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Santa Cruz Harbor deputies observed an approximately 26-foot abandoned boat creeping toward the mouth of the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor. (Contributed)By JESSICA YORK | jyork@santacruzsentinel.com | Santa Cruz Sentinel
PUBLISHED: April 12, 2022 at 4:46 a.m. | UPDATED: April 12, 2022 at 5:12 a.m.
SANTA CRUZ — A man caught in the act of allegedly trying to sail away in an abandoned boat is a suspect in a Humboldt County murder, authorities learned this weekend.
Santa Cruz Harbormaster Blake Anderson said his deputies observed an approximately 26-foot abandoned boat creeping toward the mouth of the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor shortly before 4 p.m. When they noticed a man on board, Anderson said, deputies assumed they were responding to a rescue.
“He’s got the sail up and he’s kind of bouncing along the rocks,” Anderson said Monday.
Video surveillance footage released to the Sentinel shows a boat emerging from a dock where it had been stored on the harbor’s western side, across from the public launch, its sail wildly flapping in the wind.
Anderson said Senior Deputy Harbormaster John Haynes, Deputy Harbormaster David Hill and Deputy Harbormaster Parker Guy responded in a patrol boat before the sailboat exited the harbor. The man on board, however, was “immediately confrontational with them.”
“He tried to go back inside the cabin, but they were able to detain and get him onto our patrol boat before he could go back in the cabin,” Anderson said.
The deputies returned with the man in cuffs — later determined to be 27-year-old Austin Medeiros of Warwick, Rhode Island — to the launch ramp, sailboat in tow. There, Santa Cruz police provided backup and searched the boat for a potential accomplice, Anderson said. Inside the cabin, officers found a loaded stolen firearm and about 29 grams of psychedelic mushrooms, according to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office.
“For our guys to go from rescue mode into ‘OK, this is a potentially dangerous person’ — to switch gears like that and prevent him from going back into the cabin, where there was a loaded gun, that was really good on our guys,” Anderson said.
Officers later learned that Medeiros was wanted on a warrant out of Humboldt County in connection with the April 3 death of 28-year-old Emily Rose May Lobba, of Kneeland. Lobba was found dead by a caregiver arriving for a regularly scheduled appointment at the woman’s home, according to Humboldt County authorities. A man there reportedly attempted to refuse the caregiver access to the property, then allegedly assaulted the caregiver and fled in Lobba’s vehicle. According to the caregiver, the man and Lobba knew each other and had been spending time together in the days prior to this incident, the sheriff’s office wrote in a media release.
Inside the cabin, officers found a loaded stolen firearm and about 29 grams of psychedelic mushrooms. (Contributed)
Medeiros remained held Monday afternoon in Santa Cruz County Jail in lieu of $1 million bail on suspicion of the Humboldt County murder and several related out-of-county charges, as well as local charges of misdemeanor grand theft, felony carrying a stolen loaded firearm and misdemeanor transporting psychedelic mushrooms.
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