Man's body found in Monte Rio home

Mumbling and sobbing, a Monte Rio resident who lived up the hill from Deb's Unique Boutique sat in the small shop Friday afternoon, drunk and repeating over and over that his partner was dead.

At first, the shop owner, Debra Buetow, didn't believe the man, who she knows only as "Brett." His fights with "Robert" were common knowledge, she said, and usually fueled by excessive drinking.

The man arrived in her shop shortly after 1 p.m. He was upset, she said, and started saying that his partner had been killed in a car accident.

"He passed out or acted like it and was laying on the floor in that area," she said, pointing to an open area in the middle of her small shop surrounded by racks of clothes and other accessories.

"I went to cook something and when I came back he was sitting up mumbling things," she said, adding that sometime around 2:30 or 3 p.m. the man told her that he had hit his partner with a lamp.

Buetow said she left her shop and walked to the fire station a few yards away on Main Street to tell authorities what she had been told. When she came back, she said she saw the man leaving her shop and making his way back up the hill.

Officials at the Monte Rio Fire Department said the man made his way up the hill to a bridge behind the fire station and was about to jump but fell back onto the road.

He told fire officials that his partner was dead inside a house on Middle Terrace, just up the hill. Monte Rio Fire Chief Steve Baxman said he went up to the house and found a body in a bedroom.

"I checked for a pulse," Baxman said. "I just felt for a pulse and he was cold. It was dark in there."

On Friday evening, investigators from the sheriff's violent-crimes unit cordoned off Middle Terrace just south of Rio Vista Terrace. Word of the incident spread among residents on the hillside.

One man, who was walking down Starrett Hill Drive, asked, "Was it at Robert's place?"

Buetow, who also works as a clerk at Bartlett's General Store, adjacent to her shop, said that on Thursday the two men were banned from buying buying alcohol at the store.

"He stabbed Robert about a month ago," Buetow said. "This wasn't a big surprise, but I'd rather they pulled their surprises somewhere else."

Sheriff's investigators said Friday evening that the incident was still under investigation as a homicide and would neither confirm the names of the two men nor the cause of death.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com.