by Dave Waddell
Myra Micalizio didn’t live to achieve the baptism she so desired.
Instead, the unarmed Micalizio was killed with stunning swiftness in a barrage of bullets from two Butte County sheriff’s deputies responding to what started as a trespassing complaint last April 26 in Palermo. In her 56th year of a life that had no history of violence, Micalizio was accused of trying to back her vehicle into a deputy she had encountered only seconds earlier.
A mere 15 to 20 seconds elapsed from the moment deputies confronted the apparently delusional Micalizio to when they fired their pistols at her. According to a Sheriff’s Department statement issued the day after the killing, Micalizio, after being yelled at by deputy Lair “to stop and show her hands,” got in her car and backed it toward him “at a high rate of speed.”