Jerry Garcia’s marijuana pipe takes a long, strange trip and ends up in a Marin County antique shop.
SAN FRANCISCO — At first, Jeff Hochschild and Benjy Chavarria said they knew exactly where they were going. They were going to San Francisco. Then they said they were going to Marin County. Now they’re saying they’re going to Australia.
“There’s been a lot of interesting twists and turns along the way,” said Hochschild, a former computer science student at UC Berkeley, with the goal of selling to a friend in Australia who wants a replica of what he thinks was a gold-plated smoking pipe that he said belonged to “Goldie” — the name, he says, that the Grateful Dead founder gave to the pipe.
Hochschild and Chavarria, who is retired, were planning to stop by the Chateau Marmont hotel on the outskirts of San Francisco to look for a pipe and to meet a friend who was interested in buying it, Chavarria said.
But Hochschild and Chavarria said they didn’t make it. Not because they were arrested by San Francisco police officers, as they say. But rather because they were arrested by police in Marin County, in Northern California.
Their arrests of Dec. 20 are detailed in a criminal complaint filed Monday in Marin County Circuit Court. The complaint was filed under the name David J. Leister, which is the name of a San Francisco man who was arrested and charged last week with possessing, trying to sell and delivering marijuana and having an illegal gun.
In the complaint, Deputy District Attorney John H. Yaxley charged both Hochschild and Chavarria with possession and delivery of marijuana and possession of a controlled substance. He charged them both with possession of one or more contraband weapons, possession of a firearm while illegally in possession of drugs, possession of a firearm with a obliterated serial number and possession of a short-barreled or shotguns shotgun.
As to the marijuana and gun charges, Yaxley