeting of the year, Supervisors Kevin Crye, Patrick Jones and Chris Kelstrom attempted to convince a packed audience of local taxpayers that retired Shasta County Sheriff’s Office Capt. Patrick Kropholler deserves a multimillion-dollar out-of-court settlement. That’s allegedly because Kropholler’s superiors at the Sheriff’s Office created a toxic work environment after he blew the whistle on them in March 2021.

Crye, Jones and Kelstrom, serving as the board majority for the last time, were dead wrong on the facts. Kropholler’s whistleblower report sparked an investigation that ultimately found Kropholler had much more to do with creating the toxic work environment at the Sheriff’s Office than his boss, Shasta County Sheriff Eric Magrini.

What we have here is a tale of two men, Kropholler and Magrini, who were great friends that once went on family camping outings together until former Sheriff Tom Bosenko’s sudden retirement in December 2019.

Undersheriff Magrini was appointed sheriff by a unanimous board of supervisors vote to serve the remaining two years of Bosenko’s term. That put Magrini directly in charge of Kropholler. Their friendship deteriorated almost immediately. First Sheriff Magrini promoted Capt. Jason Barnhart to undersheriff instead of Kropholler. Then Sheriff Magrini and Undersheriff Barnhart switched Kropholler’s assignment from the Patrol Division to the Services Division.

In retaliation, “Capt. Kropholler raised numerous baseless complaints about Sheriff Magrini” according to the Ellis Report, an outside investigation conducted by Sacramento-based Ellis Investigations Law Corporation in early 2021.

As it turns out, Kropholler’s baseless allegations, first leaked online in April 2022 in a document that became known as Kropholler’s whistleblower report, sparked the investigation that ultimately discredited almost all of his claims. The allegations, 15 of them, were mailed to Ellis Investigations on Shasta County Sheriff Administrators’ Association letterhead. Kropholler was president of the SAA at the time, which joined the Deputy’s Sheriff’s Association in voting no confidence in Sheriff Magrini in early 2021.

Kropholler retired in January 2022 and included some of the allegations against Magrini in the wrongful discharge lawsuit he filed against the county in May 2022, right around the same time the whistleblower report was leaked. The case has been slowly churning through Shasta County’s legal system, which continues to recover from the backlog of cases created during the pandemic, which was surging when the events of this story took place.

Supervisor Kevin Crye sponsored the resolution to recognize Capt. Patrick Kropholler’s service.

The case’s delayed status made it excellent fodder for Crye to mold into a conspiracy theory alleging Kropholler’s lawsuit has been covered up by militant county administrators and staff at Thursday’s board meeting.

Supervisor Kevin Crye’s claims

Here’s Crye’s unlikely spiel: At some point after it was filed in May 2022, Kropholler’s lawsuit was assigned to outside counsel. Crye, who took office in January 2023, claimed he wasn’t informed about the case until it appeared on the agenda in March of this year. Crye claimed that a search conducted by the Clerk of the Board, the County Counsel’s office and Crye could find no record of Kropholler’s case on the agenda before its March appearance.

Therefore, Crye jumped to the conclusion that former Shasta County Counsels Rubin Cruse and Jim Ross buried the Kropholler case for some nefarious purpose yet to be uncovered.

“Just to bring us back, the first step in litigation was taken February 24th of 2022,” said Crye Thursday evening, overseeing his final meeting as board chair. “Supervisor Kelstrom and I were not seated. And the board first heard of this March 26th of 2024. That is over two years. I’m not sure if this was total incompetence or total corruption that this litigation was hid from this board. How can we be assured as the public that there are safeguards to prevent this activity?”

Shasta County Counsel Joe Larmour, Supervisors Kevin Crye and Chris Kelstrom.

Crye conducted a mock trial with reluctant County Counsel Joe Larmour serving as witness for the prosecution to make his point.

“At some point outside counsel was brought in and were hired and there was no two-thirds vote and it was not in front of this board,” Crye pontificated. “Counsel Larmour, how is that supposed to happen, to be executed? I know you just said it, but I just want it said again for the record. What’s supposed to happen?”

“The item would be placed on closed session, the agenda would state the name of the case, the board would be asked for permission to defend the claim and retain outside counsel,” Larmour stated. The attorney was careful to point out that county counsels are given discretion to operate within certain bounds and that it is “essentially a position of trust.”

Jones took Crye’s allegations against Cruse and Ross and jacked them up to hanging offenses.

“Shasta County citizens are going to lose millions of dollars over this because of Rubin Cruse and Jim Ross not following the government code, and also depriving this board for making the decision,” said Jones in his final meeting as District 4 Supervisor. “They don’t get to make those decisions. That’s this body. We would deny that. Now the question arises, what else did they do that we did not know about?”

Shasta County CEO Dave Rickert celebrates Supervisor Patrick Jones’ imminent departure.

When Jones says, “we would deny that” he means the current board majority would not approve assigning the Kropholler case to outside counsel. Instead, they would settle the case for whatever they believe Kropholler deserves.

Board majority exalts Kropholler

Thursday’s agenda featured a resolution, R-4, to recognize, two years after his retirement, Kropholler’s 28 years of service. In addition, the agenda featured item C-21 on the consent calendar, a request for a $2.65 million increase in the Risk Management General Liability Budget for an unnamed claim settlement. Sources familiar with the Kropholler case speculated that $2.65 million was destined for Kropholler’s bank account.

Yet shortly after the board agenda for Dec. 19 was released, C-21 was pulled from it. Perhaps that’s because Crye, Jones and Kelstrom realized they’d need four out of five votes to approve a $2.65 million settlement, and supervisors Mary Rickert and Tim Garman weren’t on board.

“I want you to know during the time that we’ve been discussing this case, I voted ‘no’ whenever we had a vote, because I was never given any information and any tangible concrete information to award $ 2.65 million to someone,” Rickert said at the meeting, her last after two terms in office. Her remark drew a brief rebuke from County Counsel.

“I just I just want to be clear,” Larmour said. “So, the vote is releasable from the closed session, the facts are not. So, you can provide what you voted on in the closed session, but not the factual basis.”

Translation: The public isn’t supposed to know the outgoing board majority wants to award Kropholler $2.65 million in taxpayer money.

District 2 Supervisor Tim Garman, also attending his final meeting as supervisor, said the timing of the proposed $2.65 million payout to Kropholler was unfortunate, given the state’s budget deficit and the coming tightening of purse strings. Both he and Rickert abstained from voting to grant Kropholler special recognition due to the lawsuit.

For now, the Kropholler settlement proposal appears to be on hold, and not a moment too soon, because the claims of Crye, Jones and Kelstrom are dubious at best.

District 3 Supervisor Mary Rickert and family celebrate eight years of service.

For instance, is it believable that the trio—Jones has been on the board since January 2021, Crye and Kelstrom since January 2023—didn’t know Kropholler was suing the county until earlier this year?

Kropholler’s whistleblower report, his lawsuit against the county, and the Ellis Report have been the subjects of multiple local media reports since at least May 2022. The Redding Record Searchlight waged a high-profile two-year legal battle against the county to obtain the Ellis Report that was resolved in the daily newspaper’s favor in August 2023.

At Thursday’s meeting, Kelstrom claimed he’d known about the Kropholler whistleblower case but somehow didn’t know the retired sheriff’s captain was suing the county. Kelstrom said he read every word of the 168-page Ellis Report, sparked by Kropheller’s whistleblower claims, in three-and-a-half hours under the watchful eye of county counsel. That was in April or May 2023, before the report was released to the public in August thanks to the Searchlight’s successful lawsuit.

In researching this story, this reporter read, researched and analyzed the 168-page Ellis Report and the 12-page opening brief for Kropholler’s lawsuit for approximately 20 hours. Hoping to compare notes with Kropholler and Kelstrom at Thursday’s meeting, I sought them out during a break, asked for comment on this story and handed each my business card.

Kropholler gingerly accepted it. Kelstrom immediately discarded the card somewhere behind the dais. I also reminded Crye that he still had time to reply to the latest list of questions I had emailed him regarding his interactions with former Shasta County Sheriff and Assistant CEO Eric Magrini. So far, Kropholler, Kelstrom and Crye have not responded to my inquiries.

Shasta County Sheriff Mike Johnson thanks Capt. Patrick Kropholler for his service.

The whole point of the courtroom scene orchestrated by Crye, Kelstrom and Jones last Thursday was to somehow bond with three new incoming supervisors, District 2 Supervisor Allen Long, District 3 Supervisor Corkey Harmon and District 4 Supervisor Matt Plummer. Their political allegiances are unknown for the moment, and Crye and Kelstrom, the two returning supervisors, openly curried their favor.

See how clever we are, Crye and Kelstrom seem to be saying to Long, Harmon and Plummer. We hired Joe Larmour for County Counsel and not those “bad actors” Cruse and Ross who “buried” the Kropholler case.

Crye laid special blame on Magrini, the former sheriff and assistant CEO who officially retired in October after spending the last year of his 26-year career on paid administrative leave.

“I believe much of this started in December of 2019 as discussed in the Ellis Report,” Crye said. “At that time, undersheriff Eric Magrini wanted John Patrick Kropholler to illegally use the CLETS or California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System to run a RAP sheet of Matt Pontes, who was then an applicant for the CEO position.”

“After Kropholler refused,” Crye continued, “he was allegedly bullied and harassed per court documents for nearly 20 months, ultimately leading to Captain Kropholler being led out of the building and placed on administrative leave by then-sheriff Eric Magrini. That was in July of 2021. You can find this information on the court’s website, case number of 199976.”

Crye’s claims sound similar to the allegations Kropholler makes in the opening brief of his lawsuit against the county filed in May 2022. But there’s a big problem with those allegations. Nearly all the 15 claims made by Kropholler about Magrini in his original whistleblower complaint were thoroughly discredited when the Ellis Report was completed in April 2021.

In fact, the Ellis Report found problems with Kropholler’s credibility, starting with his first claim, labeled Issue One, the allegation that Magrini illegally used CLETS to conduct a background search to discredit then-County CEO candidate Matt Pontes in favor of Magrini’s preferred candidate. Although Magrini did wrongly use CLETS, it wasn’t done with malicious intent as Kropholler claimed. That immediately raised a red flag for investigators.

Ellis report deems Magrini more credible than Kropholler.

“First, with respect to Sheriff Magrini, this investigation found his account credible,” the Ellis Report states. “In contrast, this investigation found that Capt. Kropholler’s account lacked relative credibility for several reasons.”

Those reasons included:

· Kropholler’s refusal to be interviewed by investigators or provide a reason for his refusal to participate.

· Kropholler’s refusal through his attorney to provide emails and other documentary evidence supporting his allegations.

· Kropholler’s tendency to exaggerate and mischaracterize events.

· Kropholler had a motive to file false claims against Magrini after Magrini reassigned him from Patrol to Services in December 2019.

The Ellis Report refers readers back to Issue One regarding Kropholler’s lack of credibility on eight out of the 14 claims that follow in the report. In the six allegations where Kropholler’s credibility isn’t questioned, Magrini was cleared of any wrongdoing in four instances. In two allegations, the Ellis Report sustained the claims that Magrini made inappropriate jokes on several occasions.

Depending on your point of view regarding humor and proper sheriff etiquette, Magrini’s jokes range from typical workplace banter to egregious offenses against official decorum, such as sharing a photo of Kropholler with a Hitler mustache with command staff, including Kropholler himself.

According to the Ellis Report, this doctored photo of a younger Patrick Kropholler with a Hitler mustache has been circulating for an unknown number of years.

Ellis Report exonerates Magrini

During the days preceding the George Floyd demonstration in June 2020, Magrini, in an email shared with command staff on the department’s intranet, posted a map leading to the dilapidated South County Patrol Station. He joked that if protesters were going to burn any police precincts down, as occurred in Minneapolis after Floyd was killed by a police officer, South County would be a good place to start. He later posted Kropholler’s photo with a Hitler mustache drawn on it, suggesting it might be used to rile protestors up.

In his lawsuit, Kropholler asserts that Magrini maligned his German heritage by posting the Hitler mustache photo. Yet according to multiple sources, Kropholler is well known for celebrating his German heritage. He’s an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia who has hosted well-attended WW II cosplay parties at his home on Halloween.

It wasn’t unusual for co-workers to rib the Germanophile about his pastime. Was Magrini poking fun at Kropholler’s German heritage by drawing a Hitler mustache on his photo? It seems likely, though perhaps ill-advised.

In another poorly timed attempt at humor, Magrini jokingly refused to deploy 15 deputies to cover board of supervisor meetings that had grown increasingly boisterous during the COVID-19 pandemic because the board had refused to grant him a pay raise. The Ellis Report found that no request for 15 extra deputies was ever made; Magrini was simply making a joke about not getting a pay raise.

In short, except for these errant jests, the Ellis Report completely exonerated Magrini of any of the wrongdoing, criminal or otherwise, alleged by Kropholler. But you’d never know that reading the Record Searchlight’s extensive coverage of the case during the two years it was waging a legal battle to obtain the Ellis Report. Here’s the lead sentence in the story published after the Record Searchlight obtained the report in August 2023:

“An investigation into wrongdoing in the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office, kept secret for two years, reveals an agency that was riven with mistrust under a leader who admitted he violated a state law, allegedly bragged about working with a local militia group, and claimed to defy the county Board of Supervisors, the now-released documents show.”

As we shall see, that’s a misrepresentation of the Ellis Report’s findings. The Record Searchlight never mentions the problems with Kropholler’s credibility, which are emphasized repeatedly throughout the Ellis Report. It’s understandable why the Record Searchlight might take such a slant, considering the resources that went into the lawsuit to obtain the report. But in the process, Magrini’s reputation has been trashed and continues to be trashed by the likes of Crye, Jones and Kelstrom.

Former Shasta County Sheriff and Assistant CEO Eric Magrini.

Magrini sets the record straight

Now, Magrini is fighting back. For more than fours years, he’s kept silent about the events that transpired while he served as Shasta County Sheriff from December 2019 to June 2021, and Assistant Shasta County CEO from July 2021 to his involuntary retirement in October. He’s speaking exclusively to A News Café to explain his side of a story for the first time.

It’s a story that is as much personal as it is political.

It’s personal because Assistant County CEO Magrini was placed on paid administrative leave in March 2023 after filing numerous complaints against Crye, including the allegation that the mercurial supervisor showed up at Magrini’s wife’s workplace unannounced in what the Magrinis perceived as an obvious attempt at intimidation.

It’s political because at the same time, Magrini was tasked with approving the fledgling supervisor’s bizarre expense requests, which included the installation of a PacMan machine in his office and an unauthorized trip to Minneapolis to consult with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell on hand counting Shasta County’s elections.

But we’re getting ahead of the story. Magrini’s saga begins in December 2019 when the board of supervisors unanimously appointed him to replace Sheriff Tom Bosenko after Bosneko’s surprise retirement announcement. Things were looking considerably brighter for newly appointed 44-year-old Shasta County Sheriff Eric Magrini back then.

“This is not about an election, this is not a popularity contest,” District 5 Supervisor Les Baugh declared during the board’s deliberations. “This is about the best prepared to hit the ground running. I heard one clear person who is ready to hit the ground running.”

That person was Magrini, but the newly sworn-in sheriff’s honeymoon proved short-lived.

Shasta County Sheriff Eric Magrini being sworn in, December 2019.

Magrini’s promotion opened up the undersheriff position and Kropholler hoped his longtime friend Magrini would grant him the promotion. Instead, Sheriff Magrini chose Capt. Jason Barnhart for the position. Magrini and Barnhart then transferred Kropholler from head of the Patrol Division to head of the Services Division, a move Kropholler perceived as a demotion.

Magrini told the Ellis investigators that one reason he declined to promote Kropholler to undersheriff concerned an incident involving former Shasta County Sheriff’s deputy Hank Taylor, who in November 2019 crashed his patrol car head-on into an oncoming vehicle, killing one passenger and seriously injuring two others.

Magrini planned with Shasta County District Attorney Stephanie Bridgett to allow Taylor to turn himself in on a charge of vehicular manslaughter with a peer support group of fellow deputies standing by at the jail the next morning.

In the morning, Magrini received a call that Kropholler and two detectives had picked Taylor up and were taking him to a bail bondsman. Magrini ordered the detectives to take Taylor to the jail, where he was booked without incident and posted bail. According to the Ellis Report, Magrini considered it an act of insubordination and cited it as a reason for not promoting Kropholler to undersheriff and transferring him to the Services Division.

“In my opinion, once Capt. Kropholler was not selected as undersheriff he became very toxic and subversive,” Magrini recalled during a recent interview. “I consulted with other law enforcement leaders who also provided information about Mr. Kropholler’s disturbing behavior.”

In January 2020, one month into his term as sheriff, Magrini received a request from Director of Support Services Shelly Forbes to run a criminal background check on Matt Pontes, the leading candidate for County CEO following Larry Lees departure. She informed Magrini that Pontes had signed a release permitting the background check.

Former Shasta County CEO Matt Pontes.

As undersheriff, Magrini hadn’t run a criminal background check for several years, so he asked Kropholler for assistance. Although county policy mandates that criminal background checks be conducted using fingerprints through specified federal and state channels, Magrini and Kropholler used the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, CLETS, to conduct the background check.

Pontes had criminal theft convictions as a young adult that he successfully expunged. Expunged charges don’t usually show up in low level criminal background checks. They do show up in CLETS, which is one reason why CLETS is prohibited for use in employee background checks. Sure enough, Pontes’ expunged criminal record turned up as Kropholler helped Magrini navigate the CLETS database.

According to Kropholler’s whistleblower report, Kropholler warned Magrini that using CLETS for employment background checks was illegal. Nevertheless, he helped Magrini conduct the search.

Magrini wasn’t aware he was breaking state law when the CLETS search was conducted, as implied by the Record Searchlight.

He maintains he was unaware the search was illegal.

“Kropholler never said it was inappropriate,” Magrini said. “I called him into my office to help me run the background check as I could not remember how. Kropholler helped walk me through the process and was present when the results came in which is how he knew of Pontes’ prior criminal history.”

Support Services Director Shelly Forbes was “sick to her stomach” when she discovered the CLETS search results for Pontes clearly stated they weren’t to be used for employment background checks at the bottom of the document. She didn’t notice it until being contacted by an investigator, according to the Ellis Report.

Pontes was hired as CEO in January 2020, but his criminal history was later leaked by Supervisor Jones in May 2022 in a failed effort to force Pontes to resign from the CEO position.

“It is my belief that Kropholler shared Mr. Pontes’ criminal record with Jones,” Magrini said. “There were only a select few people, three that I am aware of, who were privileged to have known this information. Kropholler, myself and the person who requested the information as part of his background check (Shelly Forbes). I know for a fact that neither I nor the person in charge of the background shared this information with Jones.”

If Kropholler did leak the CLETS information, that might explain why Jones believes the retired sheriff’s captain is entitled to a $2.65 million payout.

Thomas Anderson Barbosa was killed by Sgt. Jose Gonzalez in February 2020.

In February 2020, Kropholler openly criticized Magrini’s initial response to the killing of Thomas Andrew Barbosa by Sgt. Jose Gonzalez after a vehicle chase, suggesting Magrini was prejudiced against Gonzalez. Magrini acknowledged his bias and recused himself from the case. Sgt. Gonzalez was not charged in the shooting, but Barbosa’s family was awarded a $12 million settlement in a wrongful death lawsuit earlier this year.

When a Sheriff’s Office deputy is involved in a fatal shooting, the Redding Police Department conducts the investigation to avoid bias as much as possible. Kropholler took it upon himself to conduct his own investigation of the Barbosa shooting, gathering evidence that contradicted RPD’s investigation, recommending that the deceased be charged with a crime and submitting his conclusions directly to the DA’s office, in violation of protocol which requires all OIS reports to be run through the investigating agency before being submitted to the DA.

According the Ellis Report, Kropholler’s actions created serious division between the Sheriff’s Office and the RPD that persists to this day.

“For example, Chief Bill Schueller stated that Cpt. Kropholler created a divide between the Sheriff’s Office and the RPD by the manner he submitted his executive summary to the DA’s Office,” the report states. “Similarly, Cpt. Brian Barner stated that Cpt. Kropholler’s conduct led the RPD to no longer trust the Sheriff’s Office.”

“This evidence supported that it was reasonable for Sheriff Magrini, as the Sheriff’s Office department head, to try to alleviate the tensions between the two agencies,” the Ellis Report continued. “In turn, it was plausible and reasonable for Sheriff Magrini to try to address Cpt. Kropholler’s conduct that contributed to a divide between the two agencies.”

Sheriff Eric Magrini confronts Ellissa McEuen, AKA “the bullhorn lady,” during the early days of the COVID pandemic.

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Shasta County, dividing the community between those who followed public health mandates and those who vehemently didn’t.

“It was extremely stressful and difficult because initially we all subscribed to the fear of the unknown,” Magrini said. “We were trying to do everything right. I had just taken over as sheriff in December and three months later we’re dealing with a pandemic. I’m trying to get on my feet as sheriff and adopt the role of Emergency Operations Manager as well.”

“I was meeting real frequently with HHSA Director Donnell Ewert, with Dr. Karen Ramstrom, with county officials, the board,” he continued. “We had an ad hoc committee that was put together to help stand up a whole command center we had on Caterpillar Road. We stood that thing up and then we worked on getting the hospital stood up in the Civic Auditorium. And so those were long days, and again, it was that fear of the unknown and trying to do what’s right.”

Magrini quickly found himself in the public eye much more than he was accustomed. He was widely criticized for not shutting down the Mother’s Day Cottonwood Rodeo, in accordance with the state’s shelter at home policy prohibiting large outdoor events.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office gave him a stern warning about the rodeo, Magrini said. Despite Magrini’s hands-off approach to enforcing state mandates, his work with Dr. Ramstrom, Ewert and others involved in the COVID response cast him as an enemy in the eyes of Shasta County’s burgeoning anti-public health movement.

“This community was very much anti-COVID and based on what I was told versus what I saw, I was wrestling with it myself, what I thought of it,” Magrini said. “But that didn’t negate the fact that I’m still the sheriff and still have the legal obligation to enforce mandates, OSHA regulations and protect employees—and there were employees who were affected and who had fear. You have to represent them, and you have to fight for them. Trying to find that balance was one of the more difficult things that I’ve ever had to navigate.”

 

In June 2020, the nationwide George Floyd civil rights protest came to Redding, threatening to ignite an already enflamed populace as local Black Lives Matter supporters faced off with the Cottonwood Community Militia.

In his whistleblower report, Kropholler claimed that Magrini inappropriately communicated with the militia during the protest, including sending RPD drone footage to the militia to “keep them advised of the movements of the protestors.”

The Ellis Report found that Magrini only shared a few drone screenshots with CEO Matt Pontes, who was watching the protest from his office in the County Administration building. Hoping to convince Pontes to purchase drones for the Sheriff’s Office, Magrini had the RPD drone pilot zoom in on Pontes. He then sent the screenshot of the close-up to the County CEO.

Magrini did call Cottonwood Militia leader Woody Clendenen once during the protest to ascertain the militia’s location. Clendenen told him they were gathered on Oregon Street, one block away from the protestors on Court Street. Magrini advised them to “stage” in the Oregon Street area, to keep the two groups from mingling.

That was the extent of Magrini’s communication with the militia, which the Ellis Report found entirely appropriate. But Magrini didn’t help his cause when he joked with a younger deputy that help from the militia was just one phone call away.

The Ellis Report found that like most local law enforcement leaders, Magrini doesn’t advocate involving the militia in local policing. When he says the militia’s one phone call away, he’s kidding. Humor may be one way Magrini deals with a job that’s extremely stressful in the best of times, let alone during a pandemic with an uncooperative population.

“The George Floyd protestors joke and the Hitler mustache were two separate things and time frames,” Magrini said. “Yes, I did make a joke and sketched a map with an “X” indicating where our South County Substation was located. I did this in jest as we were working to get our staff relocated out of that facility, which was in bad physical condition, with sewer leaks, water issues, etc. I made this joke with my command staff, it was a known joke. Unfortunately, when Kropholler turned against me he spun this and used it against me. If this was so offensive to him, I question the timing. It’s over a year later that he used it against me.”

Peaceful George Floyd protestor, Shasta County, June 2020.

After the George Floyd protests, Magrini put his head down and focused on work. Contrary to the rumors swirling around the whistleblower report portraying Magrini as hostile to Pontes, the sheriff and the CEO connected working on the development of a state-of-the-art jail project, the so-called wagon wheel concept in which the spokes of the wheel would offer drug and vocational rehabilitation services to the incarcerated criminals in the hub.

Pontes, who helped develop a similar project in Santa Barbara, was specifically hired by Shasta County to develop the new jail project. When Pontes created an assistant CEO position to focus on jail development and marijuana enforcement, Magrini leapt at the chance to escape the Sheriff Office’s toxic environment.

“Once this position opened up, it really appealed to me, to work with Pontes getting the jail built and get out of that environment,” said Magrini, who began the new job in June 2021. It helped that the assistant CEO position paid 31 percent more than his sheriff’s salary, at $178,341 annually.

Five days before Magrini stepped down from the sheriff’s position, he placed Kropholler, his old friend, on administrative leave. He never returned to work. By the time Kropholler retired in January 2022, a political storm fueled by an out-of-state son-of-a-billionaire seeking retribution against anyone who had enforced public health mandates had overtaken Shasta County.

Magrini’s new role as assistant county CEO allowed him to continue keeping his head down during the storm as one by one local public officials dropped by the wayside. He became aware of a “hit list” targeting future officials for elimination with his name on it.

Shasta County District 2 Supervisor Leonard Moty was recalled in February 2022. HHSA Director Ewert retired the same month, forced out in part by the anti-public health mob’s increasingly violent rhetoric. In May 2022, the new board majority featuring Supervisors Patrick Jones, Les Baugh and Tim Garman voted to fire Public Health Officer Dr. Karen Ramstrom.

That same month, Kropholler filed suit against the county just as his whistleblower report maligning Magrini was released on the internet. Simultaneously, Jones attempted to blackmail Pontes with the expunged criminal record illegally obtained from CLETS. In June 2022 Pontes got the last laugh, leaving the County CEO job for a much better paying gig with Sierra Pacific.

But Pontes’ departure left Assistant County CEO Magrini in limbo. Since Magrini was hired by CEO Pontes, the board can’t fire him; only the CEO has that power. In the coming months, Magrini found himself at the mercy of a succession of interim CEOs who were encouraged by the board majority to fire the Assistant CEO.

Then Kevin Crye took office in January 2023, and the real storm began.

NEXT WEEK: The Redemption of Eric Magrini Part 2: Legal Action Is Coming.

If you appreciate career journalist R.V. Scheide’s investigative reporting, please consider supporting A News Cafe with a subscription or one-time donation. Thank you!

 

R.V. Scheide

R.V. Scheide is an award winning journalist who has worked in Northern California for more than 30 years. Beginning as an intern at the Tenderloin Times in San Francisco in the late 1980s, R.V. served as a writer and an editor at the Sacramento News & Review, the Reno News & Review and the North Bay Bohemian. R.V. has written for A News Cafe for 10 years. His most recent awards include best columnist and best feature writer in the California Newspaper Publishers Association Better Newspaper Contest. R.V. welcomes your comments and story tips. Contact him at RVScheide@anewscafe.com

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