Arrested for refusing to wear a mask. The charge was trespassing, but it was really about a woman’s refusal to wear a mask while shopping in the Port Townsend Food Co-op. With the end of the statewide masking mandate approaching, we’ve been asked, “What happened to that woman who was arrested in the Co-op last year?”
On April 5, 2021, Rachelle Merle was engaged in shopping in the Co-op, where she is a member and co-owner, and was told by management to put on a mask or leave. She went about her business without a mask. The Co-op called in Port Townsend police who arrested, handcuffed and charged her with trespassing. See, “The Arrest of Rachelle Merle: The Food Co-op on Trial.”
Merle was also “trespassed” from the Co-op for one year, meaning the Co-op revoked this member’s rights to shop in the store and threatened to have her arrested again if she stepped inside the store during the next twelve months. I have written previously how this violated Merle’s rights as a co-owner.
Behind the scenes, the Co-op told the County Prosecutor’s Office it did not want to press the charges or see the case go to trial. See my prior articles on this turn of events.
Merle never did go to trial. The charges against her were dismissed December 23, 2021. You didn’t read about this in The Leader, which never even covered the arrest, though thousands of people came to Port Townsend Free Press to read and comment about it on our site or social media.
The dismissal is “with prejudice,” meaning charges cannot be refiled without violating Merle’s right against double jeopardy — a citizen’s right, basically, not to have to defend the same charges more than once. The charges were dismissed as part of a plea bargain.
As Jefferson County Prosecutor James Kennedy explained in his statement to the Free Press (reproduced verbatim, below), “Ms. Merle entered into a Continuation for Dismissal (or CFD) with the Prosecutor’s Office. It is essentially a diversion. The way it works is that if the defendant abides by certain conditions and stays out of trouble for a certain length of time the Prosecutor’s Office will move to dismiss the case once the time period has elapsed.”
He added, “The time period for this diversion was 6 months…and the defendant fully complied with it.” Merle, a mother of three, had no prior criminal record whatsoever. Her choices that day contained no element of criminal intent whatsoever.
Merle made no secret of her reasons for incurring and accepting the arrest. She is opposed to the mask mandate and strongly believed it was a violation of individual rights and not justified by the best medical science. She has repeatedly in social media posts warned against creeping totalitarianism wrapped in the COVID mandates from the governor and Jefferson County Public Health Officer.
Merle raised thousands of dollars to hire criminal defense attorney Calebjon Vandenbos, who has taken on several of these types of cases. He provided the following comments to Port Townsend Free Press:
Vandenbos:
Rachelle asked me to send some thoughts along to you about her case and its significance. In my opinion legal cases don’t have much of a chance of being important at this point. Right now, the debate is with hearts and minds, a cultural and value disagreement, not legal.
That being said, this case is an example of what makes this cultural conflict particularly difficult. Private and public forces can suppress dissent without ideological or legal accountability and this case was a good example. The formal criminal trespass case against Ms. Merle was pretty straightforward — the store told her to leave and she didn’t. There wasn’t much to fight there from a purely ‘legal’ perspective. That’s why the case resolved the way it did.
But the real reason Ms. Merle was arrested was because of her dissent. Regardless of if the science is agreed, the ‘right’ response to COVID 19 depends on a person’s values and beliefs. But the coop and the government are able to side-step these issues: the store points to the dubious mask mandate, and the government points to the store’s decision to expel. A confrontation over the real issues — discrimination based on ideology and the legality of the mandates — is avoided. It’s a problem, and there is no apparent solution at this point.
Here are our questions to the County Prosecutor and his full response (it has always been my practice to publish verbatim responses to written questions):
PTFP: Do you have any comment on the case against Rachelle Burt Merle, involving the charge of trespassing for being inside the PT Food Co-op without a mask and refusing to leave? Also, why were the charges dismissed and under what terms?
Prosecuting Attorney Kennedy: Ms. Merle entered into a Continuation for Dismissal (or CFD) with the Prosecutor’s Office. It is essentially a diversion. The way it works is that if the defendant abides by certain conditions and stays out of trouble for a certain length of time the Prosecutor’s Office will move to dismiss the case once the time period has elapsed. If the defendant fails to abide by the conditions then the prosecution can move to revoke the agreement. If the court agrees, the court will then review the discovery to determine if the crime alleged was in fact committed.
These types of diversions are not uncommon when we are working with cases where the offense is relatively minor and the defendant does not have significant criminal history.
In this case, the defendant had zero criminal history that we are aware of, additionally there were some other facts and circumstances that were unique to the case (e.g. the victim being a co-op, which the defendant is a member) that led us to believe that a diversion was the proper way to adjudicate the case. The time period for this diversion was 6 months (this can vary from case to case) and the defendant fully complied with it. Consistent with our agreement we dismissed the case.
So I think I answered your second question without answering your first. To answer your first – The prosecution and the defendant came to a resolution that would allow the defendant to avoid having a criminal conviction by way of a diversion agreement. The defendant fully complied with the agreement so the prosecution, in fulfillment of its end of the bargain, moved to dismissed the case.
You mentioned this in your email, but I think it is important to reiterate, what was charged was Criminal Trespassing, not a violation of any public health order. The issue of masking is what lead to the charged offense, but was not the offense itself.
Get Out of Clallam and Jefferson Counties if you’re worried about OMG! Omicron! Counties with the least restrictions seem to be doing the best during the Omicron “surge.” Clallam County, struggling under Dr. Allison Berry’s exclusion of the unvaccinated from dining and drinking establishments and a strict masking requirement for indoor public spaces, has one of the highest rates in the state. The Wild East, those counties where they look at you funny if you wear a mask into a bar, are beating not only Clallam, but also Jefferson County in the 14-day Covid rate matchup.
Rates per 100,000 Population of Cases, Hospitalizations and Deaths by County 1/11/22
Only King, Pierce, Snohomish, and Thurston County are experiencing a higher rate of positive cases. King County, which like Jefferson and Clallam also bars the unvaccinated from dining or drinking establishments (but allows negative test exemption), has the highest 14-day rate in the state, at 2209.
All those draconian Dr. Berry orders, the burden on restaurant staff, the loss of business for food and drink service businesses, the societal divisions and stresses don’t seem to be making much difference—at least not in the right direction.
Ferry County, where just about no one wears masks and where a vaccine passport requirement would earn the Public Health Officer a ride out of town on a rail, has a 14-day rate of only 594. Other “Wild East” counties also show rates lower than Clallam: Adams, Asotin, Benton, Chelan, Clark, Columbia, Cowlitz, Douglas, Franklin, Garfield, Grant, Kittitas, Klickitat, Lewis, Lewis, Okanogan, Pend Oreille, Skamania, Spokane, Stevens, Walla Walla, Whitman, even Yakima. On the western edge of the state, Grays Harbor, Island, Pacific, San Juan, Kitsap (where Jefferson and Clallam’s unvaxxed go to dine out), Mason and Wahkiakum are doing better than Berry’s locked-down Clallam.
I have been traveling around Washington since June 2020 reporting here on how most of the state is getting along just fine and is operating close to normal. But when you re-enter Berryland, you feel the curtain coming down. The restrictions are supposed to but are not producing superior public health results to what we are seeing in counties where the Public Health Officers and Board of Health are not imposing a kind of medical apartheid on the populace.
What of Jefferson you ask? Jefferson County is also ruled by Berry’s dictates and is doing no better than much of the state. Jefferson’s 14-day rate, as of this writing, was 1010. This is worse than 16 counties (all of them “Red” conservative counties with loose Covid rules and enforcement). Berry’s proof-of-vaccine requirement is not paying the health dividends that would justify the damage it is doing to businesses and community spirit.
But if you’re really, really, really terrified of OMG! Omicron!—I mean if you’re terrified it is going to kill you—where, oh where can you hide?
The answer is: just about anywhere. Only Yakima and King County are showing anydeaths. Yakima has a whopping 7-day death rate of 0.4 and King’s death rate, despite having the highest case rate, is only 0.1. The marginal death rate is dropping so fast statewide it is pulling down the cumulative death rate for the entire period of the pandemic. That’s what weeks of zero will do.
And if you are still scared silly, take solace in this week’s admission by the Director of the CDC that throughout the pandemic “the overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, were among people who had at least four comorbidities,” something we’ve been pointing out here for a long time. Fatalities occurred in people who were already very, very ill in several ways. Dr. Scott Atlas, the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health care policy at Stanford University, reports that two-third of deaths reported as Covid deaths were in people with six comorbidities.
Clallam County recently reported a Covid-related death. Whether the death was contributed to by the virus or whether the person died from other causes while also having Covid we don’t know. This sad event apparently has not made it yet to the DOH’s data base. The fact that Clallam has had a Covid-related death while counties without Berry’s proof-of-vaccine order have not further undermines the case for her extreme order.
So, relax. Your chances of dying from OMG! Omicron! are pretty much a big goose egg, the number you will find in DOH’s latest table on death rates in Washington counties.
Did They Learn Anything? With the trashed-out Cherry Street Project nowhere near housing its first human occupant, Port Townsend City Council has gone big, very big. Last month they approved the purchase of 14.4 acres next to the first traffic circle at the entrance to the city. They envision an entire neighborhood of subsidized housing. It may have shops. It may have apartments. It may have row homes and townhouses. It may have a plaza. Michelle Sandoval said at a December City Council meeting that she would “love” a plaza, preferably with a Hispanic name.
Plaza Sandoval perhaps?
The former mayor may not get a monument-to-me anytime soon. The City still lacks over $4.2 million for the infrastructure that would open to development all 14.4 acres and perhaps be a meaningful step to extending city utilities to the Glen Cove industrial area. Construction of anything, if Cherry Street is any indication, is a long, long way off. They don’t even know what they will build or who will build it.
But there’s no need to wait to honor Sandoval and her decades of influence over the city’s regulations, taxes and vision—a combination of policies that have contributed greatly to the current housing crisis. There is an edifice available right now that could bear her name. She played a leading role in its entry into our fair town. She was its chief advocate. I’m speaking of the ill-fated, tax dollars-suck of a building called the Carmel House—the heart of the Cherry Street Project. Henceforth, so we not forget, let us recognize this shabby but iconic memorial to ineptitude and dysfunction as Casa Sandoval. In its current state it goes well with the deteriorated condition of most Port Townsend streets, another Sandoval legacy that took years to achieve and will be with taxpayers for many years to come.
Sandoval may be moving on after 20 years of elected power and influence, but taxpayers still have to pay off the $1.4 million indebtedness she and her City Council yes-people incurred. Sandoval the real estate broker will be showing houses in the neighborhood as taxpayers eat the costs of crunching and removing Casa Sandoval. They will be paying the extra charges for toxic materials mitigation inside the same building Sandoval the real estate expert led the charge to buy without ever requesting an inspection.
A Demonstration Project
Mayor Sandoval touted the Cherry Street effort as “a demonstration project.” That was early in the game, back in 2017, when taxpayers were told it would cost only a couple hundred grand and be finished and occupied in the Fall of that year. Projected costs have climbed into the millions. Almost five years later Casa Sandoval remains empty and suffers from vandalism and neglect. It has blighted the neighborhood and is now a safety hazard. Lawyers and insurers would call it “an attractive nuisance.” Kids easily get in there, where city inspectors have found holes in floors and walls large enough someone can fall through. Sometimes people who get into Casa Sandoval launch refrigerators out windows to see if they might fly.
So just what did Mayor Sandoval’s “demonstration project” demonstrate? Are the city councilors who got PT into the Casa Sandoval mess any smarter for the experience? Nope. They have no regrets and proudly declare that if they had it to do over, they wouldn’t do any thing differently.
Denial and Delusion
It’s the December 6, 2021 City Council business meeting. Council is being briefed (click for video) on the possibility of acquiring what is known as the 14.4 acre Evans Vista property. The state Department of Commerce will give them money, more than $1.3 million. With this land, they can do so much more than rehab a modest 70-year old building. They can build an entire neighborhood of affordable and workforce housing. But there’s still that unfinished Cherry Street Project hanging around, what Ariel Speser in her last days on council called “the elephant in the room.”
David Faber, now PT’s mayor, took the white elephant by its ivory tusks.
“I wouldn’t change a single thing about what we did,” David Faber proclaimed. “I am nervous,” he said, about “again” getting “the city significantly involved in a project that doesn’t necessarily have a perfectly clear end project yet—given the status of the Cherry Street project and so forth.” He did not want to get the city involved “in a long-term dragged-out morass.”
But, he would do Cherry Street all over again, the same way, no changes, no regrets.
Pamela Adams, who was in her last month of service on council and who strongly supported the Cherry Street debacle, stood with Faber and declared, “I don’t regret having trucked that, barged that over there.” (Casa Sandoval was barged across the Strait of Juan de Fuca and trucked from a landing next to the Pourhouse to its present hillside above the golf course.)
Ariel Speser, in one of her last meetings, acknowledged, “It is hard to think about this without thinking about the Cherry Street Project.” Ya think? She went on to dismiss the debacle. Failure, she suggested, was to be expected. “It is very rare that you have a successful housing project on the first try.” Since when? Is that a rule-of-thumb for private homebuilders as well as politicians?
Michelle Sandoval was “nervous” but “excited” about getting into another big “affordable” housing project. “We took a risk,” on Cherry Street, she said, “and we got a lot of grief.” (Oy, such a price to pay for wasting millions of dollars and five years in the midst of a housing emergency.) Everybody makes mistakes, she pleaded as if that excused the utter negligence demonstrated by City Council in buying a building without inspection, without a realistic construction estimate, without anyone to do the work—without any plan. This next project, she recognized, is much, much bigger. “It is going to be incredibly expensive.”Buckle up, taxpayers. Like duct tape, your money will be used to fix everything.
But everyone was relieved that “this time,” unlike the implicit “last time,” the city was doing “due diligence.” What exactly is this confidence-inspiring “due diligence” that washes away all sins and failures? Except for confirming compatibility with city zoning, conducting a cultural resources assessment, and snagging enough state funds to pay the asking price, there’s….nothing. The city has merely bought raw land with someone else’s money. It has no plans, no artist conceptions, no number or type of buildings, no street or landscaping schematics, no feasibility study to determine if the units once built can actually be offered and maintained as “affordable” and workforce housing–that magical and all-critical accomplishment known as “penciling out.” There’s no organization that can be held responsible for getting it done (or not), no builder willing and qualified to take on something so big, no reliable statement of projected costs. No money to build the thing.
Just like the Cherry Street Project.
A week after the 12/6/21 discussion, Council voted unanimously to purchase the Evans Vista property for about $1.3 million without any idea of what to do with it.
I will be writing more on the Evans Vista project. It is huge in scope and “incredibly expensive,” as Sandoval admits. This will probably be the largest project ever undertaken by the city. Let me now address those who will say that by doing this I’m trying to stop affordable housing, just as they criticized me for following, predicting and exposing the failures of the Cherry Street Project—er, Casa Sandoval. Port Townsend desperately needs affordable and workforce housing. Casa Sandoval has provided no housing whatsoever. It has absorbed resources and land and been a huge opportunity lost. Barging that building to PT was one of the stupidest things any elected body has done. The result is that the city’s largest housing project has accomplished nothing positive.
It could have been otherwise. That land where the vandalized hulk sits could have been, for instance, a terraced hillside of manufactured homes. Going simple and small, incrementally, being hard-headed, bird-dogging costs and saving money instead of indulging in a grandiose, wasteful gesture—a guilt offering for years of making PT exclusive and expensive—would have helped this city and a good number of workers who can’t afford to live here.
Because it came from the state, money for purchase of the Evans Vista property was free in the eyes of City Council. But that is how they have treated the tax dollars wasted on Casa Sandoval. Every dollar wasted is a dollar that could have but did not accomplish something beneficial.
That old adage about “those who fail to learn the lessons of the past are condemned to repeat them” rings out. City Council appears to have learned nothing. I asked the rhetorical question previously about what Casa Sandoval has demonstrated. Now I propose an answer: it has demonstrated that the City of Port Townsend is very bad at the business of building affordable housing. The cliquish, virtue-signalling, peer pressure-regulated proceedings of City Council have not produced sound decisions. There’s little reason to conclude that things will change under Mayor David “No Regrets” Faber.
The public needs to keep an eagle eye on what happens with the Evans Vista property. We’ll be here, and so will Casa Sandoval.
“Mom! They’re throwing a refrigerator out a window!” Teenagers easily gained entrance to the derelict Carmel House and trashed it. Almost every window has been broken. Furniture, light fixtures, random kitchen utensils, a door and, yes, a refrigerator were hurled through glass. I found shards of glass twenty yards from the building. There is broken glass everywhere. Rainspouts were ripped off and thrown over the fence. Drawers launched through the windows have been claimed by a cat as litter boxes.
Note refrigerator against fence behind cat claiming a new litter box.
A neighbor ran to her own window when her son yelled about a refrigerator going airborne. She saw two teenagers in the act. She has seen teenagers in the derelict building on two to three previous occasions and had called the city. A crew eventually boarded up an open ground floor window and pushed the rear fence closer to the building. That window had been wide open for two years. I had seen evidence that it was being used to access the building. The chain link fencing was never locked tight. There has always been an opening at the rear of the building, conveniently in a blind spot—a spot near the place in the trees with the piles of empty beer cans. Teenagers pulled the fence open and pushed in two large plywood sheets and went to work.
The neighbor (who asked that her name not be used) called the police as the kids rampaged through three floors of the building. The police arrived 40 minutes later and entered the building the same way the kids did. “Come out with your hands up,” the neighbor heard the police shouting. The kids were long gone. The neighbor and I found their fresh footprints in the muddy path leading out the back of the building, through the party site and further up hill.
The front doors have been open to the elements for five years, as if the city and Homeward Bound, the nonprofit that had the project for four of those years, did not care what happened to the building. Now the windows are open and a second level door on the back.
I have been in the process of writing a story on the Cherry Street Project and its lessons for the even larger 14.4 acre “affordable” neighborhood development City Council has bitten off. That article should be out this week. Cherry Street was supposed to be, as then Mayor Michelle Sandoval said in 2017, “a demonstration project.” She and the rest of City Council at the time loaded taxpayers with about $1.4 million in debt, and gave away tens of thousands of dollars in cash and services to a nonprofit that couldn’t even pick up construction trash. The latest cost estimate, as we’ve reported, calls for another $1.8 million just to rehab the old building. Looking at photos taken today, ask yourself, exactly what has the Cherry Street Project demonstrated?
Newly elected Mayor David Faber at a December 6, 2021 meeting said that if he had it all to do over again, he would not have done anything differently. Ponder that attitude, taxpayers, and keep your eyes posted for the upcoming story on “Casa Sandoval.”
A year ago, Jammi Lee Oxford killed herself. On December 17, 2020 she took her life at Morro Bay, California, in the same spot where her mother had committed suicide before her. Jammi had been living in a Chrysler minivan at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds. She fled in terror after her name had been attached to an anonymous letter to the county commissioners. In that letter, she attempted to notify the commissioners about dangerous conditions at the homeless/squatters camp and open-air drug market. Even though the letter had been submitted anonymously, her name (appearing in the email address) was blurted out when it was read aloud during the public comment section of the meeting.
She had wanted the commissioners to know about a drug dealer operating at the Fairgrounds. She reported that the dealer and his associates were “harassing and bullying” others. “Is there anyone out there?” she asked in a plea for help.
At the next meeting she said there was no point trying to hide her identity since her request for anonymity had not been honored. Now she told the commissioners she was fleeing in fear of the drug dealer she had attempted to report to them. “I have nothing more to lose,” she wrote. She related troubling misconduct by this person, whom she called “Brian.” She said he had managed to gain control over the supplies from the Food Bank and had used that control to gain power over people dependent on that food. He had designated himself “camp cook.” She suggested she had been punished, had fallen out of disfavor and had been denied food. “I have gone to bed hungry. He has shown me how cruel he can be.” She told the commissioners that she had been warned he had hired someone to “take care of” her. She said she didn’t run from people, but she was running now in fear for her life.
“Please, I express my concerns in desperate need of this safe place to be without my life being in jeopardy,” she closed.
That is Jammi Lee Oxford in the photo at the head of this article.
Jammi’s daughter is Kristan Sigler. She was recently promoted to E5, Petty Officer Second Class, in the United States Navy. She reached out to ask if the woman I mentioned in a September 9, 2020 story might have been her mother. She was. I remembered the scared, sensitive, fragile woman who told me she just wanted a place to be safe. She was soft spoken, courteous, and damaged. It was obvious to me she had been homeless for a long time and likely had some serious substance abuse issues. I talked to Jammi a second time, when she was drinking straight liquor in the early afternoon. But so were many of the others in cars and tents at the Fairgrounds that bright, sunny August day.
A man who identified himself as Brian told me that for that night’s dinner he was making steak “for everyone.” That apparently included one of his dogs. It ran by with a large steak in its teeth. This man acted like he was in charge and spoke of plans for a larger encampment. At the time, the homeless and transients were limited, with only one or two exceptions, to a single line of tents and run-down vehicles against the fence that separated the Fairgrounds from the apartments on the next property. He waved his hand over the grassy field. “We want five acres,” he told me. And he explained how “we” (he purported to speak for others) effectively became squatters when “we” decided to exploit the Governor’s no-eviction order and stop paying the minimal camp fees they had been paying up to then. He also explained how many of them, like himself, had incomes, such as SSI and veteran’s and retirement benefits. They just weren’t going to be spending any of it on compensating the Fairgrounds for living there and using the bathrooms with endless hot water and showers, the waste hauling service and the electricity they were tapping into through very, very long extension cords snaking across the field.
Ms. Sigler says that her mother fled the Fairgrounds in terror. A severe downward spiral began when her identity as the letter writer was revealed. Jammi asked Kristan to get her a gun. She thought that because her daughter was in the Navy she would have access to a weapon she could give her mother.
Jammi had addiction problems and struggled with mental illness, Ms. Sigler says. She had suffered much abuse and trauma. The shock and terror that hit Jammi when her name was revealed despite signing her letter “Anonymous”… well, it just made everything worse. County Commissioner Greg Brotherton in the meeting when her second letter was read apologized for previously “outing” her, but the damage had been done.
Kristan Sigler will be visiting Port Townsend on the anniversary of Jammi’s death to spend some time at the Fairgrounds. Jammi had sought safety there. It was her last known place of more than itinerant residence before the terror descended and took hold of her life.
The commissioners should have listened to Jammi. The Fairgrounds became a very dangerous place. Twelve days after Jammi committed suicide in Morro Bay, a young woman was found dead outside her RV by the Fairgrounds employee who usually managed families and retirees spending vacation time in the grassy field. There were at least half a dozen other near-death overdoses handled by Port Townsend police and emergency medical personnel. Michael McCutcheon, then a Dove House employee, on Memorial Day weekend 2021 saved a woman from dying when he applied Narcan. One of the dealers who set up operations there—several relocated to the Wild West of the Fairgrounds—would use Narcan on addicts who OD’d in the tents and RVs.
One Port Townsend police officer on social media reported that he had been called out to the Fairgrounds at least a hundred times. Police records for incidents at the Fairgrounds cover nearly a thousand pages. I reported on some of these incidents in “Fairgrounds Police Log.” That story was published the same day Jammi killed herself.
There were assaults, thefts, fights, mental health crises every week. Neighbors were harassed, stalked and some were assaulted. Crime spiked in surrounding blocks. Neighbors lived in fear. One couple watched as a drunken Fairgrounds squatter fought and injured a police officer in their driveway.
The Fairgrounds is county property under lease to the Fairgrounds Association. Jammi’s wasn’t the only letter to the commissioners pleading with them to act. Others who lived in the tents and RVs wrote and called them regularly. Neighbors wrote them almost every week. The commissioners would wring their hands and talk about “meeting with both sides.” But they did nothing to stop the unfolding tragedy on property they ultimately control. They dumped all the problems on Port Townsend police. An overdose death didn’t shock them into action.
If you listen to the 9/8/20 commissioners’ meeting, where commissioner Brotherton apologized to Jammi for “outing” her, you will see that they were rather nonchalant about conditions at the Fairgrounds. They believed the problem would go away when the weather changed. Commissioner Kate Dean was more upset about a pro law enforcement “Back the Blue” event. In none of their meetings where the Fairgrounds was discussed will you find them spurred to act to end the drug dealing, violence and slow suicides underway on land under their jurisdiction. They could have moved in and cleaned things up, seen that the dealers were kicked out, imposed controls on who went in and out and what behaviors would not be tolerated, and provided round-the-clock security.
As it was, the Fairgrounds became the shopping market for local addicts. The woman who almost died (had not McCutcheon saved her) had come to the Fairgrounds from Seattle—a drug tourist who almost ended her travels here. One of the most notorious dealers—someone other than the man Jammi reported to the commissioners—went so far as to declare himself to police as the Fairgrounds camp leader.
Jefferson County Commissioners should have listened to Jammi and acted. They could have prevented a lot of pain and suffering. And death.
Jammi Lee Oxford was born on Christmas day. She would have been 44 this year.
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Other Port Townsend Free Press coverage of the squatters/homeless camp and open-air drug market at the Fairgrounds:
