Travis Mendes gave Ray Christie a goat that was "too sick"; did Sheriff Honsal brush off photos,videos, complaints about weak, sick cattle at auctions for years? HCSO, former DA Maggie Fleming, Adrian Kamada, Travis Mendes pursued a prosecution for 5 years that ultimately resulted in dismissal

 

This is part 2 from the post I did yesterday on the second amended complaint filed yesterday in Ray Christie's federal lawsuit against County of Humboldt, HCSO deputy and CALFire employee Travis Mendes, former Deputy DA and current Deputy Public Defender Adrian Kamada and Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal Does 1-10. 

I published emails referenced in this filing in April 2026.

From pages 1 - 4 of the SAC:

"4. Defendants’ own files confirm that they were aware of all of these facts. In early August 2018, days before Ray’s preliminary hearing, Deputy Mendes himself gave Ray a goat from the Sheriff’s Office work farm that he admitted was “too sick.”1 In fact, that goat died that same day, even though a veterinarian had examined it weeks earlier, when it was in Deputy Mendes’ custody, and found it healthy. In contemporaneous emails, the prosecutors acknowledged that the episode “reinforces the defendant’s story line—Christie buys (takes in) the sick animals from others and does what he can to help them, and that it hurts us in terms ofcredibility for Dep. Mendes.”

2 They resolved to dismiss felony counts against Christie in order to “remove Dep. Mendes as a witness” and to proceed only on charges they could prove “without Mendes.”

3 Knowing all of this, Defendants prosecuted Ray for five more years. Defendants targeted Ray for prosecution despite their knowledge of his innocence.

For example, Deputy Mendes knew Ray was innocent because Deputy Mendes was himself part of the very trade in sick and injured animals he used to brand Ray an abuser. Week after week at the Humboldt Auction Yard, witnesses saw Deputy Mendes work the pens like a ranch hand, encouraging and helping to move weak, sick, lame, and non-ambulatory animals through the sale, knowing full well that Ray would be there to buy them. Deputy Mendes even brought skinny, failing animals to the Humboldt Auction Yard for sale. This includes the goat cited above, as well as pigs so emaciated that several died in the auction pens on the day of sale. Deputy Mendes, not to be dissuaded, told the auction staff the pigs should be sold anyways while Ray sat waiting as a buyer. Deputy Mendes thus knew, better than anyone, that the sick and subpar condition of the animals in Ray’s herds was the product of other ranchers’ and farmers’ operations in Humboldt County, not evidence that Ray abused anything. The goat and pig incidents were not unique; they were how Deputy Mendes operated. And Defendants knew it. At Ray’s August 2018 preliminary hearing, the District Attorney’s Office stood up in open court and dismissed several felony animalcruelty counts, conceding on the record that it could no longer rely on Deputy Mendes as a witness because this was the same deputy “who then would allow a sick goat to go into the hands of thedefendant.”

4 Sheriff Honsal knew it too. For years, ranchers had sent him photographs and video and implored him personally to address the sick, skinny, lame, and weak cattle being run through the auction by other Humboldt County ranchers and farmers, the very animals everyone knew Ray bought. Sheriff Honsal brushed them aside, telling one complainant, who Sheriff Honsal knew was a friend of Ray’s, “Good luck my friend.”

6. The gulf between how Defendants treated Ray and how they treated the other ranchers and farmers actually bringing sick, skinny, lame, and weak animals to auction shows that they never believed Ray was an animal abuser. For years, Defendants looked past documented, and in some instances admitted, animal abuse by established ranchers and dairies, most notably Alexandre Family Farm, whose mistreatment of cattle the USDA later confirmed. Defendants also looked past the sick, injured, and non-ambulatory cattle run through the Humboldt Auction Yard every week in plain view of the Livestock Deputies. Those operators were never investigated, arrested, or charged, despite Defendants’ full knowledge that those operators were the source of the sick, injured, and non-ambulatory animals. Had Defendants genuinely believed that these animals’ condition was evidence of a crime, they would have pursued the operators who sold them. They did not. Ray alone was singled out. Defendants intentionally treated Ray differently from every similarly situated operator in Humboldt County, with no rational basis for doing so, and pursued the prosecution of Ray for the purpose of denying him the equal protection of the laws. Their choice to spare every comparable operator—and in the case of Deputy Mendes, assisting them with the sale of their mistreated cattle at auction—while relentlessly targeting Ray confirms that the investigation and prosecution were undertaken in bad faith, without probable cause, and for a purpose the law forbids.

7. In December 2023, after the state court suppressed the fruits of a second unlawful raid and permitted Ray to expose Deputy Mendes’ evidence-handling and false testimony, theDistrict Attorney dismissed, without a conviction, every felony charge. The remaining misdemeanor convictions were later set aside and that action dismissed."

Excerpts from the three pages posted above:

Deputy Mendes cited the presence of dead cattle as evidence of animal neglect or abuse. But he omitted the material information that this was an unfortunate norm in the HumboldtCounty cattle industry.

The best way to dispose of cattle carcasses is to send them to a rendering plant, where the animals can be safely processed into hides, tallow, grease, and meal by-products. But, there are no such rendering plants in Humboldt County. None have existed more than 20 years. 

And there are no other rendering plants nearby. The closest ones are in Sacramento and Petaluma, which are both nearly 300 miles away over mountainous roads, or in Portland, over 400 miles away. It is cost prohibitive and realistically impossible to transport cattle carcasses over that distance on a regular basis before the carcasses deteriorate to the point they cannot be used. As a result, cattle ranchers like Ray have no choice but to make “dead piles” on their properties or bury the carcasses as best they can. In addition, the particularly long and muddy winters of Humboldt County make it so that it is difficult to bury, or even move, the animal carcasses weighing thousands of pounds out of the mud. Thus, in the winter—including the months leading up the March 2018 raid—ranchers may have to leave dead cattle where they are until spring. 

73. The community knew this. And Deputy Mendes and Sheriff Honsal knew this. 

Deputy Mendes stated that “to my knowledge, the county does not have any means of removal or storage for that many carcasses. Addinionally [sic], i know that Humboldt county does not have a carcasse [sic] disposal factory anymore.”41 But Deputy Mendes intentionally or recklesslyomitted from his affidavits this material information about the lack of rendering plants and thepervasiveness of cattle carcasses on ranches in Humboldt."

There is so much in this over 70 page filing but as I said, I am not posting the entire document. People can go pay to view or donload the document.

It is only going to piss off and make me a bigger target from those at 825 Fifth street who already have an issue with any independent, real reporting that is not PR. It will infuriate the extra help HCSO deputies who are Travis Mendes' buds. They know who they are.