When the dreadful commotion began on Santa Rosa Avenue that Sunday nine days ago, Andy Brewster was inside Steel Deli & Liquor, buying a can of beer.
Brewster is a 47-year-old trucker who came to Sonoma County recently to care for his ailing mother. He heard a woman shout, "Halt! Freeze!" and he looked out the store to see a uniformed police officer get hit by a car and thrown into the air as she chased a man across the four-lane avenue.
"It was terrible," Brewster said. Next he saw that the fleeing man was heading toward the Steel Deli parking lot. I watched the store's security video on Monday and saw Brewster run to intercept the man.
Brewster, who's 6-2 and 200 pounds, stood in the smaller guy's path and told him, "Where do you think you're going?" Then he grabbed the man, took him down and pinned his arms behind him.
Brewster said the man struggled and said, "Let me go! I'm having a seizure." Brewster told him, "Let me help you have one."
A passing security officer helped Brewster handcuff the man, identified by police as robbery suspect Manuel Santiago.
Brewster said Monday he couldn't just let the guy run off away as the officer - he now knows her name is Lucia Wade - lay badly injured in the street.
"All I hope is that she gets better," he said. "One day I'd love to have lunch with her."
"MILK" & SALLY GEARHART: The history of lesbian activism will be the topic at hand, and three fascinating women will be on the stage, at an afternoon program Sunday in Cotati.
Sally Miller Gearhart, a Willits resident who became the nation's first openly lesbian college professor at San Francisco State in the 1970's and worked beside Harvey Milk to defeat the Briggs Initiative, will be there. So will San Francisco's Phyllis Lyon, the longtime activist whose marriage to the late Del Martin in 2008 was California's first legal same-sex nuptial.
Gearhart and Lyon will be asked questions by Ruth Mahaney, a founder of the sponsoring Sonoma County Lesbian Archives. The event is from 2 to 5 p.m. at Congregation Ner Shalom on La Plaza in Cotati.
When "Milk" came out last year, some lesbian activists said Sean Penn was wonderful but the film ignored the role that women - certainly Sally Gearhart - played in defeating the anti-gay Proposition 6.
Gearhart, a native of Appalachia who's great fun to listen to, said the movie about her slain friend Milk certainly did give short shrift to his feminist convictions and to the women who struggled with him.
"I feel like women were deliberately made invisible for an artistic purpose," she said.
Gearhart has lived in Willits since she retired from San Francisco State in 1992. She adores the town at the heart of Mendocino County.
"There's a consciousness about living a little more gently on the Earth," said the self-described "recovering political activist."
"The farmers' market on Thursday afternoon is a wonderful playground and a lot of community takes place, too."
ONLY IN SONOMA does a visitor to a lovely Wine Country restaurant refuse to turn and look because she's sure her friends are pulling her leg about there being a camel in the parking lot, but they aren't.
Of course there was a camel outside the Kenwood Restaurant on Friday. Rob and Robin Lyon, the owners of Sonoma's Lyon Ranch, stopped by for a meal after taking Hump-Free to see the kids at Valley of the Moon Childrens' Home.
Hump-Free is getting more face time with kids and seniors since his camel friend Kazzy, a genuine Sonoma character, died in September.
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