Palouse: Town looks for answers in teen’s suicide

Protestors question task force about alleged drug den

Nearly two dozen Palouse residents rallied in front of what they believe to be a drug den sanctioned by the Quad Cities Drug Task Force on West Mohr Street last weekend.

Task force officials and residents of the home have both denied that accusation, saying the protestors were taking out their sadness over the suicide of 16-year-old Dylan Mayhan-Treese on residents of the house.

Banging signs and wooden sticks on the ground and yelling “time to move out” to the residents inside, the protestors said the Mohr Street residents are a danger to the neighborhood because they have acted as informants against dangerous drug dealers.

“I’m worried that some of the people they narc’d on will retaliate and we’ll have drive-by shootings here,” said protestor Pete Hertz, who lives a block away from the Mohr Street house.

The residents of the house, Craig Neiman, his daugher, Alexandra Neiman and Craig Neiman’s girlfriend, who asked not to be identified in this story, called 911 during the protest, saying they felt threatened. Craig Neiman’s girlfriend owns the house.

“We were all hiding inside our bedroom,” Craig Neiman said in an interview with the Gazette in his home Tuesday.

Criticism of the residents of the Mohr Street house was prompted by the Oct. 23 death of 16-year-old Dylan Mayhan-Treese. Mayhan-Treese was a friend of Alexendra Neiman, and residents speculated drugs from the house contributed to his death.

“Dylan did not do drugs here,” said Neiman’s girlfriend. “He was a pill-popper and he got it from his parents.”

That the drugs came from his home was confirmed Tuesday when Whitman County Coroner Pete Martin officially declared Mayhan-Treese’s death a suicide.

Final results of a toxicology examination showed Mayhan-Treese had high levels of prescription drugs morphine and amitiriptyline in his system, which resulted in respiratory failure.

Martin said the drugs had been prescribed to a member of Mayhan-Treese’s family and were taken from his home.

His mother, Cindi Mayhan, wrote in an e-mail to the Gazette last Friday that Dylan’s death was caused by his infatuation with Alexandra Neiman, and was not due to drugs from the Neiman home.

“One has nothing to do with the other,” she wrote.

That erases the believed connection between his death and the Neiman home, said Sheriff Brett Myers.

“We don’t like that house,” said Sheriff Myers. “But in this particular case, they’re not the ones that killed Dylan.”

Palouse Mayor Michael Echanove said during Saturday’s protest he was fairly certain the Neiman house had no connection with the death of Mayhan-Treese.

The efforts to drive the Neimans out of their home, he said, were part of a larger goal of ridding Palouse of crime.

“It’s like a big pot of stew,” he said. “You can’t just pick out the carrots or the potatoes. It’s all part of the recipe.”

Many at the protest criticized the Quad Cities Task Force.

Prosecutor Denis Tracy told the Palouse City Council at its Nov. 9 meeting that the task force had prosecuted “big fish” based on information from residents of the house.

Protestors alleged the task force knew the Neimans dealt drugs and kept them in their Mohr Street house in order to lure larger drug traffickers, or the “big fish,” to Palouse to arrest them.

Even the Palouse police department expressed suspicion in an interview Friday that potential charges against the Neimans had been dropped or lessened in exchange for information.

“They work very hard at the bigger picture,” said Palouse Police Chief Jerry Neumann. “I would certainly hope that they would just work on putting them away.”

Neumann listed several arrests his department had made at the house, but noted some of those allegations had not been forwarded for prosecution.

The Neimans flatly denied making any deals with the task force.

“They see the police come to our house and arrest people out front, and we don’t go away. So they think we’re narcs,” said Craig Neiman.

Sheriff Myers pointed to four arrests made at the house this year. One resulted in a drug dealer, Kenneth Krause, being convicted on federal charges and sentenced to 17 years in prison.

Most recently, three associates of the Neimans were arrested for possession of methamphetamine and prescription narcotics with intent to distribute.

One of those, Gregory Early, 51, Deer Park, is in jail on a $100,000 bond until a Dec. 13 trial after he was arrested in a vehicle behind the Neimans’ home Oct. 25. Early had been the subject of a four-month investigation by the task force.

“There’s cops here all the time because of drug dealers,” said neighbor Kathy Wilson. “I’m worried about my grandkids who live next door.”

Sheriff Myers, who acts as the head of the multi-agency task force, said tips from the Neimans were crucial in those cases.

“If we had made any buys or had any evidence that they were selling drugs to school kids, we would tag them so hard, and we would ram them so hard, they wouldn’t know what hit them,” Myers said.

Often times, the task force pays informants for credible information, said Myers, but the agency would not pay to keep up a house as a “spiderweb.”

“Sometimes the bad guys provide us information,” he said.

He added that, though the task force has received information from the Neimans, agents have never had evidence of them selling drugs.

“We have never located drugs on a dealer level inside that house,” said Myers.

“We have to work with the facts and the facts we have,” said Myers. “We can’t just make up a case to make the people in Palouse happy.”

Craig Neiman’s girlfriend said she knows several people that are infamous among drug agents on the Palouse. It is because of those connections, she said, that dealers like Krause and others have been arrested at their home.

“Our house has been labeled a drug house for a long time,” said Craig Neiman. “If it was, we wouldn’t be here. If it was, Brett Myers would have shut it down and thrown us in jail a long, long time ago.”

Without that solid evidence, said Myers, the task force has no way to force the Neimans out of their house.

“She owns the house,” he said. “She’s a homeowner, and she has rights. And we can’t force her out of her house without solid charges.”

Several times a day, the Neimans said, cars drive by honking their horns as they pass the house. During the Gazette interview Tuesday, the sound of a blaring car horn came from a passing red station wagon.

And the protestors plan to keep up their efforts. They plan to return next Saturday morning.

“We’re going to be here probably every day,” said neighbor Kathy Wilson. “We’ve got their attention.”

Committee lauds cops for investigation of teen’s disappearance

By Jeslyn Lemke, Gazette Reporter

A Palouse city council committee has publicly approved the Palouse Police Department’s handling of the runaway case of Dylan Mayhan-Treese. The 16-year Palouse youth was found dead Oct. 23, 13 days after his father reported him as a runaway.

County Coroner Pete Martin has ruled the teenager’s death was a suicide, caused from an overdose of prescription medication taken from his family, according to the coroner’s report released Tuesday.

A report of the review by the committee was read at the Nov. 9 council meeting. The review affirmed the work of the department and encouraged anyone with formal complaints to come forward.

The only point of contention on the case was police chief Jerry Neumann didn’t have a runaway form to be filled out when he initially responded to the dispatcher about Mayhan-Treese missing Oct. 11.

The teenager was found dead under the end of the W. Church Street bridge in north Palouse. The coroner determined the day of his death was Oct. 11, the same day he was reported missing.

In two meetings following Mayhan-Treese’s death, the city’s police, fire and safety committee questioned the police chief extensively on how his department acted in the 13 days Mayhan-Treese was missing.

There are three city council members on the committee; Rick Wekenman, Connie Newman and Jeff Snook.

Wekenman said upon reviewing the step-by-step investigation of the department that he had full confidence in its work.

“The majority of the council has confidence in Jerry and his department. And the committee, with myself as chairman, has confidence in his handling of what transpired,” Wekenman said.

Council member Newman said she received two phone calls from citizens criticizing the department.

“That’s really unfair for people to ask, ‘Why didn’t you do this? Why didn’t you do that?’ None of this would have changed where he [Dylan] was that day,” said Neumann.

In a sit-down interview with the Gazette Nov. 5, the police chief detailed the steps his department took the day Mayhan-Treese went missing. Neumann also played recordings of the series of phone calls he made with the Whitcom dispatch that day.

A dispatcher from Whitcom called him the morning of Oct. 11 to ask if he had filed a runaway report.

The dispatcher had already taken identifying information from Dave Mahan, the father of the 16-year-old. Neumann, on the phone with the dispatcher, said he did not know what a runaway form was and asked for one to be faxed to his office.

Whitcom didn’t have the form either. Dave Mayhan ended up driving to the sheriff’s office in Colfax and filling out the runaway form with the county. Neumann asked Whitcom to send out a broadcast message to all surrounding counties alerting them of a missing youth.

Deputy Sheriff Randy Zehm, also a member of the Palouse city council, also asked Whitcom to send out a runaway broadcast.

Whitcom did not send out a broadcast.

An Amber Alert is a nationally recognized signal put out by law enforcement on a missing child that has been abducted. Because Mayhan-Treese was not believed to have been abducted or in danger of serious harm or death, his situation didn’t qualify for an Amber Alert.

“Would the Amber Alert have found him under the bridge?” Chief Neumann asked the Gazette.

Zehm spoke on the issue of the police investigation at the Oct. 28 meeting but could not be reached for comment by press time.

When asked about the department’s lack of a runaway form, Wekenman said the committee did not find that to be a major issue.

“The dispatcher didn’t know anything about that form either, if you recall. I just don’t see that the form played into it that much,” Wekenman said.

Spokesman for the Spokane County sheriff’s office Dave Reagan said his office could handle upward of 30 runaway calls a month. Standard procedure is to fill out a runaway form and, if the child’s situation is believed to be dangerous, the officers in the area are alerted of the situation. This is largely the extent to which a county officer will go, Reagan said.

“That’s about as much as happens. A runaway is not a crime in the state of Washington,” Reagan said.

Council member Newman also listened extensively to the police department’s recollection of their handling of the case. Newman said she thought the department had done very well, particularly since Mayhan-Treese was for a time believed to be in Pullman, outside the jurisdiction of the Palouse police.

“I don’t know what more we could have done,” Newman said.

As far as the police chief not knowing about the runaway form, Newman said she did not think it was crucial.