◼ Fight over supplies led to Kneeland grow shooting
Court documents claim that 28-year-old Mikal Xylon Wilde shot two men tending his Kneeland marijuana garden in anger when he found the two had left the grow to make a phone call after he told them he'd no longer provide them with food.
According to a statement of probable cause for search warrants in the case, three men had been staying on the Mountain View Road property to tend the pot grow, for which they would be paid $10,000 each for three months of work. About a week before the Aug. 25 shooting, Wilde came to the site to inform the workers that he could no longer provide food for them as he had been. He also couldn't afford to run a water truck to water the plants, and it would now have to be done by hand, according to the statement, which cites one worker as the source of the information.
Two of the men “did not like this,” and wanted to be paid for the work they'd done and to leave.
On Aug. 25, they went to the Kneeland Airport to call someone to pick them up, the statement reads. Later that day, Wilde came to the property and got into an argument with the two men who had protested, and said he was mad that they had left the property. Wilde left, then came back, driving up to a travel trailer on the property where the two men were standing outside. The other man was inside the trailer, according to the documents.
Wilde pulled out a revolver and fired six shots, the man who was inside the trailer told deputies, and the other two ran. Wilde ran after them, and 20 minutes later, the man in the trailer heard three shots. The man in the trailer hid in the woods the remainder of the night, the statement said, and saw Wilde driving along the roads in his truck, shining a spotlight into the woods. The next morning, the man contacted a jogger, who led deputies to him.
At about the same time on the morning of Aug. 26, apparently without knowledge of the shooting, deputies visited Wilde's Greenwood Heights home, then went on to the Kneeland property on Mountain View Road. They were investigating the growing operation that was spotted in early July. A deputy used a PG&E key to get through a Humboldt Redwood Co. gate that would allow them to access a road leading to the Ashland Ranch property. The deputies saw a photo of two men and a woman on a gate along with a “newspaper-type article” and medical marijuana information, according to the statement. They then left.
The Humboldt County Sheriff's Office Drug Enforcement Unit had been investigating the expansive marijuana grow for more than a month before the shooting.
According to the court documents, the garden was spotted by helicopter on July 5 during a search for pot grows. Investigators learned that the grow was occurring on 10 rural parcels totaling 663 acres owned by Ashland Ranch LLC, of which Wilde is apparently a principal owner. The land had been bought by Ashland Ranch earlier this year for $1.5 million, according to the statement.... more
