Glen Ellen woman drowns in Cazadero creek

<p>Sonoma County Sheriff officials are investigating the death of a Glen Ellen woman found in a Cazadero creek Tuesday afternoon, officials said Wednesday.</p><p>Erica Demarest Shane, 34, a regular volunteer with the Wine Country Film Festival, was found dead just after 4 p.m. in a creek off a rural stretch of Fort Ross Road near Cazadero Highway.</p><p>“It may be a drowning, but how did she get there?” Lt. Chris Spallino said of the rural area. “We don't want to presume it was an accident and overlook something that might show otherwise.”</p><p>An hour before deputies found Shane, a passerby called CHP authorities to report there was a silver Subaru Forrester parked alongside the narrow road that travels up a forested hillside near Cazadero.</p><p>A deputy from the Sheriff's substation in Guerneville found the vehicle, which was parked partially in the road, Spallino said. The way the vehicle was parked was “unusual,” Spallino said, because there was a natural spot for a vehicle to park just ahead of the Subaru at a bend in the narrow road.</p><p>The deputy took a path near the parked Subaru that followed a steep hillside along a fast-moving tributary of Austin Creek.</p><p>The deputy found Shane submerged in the water about 200 yards up the path. The deputy tried to resuscitate her, and paramedics from the Fort Ross Fire Department pronounced her dead at the scene, a sheriff's report said. It was not clear how long she had been dead.</p><p>Spallino said he couldn't comment on whether there were signs of a struggle or trauma. Results of an autopsy Wednesday were not available.</p><p>Sheriff's investigators are searching for leads on what brought the Glen Ellen resident to that part of the county, Spallino said.</p><p>“She was not a reported missing person, but I don't know if anyone had an inkling that she was gone,” Spallino said.</p><p>Shane didn't show up for a film festival hosted last weekend in Sonoma by the Wine Country Film Festival, with whom she'd volunteered for about a year, said festival founder Stephen Ashton.</p><p>“We thought she would attend the festival,” Ashton said. “She did not have an assignment, but she was always interested in everything that we did so I would assume she would have been there.”</p><p>“We wondered what had happened to her,” he said.</p><p>Shane told Ashton she was taking time off from a career in finance, he said. Ashton said she wasn't employed and spent a great deal of volunteer time helping them put together the next film festival, scheduled for the fall.</p><p>“She was such an important part of our operation,” Ashton said. “She was great with people, with public relations. She would go to meet with filmmakers, liaison for them, arranged for their hotels, she was really into the whole thing.”</p><p>Shane's Facebook page says she graduated from Santa Rosa's Montgomery High School in 1993 and the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1997.</p><p>“I'm just shocked, I'm just totally shocked,” Ashton said. “She was so bright, she was so positive.”</p>