Killings Send Shudder of Fear Through Wine Country Communities

Carol Morehouse moved to the peaceful Sonoma Valley less than a year ago with her husband and teen-age son to escape the “rat race” of San Francisco.

So she was as shocked and fearful as anyone in this tiny wine country village when she heard Friday that a man had killed five people and was still at large, described by authorities as armed and “extremely dangerous.”

“People normally feel very secure, very safe here,” Morehouse said as she rang up a sale where she works at the the Secret Garden crafts boutique on state Highway 12. “This really is the kind of place where many people still don’t lock their doors. So when something like this happens, it’s really upsetting.”

If the killings and manhunt did not bring life to a standstill here, they disrupted it by stunning local residents and tourists and sending chills through many who knew the victims.

Roadside Discussions

Small knots of people stood on roadsides discussing the news as police helicopters hovered overhead. Cars from the California Highway Patrol and the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department crisscrossed the valley’s tree-lined roads, passing places with names like Oak Hill Farm and Sunny Slope Ranch.

At Dunbar Elementary School, which backs up against the Grand Cru Vineyards, site of one of the slayings, school personnel took precautions to safeguard the more than 300 children who began arriving for class Friday morning just as sheriff’s deputies were beginning to investigate the killings.

The children were allowed outside for their morning recess, but by noon, with the killer still at large and memories of January’s schoolyard massacre in Stockton still fresh, the principal ordered the children indoors. The afternoon kindergarten was canceled lest the 30 children who attend that session be forced to wait on the streets for the school bus.

“We tend to think this kind of thing doesn’t happen in a community such as ours,” said Dunbar Principal Rosemary Haver. “Yet it does happen. Times are changing, and this is just one more confirmation that they are.”

PTA President Cherry Hastings, whose 7-year-old daughter attends Dunbar, said the collection of small towns in the Valley of the Moon, as some call it here, form a tight-knit community in which neighbors still know and care for one another.

One mother bringing her child to school Friday morning lived next door to the victim who was shot at the winery, Hasting said. The man has a young child and newborn baby, she said.

“We’re thinking about what we can do for the family,” Hastings said.

Some feared that a place known mainly for its bountiful wineries might be scarred with the mark of the grisly string of murders. But no one was quite ready to put the tragedy into perspective as long as there was a killer on the loose. Nerves were taut, and rumors spread from neighbor to neighbor, shopkeeper to customer.

At 3 p.m. Friday, three loud pops--perhaps a vehicle backfiring, but they sounded like gunshots--echoed across the valley not far from the school. A sheriff’s deputy posted there quickly repositioned his patrol car and scanned the horizon with binoculars. Parents rushed several children from the parking lot into the school and shut the doors.

Suspicious Vehicle

A few minutes later, a Pepsi deliveryman arrived and said he thought he had just seen a car matching the description of the gunman’s vehicle. Sitting beside the car was a Latino man staring into the hills, the deliveryman said. A teacher called the 911 emergency line to report the sighting.

But hours later, the killer still had not been captured. As word, and hope, spread that he might have left the area, residents began to feel more secure.

“We’re not panicking,” Hastings said. “What’s uppermost in our minds is how we can stick together and help each other.”