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THE DAILY ASTORIAN THURSDAY, MARCH 17, 2016
Governor signs wolf-delisting bill Boneyard Ridge
will be preserved
Environmentalists
had hoped for a veto
By R.J. MARX
The Daily Astorian
By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI
Capital Bureau
A bill that averts an environmentalist
lawsuit by ratifying the removal of wolves
from Oregon’s list of endangered species
has been signed by Gov. Kate Brown.
Oregon wildlife regulators found that
wolf populations have recovered enough to
delist the species last year, which prompted
three environmental groups — Cascadia
Wildlands, Oregon Wild and the Center
for Biological Diversity — to petition the
Oregon Court of Appeals to overturn the
decision.
House Bill 4040, which holds that the
delisting process complied with the law,
was approved by Oregon lawmakers during
the 2016 legislative session and effectively
voided the environmentalists’ argument that
the decision was illegal.
Brown signed HB 4040 on March 15
over the objections of environmentalists,
who urged her to veto the bill, arguing the
Legislature shouldn’t have interfered with a
judicial review of the wolf delisting that they
had sought.
Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife/AP
A female wolf is pictured from the Minam pack outside La Grande, after it was
fitted with a tracking collar.
A critical 360-acre land par-
cel on Tillamook Head will be
transferred from timber prop-
erty to conservation corridor.
The North Coast Land
Conservancy and Green-
Wood Resources signed a
sales agreement Monday for
Boneyard Ridge on Tilla-
mook Head for $1.3 million.
The purchase will create 3,500
connected acres from the sum-
mit of Tillamook Head to the
Necanicum River Valley.
“This agreement as of
Monday is a full purchase
agreement,” North Coast Land
Conservancy Executive Direc-
tor Katie Voelke said. “Not
only are all parties in, but we
know what the cost will be,
we’ve agreed on it, and we
know what the closing date
will be.”
Boneyard Ridge will serve
as a link between Ecola State
Park, which stretches along the
Tillamook Head shoreline, and
the land conservancy’s Circle
Creek Habitat Reserve in the
Necanicum River Àoodplain
west of U.S. Highway 101 at
the south end of Seaside.
The site’s dramatic name
came from the discovery of
elk bones by hunters on the
property.
The conservancy’s goal
is to allow the land to mature
into a complex rainforest of
the kind that once character-
ized headlands along the Ore-
gon Coast.
The sale was stalled after
ownership shifted from Camp-
bell Global to GreenWood
Resources, Voelke said.
“It had to go through
a whole process again of
review, approving it, looking
at it against company goals,”
Voelke said. “That added a
whole new layer to it.”
Murder plotter gets sentenced to 20 years in prison
Appeal likely
in case that
roiled rural
community
By NATALIE ST. JOHN
EO Media Group
CATHLAMET,
Wash.
— Former Altoona resident
Samuel Fredrick Valdez has
been sentenced to spend 250
months — about 20 years —
in a state prison.
Valdez, 64, was convicted
in late February of solicitation
to commit murder, arson, mar-
ijuana delivery and marijuana
possession with intent to man-
ufacture or deliver.
During the Monday after-
noon sentencing hearing in
Wahkiakum County Supe-
rior Court, visiting Cowlitz
County Superior Court Judge
Stephen Warning acknowl-
edged that given his age, Val-
dez might well spend the rest
of his life in a cell. Warning
said he took that seriously, but
decided to not to give the min-
imum sentence after consider-
ing the facts of the arson case
— the jury had unanimously
agreed that in July 2014, Val-
dez started a devastating ¿re
at the home of his neighbors,
Fred and Kathy Cantrell, while
they were still inside.
“For vanishingly small rea-
sons you decided to set ¿re to a
house in which there were two
elderly people, one of them
blind,” Warning said.
‘A victim of my success’
During the trial, Wahkia-
kum County Deputy Prosecu-
tor Sue Bauer argued that Val-
dez was so vindictive that he
plotted to hire a hit man to mur-
der his ex-wife, Elizabeth Rob-
bins, last summer. His defense
attorney, Wayne Fricke, said
the state’s case was built on tes-
timony from a highly unreliable
con¿dential informant who
aimed to steal Valdez’s pro¿t-
able drug business.
Valdez admits he manu-
factured large quantities of
marijuana oil at his home on
Altoona-Pillar Rock Road,
but he still maintains that he
is innocent of the more serious
arson and solicitation charges.
“Yes, I got involved in this
equipment and I was quite
excited about it …,” Valdez
told the packed courtroom on
Monday. “Yes, I am a victim of
my success.”
Though he wore street
clothes during his trial, Val-
dez attended the hearing in
the bright orange sweat suit
uniform of the Wahkiakum
County Jail, where he has been
incarcerated since his arrest
last July. He appeared tired and
frail, and struggled at times to
manage the shackles on his
wrists and ankles.
Valdez’s sentence was
based primarily on the solici-
tation charge, which is consid-
ered to be one of the most seri-
ous violent offenses in the state
of Washington.
‘Lived in fear’
Bauer
invited
Kathy
Cantrell to read statements
that she and her husband had
written.
Cantrell said the ¿re had
“changed everything.” The
couple lost virtually all of
their property, as well as two
dogs.
“Since that night, I have
lived in fear of him returning
to ¿nish us off,” Cantrell said.
She described the episodes of
sudden panic that haunted her
after the ¿re, her fear for her
husband, who is blind, and her
reluctance to invite her grand-
children to visit in the months
between the ¿re and Valdez’s
arrest.
Fred Cantrell said that
being blind made it all the
more horrifying when he was
awakened by the sound of an
explosion on the night of the
¿re.
“I ran down the halls
crashing into walls in my ter-
ror to save my ¿ancp Kathy,”
Cantrell wrote. He said he
had also lived in constant fear
that Valdez would “return to
wreak havoc,” if set free.
Bauer told Judge Warn-
Natalie St. John/EO Media Group
Family members and attorney Wayne Fricke (second from left) watched as Sam Valdez
completed sentencing paperwork in the Wahkiakum County Superior Court on Monday.
ing that Valdez had likely
engaged in criminal conduct
beyond what was covered in
the trial, and had involved
“friends, neighbors, friends of
friends.”
“If the defendant had sold
(the marijuana oil) that was
in his house by the gram, he
could have made $243,000
dollars. That is substantial,”
Bauer said. “It wasn’t the
¿rst time he had delivered. It
probably wasn’t even the last
time.”
Bauer said she thought
Valdez was capable of further
victimizing his former friends
and neighbors, if he were to
be released.
“It’s basic safety. There
isn’t anything that’s going to
teach him anything,” Bauer
said. “I think the commu-
nity deserves to be safe from
this man for the maximum
amount.”
In his brief remarks, Fricke
said Valdez deserved the mini-
mum sentence because he had
never been in trouble with the
law before, and never intended
to follow through with the
shocking, violent fantasies
he shared with the con¿den-
tial informant in three secretly
recorded conversations.
“It’s a situation where
there’s a lot of vitriol in his
remarks, a lot of stuff that
looks bad … but we’re not
here to sentence because he
called a certain person names
or because he was petty,”
Fricke said.
‘My heart has been
broken’
When it was his turn to
speak, Valdez stood and faced
the roughly 25 members of
the public who attended the
hearing. His anger with Bauer
was evident, as he repeatedly
invoked her name in an emo-
tional speech.
“I’ve listened to Miss
Bauer ripping me apart,” Val-
dez said. “It’s tearing my heart
out.” He described good deeds
he had done for neighbors and
strangers, and insisted that he
had been set up.
“The CI is a con. He’s
conned this court, he’s conned
Miss Bauer, and he’s conned
me. I’ve never threatened or
hurt anybody in my life.”
Valdez concluded, “My
heart has been broken.”
Convicted by
his own words
Warning said some parts
of the incriminating recorded
conversations between Val-
dez and the informant were
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so dramatic that they were
hard to take seriously.
“It had a kind of juvenile
quality to it. It was like lis-
tening to two 13-year-olds,”
Warning said. Despite his
doubts about the informant’s
credibility, Warning thought
Valdez’s own statements
and testimony had sealed his
fate.
“You didn’t get convicted
based on what CI said. You
got convicted based on what
you said,” Warning told him.
“There’s no doubt about that
in my mind.”
At the end of the hearing,
Valdez was not allowed to
touch or talk to his mother,
girlfriend, or other support-
ers who watched in silence
from the front row.
“I’ll see you guys later,”
he mouthed, as the bailiff led
him away.
Outside the courthouse, his
mother, Laurel Valdez, said she
thought the sentence was too
harsh, and that she did not feel
her son could have received a
fair trial in his own county.
Valdez’s ex-wife, Eliz-
abeth Robbins, said she
was disappointed that he
didn’t receive the maximum
sentence.
She said that she and her
former Altoona neighbors
had feared for their lives
before his arrest, and would
fear for them again if he
were ever to be released.
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