SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — On Monday, Santa Cruz Harbor Patrol shared the moments they say they found 27-year old Austin Medeiros stealing a sail boat on Sunday afternoon.
Harbor Patrol Officer David Hill described his initial reaction as confused and said, “We’re like, ‘Whose boat is that?’ and my supervisor’s like, ‘That’s one of our boats, that’s one of our impounded boats. What’s someone doing on it?'”
“We weren’t sure if it was going to be a rescue or what was going on, we just knew it was our boat,” added Officer Parker Guy.
With it being a windy day, officers said they were concerned for his safety and their initial goal was only to send help.
“They got underway in the patrol boat. Three officers on the patrol boat and went out into the channel to make contact with him, really for safety reasons because it was a potential rescue,” Harbor Master Blake Anderson said.
But as soon as they approached Medeiros, officers said they quickly realized something wasn’t right.
“The guy was acting pretty erratic, he was jumping around on the boat, reaching around his pockets,” Guy said. “We were trying to talk to him and get him onto our boat, he was just freaking out a little bit and wasn’t really listening to what we were saying.”
They said Medeiros then tried running back into the cabin area of the boat but officers were able to grab him and pull him onto their boat.
“He gave up pretty quickly. He says ‘I give up I give up’ and then he’s a little hard to comprehend but one key thing he said was there’s a loaded gun on board,” Hill said.
After docking the boats, officers searched Medeiros and checked his records.
Harbor Patrol officers said they found a loaded gun, 29 grams of psychedelic mushrooms along with other items. In addition, they learned Medeiros is wanted for murder in Humboldt County.
“We found out the history that he had a warrant for homicide so that’s when things ramped up a little bit,” Hill said.
A chaotic series of events, the harbor master said he’s never seen but praised his patrol officers for preventing what could’ve been a worse outcome.
“The conditions yesterday were not good, so that would have put other people in danger trying to go rescue him,” Anderson said. “When you think about it, this could have really been a tragedy. Fortunately our officers they had great intuition.”
Humboldt County sheriff’s investigators believe Medeiros killed 28-year old Emily Lobba in a home in Kneeland, California, on April 3.
Medeiros is being held in the Santa Cruz County Jail. He will be extradited to Humboldt County on charges of murder, evading a peace officer, assault, battery and possession of a controlled substance.
His bail has been set at $1 million.