Ex-Rohnert Park Officer Found Guilty in Highway 101 Marijuana Seizure Scheme

Former Rohnert Park police officer Joseph Huffaker was found guilty on Friday in San Francisco federal court of six counts, including conspiracy, extortion, falsifying records and impersonating a federal officer to seize marijuana from motorists on Highway 101, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.

The jury deliberated for about 90 minutes before reaching a unanimous verdict. During closing arguments on Friday, prosecutors focused on phone records that placed Huffaker — who illegally stopped motorists to steal their marijuana as part of a conspiracy with other officers — at the scene of one of the suspicious stops.

The defense strategy was to blame Brendon “Jacy” Tatum, Huffaker’s former partner, who testified during the trial, among others. The jury was not swayed.

After the verdict, Huedell Freeman, one of the victims of the seizure scheme, said he had goosebumps. Huffaker is scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 15.

“It does feel like there’s a small measure of justice,” he said. “And I’m gratified that the jury was able to sort through the facts, because there was a lot of obfuscation put up by the defense, which is their job.

“I’m really gratified and feel happy that — finally — justice for the unfairly much-maligned cannabis farmer is finally being served. I mean, they made us out to be rich people that needed to be robbed, and we are not that. We are anything but that.”

Richard Ceballos, Huffaker’s attorney, declined to comment, as did Assistant U.S. Attorney Abraham Fine.

Seven years ago, KQED first reported on a string of allegations from drivers who said Rohnert Park cops, operating far outside the city’s limits, had unlawfully seized hundreds of pounds of cannabis during pretextual traffic stops.

As recreational marijuana became legal in 2018, growers who had operated in the grey area of the medical cannabis market finally felt safe to come forward. Huffaker’s trial promises a rare window into how local and federal officials responded to long-silenced complaints of police corruption.

“This has been a long time coming, and it is a very important case,” said Izaak Schwaiger, a defense and civil rights attorney who filed a lawsuit over the unlawful seizure scheme.

He said taking the case to trial demonstrates “the government’s willingness to start holding people accountable in a real sense — people who were given a free pass for so long precisely because they were cops.”

Shortly after KQED published its investigation in 2018, Tatum resigned. The city moved to terminate Huffaker but later agreed to a settlement, ensuring that an internal affairs investigation into the interdiction team would remain secret, despite a new police transparency law.

The city of Rohnert Park has since paid out more than $1.8 million to settle civil lawsuits over the seizures. A federal grand jury indicted Huffaker and Tatum in September 2021.

Two months later, Tatum pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit extortion under “color of law,” falsifying records in a federal investigation and tax evasion.

Unlike Tatum, Huffaker chose to fight the charges, backed by the police union’s legal defense fund, according to court filings and documents reviewed by KQED.

Over the past four years, Huffaker has gone through at least seven different lawyers, including Chris Shea of Marin, who died unexpectedly just two weeks before Huffaker was set for trial in October 2023. Huffaker’s latest defense attorney, Richard Ceballos of Ferrone Law Group, said he can not comment on his client’s case until after the trial is over. The U.S. attorney’s office also declined to comment.

“There’s always been this gnawing feeling that these guys are still walking free,” said Freeman, who received a settlement from Rohnert Park. “They’ve never done any time for the crime.”

Even with extensive public scrutiny, the lawsuits and a federal indictment, this case continues to present surprises. In February, KQED discovered that Sonoma County Code Enforcement had busted Tatum for a large indoor marijuana grow on his Santa Rosa property. In March, prosecutors dropped one of the charges against Huffaker. And then in May, a new witness — a coconspirator who said he sold stolen weed on the officers’ behalf — was added to the case.

‘Brady’ cop

One of the key witnesses expected to take the stand is Tatum, whose plea deal includes an agreement to testify against his former partner.

Tatum was the sergeant in charge of Rohnert Park’s interdiction team, which oversaw the seizure of $3.6 million under civil asset forfeiture laws and at least 2.5 tons of marijuana between 2013 and 2018, according to documents obtained and analyzed by KQED.

In 2015, Rohnert Park’s mayor formally recognized Tatum for his drug suppression efforts.

But alongside the apparent success of the interdiction team, complaints about Tatum’s tactics and his credibility began to mount. By 2016, the Sonoma County District Attorney’s office had placed him on its “Brady list” — a list of officers with known integrity issues. When Tatum takes the stand, Ceballos will likely introduce materials from his record to impeach his testimony.

“He’s a habitual liar,” said Schwaiger, who gave the DA evidence of Tatum’s dishonesty, which led to his placement on the list of problem cops. But Schwaiger said that in this case, Tatum’s testimony will be backed up by hard evidence. “So, I don’t think that the case is made or lost on the testimony of any given witness,” he said.

Tatum has spent the past four years out of custody awaiting sentencing, which is currently scheduled for September. While under pretrial supervision, KQED discovered that Tatum was fined by Sonoma County code enforcement in 2024 for a large indoor cannabis grow on his property. Federal officials declined to comment on whether this violated the terms of Tatum’s $100,000 bond agreement.

Proffer admissions

In February 2022, court documents show that Huffaker sat down with the FBI and admitted that he and Tatum had “agreed to extort drivers under color of official right for marijuana in December of 2017, that they committed multiple such extortions, that Defendant expected to receive money from these extortions, and that he knew his acts were criminal.”

Huffaker made these admissions during a proffer interview — part of a plea process in which defendants offer information to the government in exchange for leniency. But in this case, the negotiations “fell apart,” court records show, and Huffaker walked away from the deal.

Senior District Judge Maxine Chesney has allowed the government to use Huffaker’s statements during the proffer interview and to internal affairs as rebuttal evidence.

It is not clear yet if Huffaker will take the stand, but if he does, Schwaiger said these “prior statements” are likely to be introduced.

A last-minute witness

In the final month leading up to trial, prosecutors also introduced a new witness in their case against Huffaker: a man named William Timmins.

Timmins told the FBI that he saw Huffaker with Tatum around Dec. 4, 2017, and that he’d “assisted in unloading and loading of approximately 100 to 200 pounds of marijuana on the side of the highway,” according to court filings.

Timmins also said it was his job to sell the stolen cannabis and that he’d split the proceeds with Tatum, court records show.

The defense filed a motion to exclude Timmins’s testimony, noting that the FBI interviewed Timmins at least four times in the past two years and that his story has changed. It wasn’t until May 2025 that Timmins admitted his involvement in the scheme and told the FBI that he’d seen Huffaker on the side of the road.

The judge will allow Timmins to testify. Court filings indicate he has been granted immunity in exchange for his testimony.

Dropped charge

Another witness long expected to testify for the prosecution is Texas resident Zeke Flatten. Flatten was the first driver to come forward and tell independent journalist Kym Kemp that on Dec. 5, 2017, officers claiming to work for the ATF — the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — stole three pounds of cannabis from him.

As Kemp began to ask around, court records show that Tatum and Huffaker met at Huffaker’s house and used his wife’s computer to draft a press release claiming responsibility for the Dec. 5, 2017, traffic stop. But the incident report details were all wrong: the make and model of the car, the amount of cannabis and even the presence of Tatum.

The press release, written to cover up one incident, actually contained the accurate details of a different seizure and traffic stop that took place on Dec. 18, 2017.

“ They issued a press release after the fact regarding the seizure, but got all of the details wrong because they were unlawfully seizing too many people to keep track of everyone,” Schwaiger said. “It’s like these cops — nobody questioned them.”

From the beginning, Flatten has said that Tatum was not one of the officers who pulled him over. He has said Huffaker was there along with another older white man, both wearing green uniforms without name tags and large “POLICE” insignias. That man has never been identified and Huffaker later claimed he was not a part of Flatten’s stop.

Flatten’s complaints, filed with local, state and federal law enforcement, sparked public scrutiny and the FBI investigation that ultimately led to Tatum and Huffaker’s indictment.

But Flatten’s case is hard to boil down into a tidy story. In March, prosecutors dropped Flatten as a witness and dropped one of the extortion charges initially filed against Huffaker related to the Dec. 5, 2017, stop. At the time, Flatten said he was disappointed he wouldn’t get the chance to face Huffaker in court.

“After this many years and this much time put into it and very much life altering,” Flatten said. “And it’s not like I created something out of the air that didn’t happen. These guys were really doing it.”

Then, in another twist, the defense added Flatten to its witness list in June. In court filings, Ceballos argued that excluding Flatten from the case would confuse the jury. He also claimed that federal prosecutors dropped Flatten because he was a “paid FBI informant,” which hadn’t been disclosed. Flatten said he did work as an undercover informant for the FBI many years ago, but was not working as an informant on Dec. 5, 2017.

Judge Chesney has yet to rule on whether or not Flatten can take the stand.

Brothers in blue?

Court filings show that the federal prosecution plans to focus on a single traffic stop — the one on Dec. 18, 2017, that Huffaker and Tatum conflated with Flatten’s stop on Dec. 5, 2017. However, more than two tons of cannabis were seized during the years that Tatum ran Rohnert Park’s interdiction task force.

Huffaker and Tatum pulled over Freeman on Dec. 29, 2016, and took 47 pounds of cannabis that he had grown legally in Mendocino County, for which he had documentation. The day after the stop, Freeman said he called Rohnert Park and spoke to Sgt. Eric Matzen, who assured him that he’d be able to get his property back.

A few days later, Freeman’s attorney also contacted the city, but the department never returned his property, and his complaints were never investigated.

“I lived in terror for two years after that,” Freeman said. “They bankrupted me.”

Matzen is listed as a witness for the prosecution, along with a handful of other command staff and records personnel from the Rohnert Park Public Safety Department, including former chief Brian Masterson, who retired in the wake of the scandal.

Four other officers took part in cannabis seizures alongside Tatum: Matthew Snodgrass, Nicholas Miller, Chris Snyder and Chris Medina.

Snodgrass is now a lieutenant for Rohnert Park. Snyder and Miller are deputies with the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office. Medina worked for the Burlingame Police Department before returning to Rohnert Park, where he worked until 2021.

Initially, when Huffaker was set to go to trial in 2023, these men were on the prosecution’s witness list, court filings show. Now, if called, they will be witnesses for the defense.

Schwaiger said he hopes the outcome of this case sends the message “ to people who wear the uniform and the badge, that this is not a license to rob, to steal, to kill, to hurt people.”

Freeman said he will be attending the trial and hopes for a guilty verdict.

“ I feel bad about anybody that has to do time, but sometimes people deserve it,” he said. “I mean, they, really, really did incredible damage to a lot of people’s faith in law enforcement.”