Northern Santa Barbara County is rounding out 2025 with an alleged maternal filicide case that’s captured national interest.
It’s a shocking case in which a 9-year-old girl from Vandenberg Village was murdered and left on the side of a remote road in Utah, where she stayed for weeks before being discovered. It’s sad on a number of levels, and the case will play out in earnest starting in January. I’m sure we’ll all be watching.
If the details that have been released about the case aren’t bad enough, armchair “journalists” and “detectives” make it worse. They staked out the mother’s house starting in October when Melodee Buzzard went missing, posting fuzzy videos of Ashlee Buzzard on Facebook, detailing her comings and goings, speculating about what happened to her daughter, who was at her house, why the police hadn’t arrested her yet, and then finally capturing her arrest.
The behavior leans into society’s basest instincts to pry and make a spectacle out of people’s lives in times of tragedy, to gesticulate and speculate about the family, the mother, and everything else until we’re all worked up into a fervor even though we don’t have the details of the case and don’t have any knowledge or relationship with the family. The spectacle will become a conspiracy if we’re not careful, superseding the societal mourning that should take place with wild discussions that prey upon a grieving family and infringe upon their deserved privacy.
I don’t know what these people are going to do now that they don’t need to stalk Ashlee anymore because she’s in jail. Although, there are plenty of videos and posts about Immigration and Customs Enforcement patrolling local neighborhoods, so I guess we can fill the outrage void with those.
Outrage was the name of 2025’s game. Thanks, Donald J. Trump, for the wild ride and the fear that continues to blanket certain Central Coast communities. We don’t know what we’d do without you.
The county is also rounding out the year with some Trump administration news impacting Sable Offshore Corporation’s controversial push to restart the oil pipeline that caused the 2015 Refugio oil spill.
Go ahead, start ‘er up, the administration said at the end of December, after a full year of permit issues, the company ignoring the state’s environmental rules, lawsuits, and being fined millions of dollars by the state’s various agencies.
And the environmental nonprofits lined up, press releases at the ready and lawsuits firing! The Center for Biological Diversity and others sued the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration for wresting jurisdiction of the pipeline from the state and subsequently approving Sable’s restart plan.
The saga will definitely continue into 2026.
As will the battle over federal funding of health care and who gets to receive it. The county is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to the lay offs on the horizon and the inevitable tough choices it will need to make to balance the budget next year.
The potential impacts of Trump’s policies on immigration and the social safety net impact more than just the most vulnerable in our communities. It also impacts the employees who provide those services as well as those who support the infrastructure around providing those services.
The Canary is crossing its claws for 2026. Send outrage to canary@santamarisun.com.
This article appears in January 1 – January 8, 2026.