Smith: Without a bite, Yari the dog helps solve a crime

Carol Mills stepped into her Santa Rosa home and was greeted by the dog, which gave no indication that something was up.

But Mills reached her bedroom and gasped. It had been trashed.

Naturally, she looked hard at Yari, the pit-bull mix.

“He looked kind of guilty,” Mills recalls. “I thought he did it.”

But, continuing to the second bedroom and seeing that it, too, had been ransacked, she realized she’d been burglarized. She dialed 911.

Sean Wall, a Santa Rosa Police technician, came out and worked the crime scene, cataloging what was stolen and looking for fingerprints. Mills said he couldn’t have been more professional.

Days after the break-in she received a call from another Sean. He’s Sean Jones, a property crimes detective with the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office.

He told her deputies had recovered a camera that looked to be hers. They’d found it, and other suspected property believed stolen in a string or burglaries, in a motel room they’d been drawn to by a couple engaged in a fight.

Det. Jones had looked though photos in the camera and found one of the folks posing with a handsome dog and a certificate of achievement from the Sonoma Humane Society. The name on the obedience-class certificate was “Yari.”

The burglary investigator took the camera to the Humane Society and showed staffers the picture. He was told, that’s Carol Mill’s dog.

So Mills got her stolen camera back, as well as a few other items lost in the burglary. And the authorities have evidence tying the guy arrested at the motel to the break-in of her house. Both Seans have a new fan.

And Yari, he practiced non-violence during the burglary and wound up something of a hero after all.

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THIS NEXT CRIME awaits a fully happy ending.

Kathleen Cochran parked and locked her car behind the Redwood Café in downtown Cotati and, then returned to find a window had been broken. Both her purse and a hip pack were gone.

Quickly, one of her credit cards was used to make purchases at Rotten Robbies and Jack in the Box. Days later, something surprising and heartening happened.

An employee of the Exchange Bank branch on Stony Point Road phoned to report that someone had placed in the night drop box a plastic bag containing her drivers license and credit cards.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Cochran says to whomever did that.

And she has a small request. Taken also in a car break-in was a small spiral-bound notebook with a purple and pink floral design on the cover.

That is Cochran’s journal of dreams, poems and such. If someone has it, she’d like that person to know it is quite important to her.

It’s also, she said, “Kind of personal.”

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CANCER IS PERSONAL to Marcy Smothers.

“I’ve lost five members of my close family to lung cancer: my mother, biological father, maternal aunt and both maternal grandparents,” said the radio personality, author, parent and Sonoma County treasure. You may recall her undergoing a mammogram live on KSRO.

Marcy’s resolve to combat cancer has her looking forward to a free, educational conversation on Feb. 10 at Santa Rosa Golf & Country Club.

She will moderate a discussion among Dr. Amy Shaw, medical director of the Cancer Survivorship Program; Dr. Charles Elboim, medical director of St. Joseph Health’s Breast Center, and registered nurse and research director Kim Young.

They’ll discuss and answer questions about the state of treatment of several cancers, including lung and colon.

The hosting Women’s Health at Memorial Hospital, or WHAM, invites anyone interested to come to the 5 p.m. program. But to make sure there’s a seat for everyone, reservations are required.

If you’d like to join Marcy and the cancer specialists, phone or drop an email to Katie Kinzel at 525-5384 and Katie.Kinzel@stjoe.org.

The deadline’s Tuesday.

Chris Smith is at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @CJSPD