Deputies kill Jose Penaloza-Soto in Mines Road marijuana raid
Sheriff's deputies shot dead 28-year-old Jose Penaloza-Soto while scouting a marijuana farm in the hills near Mines Road in eastern Santa Clara County on 21 July 2010. The landscaper had been guarding an 18,000-plant farm and was holding a pellet gun the deputies mistook for a rifle.
🇺🇸 N3 Cattle Ranch off Mines Road, eastern Santa Clara County · California, United States
Three sheriff’s deputies shot dead Jose Penaloza-Soto, 28, while scouting a
marijuana farm in the hills near Mines Road on the eastern edge of Santa Clara
County on the morning of 21 July 2010.[1]Deputies from the Santa Clara and
Alameda county sheriff’s departments were combing the area in a marijuana
eradication operation when the shooting happened at about 11 a.m., and sheriff’s
spokesman Sgt. Rick Sung said the Santa Clara deputies were believed to have
fired the shots.[1]No officers were injured, and the district attorney’s
office assigned two investigators to monitor the killing.[1]
Penaloza-Soto, a landscaper from East Palo Alto, had been guarding an illegal
18,000-plant farm in the Livermore hills.[2]The weapon he brandished was a
pellet gun, which deputies said he refused to drop when ordered.[3][2]After
the shooting the sheriff’s department suspended wilderness eradication missions
until the investigation was complete.[3]
Case data
Every number and detail the sources state, with the sources that state it.
The outlets place the farm differently, near Mines Road on the county border, in the Livermore hills and near Morgan Hill, and this report uses the Mines Road location the sheriff's office gave on the day.
The opened sources do not say how many plants, if any, were destroyed in this operation.
No photograph of the raid with a recoverable direct image address was found in the opened sources.
Two armed suspects entered a marijuana dispensary on Nadeau Street in Florence-Graham on the evening of 8 October 2026 and exchanged gunfire with an employee, 33-year-old Martin Gudines, who was pronounced dead at the scene. The suspects fled, and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Homicide Bureau appealed for information.
Josepha Littlewolf Basurto, 31, was found shot dead in a pickup at an illegal marijuana grow outside Covelo on 9 July 2026. By 24 July investigators had arrested three men, including two brothers and their father, and were still seeking a 17-year-old charged with homicide.
Mexican farmworker Jaime Alanís García died on 12 July 2025, two days after falling about 30 feet from a greenhouse during a federal immigration raid on the licensed Glass House Farms cannabis farm near Camarillo. DHS said he was neither in custody nor pursued; his family filed a federal claim alleging an illegal search and excessive force, and Mexico weighed its own legal action.
Mendocino County deputies responding to a 911 hang-up near Covelo on 14 May 2025 found one man fatally shot on Hulls Valley Road, two others wounded, firearms and cartridge casings, and a blood trail leading to a large illegal cannabis grow with hoop houses that investigators linked to a drug-trafficking organization.
