At 90, she was the oldest member of Congress and the longest-serving female in the chamber’s history. During a lingering bout of shingles earlier this year and ongoing reports of her mental decline, Feinstein resisted pressure from her own party to resign.

Former Speaker of the House and fellow San Franciscan Nancy Pelosi delivered a tribute to Feinstein on the floor of the U.S. House on Friday, saying that the senator led “with great dignity, with great effectiveness and great leadership” and “left on her own terms.”

Her death will force Gov. Gavin Newsom to make a crucial decision he said recently he hoped he wouldn’t have to face: appointing a replacement to serve the rest of Feinstein’s term with the hotly contested race to succeed her in full swing.

In a statement Friday morning, Newsom called Feinstein a “dear friend and lifelong mentor” who was a role model not only to him but to his wife and daughters for what a powerful and effective leader looks like.

“She was a political giant, whose tenacity was matched by her grace. She broke down barriers and glass ceilings, but never lost her belief in the spirit of political cooperation,” Newsom said.

There is nobody, he said, “who possessed the strength, gravitas, and fierceness of Dianne Feinstein.”

Dianne Feinstein was many things — a powerful, trailblazing U.S. Senator; an early voice for gun control; a leader in times of tragedy and chaos. But to me, she was a dear friend, a lifelong mentor, and a role model not only for me, but to my wife and daughters for what a…

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) September 29, 2023

At the start of her career, Feinstein was a trailblazer for women and gay rights, and after the 1978 assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, she emerged as a reassuring leader and formidable force who pulled together the city that was still reeling from the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana 10 days earlier, where 900 people connected to the San Francisco-based People’s Temple died.

In what would become known as “The Year of the Woman” in 1992, she shared a historic moment with Barbara Boxer when they were both elected to the U.S. Senate and California became the first state with two women senators. Feinstein won in a special election and was sworn in first.

“She had tenacity. She never gave up,” especially in passing the Assault Weapons Ban in 1994, Boxer said in an interview with the Bay Area News Group. “I will always remember how proud I was when she stood her ground on the floor of the Senate, when some of the men said, ‘Well, you don’t even understand what an AR-15 is,’ and she said, ‘I understand what gun violence is. I had to put my finger through a hole in the wrist (of Harvey Milk).’ It was very emotional.”

Feinstein also pioneered a number of other firsts: first woman mayor of San Francisco, first woman to chair the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the first woman to chair the Senate Judiciary Committee, a watershed moment after public outrage over the handling of Anita Hill’s testimony during the male-dominated Supreme Court nomination hearings of Clarence Thomas in 1991.

“There are few women who can be called senator, chairman, mayor, wife, mom and grandmother,” her chief of staff, James Sauls, said in a statement Friday. “Senator Feinstein was a force of nature who made an incredible impact on our country and her home state.”

In 1994, the same year she passed the weapons ban, Feinstein wrote the California Desert Protection Act that established Death Valley and Joshua Tree as national parks and doubled the amount of federally protected wilderness in California. She also brokered landmark deals to preserve some of California’s key landscapes, protecting ancient redwoods at Headwaters Forest in Humboldt County and restoring as wetlands 16,500 acres of former industrial salt ponds around San Francisco Bay.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, as chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, she publicly released the “Torture Report” that exposed the CIA’s interrogation program that failed to work on terrorist suspects and, along with the late Sen. John McCain, authored legislation outlawing the CIA’s use of torture.

Feinstein is the 302nd senator to die in office and the first since McCain. President Biden was in Phoenix on Thursday honoring the late Arizona Republican with funds for a library in his name.

In a statement, Biden said Friday that he had a “front row seat” to Feinstein’s accomplishments serving in the Senate together for 15 years and recruited her to serve on the Judiciary Committee when he was chairman.

“There’s no better example of her skillful legislating and sheer force of will than when she turned passion into purpose, and led the fight to ban assault weapons,” Biden said. “Dianne made her mark on everything from national security to the environment to protecting civil liberties.”

For those old enough to remember the shocking assassinations at San Francisco City Hall in 1978, it was Feinstein’s brief videotaped news conference and its aftermath that launched her national political career. Standing outside the supervisors’ offices, news cameras illuminating her face, she delivered the shocking news: “As president of the board of supervisors, it’s my duty to make this announcement. Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed,” she said as the media erupted in gasps and shouts. “The suspect is Supervisor Dan White.”

She would later detail her actions that morning; When she heard the shots, she raced into Milk’s office. “I tried to get a pulse,” she said, “and put my finger through a bullet hole.”

Duffy Jennings, a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter who was in the crowd when she made the announcement, said her leadership through a tumultuous era would come to define Feinstein.

“She was incredibly resilient, strong and decisive,” Jennings said in an interview with the Bay Area News Group. “It wasn’t just Jonestown and Dan White. The ‘70s had the Zodiac killer, Patty Hearst, the SLA, the New World Liberation Front, counterculture extremism. It was a horrific decade in San Francisco and the Bay Area. And politically, she was as strong as anybody in holding the town together.”

At one point, New World Liberation Front — an anti-capitalist terrorist group — planted a bomb on the windowsill of her daughter’s bedroom. It failed to explode.

Born in San Francisco in 1933, Dianne Emiel Goldman was the daughter of a prominent surgeon. She was Jewish but attended the prestigious Convent of the Sacred Heart Catholic girls school, where she acted in plays and — because of her 5-foot-10-inch height — often played male roles. In the early 1950s, she attended Stanford University, where she was elected vice president of the student body.

When Feinstein entered San Francisco politics in the late 1960s, “nobody took her seriously,” said Jerry Roberts, the Chronicle’s former executive editor who wrote an early biography called “Never Let Them See You Cry,” named for one of Feinstein’s tips for businesswomen.

Early media reports of her campaigns, he said, were “unbelievably sexist” and often characterized her as a “raven-haired beauty” with a “slender figure.” Her husband at the time, Dr. Bertram Feinstein, was widely mocked as a “first husband.”

“Just in terms of the cultural obstacles that she had to overcome to be taken seriously and to win is something people don’t think a lot about now,” Roberts said. “She was never a movement feminist, but she was a feminist.”

She kept a firefighter’s turnout jacket and helmet in her trunk to race to fires and once gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a man she saw collapse in the Tenderloin. She listened to a police scanner in her office.

Although she opposed domestic partnership legislation for the city in 1982, when the AIDS epidemic broke out, Feinstein “got right on it. I mean, instantly,” said Louise Renne, whom Feinstein appointed as San Francisco’s first woman City Attorney. “The folks at San Francisco General were pulled in to deal with the AIDS epidemic, and San Francisco took a leadership role in solving that problem.”

Feinstein was considered moderate politically, supporting environmental causes but also encouraging commercial high rise development in downtown San Francisco. She is credited with completing the Moscone Convention Center project, renovating the city’s cable car system and retrofitting Candlestick Park before the Loma Prieta earthquake struck during the third game of the 1989 World Series.

Feinstein ran for governor of California in 1990 and lost to Republican Pete Wilson, whom she would replace in the Senate. In 1996, she was one of only 14 senators who voted against the Defense of Marriage Act that prevented the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages.

Her leadership opened doors for two San Francisco women who would become the most powerful female politicians in the country — Pelosi as Speaker of the House and Kamala Harris as vice president.

Under pressure, Feinstein announced in February she would not seek a sixth term in 2024, but she remained in office despite her lingering illness. Her absence from Senate votes earlier this year opened her to criticism that she handicapped her fellow Democrats in the split Senate to appoint judicial nominees.

Her death in office will set up a crucial decision for Newsom, who has said he would appoint a Black woman to the seat if Feinstein retired early. But with three high-profile Democrats — Reps. Adam Schiff, Katie Porter and Barbara Lee — battling for Feinstein’s seat, Newsom has said he would turn to an “interim appointment” rather than somebody campaigning for the job.

Feinstein was married three times. The first to Jack Berman ended in divorce. Her second husband, neurosurgeon Feinstein, died of colon cancer months before the Moscone and Milk assassinations. In 1980, she married investment banker Richard Blum, who died in 2022.

Feinstein’s only daughter Katherine Feinstein, a former San Francisco Superior Court judge, helped care for her in her mansion on the Lyon Steps in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood. Family infighting made headlines over the summer when Feinstein’s daughter sued Blum’s grown children over the marital estate, claiming they were shorting funds to her mother’s care to increase their inheritance. The Blum family countered that they acted “ethically and appropriately at all times.”

Looking back, Boxer recalls when she and Feinstein were first elected to the Senate, her colleague sat her down and told her, “You’ve got to stick with this. The longer you stay, the better you’ll feel, the more you’ll get done.”

Feinstein stuck with it on Capitol Hill for three decades, summing up why in her final acceptance speech, years before the political implications of her frail health threatened her legacy.

In the 2018 speech, she called serving in the Senate “the greatest honor in my life.”

At 90, she was the oldest member of Congress and the longest-serving female in the chamber’s history. During a lingering bout of shingles earlier this year and ongoing reports of her mental decline, she resisted pressure from her own party to resign her seat.

Her death will force Gov. Gavin Newsom to make a crucial decision he said recently he hoped he wouldn’t have to do: appoint a replacement to serve the rest of Feinstein’s term with the hotly contested race to succeed her in full swing.

At the start of her career, Feinstein was a trailblazer for women and gay rights, and after the 1978 assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, she emerged as a reassuring leader and formidable force who pulled together the city that was still reeling from the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana 10 days earlier, where 900 people connected to the San Francisco-based People’s Temple died.

Dianne Feinstein was many things — a powerful, trailblazing U.S. Senator; an early voice for gun control; a leader in times of tragedy and chaos. But to me, she was a dear friend, a lifelong mentor, and a role model not only for me, but to my wife and daughters for what a…

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) September 29, 2023

In what would become known as “The Year of the Woman” in 1992, she shared a historic moment with Barbara Boxer when they were both elected to the U.S. Senate and California became the first state with two women senators. Feinstein won in a special election and was sworn in first.

“She had tenacity. She never gave up,” especially in passing the Assault Weapons Ban in 1994, Boxer said in an interview with the Bay Area News Group. “I will always remember how proud I was when she stood her ground on the floor of the Senate, when some of the men said, ‘Well, you don’t even understand what an AR-15 is,’ and she said, ‘I understand what gun violence is. I had to put my finger through a hole in the wrist (of Harvey Milk).’ It was very emotional.”

Feinstein also pioneered a number of other firsts: first woman mayor of San Francisco, first woman to chair the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the first woman to chair the Senate Judiciary Committee, a watershed moment after public outrage over the handling of Anita Hill’s testimony during the male-dominated Supreme Court nomination hearings of Clarence Thomas in 1991.

In 1994, the same year she passed the weapons ban, Feinstein wrote the California Desert Protection Act that established Death Valley and Joshua Tree as national parks. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, as chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, she publicly released the “Torture Report” that exposed the CIA’s interrogation program that failed to work on terrorist suspects and, along with the late Sen. John McCain, authored legislation outlawing the CIA’s use of torture.

For those old enough to remember the shocking assassinations at San Francisco City Hall in 1978, however, it was her brief videotaped news conference and its aftermath that launched her national political career. Standing outside the supervisors offices, news cameras illuminating her face, she delivered the shocking news: “As president of the board of supervisors, it’s my duty to make this announcement. Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed,” she said as the media erupted in gasps and shouts. “The suspect is Supervisor Dan White.”

She would later detail her actions that morning, that when she heard the shots, she raced into Milk’s office. “I tried to get a pulse,” she said, “and put my finger through a bullet hole.”

Duffy Jennings, a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter who was in the crowd when Feinstein made the announcement, said her leadership through a tumultuous era would come to define Feinstein.

“She was incredibly resilient, strong and decisive,” Jennings said in an interview with the Bay Area News Group. “It wasn’t just Jonestown and Dan White. The ‘70s had the Zodiac killer, Patty Hearst, the SLA, the New World Liberation Front, counterculture extremism. It was a horrific decade in San Francisco and the Bay Area. And politically, she was as strong as anybody in holding the town together.”

At one point, New World Liberation Front – an anti-capitalist terrorist group – planted a bomb on the windowsill of her daughter’s bedroom. It failed to explode.

Born in San Francisco in 1933, Feinstein was the daughter of a prominent surgeon. Feinstein was Jewish but attended the prestigious Convent of the Sacred Heart Catholic girls school, where she acted in plays and – because of her 5-foot-10-inch height – often played male roles. She attended Stanford University in the early 1950s, where she was elected vice president of the student body.

When Feinstein entered San Francisco politics in the late 1960s, “nobody took her seriously,” said Jerry Roberts, the Chronicle’s former executive editor who wrote an early biography called “Never Let Them See You Cry,” named for one of Feinstein’s tips for businesswomen.

Early media reports of her campaigns, he said, were “unbelievably sexist,” and often characterized her as a “raven-haired beauty” with a “slender figure.” Her husband at the time, Dr. Bertram Feinstein, was widely mocked as a “first husband.”

“Just in terms of the cultural obstacles that she had to overcome to be taken seriously and to win is something people don’t think a lot about now,” Roberts said. “She was never a movement feminist, but she was a feminist.”

She kept a firefighter’s turnout jacket and helmet in her trunk to race to fires, and once gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a man she saw collapse in the Tenderloin. She listened to a police scanner in her office.

Although she opposed domestic partnership legislation for the city in 1982, when the AIDS epidemic broke out, Feinstein “got right on it. I mean, instantly,” said Louise Renne, whom Feinstein appointed as San Francisco’s first woman City Attorney. “The folks at San Francisco General were pulled in to deal with the AIDS epidemic, and San Francisco took a leadership role in solving that problem.”

Feinstein was considered moderate politically, supporting environmental causes but also encouraging commercial high rise development in downtown San Francisco. She is credited with completing the Moscone Convention Center project, renovating the city’s cable car system and retrofitting Candlestick Park before the Loma Prieta earthquake struck during the third game of the 1989 World Series.

Feinstein ran for governor of California in 1990 and lost to Republican Pete Wilson, whom she would replace in the Senate. In 1996, she was one of only 14 senators who voted against the Defense of Marriage Act that prevented the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages.

Feinstein’s leadership opened doors for two San Francisco women who would become the most powerful female politicians in the country – Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House and Kamala Harris as vice president.

Although she announced she would not seek a sixth term in 2024, Feinstein remained in office despite her lingering illness. Her absence from Senate votes earlier this year opened her to criticism that she handicapped her fellow Democrats in the split Senate to appoint judicial nominees.

Her death in office will set up a tense decision for Newsom, who has said he would appoint a Black woman to the seat if Feinstein retired early. But with three high-profile Democrats — Reps. Adam Schiff, Katie Porter and Barbara Lee — battling for Feinstein’s seat in the 2024 election, Newsom has said he would turn to an “interim appointment” rather than somebody running for the seat.

Those remarks earlier this month on NBC’s Meet the Press angered Lee, the only Black woman in the race. The longtime Oakland congresswoman is struggling to gain traction, running third in most polls behind Schiff and Porter.

Feinstein was married three times. The first to Jack Berman ended in divorce. Her second husband, neurosurgeon Feinstein, died of colon cancer months before the Moscone and Milk assassinations. She married investment banker Richard Blum in 1980. He died in 2022.

She had one daughter, Katherine Feinstein, a former San Francisco Superior Court Judge, who helped care for her in her mansion on the Lyon Steps in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood.

Looking back, Boxer recalls when she and Feinstein were first elected to the Senate, her colleague sat her down and told her, “You’ve got to stick with this. The longer you stay, the better you’ll feel, the more you’ll get done.”

Feinstein stuck with it on Capitol Hill for three decades, perhaps summing up why in her final acceptance speech before her re-election in 2018, years before the political implications of her frail health in her final years threatened her legacy.

In the speech, she called serving in the Senate “the greatest honor in my life.”

Rochelle Hawkins, a VTA mechanic, said when she heard shots she dropped her phone.

“I was running so fast, I just ran for my life,” she said. “I would hope everyone would just pray for the VTA family. Just pray for us.”

On Wednesday evening, the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office identified the nine victims as 42-year-old Paul Delacruz Megia, 36-year-old Taptejdeep Singh, 29-year-old Adrian Balleza, 35-year-old Jose Dejesus Hernandez III, 49-year-old Timothy Michael Romo, 40-year-old Michael Joseph Rudometkin, 63-year-old Abdolvahab Alaghmandan, 63-year-old Lars Kepler Lane and 49-year-old Alex Ward Fritch. Fritch was initially taken to a hospital in critical condition but later died of his injuries.

The gunman was identified by multiple sources as Samuel Cassidy, a 57-year-old VTA maintenance worker. Authorities would not say what might have led to the rampage, what type of weapon was used or whether he obtained it legally.

Sheriff Laurie Smith, whose office headquarters are near the rail yard, said deputies entered the building as shots were still being fired, but did not exchange gunfire with the gunman.

“We have some very brave officers and deputies,” Smith said.

In a news release Wednesday evening, the sheriff’s office said deputies found the suspect dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

There was a heavy police presence at Cassidy’s house in San Jose, where a fire erupted before the shooting and was reported shortly after. Bomb squad technicians were at the scene throughout the day. Authorities would not say how the fire might have started.

Explosive devices also were reported in the VTA building, and bomb dogs alerted to the devices, Smith said. Bomb squads were there as well.

About 100 VTA workers, most of them men, and some family members were escorted from the sheriff’s office to a larger auditorium across the street in the county administration. Inside the auditorium, screams and wailing broke out.

Workers said they were told not to talk to news reporters, but one worker said he was shaken to the core.

“The whole crew is gone, the whole shift is gone,” the worker, who didn’t want to be identified, said. “It’s horrible.”

Another VTA worker who didn’t want to be identified said that a woman had just learned her son was one of the fatalities.

“I just witnessed someone’s mom who just found out her son died,” the VTA worker said. “It was ugly.”

President Biden also was briefed, and later called on Congress “to help end this epidemic of gun violence in America.”

Governor Gavin Newsom visited San Jose in the afternoon and had similar remarks.

“There’s a sameness to this, and a numbness I think is something we’re all feeling,” Newsom said in San Jose. “It begs the damn question, ‘What the hell is going on in the United States of America?’”

What the Associated Press counted as the 15th U.S. mass shooting this year renewed cries for more laws to reduce gun violence. Among others were eight people fatally shot April 15 by a former employee at an Indianapolis FedEx facility; six people shot by a former NFL player April 7 in Rock Hill, South Carolina; 10 killed by a gunman on March 22 in a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado; and eight killed by a shooter on March 16 at three Atlanta-area massage businesses.

The massacre ranks as the region’s worst mass shooting, eclipsing one at a San Francisco law firm in July 1993 that left nine dead, including the shooter, a disgruntled client who also died by suicide. That shooting inspired a since-expired federal ban on military-style weapons.

California has a “red flag” law that lets family members and law enforcement ask a judge to temporarily confiscate guns from a threatening person. Legislation by Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, expanded the “gun violence restraining order” law in September to allow employers and coworkers also to make such requests.

But there were no immediate indications of home or workplace strife that might have triggered the deadly rampage. Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said Wednesday he does not believe the law was used in regard to the VTA shooter.

“It only takes one incident,” Rosen said. “We have to be perfect to stop all of these killings and we try our very best.”

One worker who sat sobbing on the phone with his wife afterward said he knew of no bad feelings among coworkers.

“I come to work and have a good time and enjoy my job,” he said.

Even so, Cassidy’s dark side unnerved those around him.

Cassidy’s former wife, Cecilia Nelms of Santa Cruz, who was married to him for 10 years but hasn’t seen him in 13, said he had a mercurial temper. She said he complained some coworkers got easier assignments than he did and resented that his father paid for his sister’s education while he worked to become a mechanic on his own. But she never knew Cassidy to have guns, and struggled to connect the man she knew with a mass shooting.

In 2009, Cassidy filed for a domestic violence restraining order against an ex-girlfriend, alleging harassment, and she in turn filed a response accusing him of rape, sexual assault and “enraged” mood swings fueled by alcohol abuse.

Doug Suh, who lives across the street from Cassidy, described him as “lonely” and “strange” and said he never saw friends or family visit.

“I’d say hello and he’d just look at me without saying anything,” Suh said. “One day I was backing out of his driveway and he yelled at me, ‘Don’t even go on my driveway!’ After that, I never talked to him again.”

The shooting was reported at 6:34 a.m. at the rail yard at 101 West Younger Ave., near San Pedro Street, the sheriff’s office said.

Deputies currently on scene for an active shooter investigation in the area of 100 W. Younger Ave. SJ. Please stay away from the area. More info to follow.

— SantaClaraCoSheriff (@SCCoSheriff) May 26, 2021

A neighbor’s security video shows Cassidy leaving his home at 5:39 a.m. with a large black duffel bag that he put in the passenger seat of his white Ford F-150 pickup truck.

According to sheriff’s office spokesman Russell Davis, some of the shooting victims are VTA employees. KTVU reported that it spoke to the mother of an employee who reported that the shooting happened at a union meeting. It was not known immediately if the shooting happened inside or outside, Davis said.

The VTA provides bus, light rail, and paratransit services and is a funding partner in regional rail service including Caltrain, Capital Corridor, and the Altamont Corridor Express. The mass shooting occurred in the VTA maintenance yard, where vehicles are dispatched — not in the organization’s operations center, according to the board chair.

San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said the city is in a “very dark moment,” but that he is “heartened by the response of the VTA family to come together and help their coworkers.” A vigil for the victims is planned for 6 p.m. Thursday at City Hall Plaza. “This is a moment for us to come together and grieve after today’s horrific tragedy.”

A shooting at the VTA facility on Younger St has left several people being treated, but the situation is still being assessed. The shooter is no longer a threat, and the facility has been evacuated. I will update as more information becomes available.

— Sam Liccardo (@sliccardo) May 26, 2021

People Acting in Community Together, or PACT, and Human Empowerment (through) Radical Optimism, or HERO Tent, held vigils for the victims Wednesday evening at St. James Park and City Hall, respectively.

“My heart mourns for those who were lost today — innocent men and women — and the families now without mothers and fathers who have to make sense of this mess, to make sense of insanity, to make sense of senseless violence,” said the Rev. Ray Montgomery, executive director of PACT.

One VTA employee who did not want to be identified said workers were told, “Run outside the building now! There’s an active shooter!” Another said he saw people scattering around the yard as shots rang out.

Two male shooting victims were transferred to Valley Medical Center in San Jose. One person was dead on arrival and another was in critical condition, hospital spokeswoman Joy Alexiou said. The coroner’s office said the second victim later died of his injuries.

“We’d be the closest to get the most seriously injured patients,” Alexiou said. “People with lesser injuries can be transferred to other hospitals.”

The shooting happened during the busiest time of day at the maintenance facility, when operators and maintenance workers are getting ready for the start of the day’s service, according to Raj Singh, the recording and financial secretary for Amalgamated Transit Union local 265, which represents VTA operators.

Singh said the shooting had not happened at an official ATU union meeting, as those meetings are held at the union hall in Campbell. He said he’s received calls from members expressing shock and from family members unable to get in touch with their loved ones.

“This is unspeakable,” he said. “You hear about it happening somewhere else and you think never here.”

Light rail service initially continued but VTA later announce the trains would stop running at noon.

We will be shutting down light rail service starting at noon today until further notice. We will have bus bridges in place to provide limited service while we work through this. The light rail yard remains an active investigation scene, limiting our ability to provide service.

— VTA (@VTA) May 26, 2021

Confirming that:
– Active Shooter at VTA Light Rail Yard around 6:45a
– Multiple casualties, extent of injuries being determined
– Suspect deceased
– Employees evacuated
– VTA service not impacted (trains were in service before incident)

— VTA (@VTA) May 26, 2021

Check back for updates.

Staff writers Nico Savidge, Ethan Baron, Rick Hurd, Emily DeRuy, David DeBolt and Kate Selig contributed to this story.

Quincy Webster, just 18 and a volunteer with the Marin County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue Team, couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing at first.

The high school senior from nearby Larkspur had spent much of his winter break searching the backwoods of Inverness. The Palo Alto couple — both in their 70s — had been missing for nine days, since they left their rental cottage on Valentine’s Day.

By Saturday, the rescue effort had officially shifted to a recovery operation. Even the couple’s son was doubtful his parents would be found alive after seven nights in the woods where temperatures dipped into the 30s.

Yet here were Quincy, K9 handler Rich Cassens and his Golden Retriever Groot — the handler and his dog on their very first search assignment — crawling their way up a drainage ditch Saturday morning. The brush was so dense they had to lift the 3-year-old rescue dog up and over the tangle of bushes to move forward.

They heard a voice, soft at first, and a bit confused.

“Hello?”

Maybe it was a fellow searcher, the two volunteers thought, or a property owner asking who’s trespassing. Then they heard calls for help.

“We looked at each other, we’re like, we were not expecting this at all,” Quincy said. He called out to Groot: “Go get ‘em, boy!”

“We started crashing through the brush as much as possible. We were yelling to them to hold on, we’re coming.”

Groot bounded back and forth from the couple to the rescuers. When Quincy and Cassens reached the couple, weak and bloody, the husband had one question:

“Are you real? Are you really real?”

The dramatic story of the disappearance and discovery of Ian Irwin, 72, a noted Parkinson’s researcher, and his wife, linguist and author Carol Kiparsky, 77, is a tale of perseverance and hope.

In a lengthy interview with this news organization on Sunday, Quincy and Cassens — who spent a half hour with the couple before they were airlifted out — and Michael St. John, the unit leader of the volunteers, who spoke with the couple Saturday night at Marin General Hospital, recounted in vivid detail what it took to bring the couple home.

The Marin County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Sunday afternoon that the couple was not ready for interviews, but that they were in “amazing spirits and expressed gratitude to everyone.”

The odyssey started in the late afternoon on Feb. 14, when the couple, who are avid hikers, set out to catch a glimpse of the sunset. With plans to be back in 15 minutes, they left their wallets and phones behind.

Few people get lost in Tomales Bay State Park, said St. John, 56, a retired Mill Valley Fire Department Operations Battalion Chief who led the team of over 100 volunteers, about 30 of them trained high schoolers.

The brush is so gnarled in those woods, hikers rarely leave the trail, he said, describing it as “a unique kind of misery.”

Irwin and Kiparsky knew the area. They had traveled to this cottage in Inverness — a charming village five miles north of Point Reyes on the west side of Tomales Bay — a number of times over the years, often heading north to the Jepson trailhead just beyond their rental.

With the moon waning and the thick canopy of pines and oaks overhead, darkness fell early and the couple was quickly lost.

“They found themselves on their hands and knees, crawling, off the trail in the brush,” St. John said. “They went down to find a road or a creek that leads to the bay.”

The couple became mired in thickets of coyote brush, blackberry vines and poison oak. To compact the vegetation as they moved, Irwin would fall onto it, creating a bed for his wife to maneuver over.

The brush on the wide peninsula of hilly terrain is so dense that it swallowed up a radio and GPS monitor that rescuers dropped in the ensuing days. It’s so tightly tangled that it sucked out the sound of the searchers’ plaintive calls through loudspeakers at night, and absorbed any pleas for help that parabolic microphones were set up to capture.

Search crews from Contra Costa, Alameda, San Mateo, Napa and Sonoma counties joined in the effort, fanning out on 40 search assignments the first night, 50 the next. Boats trawled the bay. Cadaver dogs hit the trails and drainage areas.

“We kept looking at the problem over and over,” St. John said. “We believed they were there, somewhere to be found, but none of the scenarios made sense.”

Saturday morning, St. John asked Quincy if he wanted to “flank” Cassens, the 51-year-old K9 handler from the California Rescue Dog Association, and head to a drainage area close to Shallow Beach.

“It didn’t seem super likely they would be there,” said Quincy, a senior at Redwood High School in Larkspur who has been a part of nearly two dozen searches since he joined the youth search and rescue team when he was 15. “They were far away from the last known point. It did seem a little hopeless. But I’m like, ‘we’re going to go out anyway and do our best.’ ”

He and Cassens headed down Pierce Point Road towards the bay, past a few scattered homes, through a locked gate and down a private road that turned to dirt. They parked the car and suited up with thick gloves, waterproof boots, and a backpack filled with an extra jacket, granola bars and water.

Starting towards the bay first, through a boggy marsh, they looked for anything that might have washed up on shore. The mud was so thick it reached Quincy’s knees and covered Groot from tail to snout.

When they turned to head up the drainage ditch, they were confronted by a “solid wall of forest,” Quincy said.

For two hours, they forged over, under and through the brush. They followed a narrow deer trail briefly before it was consumed by undergrowth. “We’re thinking there’s no way they could have gotten out here,” he said.

That’s when they heard the bewildered “hello.”

Snapping into action, Groot dashed to the couple through a hollow in the underbrush. The couple was 200 feet away. It took nearly 10 minutes to reach them. Leaning against a log, their back to their saviors, the couple was so weak they could barely move. But their voices gained strength as they called for help.

“We asked them their names,” said Quincy, still too shocked to believe what he was seeing.

“We’re Carol and Ian,” they said.

“I kept looking at them, (thinking), is this even possible?” Quincy said. “They didn’t believe it either. They were on the verge of tears, overjoyed.”

The radio reception to the rescue base was poor, so teams transmitted the news of the “live find” from one group to the next.

“They were asking, wait, you found them alive?” Quincy said. “What? Are they alive or are they dead? What? Are you sure?”

The couple was badly cut up from the thorns and thickets. Carol had lost her shoes to a mud bog. Her feet were swollen. Ian had bumped his head and lost his glasses and hearing aids. Quincy, a high schooler with plans to be an engineer, gave them Gatorade and snacks and his coat and other layers from his backpack. Their bodies shook with cold as the rescuers took their vital signs.

To Quincy and then later to St. John, Irwin and Kiparsky explained how they had searched for the sunset on Valentine’s Day, how they trudged on hands and knees for four days until “they had nothing left,” how they drank from a muddy puddle and ate fern fronds. They had seen the lights of a house about 1,000 feet in the distance, but didn’t have the strength to get there.

Cold nights were the hardest, they told their rescuers. They were certain they would die.

No one heard their calls for help, they said, until Quincy, Cassens and Groot.

The helicopter circled above the dense forest until the pilot caught a silver flash from the space blanket Quincy waved below. They packed Irwin, who looked weakest, into the stretcher first and were just about to carry him to a clearing when they paused.

“We’re going to be together, right?” Irwin asked Quincy, worried he would be separated from his wife.

Yes, he assured him, they would meet at the hospital.

“Right before we went to carry him away,” Quincy said, “they kissed.”

In the baskets, the couple rose into the sky. On the ground, the high school senior and the dog and handler on their first mission bushwhacked their way out.

GILROY — Alberto Romero was home in San Jose late Sunday afternoon when he got the panicked call from his wife at the Gilroy Garlic Festival: Someone had shot their 6-year-old son in the back, her in the stomach and hand and her mother in the leg.

They had been playing at the bounce house.

“I couldn’t believe what was happening, that what she was saying was a lie, that maybe I was dreaming,” said Romero, a 33-year-old electrician who gathered with family members after midnight early Monday at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. He looked stunned as he carried a green balloon into the lobby.

6 year old Steven Romero of San Jose is one of the 3 victims killed in the Gilroy Garlic Festival Shooting. RIP @nbcbayarea https://t.co/anfqNSVs3p pic.twitter.com/ioE5fDagj7

— Janelle Wang (@janellewang) July 29, 2019

At first, Romero was told to head to St. Louise Hospital in Gilroy to see his son Stephen. When he arrived, the hospital staff told him the 6-year-old — who had just graduated from kindergarten and was excited to start first grade — was in critical condition.

“They said they were working on him,” Romero said, “and five minutes later they told me he was dead.”

Romero was escorted into his son’s hospital room to have a final moment with the boy. “He was joyful, always wanted to play, always positive,” he said.

Stephen was one of four confirmed fatalities, including a suspect, Sunday after a gunman in camouflage attire went on a shooting rampage at the crowded festival, apparently firing indiscriminately at about 5:30 p.m. just as the festival was nearing its end.

Witnesses say the shooter with an assault-style rifle fired at least 10 or 15 times, paused briefly and began firing again. The shooter was killed by police, authorities say.

Romero had been home with his 9-year-old daughter, staying behind to study for an electrician exam, when his wife frantically called that evening. After the shock of saying goodbye to Stephen at the hospital in Gilroy, he raced the 30 miles to Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose.

That’s where his wife, Barbara Aquirre, was taken and placed in a medically-induced coma, he said. His mother-in-law, Barbara Velasquez Aquirre was also being treated there.

They were among the 15 people injured in the shootings at the world-famous garlic festival.

Joseph Corona, a family friend, arrived at the hospital late Sunday night to embrace Romero and couldn’t stop thinking of little Stephen.

“He’s a caring loving kid, always had a smile on his face,” Corona said.

One authority thinks there’s a good chance.

“I’m 75 percent sure he will play,” his wife, Sarah Pavelski, said Wednesday morning. “He’s hoping to, but wants to see the doctors one more time this morning to be sure.

“Joe is feeling good.”

Pavelski’s return could provide a huge emotional boost in the Sharks’ quest for a first Stanley Cup after his brutal concussion two weeks ago sparked an unthinkable comeback in Game 7 of their first-round playoff series victory over the Vegas Knights.

As a hockey wife, Sarah Pavelski has watched her husband suffer the gamut of injuries, from cracked ankles to lost teeth (he took a slapshot to the face for the Sharks’ first goal of the playoffs). But the fall he took that ultimately turned around the Sharks’ playoff hopes has become one of the defining moments in the team’s 28-year history.

So what about tonight? Pavelski and Sharks trainer Ray Tufts have a close bond, his wife said, so “whatever decision the other makes they trust in that. If Joe thinks he can play, Ray trusts that.”

With the series tied at 3 games apiece, the Sharks must win tonight at SAP Center in San Jose to advance to the Western Conference Finals.

As her husband recovered off the ice, Sarah Pavelski said these last two weeks have been filled with frustration, but also special moments that reinforced their connection to San Jose. The couple have been flooded with well wishes. An ice cream shop in their Willow Glen neighborhood, where Pavelski and his 8-year-old son Nathan are frequent customers, posted a sign out front saying “Get well soon, Joe.”

“We’ve been here a really long time and you go about your day-to-day life and it gets routine like anybody else’s life,” she said. “Having an experience like that where there’s just a rush of support — those little things have made us realize how deep our roots here actually are.”

The Pavelskis were high school sweethearts in Waterloo, Iowa, and have been married for 10 years. She’s seen her husband get injured countless times — from broken fingers and teeth to ankles and feet — but nearly every time he either popped right back up or returned to the ice in the same game. (Tight skates make effective casts.)

But the April 23 injury that left a pool of blood on the ice and Pavelski with a concussion and in need of staples in the back of his head was a surreal moment for Sarah Pavelski. Sitting with other hockey wives in Section 113, she had a clear view of her husband’s awkward fall after being cross-checked after a face-off. The injury led to a controversial 5-minute major penalty for the Knights and powered the Sharks to erase a 3-0 lead with four goals in just over 4 minutes.

At first, she thought he had been struck again in the mouth, the same spot where a puck deflected off Pavelski’s face for the Sharks’ first goal in the opening game of the series. She thought “that he was lying still because it hurt really bad,” she said. “And then I realized, you know, he really wasn’t moving. At that moment, it was all kind of a blur.”

Two of her closest friends, Joe Thornton’s wife, Tabea, and Brett Burns’ wife, Susan, “dove over the people sitting between us and kind of grabbed me and took me downstairs” to the lounge, she said. Luckily, the Pavelskis 8-year-old son, Nathan, wasn’t at the game to witness the real horror of it, watching instead from a friend’s house. He texted his mother right away, who assured him his father “was fine.”

She is thankful, because she knows that her husband’s injury could have been much worse, she said. “He had no sensitivity to light or noise. His headaches weren’t severe, no memory problems,” she said. “I know girls whose husband had had such bad concussions they don’t remember their kids’ names.”

Sarah missed all the mayhem in the stands as the team pulled off its historic comeback, a powerful tribute to her husband from his teammates that she didn’t get to see until the next day. It was the first time she saw the powerful image of his teammates escorting him off the ice, with Joe Thornton holding a towel to Pavelski’s bloody head.

“That was super emotional for me,” she said.

What she did experience from the stands, however, was the roaring ovation Joe received last week when made his first public appearance since the injury, albeit in a three-piece suit, waving to the fans during Game 5 against the Avalanche. The experience was overwhelming for them both.

“That was the happiest he had been” since his injury, she said. “Just to see his face and his smile. You know, it was a long couple of weeks.”

On Sunday, he joined his wife and son at their local Catholic church to celebrate Nathan’s First Holy Communion. Pavelski hopped a plane later that day to be in Denver with the team for Game 6.

The anticipation has been building for weeks about whether — and when — he will return to the ice, and Sarah Pavelski isn’t worried.

“Everybody has messaged to say how excited they are to have him back,” she said, “and hope he plays. It would sure make a good story.”