MENDOCINO CO., 7/24/26 — Sheriff’s deputies serving a search warrant at an illegal cannabis grow this week near Covelo arrested one armed man and found nearly 10,000 marijuana plants and the banned pesticide carbofuran, while a second armed man fled with what the sheriff described as a modified assault rifle, Mendocino County Sheriff Matt Kendall said.
Deputies encountered the two men as they served the warrant, Kendall said in a statement posted Thursday to the sheriff’s office Facebook page. One ran and eluded capture. The second, also armed, was taken into custody without injury although deputies “had to work hard to convince him to give up peacefully,” the sheriff wrote.
Kendall did not name the man who was arrested. However, jail intake records show that Mario Caballero, 53, of Covelo, was booked into the Mendocino County Jail at 4:11 p.m. Thursday on charges matching that account: felony cultivation of marijuana and illegal diversion of water, felony possession of an assault weapon, a felony count of being armed with a firearm in the commission of a felony, and a misdemeanor count of possession of marijuana for sale. The records list the sheriff’s office as the arresting agency and give an offense date of Thursday. Caballero remained in custody Friday; the booking record lists no bail.
The raid was one of several warrant services deputies carried out across the county this week. Sheriff’s media logs show deputies serving warrants on Hulls Valley Road near Covelo on Wednesday and Thursday mornings. Kendall described a broader pattern of “serious crime with violence and continued environmental degradation” at illegal grow sites. “Sadly these things we are seeing are becoming the rule, not the exception,” he wrote.
The site held nearly 10,000 marijuana plants, along with firearms, water diversions and illegal pesticides including carbofuran, the sheriff said. The sheriff’s office said it is working with environmental scientists to assess the damage and would release a fuller account “as soon as we are able.”
Carbofuran is a highly toxic carbamate insecticide that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency effectively banned in 2009, when it revoked the residue tolerances that had allowed the chemical on food crops. A single granule can kill a bird, and the pesticide has been used to poison wildlife in the United States, Canada and Britain.
The chemical has turned up repeatedly at illegal cannabis grows in California. Mourad Gabriel, an ecologist with the Integral Ecology Research Center, found carbofuran at 72% of the grow sites his team sampled in 2017, up from 15% in 2012. The containers are typically labeled in Spanish, Gabriel has said, and the chemical is smuggled in from Mexico.
Editor’s Note: On July 25, the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office’s confirmed that Mario Caballero was the arrested party and that the other suspected armed subject was not located or apprehended. The carbofuran was identified in the field, and Mendocino County Environmental Health took possession of the hazardous substance. The Voice will continue following this story.
Who would want to buy their marijuana from these guys if it was cultivated using Carbofuran? That stuff will kill ya. Talk about maybe getting your weed from an approved source, not because of price or just to be on the up and up, but because hey, you don’t want to die from it.
Thank you Mendocino County Sherrifs Department. Anyone who cares about environmental issues has to appreciate this. Furidan and Monitor and others found at these grow sites are not to be taken lightly.
These are cartel and gang members no doubt. Growing poisoned cannabis without any care of who gets sick from smoking it! Between the huge legal farms that have their own distribution networks and are too big to fail and the criminal growers who don’t pay taxes and fees, the small honest farms have gone broke! Sad indeed.
Mendo County they know of at least let’s just say 20 large grows they drive right past him and all I have to do is snip the gate drive down the driveway. Chop the plants leave go to the next one and the next one and the next one and a couple of days they would wipe out half of the greater valley and then the process that would diminish future grows of destructiveness slowly so mom and Pops would pop up problem solved, but that wouldn’t allow them to get their huge grants to spend on soda pop and triple time pay for the fat boys to sit around half a fucking day drinking soda pop and swapping lies, basically spending 3/4 of the time driving sitting and bullshitting. We all know what they’ve been doing it for 40 fucking years so quit with the bullshit about the giant problem the problem is lack of law-enforcement, allowing certain people without scruples to flourish. What the fuck am I paying taxes for?
Because there are law enforcement that are getting kick backs doesn’t take much to figure that one out it’s been going on for years. It’s bullshit. Pretty sad Mendocino County is a joke anymore.