Lake County Sheriff Unseated

We normally don’t follow election results in ‘Lectronic Latitude, but we felt our readers would be interested to learn that Lake County’s Sheriff Rod Mitchell was ousted last Wednesday by a reasonably close margin. Deputy Francisco Rivero received 53.9% of the vote, with 16-year incumbent Mitchell garnering 46.1%.

Many felt that Mitchell went above and beyond in protecting his #2 man, Deputy Russell Perdock, when the latter ran his speedboat over a drifting sailboat on the night of April 29, 2006, killing 51-year-old Lynn Thornton of Willows. Despite the fact that Perdock was traveling at speeds over 45 mph on a pitch black night, investigators seemingly never even considered him to be at fault, instead focusing their attention on the couple of beers the sailboat’s helmsman, Bismarck Dinius, had consumed that night. The case against Dinius, prosecuted by outgoing District Attorney Jon E. Hopkins — he was voted out of office during the primaries in June — culminated on August 20, 2009 with ‘not guilty’ verdicts on charges including felony BUI resulting in death. It seems that, with Perdock’s firing from the department this April, justice has won a trifecta.

Meanwhile, Bismarck Dinius is still struggling to pay his monumental legal bills after having been out of work for years due to the case, but the future is beginning to brighten. "I just got my insurance broker’s license and am starting a new insurance business," he told us last week. Hopefully sailors will be eager to use his services once he’s up and running.