Missing instruments returned to Analy students, 2 months later

Last week, about two months after a large storage case containing 14 Analy High School band instruments disappeared at a Giants game in San Francisco, band coordinator Dawn Johnson threw away all her notes related to the missing flutes, clarinets and piccolos.

She assumed that if the instruments, which included a student’s irreplaceable family heirloom, hadn’t been found at that point, they probably never would.

On Thursday, she got an improbable text message from the band director, Kelly Stewart. Someone said they had the instruments and wanted to return them.

“What? No way!” Johnson remembers thinking. But she didn’t fully accept the good news until she arrived in San Francisco on Monday and accepted the precious load from a woman who said her homeless friend had found them the same day they went missing. The woman had been storing the instruments on her friend’s behalf and trying to find the rightful owner.

“When you think there’s no hope, there it is,” Johnson said.

The case holding the instruments, mostly flutes and piccolos, was accidentally left outside a bus in a stadium parking lot after the band performed the national anthem before the Aug. 25 game. Nobody realized the instruments were missing until the band returned to Sebastopol.

The same night, Johnson and Stewart returned and searched frantically for the case, but with no luck. Because no one came forward to return the instruments, they assumed someone had stolen them during the game.

Johnson and Stewart notified San Francisco police, reached out to the parking lot security company and even interviewed homeless people around the stadium. But as time passed, there was no sign of the instruments.

At the time, Johnson and Stewart estimated the loss to be about $8,000. That included some school-owned instruments and others belonging to students. Camryn Dierke, 14, lost a flute that had been in the family ?35 years and had first belonged to her mother.

Both she and her mother were heartbroken by the loss and continued to search for the flute on eBay and Craigslist in the months that followed.

Monday afternoon, Johnson returned that flute to an unsuspecting Dierke. Dierke called her mom, and both were in tears, Johnson said. Dierke took home the instrument that night.

The band leaders are still waiting to restore some of the woodwinds to their owners, most of them in the school’s intermediate band, since the band doesn’t meet Monday afternoons or Tuesdays.

The woman who returned the instruments lives in a single-room occupancy hotel on Polk Street in San Francisco. She told Johnson and Stewart that a friend of hers, who is homeless and sleeps near the baseball stadium under an overpass, found the case while collecting cans after the game. He sat with the case for about 45 minutes waiting for someone to return for it. When nobody did, he dragged it away so that nobody else would steal it and asked his friend to store it for safekeeping, the woman told Johnson.

The woman began looking for the right home for the instruments but it took her a while because the only marking on them read “AHS.” Eventually, she came across a news story about the missing woodwinds.

At first, she wanted to find her homeless friend so he could help return them, but he had relapsed into a drug addiction, and eventually she decided not to wait any longer.

Last week, she called Stewart. The instruments were all accounted for and intact, said Johnson, who traveled to San Francisco to retrieve them. It’s clear someone had tinkered with the instruments a bit - some mouthpieces were on backward, for example - but none of them was harmed.

Since the instruments went missing, an estimated 14 flutes and ?18 clarinets and a little under $4,000 in donations poured in, said Dena Allen, a parent with Analy Band Wagon, a group that raises money for the music program. Except for Dierke’s flute, the school had already been able to replace every student’s missing instrument as well as the missing band woodwinds.

Now, they plan to consult with donors about how to handle the donations, but Johnson suspects they’ll “pay it forward” by donating some of the excess instruments to local middle school bands. They might also try to buy some other instruments they lack, such as trumpets and saxophones.

The band leaders notified San Francisco police that they found the instruments but are not pressing charges. They had promised in a ?TV interview that they would accept the returned instruments no questions asked.

A San Francisco police spokesman, Gordon Shyy, said he could find no official police report of the incident.

Staff Writer Jamie Hansen blogs about education at extracredit.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach her at 521-5205 or jamie.hansen@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @?jamiehansen.