The State - News from Oct. 3, 1986

A judge has placed in legal limbo an order giving the Roman Catholic Church a trunk of items that once belonged to Father Damien de Veuster, a candidate for sainthood known as “the leper priest of Molokai.” A Solano County Superior Court granted a 60-day stay after a lawyer said he located heirs to the owner of the trunk, a doctor who attended the missionary priest when he died in 1889. The trunk, stored in the Solano County coroner’s office for 26 years, contains a guava wood walking stick, a hand-carved meerschaum pipe and a shiny black kukui nut watch fob, which had belonged to Father Damien. It also holds a collection of glass-plate negatives taken of the priest while on his deathbed in April, 1889.