GILROY — The sky turned red over the wooded ravine as the sun rose Thursday.
Doug Tollis stood just behind the yellow police tape with a sense of expectation and dread. Would this, could this be the resting place of Sierra LaMar? The official search for the 15-year-old who disappeared on her way to a bus stop near Morgan Hill ended a year ago, but Tollis and his team of volunteers have never stopped.
“As much as I go out and search and scout and look, I always feel that sometimes we’re walking right by her,” said Tollis, 59, wearing his tattered fluorescent green search vest with Sierra’s picture on the back and her initials on the front.
As the sky lightened, news came out of the tangled brush where PG&E crews had discovered the remains: It couldn’t be Sierra. The skull had a gold-capped tooth.
The mystery of this body, which was so decomposed that sheriff’s deputies couldn’t determine if it was that of a man or woman, may take weeks or more to resolve. But no other name was on the lips of the small crowd of reporters and deputies who gathered Thursday morning.
No name resonates like Sierra LaMar.
Over the years, other missing persons have captured intense interest, including 12-year-old Polly Klaas, who was abducted during a sleepover in her own house in 1993 by killer Richard Allen Davis, who led police to her body two months later; and 7-year-old Xiana Fairchild, who was abducted walking to school from Vallejo in 1999 and whose remains were found 14 months later in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Curtis Dean Anderson was convicted of her murder.
Michaela Garecht, of Hayward, has been missing since she was abducted from a grocery store parking lot 27 years ago, as has Amber Swartz Garcia, of Pinole, who was 7 years old in 1988 when she was kidnapped while jumping rope in her front yard.
Still a mystery is the fate of Jeanine Harms, 42, who vanished after a night out in Campbell in 2001.
As much attention as those cases received and as dedicated as volunteers in those cases were, no effort has quite matched the search for Sierra LaMar. While the number of volunteers has dropped from hundreds to a group of about a dozen or more, they continue to search the hillsides and gullies of Santa Clara and San Benito counties each weekend. Tollis, a Morgan Hill carpenter, has been part of hundreds of searches since Sierra disappeared in March 2012 and still scouts the region a couple of times a week. He didn’t know Sierra’s family but became one of the many strangers who felt compelled by compassion to help.
Marc Klaas, the father of Polly, says the commitment among volunteers is unprecedented — and he would know. He’s been involved in more than 300 searches over the past 13 years.
“I’ve never experienced anything like it,” Klaas said Thursday of the search for Sierra. “Why is that? It’s hard to pinpoint. It’s the culture of the Bay Area. It’s a great community. It’s a very pretty girl who was breaking nobody’s rules. And it’s a dedication to finding the truth.”
One of the most frustrating aspects of the case is that Antolin Garcia-Torres, the man who lived in a Morgan Hill mobile home park with his mother and is accused of abducting and killing Sierra, won’t cooperate with police. If he knows where she is, he isn’t telling. His murder trial is scheduled for April 25, but it’s easier to prosecute with a body than without.
Prosecutors generally go to scenes of potential homicides. But it didn’t go without notice that deputy district attorney David Boyd, who is prosecuting the Garcia-Torres case and is in charge of the cold case unit, came to the scene Thursday morning.
A PG&E crew checking on power lines Wednesday afternoon uncovered the skeleton of the person with the gold-capped tooth while trudging through the dense brush, according to Santa Clara County sheriff’s Sgt. James Jensen.
“It’s too early to tell if it’s a homicide or suicide,” Jensen said.
And that’s all that could be said — nothing about how long the bones had been there or about the person’s youth, family, loved ones, hobbies. No one pushed against the police tape shouting out another name.
It’s not as though the remains were discovered deep in the mountains or at the bottom of a reservoir. They were found near the intersection of a well-traveled road on the way to Gavilan College — in the ravine near the intersection of Castro Valley Road and the southern tip of Santa Teresa Boulevard, just a half-mile west of Highway 101. Searchers for Sierra have covered this terrain before, Tollis said, and from the looks of a graded dirt road that runs beside the ravine, farmers have clearly used it to tend the neighboring orchard.
He would like to think that had his team been there more recently, now that they are more seasoned and know what to look for, they might have found it. After all this time, he said, they’re not just looking for Sierra LaMar.
Just last month, he and other volunteers joined the search for Kyle Myrick, 28, who disappeared Jan. 22 from the motorcycle shop in San Jose where he worked. His co-worker was arrested before the body was found a week later in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Tollis and his team searched for four days and were just 10 miles away when the body was found.
“Sierra keeps us out there because maybe we’ll help another family,” Tollis said. “If we bring someone else home, that’s more families we can bring to rest.”
There’s something special about Sierra LaMar and the people who search for her, Klaas said. “Generally you need a family member to be there prompting on people and advocating for their child,” he said.
Sierra’s parents, Marlene and Steve LaMar, were fixtures at the search center in Morgan Hill until it closed last March. But Tollis, who has a grown daughter, and his team keep in touch with the family and remain motivated.
“Sometimes you just get emotional. I imagine, God, if that was my kid, I don’t think I’d ever get over it,” Tollis said. “I promised God, Steve and Marlene that I’m here until we bring her home. If it takes 10, 20 years, I’m going to continue to do this.”
Contact Julia Prodis Sulek at 408-278-3409. Follow her at Twitter.com/juliasulek.
