Part two of two-part series. Read part one here.

Kimberly Slater’s five-year legal saga for pepper-spraying the Richardson Bay harbormaster has now ended. The jury returned not guilty verdicts on all felony counts. 

“My whole perspective in life has changed—there’s more to live for now,” Slater, 34, told me after the trial. 

I watched every minute of the six-day court proceeding, which ended last week. It was a waste of the court’s time and taxpayers’ dime. The Marin County District Attorney’s Office missed the boat by overcharging Slater with three felonies for a single act.

Before handing the case to the jury, Judge Kevin Murphy added the option for jurors to consider lesser charges as an alternative to two of the felonies filed by the Marin County District Attorney. 

The 12-member panel found Slater guilty of the lesser charges: resisting/obstructing a public officer and simple assault. Both are misdemeanors.

Clearly, the jury didn’t buy prosecutor Matthew Jacobs’ version of the July 7, 2020 pepper-spraying incident. He claimed Slater wanted to cause as much harm as she could to Curtis Havel, then-harbormaster of the Richardson Bay Regional Agency (RBRA).

In a nutshell, the RBRA is a local government agency that implements and enforces rules and regulations for Richardson Bay. At the direction of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), a state agency, the RBRA developed and adopted a transition plan in 2020 to clear all vessels from Richardson Bay.

Serving as the harbormaster from 2019 to 2021, Havel testified that he received one week of training. His duties included enforcing the RBRA’s 72-hour limit to anchor in Richardson Bay by citing, seizing and destroying boats. Until he arrived, the RBRA’s rules were rarely enforced. 

Havel also said that when he joined the agency, 190 boats were on Richardson Bay, with 120 unoccupied. First, he began removing marine debris and then moved on to seizing unoccupied boats. 

The other 70 vessels were occupied by mariners who made their homes on the water, commonly known as “anchor-outs.” Slater was among them, dropping anchor in 2013. Many had been on Richardson Bay for decades. 

Either voluntarily or through enforcement, the RBRA’s 2020 transition plan required all of them to leave the bay by a then-unspecified date.

Those circumstances set the events of July 7, 2020 in motion.

During the trial, Charles Dresow, Slater’s defense attorney, never disputed that she pepper-sprayed Havel. Two videos, one captured by Slater and the other by Havel, provided the evidence.

The videos made it clear that Havel silently pulled his boat alongside Slater’s vessel, just inches away, and never announced himself. When he stepped toward her boat, she emptied a bear spray canister in his direction, prompting him to retreat behind his boat’s windscreen. He can be heard coughing for a few seconds and saying the spray got in his eyes.

According to Havel’s testimony, he wanted to toss information about the transition plan into Slater’s cockpit. He purposely approached quietly to avoid interacting with the mariner. A previous verbal encounter with her was “aggressive,” he said, although he gave no details. 

Slater never took the stand. Dresow did not call any witnesses, telling the jury that the prosecutor had not provided evidence to support the charges.

After the verdict, I spoke to two jurors, a man and woman, who asked that their names be withheld. Both indicated they had wanted to hear from Slater. 

“No question she did what she did,” the man said.

The woman felt Dresow had presented strong arguments, calling him brilliant. She explained that when the jury began deliberations, only three people, including her, were against the felony convictions.

“We had lots of questions that the DA didn’t answer during the trial,” she said. “Mostly about the other interaction she [Slater] had with Curtis Havel.”

I asked Slater about it. She said an elderly mariner complained that Havel was harassing her and asked for Slater’s help. As a result, she had words with the harbormaster.

While that situation may have colored her opinion of Havel, it didn’t have anything to do with why she pepper-sprayed him. Bottom-line, he snuck up on her, and she felt scared. 

“I had just logged out of a lesson on Zoom with my piano professor,” said Slater, who was a San Francisco State University student at the time. “When I stood up, the RBRA vessel was toe rail to toe rail with my boat, but I hadn’t even heard a boat motor up.”

“Immediately, my chest tightened, and I started breathing fast,” Slater continued. “Then I grabbed my mace because he was already too close. I waited for him to say something about why he was there. It looked like he was boarding the boat. I didn’t know if he was boarding to throw me off and grab it, or if he was going to assault me. I had no idea. He said nothing.” 

That action by Slater, a young woman who believed she was in harm’s way, resulted in her arrest, felony charges and more than 30 court dates on the matter. She acknowledges the difficulty of the last five years, yet chooses to focus on what she’s learned.

“I know that we have to incorporate the trauma and tragedy that we experience in our lives into our perception of the world and our sense of self,” she said. “I’m doing that.”

She also has goals for the near future. Just one class shy of completing her music composition degree, she plans on going back to college. And Slater, among the last dozen or so people still living on Richardson Bay, hopes to soon move her boat to a marina slip.

Murphy will sentence Slater on the misdemeanor charges on May 14.

Slater’s defense attorney reflects on the case

The mandate that the alphabet agencies [RBRA and BCDC] created to clear the Richardson Bay anchorage caused a dangerous situation for all involved.  

The evidence at trial revealed that the results-oriented enforcement priorities forced an untrained harbormaster into a complex and ever-changing environment he was not prepared to manage. 

My client and the harbormaster are both victims of the alphabet agencies placing their priorities over common sense and humanity. 

This case is the epilogue to the long history of the struggle between the Hill people and the people who live on the water in Sausalito (the haves and have nots). The Hill people have pushed the less fortunate from the flats to the docks, and now they have cleared them from the water. 

It is a sad end to the long story of the artists, outcasts, free thinkers and independent spirits who have lived on Richardson Bay.  

But the ending of the story is also that my client stood up for herself and faced the full weight and power of the government that occurs when their power and mandates are challenged.

— Charles Dresow