POT'S AN EASY CROP, FARMS EASY TARGETS

As Marijuana-Growing Rises in the Central Valley, Robberies and
Shootings Follow.

The father was clearly worried.

Behind him, his son was tossing medical marijuana plants into a truck
- - part of a hasty move out of this small farm town after a deadly shooting.

The week before, on a mid-September night about 11:30 p.m., Robert
Craven had gotten a call from his son, who lives a half-mile away
down a country road. The son said his neighbors, who also grew
medical marijuana, were being robbed. There were four gunmen.

"I flew over there locked and loaded, there was already an ambulance
coming down the road," said Craven, 45, a pig farmer and Little League coach.

The son had gone next-door armed with a handgun. One of the gunmen
grabbed him from behind and the son fired over his shoulder,
according to police reports. Authorities deemed the shooting
self-defense. He killed a 17-year-old suspected gang member.

Now he's on the run from threats of retaliation.

It's harvest season in California's Central Valley, and that includes
medical marijuana. Pot-growing used to be more the domain of
free-thinking, freely-puffing places such as Humboldt County along
the state's northern coast. But in recent years, with some legal
cover, this conservative, agricultural valley has sprouted a new
favorite crop and a new crop of troubles.

"There's so much of it that we can't even get a handle on the
quantity," said Capt. Jose Flores of the Fresno County Sheriff's Department.

"We're the No. 1 agricultural valley in the world. Then you add this
recession where there are people who know how to grow things who are
desperate to augment their livelihood, unclear laws that allow
growing marijuana, doctors who will write a prescription for
anything, and for the past three years it's been open season on
marijuana-growing in our rural setting," he said. "We're a very
fertile valley."

Medical marijuana cards might shield growers from law enforcement,
but not from robbery. In the past month in the Central Valley there
have been at least five confrontations with growers, two of them
fatal. In one Fresno incident, a woman in her 70s used a machete to
ward off two thieves. One of the thieves fired a round that wounded
an 82-year-old man who lived in the home.

Citing the Valley violence, Fresno County's Board of Supervisors on
Sept. 14 passed an emergency ban on outdoor medical marijuana cultivation.

Proposition 19, an initiative on the November ballot, would legalize
non-medical marijuana in California and allow it to be regulated and
taxed. A Public Policy Institute of California poll released Thursday
showed majorities in the San Francisco Bay Area and much of Southern
California support Prop. 19, while a majority in the Central Valley do not.

In the Lindsay shooting, police arrested two men on suspicion of
robbery and kidnapping. A third is wanted for questioning.

Craven thought medical marijuana cards protected his 22-year-old son
and his son's friends. They all had plants, they all had
prescriptions (his son's was for migraine headaches). Craven didn't
much like their pot-smoking, but they were grown men and he'd been
most worried about them getting in trouble with the law. He hadn't
thought of robbers.

"I mean, why that house?" he said. "You're going to have trouble
finding a place around here that doesn't have a grow."

Across the street, Maria Sanchez, a grandmother, had a medical card.
Her squat, showy pot plant grew among her rose bushes.

"I don't smoke it. I use it in tea. I use the leaves and just a tiny
bit of bud. I have really bad arthritis," she said.

Her son, Socorro Sanchez, 31, also had a prescription and his own plants.

"I make edibles, like rice crispy treats," he said. "You make
marijuana butter and when a recipe calls for oil you replace it with
the butter. It's for my epilepsy."

Around the bend, behind a two-story barn-style home was at least a
half-acre of marijuana in a partly open shed next to fields of
pumpkins, flowers, tomatoes, corn, jalapeA os and cilantro.

Up and down country roads near Lindsay, at the base of the Sierra
foothills in Tulare County, a soft breeze carried the distinctive
odor of budding marijuana plants, as if the smell of a rock concert
had been distilled in herbal tea, then wafted over earth and
fertilizer. Tulare County requires marijuana to be cultivated within
a protective structure, but this seems to be often loosely
interpreted as arbors or hedges. It's easier and cheaper to grow
marijuana outside in the sunshine.

In Fresno, at an outdoor marijuana garden next to Brown's Floral and
across the street from the city's oldest park, the scent was even stronger.

Ten-foot-tall plants were easily visible over a ragged wooden fence.
A posted sign with a drawing of a gun read: "Never mind the dog.
Beware the owner."

"When the wind kicks up, boy do you smell it then," said Reuben
Tolentino, who works in the flower shop. "On breezy days we used to
say, 'Smells likes trouble.' "

Trouble came Sept. 8 when their neighbor Phayvahn Dydouangphan, 47,
shot 40-year-old Stanley Wallace, who later died.

Police say Dydouangphan heard his dogs bark about 6:30 a.m. and found
six or seven men in his yard, uprooting plants. He fired a shotgun at
them. As they tried to drive away, he fired again, hitting Wallace in
the head. Dydouangphan will stand trial on a murder charge.

"I don't know how you could not have known something like this was
going to happen," said 70-year-old flower shop owner Donna Brown. "It
was like someone put candy in my driveway and told all the kids,
'It's not for you.'"

Brown is a fixture in the neighborhood. She lets homeless friends and
others who are down-and-out park on her property. She also extended
kindness to the police officer who watched over the marijuana
next-door after the shooting.

"He was there for two days, so I took him over a sandwich and a Coke.
He said, 'Thank you. You just don't know how terrible it is for a cop
to have to guard a pot farm.'"

Brown says she's voting in favor of Proposition 19, which critics say
could increase marijuana consumption and further confuse legalities
by clashing with federal law.

"How could it get any more insane than it already is?" Brown said. "A
man died over a plant, next to my floral shop. Just legalize it already."

Richard Hanni, a 49-year-old homeless man who does chores around the
shop, said the marijuana garden next-door - which has earned the
corner the nickname "flower-pot" - is atrocious. Not just for the
deadly violence or for being right across the street from a city park
where a choo-choo train makes it way through Storyland, but for the
state of the feathery, spindly plants.

"There was no need to let them get that tall. Those buds should be
three times bigger," he said. "Now, last year, they had a real
nice-looking garden. Mostly pumpkins. People did steal a few
pumpkins. But the difference is they knew how to grow those right and
no one got killed."