Army veteran says Riverside sheriff wrongly raided his legal cannabis grow on tribal land

A cannabis grower and former Army Green Beret has sued the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, saying deputies illegally raided his farm in late 2022 on Torres Martinez tribal land near Mecca.

Preston McCormick, the grower, said his business is located on reservation property and was licensed through the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, to whom he paid rent and taxes. Federally recognized American Indian tribes are considered sovereign nations with different regulatory frameworks applying to cannabis cultivation. The tribe did not respond to The Desert Sun's request for comment.

McCormick is demanding at least $10 million in the case to cover the damage wreaked by about 100 county deputies and a heavily armed SWAT team destroying a crop near harvest, along with most of his agricultural infrastructure. He's also alleging his home, which is located on the same property, was set fire to the day after the incident, resulting in more loss of personal property.

The Operation Desert Storm veteran said he was handcuffed for hours as the Dec. 7 raid unfolded and that the deputies appeared to throw a large pizza party on his property, as he found about 70 trashed pizza boxes and, strangely, several department radios after the celebration. McCormick has not been charged with any crimes and declined to comment for this story beyond what is written in his legal complaint.

McCormick's lawyer, Gregory Morrow, wrote that his client had provided a sheriff's department employee at the Thermal Station with proof he was legally permitted to grow cannabis on the property weeks before the raid. The complaint alleges that when tribal administrators came to the scene of the raid and later continued questioning the basis for it, Sheriff Chad Bianco's department maintained they have legal authority to enforce local ordinances on federally-recognized Indian land.

Neither the sheriff's department or a lawyer cited in the complaint as representing the tribe responded to The Desert Sun's requests for comment.

The legal complaint claims the department seized a safe from a tribal office on the property containing about $300,000 cash. It's unclear whether that money was returned, as the sheriff's department, the tribe and McCormick would not respond to questions.

The tribe has been involved in legal cannabis cultivation for about a decade and was among the first in the Coachella Valley to do so after the U.S. Department of Justice issued legal guidelines for such operations, according to previous reporting by The Desert Sun.

McCormick is from Banning, attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and served in the U.S. Army. He was in the U.S. special forces and was deployed during the Gulf War. He's owned several business ventures since, and his latest foray into cultivating cannabis was permitted by the tribe in September 2022. The complaint says McCormick paid the tribe approximately $60,000 in monthly rent and a 17% tax on sales. And the tribe is said to have operated its own office on the property related to the cannabis industry.

McCormick did not identify the exact location of his land in the complaint, but The Desert Sun used information about his tribal permit to determine there is a related agricultural project. The complaint includes two Bureau of Indian Affairs tract numbers that correspond with parcels in the eastern Coachella Valley with a large number of greenhouses on them, according to satellite imagery and Riverside County Clerk records. The parcels are actively held by the Torres Martinez tribe in trust. California generally legalized the use and cultivation of cannabis in 2016, and the U.S. Office of the Attorney General had previously issued a memo discouraging federal enforcement of cannabis laws in states where it had been legalized.

A pre-dawn raid

The legal issue most central to the case, however, is what if any legal authority the county sheriff's department had to raid a business on sovereign tribal land. McCormick's complaint alleges it had none, and knew it.

The business owner said he went to the sheriff's Thermal Station in November 2022, gave a clerk there documents that showed the tribe permitted his farm and asked to speak to a sergeant on duty, but was declined a meeting. The visit was prompted by the department's raid of another nearby farm, not believed to be on tribal land, during which a police helicopter appeared to survey McCormick's land.

Weeks later, at about 4:30 a.m., Imperial Irrigation District cut the power to McCormick's property and more than 100 deputies stormed in. The scene is described as chaotic in the filing with the police "dressed in flak jackets and body armor, carrying assault rifles and other highly lethal weapons designed primarily for military use, operating and deploying and directing military armored vehicles."

McCormick said he immediately informed the raid's leaders that his business was legal and on sovereign land but was spurned and handcuffed. At one point, tribal officials are said to have given the deputies copies of notarized documents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs showing the parcels were tribal and out of the sheriff's jurisdiction, but they too were ignored.

McCormick was eventually released, and no charges have been filed against him in the more than a year since.

He was released after being interrogated, and when he returned to the property he found rampant destruction and the left pizza boxes, under which were several department radios and phones. Deputies returned soon after to retrieve the equipment they left. In all, more than $10 million in damage was tolled, McCormick claims, water and electricity had been cut, and his home caught fire the next day, destroying even more of his belongings. He filed suit in December in the United States District Court alleging assault, battery, damages to his business, civil rights violations and training failures at the sheriff's department.

It's not the first destructive raid related to the department's cannabis enforcement that has led to a civil suit.

An elderly couple in Lake Elsinore won about $136,000 after suing the department for similar damages. Deputies raided their two homes in August 2021, believing their low electricity consumption indicated they were using the residences as illegal grow houses. The department was wrong. The couple simply didn't use that much power.

Deputies broke into their residences, destroyed property and rummaged through their personal effects. The searches were illegal, as no search warrants permitting them were produced during the case, according to reporting by The Press-Enterprise.

McCormick's joins about a dozen federal suits filed against Bianco's department over the last year alleging civil rights violations, most relating to the deaths of incarcerated people in the county's jails. California Attorney General Rob Bonta launched an investigation of Bianco's department last year in connection with a spike of in-custody deaths and use of force. It's still ongoing.

Christopher Damien covers public safety and the criminal justice system. He can be reached at christopher.damien@desertsun.com or follow him at @chris_a_damien.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Army vet says California cops wrongly raided his legal marijuana grow