I understand from the amount of emails I have received there is high interest in what may have happened Monday evening in Grass Valley that led to someone's death.

To be honest, I don't know it was Monday, or that there was an accident, or that someone was killed.  So, thinks I to myself, I'll ask.

To that end, I made two requests for information from the investigating agency:  the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office.  The troops aren’t allowed to speak to the media (literally), so I emailed Undersheriff Curtis Kull and  Sheriff Ed Kilgore and requested information.

Sure, three days have gone by without any response whatsoever, but I’m willing to cut the SO some slack on this one.  I’m a professional writer, so it doesn’t take me long to write, “We were called to the scene of an accident Monday evening in which a man was tragically killed. Name withheld pending notification of next of kin.”

For me that was easy-peasy, but I spent years and years getting my degree in English.  Kilgore and Kull were formerly not English majors, so perhaps they had to order a Thesaurus to help with the statement and they’re still waiting for said book to arrive.

We must also consider that investigations of this kind can be tricky -- even for former investigators like Kilgore and Kull.  We don’t know what experts had to be called in.

Although it’s true I’ve been on the scene of thousands of traffic accidents, and the responding officers can usually identify a deceased individual immediately, that’s NHP and (in my experience) those guys are especially clever.

We just don’t know what’s going on at the SO.  Too bad they don’t have someone on staff whose job it is to communicate with the community.  Oh, wait …

I think, perhaps,  just possibly, the SO actually has a public information officer.  I believe it’s Undersheriff Kull.  No?

Perhaps Kull is not fully aware of what it means to be the “public information officer”. I think you would agree the term is somewhat vague.

He may be sitting at his computer every morning wondering why people are always emailing him with questions about events that happened in the community involving the sheriff’s office.  He’s probably thinking, “What do I look like?  The SPJ?  Why are people always coming to me for information?”

At any rate, I would suggest patience is in order.  Wait long enough and the gossip will eventually get all over town and  there will be no need for actual facts.