By India Neville
A missing San Rafael man, 93, with ties to our school was found dead last week after disappearing in late February. Robert Davis, or Papa, as his family called him, was last seen the night of Wednesday, Feb. 26th. Every Wednesday for the past 15 years, Davis went to dinner at Marin Joe’s with his daughter and other family members. On the night he went missing, he was dining with his granddaughter-in-law, Sylvia Herrera Mathews, his daughter Leslie and her husband Peter.
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, according to Herrera Mathews. “That night was actually a pretty good night,” recalled Herrera Mathews. She works at Tamalpais High School and her partner, Jeff Mathews, one of Davis’ two grandsons, is an employee at our school’s cafeteria. “Some nights he’s a little quieter, but that night he ate all of his dinner. I arrived late and was soaking wet [because of the rain]. I was complaining and he was across from me laughing,” Herrera Mathews said.
The party of four left around 8:00 p.m. Davis got in his car to drive home to Terra Linda. However, the next morning, the family found out that he had never arrived.
Police, family and friends put in many hours trying to find Davis. In the first week, Mathews drove over 1,000 miles in his car searching for his grandfather. A search and rescue team was sent, as well as a San Rafael Police Department patrol boat. The Oakland Police Department donated one of their helicopters, equipped with an infrared camera and searchlights, to the manhunt.
On Tuesday April 2nd, more than a month after Davis disappeared, two CalTrans employees spotted a car down an embankment on Shoreline Highway, near Dogtown. “It was just by chance that the passenger driving on Shoreline saw something that caught his eye,” said Herrera Mathews. “If you weren’t paying attention you would not have seen it.”
One of the workers went down to inspect the car and didn’t find it occupied. The air bags were deployed, but there was no sign Davis had been ejected out of the vehicle because the seat belt had been released.
There was no cell phone reception in the area so they retrieved the car’s registration and drove to the California Highway Patrol’s Corte Madera office to report the incident. The car was identified as belonging to Davis.
The case was turned over from the San Rafael Police Department to the Marin County Sheriff’s Office. The Marin County Search and Rescue team was called to the scene and found and recovered a body about 30 to 50 feet from the car.
“At this point he has been identified, but at the moment there is no cause of death,” said Herrera Mathews.
The family is not sure why he was driving that way, but Davis was not ill. He was healthy and did not have any sort of dementia, according to Herrera Mathews.
“That last night we had dinner with him was one of the best nights we had with him, and I’m very happy and relieved that that was a good night,” said Herrera Mathews.
The dinners started after Davis’ wife died and he moved to Terra Linda. Davis and his daughter wanted to keep in touch so they decided to meet up for dinner, and Marin Joe’s just happened to be located right between their two homes. They continued the dinners, and without them realizing it, they turned into a weekly tradition.
The five weeks after the disappearance was an incredibly difficult time for friends and family of the beloved man. “It’s the not knowing…it’s been a long process. It’s hard to see my mother in law because she is always happy and see her question everything. It’s hard to watch Jeff and his brother, strong stubborn boys. It’s just hard watching the family and going through it,” said Herrera Mathews. “[Jeff and I] live with them and it just changed the demographic–every night we’d go to bed wondering, asking ‘what if this, what if that’. The past month has just been what ifs.”
Davis touched the lives of many, especially his close family. “There are a lot of memories out there for the boys and for myself because I’ve been with the family for 10 years. For the boys I’ve noticed they’ve been talking about the small moments. It was just the little memories that they have with him not the big ones. It’s nice because it was the ones taken for granted,” said Herrera Mathews. “For Jeff, specifically, it was having a drink with his grandfather. Papa loved Old Fashions.”
Davis was an avid flyer and was a pilot in World War II. “He loved talking about and I loved asking him about the war and the planes because he loved being a pilot. He wanted to be one when he was a kid,” said Herrera Mathews.
“He got to serve this country and do something that he loved,” she said.
Jolly Roger 