Tunoa Meo got 25 years to life Friday for stabbing his wife to death in Santa Rosa. The district attorney’s office says Proposition 57 credits cut that to about 15 — a claim a state appeals court has rejected for murder.
Author: Roger Coryell
Roger Coryell reports on water, local government and the wine business across Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino and Lake counties. He edited the Sonoma County Gazette until its closing in 2026, and his reporting has appeared through Bay City News and Local News Matters, The Mendocino Voice and the Sebastopol Times. Reach him at roger@rogercoryell.com or 707-394-2642.
Sonoma County’s earliest harvest in decades begins
Sonoma County’s 2026 winegrape harvest began July 16, nearly two weeks earlier than any start the county’s growers association has documented. The crop is light, and growers say that is the point.
A fire hydrant struck by a bus sprays water over Main Street in St. Helena. The city released the photo with its July 19 advisory on the resulting discolored water. (Courtesy City of St. Helena)
Grand jury flagged the pipes in St. Helena. Then a bus hit a hydrant
A Napa County civil grand jury said in June that decades of sediment in the St. Helena water mains had never been assessed and had no repair plan. Twenty-four days later, a bus hit a hydrant.
Trees killed by wildfire still stand above the regrowth near Middletown, in the heart of the 2015 Valley Fire burn area. (Roger Coryell, June 7, 2026)
Lake County lost more than a thousand homes to fire. Nobody will say how many came back.
Lake County gained thousands of residents and lost more than a thousand homes since 2010, nearly all in the 2015 Valley Fire. Eleven years on, no agency will say how many burned homes came back.