Madera County

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of information about Ronald, and the only information available is pertaining to his disappearance.

On September 2nd, 1989, Ronald, along with three other men, entered the Ansel Adams Wilderness Area in Madera County and planned to hike there.

Ronald was last seen at around 4:30 PM, and after that he became separated from the group as the rough terrain forced them apart According to a news article from the Times-Herald, the group had planned to camp overnight, and the three men headed towards their campsite in the hopes that Ronald would eventually catch up with them.

As September 3rd, 1989 rolled around and there was still no sign of their traveling companion, they reported him missing to the Madera County Sheriff's Department.

The sheriff's department, along with search and rescue crews, searched a 20 square mile area before calling off the search.

Crews were in the air and on the ground, but failed to find any sign of Ronald.

Tommy Tomlinson, the sheriff's sergeant of Madera County Sheriff's Office, told the Times-Herald, "No signs, evidence or any of his gear has been found.

It's unusual for nothing to be found.

New tonight, North Valley authorities are warning about a man accused of heinous acts.

The Madera County Sheriff's Office says the suspect is wanted for attempted murder, torture, and robbery.

33-year-old Eric Von Richard Howman is accused of attacking and threatening to kill a 75-year-old yesterday in North Fork.

The Sheriff's Office says the victim suffered severe and permanent injuries.

Howman is also suspected of stealing the victim's car after the attack.

That vehicle was recovered in the Lemoore area.

Anyone with information on Howman's whereabouts is urged to contact the Madera County Sheriff's Office.

In Valley headlines tonight, an 86-year-old man was hit and killed in Fresno this evening while he was walking.

What do we know about the arrests and illegal substances seized?

Plus, a fire destroys a big rig in Madera County.

The scorched scene that triggered major traffic backups on a well-traveled roadway.

And it's cool for now, but we warm a little bit over the weekend.

If convicted, the defendants face 10 years to life in prison and fines up to $10 million.

Ahead on Action News Live at 6, we'll have more on the dangerous nature of drug labs hidden in local communities.

In Madera County, fire crews rushed to put out flames coming from a big rig on Highway 152 off Highway 99, the connector.

You can see thick smoke coming from on top of the semi-truck and the traffic backup caused by the fire.

She had trained to be a park ranger in college and was experiencing the outdoors.

On July 5th of that year, the Madera County Sheriff's Office asked for the public's help in locating Sandra after they found her campsite near the Johnson's Meadows section of the forest in disarray.

On that same day, the authorities located Hughes Silver Saab in Chiquito Creek to the north of the campsite.

They said it appeared to have crashed into a tree at a speed of less than 20 mph before rolling into the ravine.

The search for Sandra was ongoing but limited.

Now, flash forward to almost exactly one year later.

This strange update to the case comes from the Madera County Sheriff's Office in Madera, California.

It seems that a family from nearby Coarsegold, California, experienced a bizarre broad daylight ghost sighting in the Madeira County Mountains on Wednesday, July 21st, 2021.

Thank you, Kevin.

Today, Madera County supervisors proclaim September as National Library Card Sign-Up Month.

It comes in honor and celebration of the 125th anniversary of the Madera County Library.

You'll now be having an exhibit showcasing newspaper articles of the library's history and the city during that time.

Madera County Library became the first county free library in the state of California.

We were the groundbreakers in that area.

The library will also have a free concert and open house this Saturday at 4 p.m. at the main library to celebrate its anniversary.

A look at Guillermo's new line of salsas and where he took taste testing to a new level.

It's a for-profit firm, but their funding is taken from contracts with individual counties for public defense services.

So they're the main provider and conflict provider in Madera County.

They also provide a significant portion of conflict services in Merced and Fresno counties.

I know most of your listeners will be familiar with what that means, but if anyone isn't, every public defense system needs a way to handle cases when there's a conflict of interest.

But what we were able to do in this report is dig in a little bit deeper into what are some of the consequences of these enormously high caseloads.

How are these high caseloads actually affecting clients' cases? And we were able to do this actually by grabbing court data from a number of different counties and coding it to identify which are the cases with court-appointed attorneys and which are those with privately retained attorneys, and then being able to do some comparisons.

And what we found in some of the counties that Josh was just speaking about that have egregious caseload numbers was, you know, for instance, in Madera County, we had a sample of almost 1,500 cases from 2023.

And privately retained attorneys were filing motions 85% more often than these flat fee court appointed attorneys.

The sheriff's office that I worked for at the time, uh, received a, what we call a dealer's record of sale.

One of our records clerks brought back to us a, a file card and said, "You know, this, this guy just tried to buy a gun and his record was expunged, but I could see th- through the blackout that he was involved in a murder in Madera County some years ago."

Affectionately known as Big Ed, the 25-year-old, 6 foot 9 inch, 280 pound Edmund Kemper was a regular fixture at cops' bar, the Jury Room.

He would, uh, come down to a local watering hole that us police officers would go to after work and, uh, hang out and talk with us.