A Jeep ride on a remote Cazadero ranch turned deadly for two longtime Sonoma County residents who were business owners and friends.
Donald Charles and Leslie Meline, both 53, had known each other since elementary school and had reconnected in recent months while working on a Montgomery High School reunion for their class of 1971.
Relatives found their bodies Tuesday evening still in the wrecked Jeep.
Charles owned DH Charles Engineering, with offices in Santa Rosa and San Diego. The engineering business is involved in projects on the Golden Gate Bridge and had designed 300 structures for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
Meline and her husband, Robert, owned a finish carpentry business. She had been an avid pilot for 25 years, often flying her family in her Cessna to vacation destinations.
A day before he died, Charles had returned home to Forestville from a vacation with his son and daughter. They had gone to Kauai, Hawaii, where they had stayed at the Melines' vacation home, friends said.
As a thank you, Charles on Sunday had asked Leslie Meline to his family ranch.
The Charles family settled in the area north of Cazadero in the 1880s and today owns about 3,000 acres.
Charles took Meline on a tour of the rugged country in a 1998 open-air Jeep. The accident occurred as he tried to drive up a steep, unimproved roadway, CHP Officer Scott Dutton said.
The 4-wheel-drive vehicle, which still may have been in 2-wheel-drive, apparently lost traction and slid backward.
It ran off the roadway and tumbled down a steep drop of about 500 feet before landing on its wheels. The two were found still strapped into the wreckage by their lap belts.
Family members began to worry Sunday when neither returned home, and missing-persons reports were filed Monday and Tuesday. Members of Charles' extended family began searching the area Tuesday and found the wreckage in the evening.
"We're devastated," said Jasper Calcara, Charles' business partner and the firm's chief engineer. "We've got hundreds of clients we work for over and over. Everybody in the industry was just shattered."
"He was amazingly successful but so down to earth," Calcara said.
Charles' 26-year engineering career took him around the world, including projects in Saudi Arabia, New Guinea and as senior project manager in France for a huge section of EuroDisney near Paris.
"It was neat he got his chance to see the world and be involved in these amazing projects before he settled down and had kids," Calcara said.
He started his own business about 14 years ago, working solo for about six years before hiring Calcara. The two first worked out of a granny unit in the back of Charles' home in west Santa Rosa.
Calcara said Charles Engineering is notable in that it is among a handful of companies nationwide specializing in temporary structures that help contractors complete their projects.
"We've worked on all bridges in the Bay Area. We don't necessarily design the bridge; we solve complicated problems that help a contractor build something," Calcara said.
The huge scaffolding platforms on the Golden Gate are the work of Charles' company.
The firm has about a dozen engineers and drafters. Projects range from minor road work to huge bridge retrofit projects. Charles Engineering has completed about 8,000 projects in eight years.
"We're impacted by his loss, but we're going to honor him by continuing the tradition," Calcara said.
Charles, who was divorced, had recently moved into a new home in Forestville with his children, Vaughn, 12, and Livia, 10.
"He was a generous to a fault. We're all going to have a lot less liveliness in our lives," said his older brother, Leonard Charles, of Marin County.
Charles was born in Davis but came to Sonoma County each summer to the family ranch. At about age 6, he and his family moved to Rincon Valley where he attended Sequoia Elementary School.
That's where he met Meline, then Leslie Pixton, who was a lifetime resident of Santa Rosa.
At Montgomery High, the varsity cheerleader fell in love with the associated student body president, Robert Meline. The two married soon after graduating. As of this year, they'd been married 34 years. They raised two daughters and a son. She also is survived by two grandchildren.
About 22 years ago, the couple started Westrim, a carpentry company.
One of her biggest passions was flying, a love she inherited from her father, who also had been a pilot.
She was good at it, her family said, and was accomplished enough to have become instrument rated. She carried both a private and a commercial license.
"She had her first solo flight in 1981," said her son, Gabe Meline, of Santa Rosa. He recalled how over the years she would pack the family into her Cessna 182 and fly them to Utah, Jackson Hole, Las Vegas or Mexico. "She really loved it," he said.
Meline had a mental list of things she wanted to do in her life, and much of it involved the outdoors. Two years ago, she achieved one of those goals when she went skydiving.
Favorite spots included the Sonoma Coast and Hawaii and Meline was thrilled to have a vacation home there.
"We were in awe of her unending lust for life. She lived each moment by her favorite phrase, "It's not fun if it's not fun," Gabe Meline said.
"There is an unimaginably enormous hole without her."
You can reach Staff Writer Randi Rossmann at 521-5412 or rrossmann@pressdemocrat.com.
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