Remembering the victims
The fires that swept the North Bay died down last week, and the task turned to going through the ashes and ruins to identify those who lost their lives. Among the victims were a doctor, a firefighter and a wildlife biologist. Here is a look at who some of
Karen Aycock
Karen Aycock was a quiet woman who lived on Dogwood Drive in the Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa. She was 54 years old and was a timid woman, not much of a people person, said Chad Hinden, who was her friend.
“But she had a big heart,” he said. “If you needed anything, she’d always be there to help you.”
Ms. Aycock was fond of animals, and had several cats that Hinden said meant everything to her. She volunteered for animal rescue groups as well. Hinden, who was Ms. Aycock’s roommate for a while, thinks she might have tried to rescue her animals when the fire approached.
“She wouldn’t leave the house without her animals,” he said.
Hinden had moved to Texas, and when he heard about the fire, he called Ms. Aycock’s house. There was no response. The house was destroyed, and Ms. Aycock’s blue Mustang was still on the street, charred and burned. Ms. Aycock’s remains were found in the bathroom of the house.
Michael Dornbach
Michael Dornbach lived in San Pedro, the port town in Los Angeles County, but he loved to come north to Napa County.
“It was one of his favorite places to be,” said his sister, Laura Dornbach.
He was visiting his sister and members of the family near Calistoga when the fire broke out. He was thinking about buying property up in the hills.
“He loved being on that property up here,” Laura Dornbach said. “He loved looking at the stars at night . ... He loved how clean the mountains were.”
Mr. Dornbach worked most of his life as a longshoreman in San Pedro, but had to retire after an injury. He was 57.
He bought a new truck and drove it up to Calistoga for his visit. He was staying with his nephew, Laura’s son, when the fire approached. Everybody had to leave, but Mr. Dornbach stayed behind to search for the keys to the new truck.
His nephew pleaded with him. “I’m not leaving without my truck,” Michael said. Ordered to evacuate, the others left. Mr. Dornbach was never seen again.
Two days later, Laura Dornbach got a call from a Napa County official who was trying to identify a body they thought might be her brother’s. “Can you tell me the jewelry he wears?” the man asked. “So I said, ‘He wore a gold chain.’ ”
She doesn’t remember much of the rest of the conversation.
“He was such a fragile, stubborn, beautiful man,” she said.
Mike Grabow
Mike Grabow worked in construction and landscaping jobs, but what he really liked was the outdoors.
“He liked hunting and fishing,” said Victor Grabow, his father. “Those were his passions growing up. That’s what he did to get away.”
Victor Grabow said his son was very outgoing. “He developed a lot of friendships over the years. He’d do anything for his friends.”
Mike Grabow was born in Idaho, but moved around a lot. He’d lived in Hawaii, Idaho, the Nevada County town of Grass Valley and finally Santa Rosa, where he lived in his family’s second home, not far from Mark West Springs Road. He was 40 when he died.
“He was the light of everyone’s life,” said a friend, Rachel Ingram. “I don’t know how to put into words how he touched people’s lives without sounding like a cheesy novel. I loved him a lot. I still love him a lot.”
The fire burned his house soon after it started, but it took five days to identify Mr. Grabow’s body.
“It was pretty clear what had happened,” Victor Grabow said. “His truck was still parked in the driveway. He went to bed, and that was it.”
Monte Kirven
Monte Neil Kirven was a wildlife biologist who had a major role in preserving the peregrine falcon, a bird of prey he called “the most spectacular member of our wildlife heritage.”
Mr. Kirven was 81, long retired from the field and laboratory work that earned him a considerable reputation among his peers. He worked for many years for the federal Bureau of Land Management, and when he died, the bureau noted that Mr. Kirven “had dedicated his life to the recovery of the American peregrine falcon.’’
Monte Kirven was born in San Diego and held a doctorate in wildlife biology. In the 1960s, he began a study of the diminishing number of peregrine falcons.
The peregrine falcon is a handsome bird that is among the fastest in the animal kingdom. At one time they were plentiful in Northern California, but their numbers had dropped, so they were listed as an endangered species.
Mr. Kirven and others believed the decline in the falcon population was due to DDT, a pesticide once commonly used for insect control. He and his colleagues believed that the pesticide weakened the falcons’ eggshells, causing them to break before the chicks were hatched. He was one of the scientists who worked to ban the use of DDT.
“His love of the peregrine falcons was amazing,” said Jack Booth, a retired biologist who was Mr. Kirven’s partner on many field trips.
Mr. Kirven worked for many years at the Bureau of Land Management’s district office in Ukiah. He was said to know the location of every peregrine falcon in the Mendocino National Forest. The population got as low as 15 pairs in the 900,000-acre forest.
They seemed to be on the edge of extinction, but the population rebounded.
Mr. Kirven called it “a conservation success of unprecedented magnitude.”
In his retirement, Mr. Kirven lived on Mark West Springs Road in Santa Rosa. He died in his home.
Sally Eaves Lewis
Sally Eaves Lewis was 90 years old and had deep roots in Napa County. Her greatgrandfather John Putnam Jackson, a Civil War veteran — he was a colonel in the Union Army — built the Napa Soda Springs Resort on Soda Canyon Road in 1872.
Her grandparents built a house not far away on Soda Canyon Road. Mrs. Lewis, who was born as Sally Eaves in 1927, spent most of her childhood on Atlas Peak there.
After she married, she and her late husband lived for many years in the Berkeley hills, but her home there was destroyed in the 1991 Tunnel Fire in the East Bay hills that killed 25 people. After that, she made the family home in Napa County her primary residence. She was always wary of fire: A major blaze on Atlas Peak in 1981 came so close that Mrs. Lewis outfitted the house with sprinklers on the roof connected to a reservoir.
Mrs. Lewis had a lifelong fondness for the outdoors. After her husband died in 1958, she took her two daughters, Windermere and Dixie, camping, hunting and fishing.
“She was a tough gal,” said her daughter Windermere Tirados.
Mrs. Lewis was proud of her home. “It was like walking back into the 1920s,” Tirados said. “A special place.”
When she heard of the fire late on Oct. 8, Tirados, her husband, Marlon, and their two sons took off for Mrs. Lewis’ house.
The driveway was sur-
rounded by flames when they arrived, but they smashed through the front gate. It was too late. The house was on fire.
“There was a 20-foot fire tornado column around the patio,” Tirados said.
Veronica McCombs
Veronica McCombs was 67 and died in her home on Mark West Springs Road early on Oct. 9 in the Tubbs Fire. Her family made repeated efforts to come to her home and rescue her, but their efforts were unsuccessful.
Her son, Branden McCombs, read a statement last Sunday. Their lives, he said, were “changed forever” by her death.
They said they were not prepared to share their story. They were deep in mourning.
“She devoted her life to the love and care of our family and her community,” Branden McCombs said. “She was our foundation. As a family we are grieving deeply and she will be missed forever.”
Carmen McReynolds
Carmen McReynolds was a retired physician who rode motorcycles, fired rifles and played classical piano.
“I was always fascinated by her,” said Gabriel Coke, her nephew.
“She was really proud to be a doctor — you could imagine the sexism she encountered as a medical student in the 1950s.” She always stuck up for women, Coke said, and “demanded to be treated equally.”
She was born Carmen Colleen McKinley in Durango, Colo., in 1935. The McKinleys were a medical family. Her father was a doctor and her mother was a nurse.
Dr. McReynolds was raised in Rocky Mountain country, “very much a Western gal,” Coke said. “She always had a pocket knife nearby and could shoot a rifle, but she was very dignified.”
She went to the University of Colorado medical school, was married and divorced and moved to the Bay Area. For many years, she worked as an internal medicine physician at Kaiser Permanente hospitals, including Kaiser’s Oakland campus.
She was in her 60s when she bought a house with Nadine Caligaris, one of her best friends, on Kilarney Circle in the Fountaingrove area of Santa Rosa. Caligaris died in 2005, and Dr. McReynolds had lived alone ever since.
Dr. McReynolds was 82 years old, and a double hip replacement limited her mobility. When the fires swept the area, she was trapped in the garage inside her 1973 Mercedes.
“She was trying to escape, but didn’t make it,” Coke said. “Imagining that kind of terror in the middle of the night is heartbreaking. I wish she could have died more peacefully.”
Dr. McReynolds left her estate to charity.
Garrett Paiz
Garrett Paiz had always dreamed of being firefighter. “That’s what he wanted to do,” said his sister, Cinthia Paiz of Coachella in Riverside County. “He set out to do it, and that’s what he did. I am very proud of him.”
Mr. Paiz was killed just before dawn on Monday when the water truck he was driving in firefighting service drove off the road on the steep Oakville Grade in Napa County. He was 38.
He had been an on-call firefighter in the volunteer fire department in Noel, Mo., a village on the Elk River in the Ozarks.
He had a trucking company there, but was always available to go out of town whenever there was a big fire. His friends used to call him “Taco” because he came to California often during wildfire season and returned with tales of the taco stands in the West.
“Garrett was always smiling, always laughing, always the guy who put some light on a bad situation,” said Brandon Barrett, chief of Noel’s volunteer fire department. “Anytime he was assigned a task, he was a get-in-and-get-it-done kind of guy. It was never a dull moment with him.”
Garrett Paiz was born in Indio, not far from Palm Springs in Riverside County, and grew up on a ranch with chickens, pigs and coyotes, his sister said. He studied agriculture at a local community college and worked as a cowboy, trucker and firefighter.
He often used his Facebook page for posts about firefighting. “We always run in when your luck runs out,” was one recent post.
When he died, he was one of 10,000 men and women fighting the Wine Country and North Bay fires this month.
Mr. Paiz left behind a wife, Bobbi, of Noel, Mo., and a daughter, Terri Ann of Tehachapi (Kern County), along with his parents, Judi and Armando Paiz of Coachella; his sister, Cinthia; and a brother, Carlos Paiz of Coachella.
Lynne Powell
Lynne Anderson Powell and her husband, George, walked their four working border collie dogs on the trails near their home on the Blue Ridge Trail in Santa Rosa every morning without fail.
“That’s one of the ways we kept in condition,” George Powell said. They took their last walk together with the dogs two weeks ago Sunday.
Late that night, or early Monday morning, George Powell woke to the smell of smoke in the air. “There seems to be something going on,” he told his wife. “We need to be ready to go.”
But Mrs. Powell didn’t think much of his idea. “We’ve smelled this before,” he remembered her saying. And she went back to sleep.
Not long afterward, George Powell was awakened by a neighbor’s car horn, looked out the window and saw a wall of fire. This time, they knew it was time to get out.
She grabbed one of the dogs and a laptop and drove away in her car. Her husband stayed behind for about 10 minutes to pick up the other three dogs. “I didn’t care if I died with them,” he said. “It was OK because I thought my wife was out. I thought she was safe.“
They had agreed on an escape route: down the street to Mark West Springs Road, turn right and get out of the fire zone.
But Mrs. Powell, who had gone first, never made it to Mark West Springs Road. Apparently blinded by smoke and flames, she drove off the side of the road and down a ravine. That’s where they found her body.
“What I didn’t know is that I passed her,” Powell said later. “I had no idea she was down there. If I had known that, I would have gone down with her. I would have gone to try and save her.”
Mrs. Powell was 72. The couple had been married for 33 years. They met in Los Angeles. Friends introduced them.
“The first time I saw her, I was in love,” George Powell said. “We met in December and married in February.”
They settled in Albuquerque, where she was the principal flutist for the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra for 17 years. After retirement, they moved to Eugene, Ore., and then to Santa Rosa to be near Mrs. Powell’s parents.
Mrs. Powell had been recovering from cancer of the mouth, but was always there for her husband. “She always had my back,” he said. “She tried to make life OK for me, regardless of what she was going through.”
Marilyn Ress
Marilyn Ress had lived in Sonoma County all of her life, grew up in Penngrove and graduated from Petaluma High School.
Ms. Ress was a certified nurse assistant and a caregiver and helped people with infirmities. In her later years, she developed health issues of her own that slowed her down. She suffered from Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disease of the thyroid.
She lived alone at Journey’s End Mobile Home Park in Santa Rosa, and had a brush with death a year ago, when she fell in her trailer home and couldn’t get up.
Her best friend, Cynthia Conners, kept calling her on the phone, got no answer for days and went to Journey’s End to check. She found Ms. Ress on the floor, where she’d been for four days. She was in a semi-coma.
“Doctors didn’t think she’d make it, but ... she pulled through,” Conners said. “She had the greatest attitude and the biggest heart of anyone I knew.”
Conners and Ms. Ress met years ago at the Mayette Apartments in Santa Rosa. Ms. Ress would go door to door to find out which neighbors had no place to go for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner.
She’d take the list to Conners, who would cook holiday meals. Ms. Ress made the deliveries.
“She’d give them a meal and she’d give them a hug,” Conner said.
Sometimes Ms. Ress would stop at See’s Candies to buy gift cards for her bus driver and peanut brittle for her friends.
“If she saw people struggling, she would say, ‘Here’s my ATM card.’ She was like an angel on earth.”
About 15 years ago, she saved up enough money to buy a place at Journey’s End. She died there when the fire swept through. Her remains were found in what remained of her bed.
Ms. Ress, who was 71 when she died, had never married and had no direct descendants.