That Black Helicopter Over Southern Humboldt? It’s Looking for More Than Pot

NCCSC helicopter, N487HB, registered out of the Butte County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO). 

Last Wednesday, residents across Southern Humboldt spotted a black helicopter circling their properties. The chopper, tail number N487HB, belongs to the Northern California Coalition to Safeguard Communities, known as NCCSC. The coalition purchased the helicopter using grant funding secured to combat trafficking associated with illicit cannabis cultivation and keeps it based in Butte County, according to Summer Hansen, public information officer for both HCSO and the coalition. It has been associated with cannabis enforcement operations in Humboldt County for years.

These days, though, according to Hansen, the mission has changed. “We’re basing all of our investigations on environmental crime and labor violations,” Hansen said in a recent interview. “It’s not even just trafficking, but labor exploitation. So we’re recentering our focus on that.”

When the helicopter is overhead, deputies say they’re watching for pesticides near waterways, illegal burn piles, and other signs of environmental damage tied to unregulated grows. When the coalition executes a search warrant, environmental scientists document potential violations on site.

What Is NCCSC?

The Northern California Coalition to Safeguard Communities is a partnership between sheriff’s offices and district attorneys in Humboldt, Lake, Mendocino, Trinity, and Siskiyou counties. It is funded entirely by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, a private philanthropic organization run by Howard Buffett, son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, by way of another nonprofit, the Center to Combat Human Trafficking. The coalition was formally established in 2022.

Documents obtained by Redheaded Blackbelt through a public records request show HCSO has received substantial grant funding through the coalition. The most recent award letter, dated August 2025, approved $531,611 for the grant year running through July 2026, covering positions including an evidence technician, a public information officer, and a program coordinator, along with equipment, training, and a new digital tip line.

Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal serves as president of NCCSC. In a February 2026 interview with Redheaded Blackbelt, Honsal said the coalition is currently funding three full-time positions within his department, with plans to request two more in the next budget cycle — a meaningful cushion for a county dealing with a serious budget shortfall.

“The coalition has been good,” Honsal said. “It’s been an awesome resource. And it sheds light on labor and human trafficking and some of the cartel-type growing operations that we’re experiencing in Northern California.”

The coalition’s annual reports describe a multi-year program building toward cross-county intelligence sharing, trauma-informed interviews at grow sites, and prosecutorial follow-through. Humboldt County DA Circuit Prosecutor Rebecca Buckley-Stein joined the coalition effort in February 2026, assigned specifically to build human trafficking cases across all five member counties.

The BOS Vote and Questions Raised

Humboldt County’s participation drew scrutiny when it came before the Board of Supervisors in August 2024. The board voted 4-1 to approve a $334,615 grant at the time, that also created two new full-time staff positions, according to coverage by the Lost Coast Outpost.

Fourth District Supervisor Natalie Arroyo cast the lone “no” vote, citing concerns about adding grant-funded positions to the county payroll during an active hiring freeze. Third District Supervisor Mike Wilson voted yes but raised questions about protecting immigrant trafficking victims from potential deportation and whether continuing a prohibition-focused enforcement model in other counties was inadvertently keeping black market profits high.

The arrangement also drew attention for another reason: Honsal, as NCCSC president, signed the August 2024 award letter congratulating his own sheriff’s office on receiving the grant he had applied for on the coalition’s behalf. While the dual role could create the appearance that the same official was involved on both sides of the grant process, Honsal said the coalition’s governance structure dictated his involvement. Honsal told the Outpost that the NCCSC board of directors which is made up of the sheriffs from each participating county voted him into the president’s role. He doesn’t make the grant decisions alone.

The Money and the Man Behind It

Howard Buffett’s foundation has poured millions into law enforcement partnerships across the country, and his views on cannabis have drawn scrutiny elsewhere. In Illinois, his foundation funded a full-time Decatur police officer dedicated specifically to catching cannabis-impaired drivers after the state legalized recreational marijuana in 2020. According to The Intercept, critics in Decatur accused city council members of blocking cannabis dispensaries in part because of financial pressure from the Buffett Foundation, which had donated tens of millions to the city — an allegation council members and the foundation did not directly address. Buffett has been described as personally critical of cannabis legalization.

Whether that history should inform Humboldt County’s view of the coalition’s work is a question some community members have raised. The counterargument, made by NCCSC supporters, is that the coalition’s stated focus has shifted away from plant eradication entirely and toward the workers being exploited in illegal operations — a distinction Hansen made in a recent interview.

“We’re not CAMP anymore,” Hansen said, referencing the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, the state-federal eradication program that defined law enforcement’s relationship with the cannabis industry in Humboldt from the 1980s through the early 2000s. “There’s no war against drugs.”

From CAMP to Labor Trafficking

For some longtime Humboldt residents, the change may be difficult to separate from the past.

During the CAMP era, helicopters were commonly associated with marijuana raids. Workers found at grow sites were often arrested alongside those running the operations, regardless of their role. The experience left many residents wary of law enforcement activity from the air.

Hansen explained the change, “Although the living conditions and the exploitation hasn’t really changed — if anything, it’s probably gotten worse — what we do now when we’re on scene is we look at everything from a victim-centered approach instead of assuming everyone is a suspect.”

Those interviews, Hansen said, have shed light on conditions that have long existed. In some cases, the conditions are only learned of after the consequences have been fatal.

The Bodies in the Hills

To most Humboldt County residents, a remote mountain community of Southern Humboldt near Alderpoint was simply known as Rancho Sequoia, until a Netflix documentary popularized the nickname “Murder Mountain” and brought national attention to a case that illustrates exactly what can happen when an outside worker ends up on the wrong grow with no way out.

Garret Rodriguez, 29, was a San Diego man who came to Humboldt County in late 2012 to work on a cannabis grow. In their last conversation, he told his father he was headed to Murder Mountain to make some fast money. He was reported missing in April 2013. His truck was found that June. His body turned up that November, in a grave on private property on Jewett Road, after a group of Alderpoint residents known as the “Alderpoint 8” confronted the man they believed responsible at gunpoint and forced him to show them where the body was buried.

Community members and Rodriguez’s family said the suspected killer was his grow boss. The motive, they believed, was avoiding paying Rodriguez for his work. According to Garret’s aunt and family representative, Bonnie Taylor, Detective Jennifer Turner told the family in 2017 that the suspect “gave an original statement to law enforcement, and it is on file as, ‘I shot Garret and buried Garret.'” No one has ever been charged. HCSO forwarded the case to local and federal prosecutors, both of whom declined to file, citing lack of sufficient evidence. HCSO has stated that a confession obtained under duress cannot be used in court — a position the Rodriguez family disputes.

Rodriguez’s case became the central story of the Netflix docuseries “Murder Mountain,” released in 2018, which drew national attention to the pattern of missing persons and violence tied to Humboldt’s illegal cannabis industry. HCSO called the series “highly sensationalized” and “one-sided.” Rodriguez’s aunt said the producers “accurately portrayed the events that led to the recovery of Garret’s body” — though for the family, the documentary was no substitute for an arrest.

Rodriguez’s case is the most local and most visible, but it is not an isolated one.

In 2010, Humboldt County marijuana farmer Mikal Wilde hired three workers — two of them Guatemalan immigrants — to tend his grow on roughly 800 acres of mountain property near Kneeland. When the workers wanted to leave after Wilde refused to pay them, he took their firearms away, returned armed, and shot them. Mario Roberto Juarez-Madrid was killed. Pedro Fernando Lopez-Paz was shot in the face and survived by hiding in the woods overnight until he found help. The third worker fled into the woods and hid. Wilde was convicted in 2015 and sentenced to life in prison plus 35 years. Federal prosecutors said Wilde “hired immigrants to work on his marijuana grow in the belief that they were expendable, not in a position to complain and that they might not be missed if they disappeared forever into the woods of Humboldt County.”

The same year Rodriguez went missing, a 15-year-old girl was kidnapped from Los Angeles and taken to a marijuana grow in Lake County — now one of NCCSC’s five member counties. When she wasn’t being used to help with the harvest, she was locked in a metal toolbox with holes punched in it for air, subjected to electric shocks, chaining, and repeated sexual abuse. Ryan Balletto and Patrick Pearmain were both charged federally. Balletto was sentenced in July 2019 to 31 years in federal prison. Pearmain received 12 and a half years. Senior U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer called the abuse of the minor among the most horrific cases his district had seen in recent history.

Despite their differences, all three cases had something in common: the people involved came to cannabis operations from outside the area, had little to no local support, and had few options when things went wrong.

It is a pattern Hansen says she sees playing out still.

Who Gets Caught Up

According to Hansen, the workers most at risk today are not necessarily immigrants from other countries, though that does happen. More often, she said, they are people from California or nearby states who are unfamiliar with Humboldt County’s terrain, have no local ties, and end up stranded when things go wrong.

“They’re unfamiliar enough of where they are, because they’re not technically residents of Humboldt County, and that’s where they get exploited,” she said.

In some cases, workers know they’re heading to a cannabis farm. In others, they don’t. Hansen described situations where people are recruited off agricultural jobs and told they’re doing similar farm work, only to end up hours deep in the backcountry with no cell service and no way out.

The coercion often builds slowly. Workers get dropped off with no transportation. Food and pay may come at first, then taper off. By the time they realize they’re not leaving, options are few.

“It has to be force, fraud, or coercion” to meet the legal definition of trafficking, Hansen explained. “Force is probably what we see the least of, but we definitely see a lot of fraud and a lot of coercion.”

Mendocino County’s Sheriff Matt Kendall made the same point in an interview with Redheaded Blackbelt about a separate criminal matter.

“As the prices are beginning to crumble and we see more and more drug trafficking organizations,” Kendall said, forced labor is spreading across industries. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s in a standard agricultural crop or in marijuana or somebody working in a sweatshop.”

In a follow-up email after her interview, Hansen wrote, “What may begin as a tip regarding potential labor exploitation at an illicit cannabis cultivation site often uncovers a much broader network of criminal activity,” she explained. “These cases are about far more than illegal plant cultivation!”

Permitted vs. Unpermitted

Hansen also noted that licensed, compliant growers are not the enemy of the coalition’s mission and may in fact be its allies.

“Even if you’re a licensed grower and you’re trying really hard, and you’re paying all of your taxes and paying all your fees, and your neighbor has got workers exploited, isn’t paying, has pesticides,” Hansen said, you can call the tip line anonymously. “No one would ever know it was you.”

Encouraging legal cannabis farmers to report their neighbors is not a new strategy. The county has used aerial surveillance and community tips to identify unpermitted grows for years, and the state has been equally explicit — a 2025 Governor’s Office press release on illegal cannabis eradication called the public “one of the best sources for reports of illegal cannabis cultivation activity.”

For some longtime growers, however, the message is a difficult sell. Cannabis cultivation has long existed in a culture where discretion was valued and cooperation with law enforcement was often viewed negatively, regardless of whether a grow was permitted or not. And law enforcement is often considered not trustworthy.

HCSO’s Marijuana Enforcement Team, which uses the N487HB helicopter for aerial surveillance and has for years, conducts operations that can and do result in arrests for unpermitted cannabis cultivation alone — no trafficking or environmental violations required. Per the county’s own website, MET is tasked with investigating properties without county and state cultivation permits. Under California law and Humboldt County ordinance, growing more than six plants per parcel without the appropriate medical exemption or state permits is illegal.

A permit, it turns out, is no guarantee of clean hands either. Licensed cannabis operations in Humboldt County have also been investigated for labor exploitation — including a December 2025 raid on a state-licensed farm in Petrolia where five trafficking victims were identified, a March 2026 case near Bridgeville where a worker was left stranded without food or pay, and a 2024 raid on a permitted Table Bluff farm where undocumented workers were found living in sheds without utilities and having their wages withheld.

The cannabis industry in Humboldt was, for many of the people who built it, genuinely countercultural — a back-to-the-land movement rooted in self-sufficiency, community, and a plant they believed in. The Alderpoint 8 didn’t go looking for Rodriguez’s body because they were indifferent to what happened to workers in their hills. They went because that’s not what the community was supposed to be about. What’s changed isn’t the plant or the hills — it’s the economics. As cannabis prices have collapsed, the margin between a viable operation and a failing one has narrowed, and as Honsal has noted, cost-cutting in that environment leads directly to labor exploitation. A permit doesn’t change that math. Greed, as Sheriff Kendall put it in a conversation about a separate criminal matter, permeates any industry trying to cut costs to increase margins — and the cannabis industry, legal or not, is no exception.

Meanwhile, N487HB keeps making its rounds over  local properties. Permitted or not, if it’s cannabis, it’s on the radar — and what deputies believe they see on the ground determines what happens next.

If you or someone you know is the victim of labor trafficking or exploitation, you can contact the coalition’s anonymous tip line at (707) 441-3031. A secure online reporting system is available at norcalcoalition.org.