Gerry Chellew and his wife, Melinda, were in Roseville, driving home from Palm Springs, where they had just celebrated their 37th wedding anniversary. It was Friday night. Their cell phone rang.
The news was mind-numbing: The ground under their house in Alta in the Sierra foothills had collapsed. Gerry Chellew instantly wondered if somehow he was at fault, having remodeled the family home to add quarters for his son and pregnant daughter-in-law. Worse still, he realized the couple were at home.
What Chellew didn't know was that his craftsmanship had nothing to do with the freak occurrence that had just killed his only son. The culprit was a mysterious 10-by-10-foot sinkhole that would continue growing deeper and wider for days.
When the creaking started, Pei-Hua Sun "Kathy" Chellew, 30, was asleep in a bedroom upstairs. Jason Chellew, 32, her husband, was in the living room and tried to bolt, but the floor suddenly opened up, swallowing him into an ever-widening pit and burying him under feet of debris.
"I knew he was gone," Kathy Chellew, told reporters at a press conference Monday. "I want to believe this happened for a good cause, a good reason."
Expecting their first child, Kathy Chellew, who is four months pregnant, had been awakened by a piece of roof that fell on her head. A glass window imploded as well.
For the next five minutes, she yelled for her husband. There was no answer.
She realized that if she tried to climb into the hole she wouldn't be able to make it out alive. Instead, Kathy Chellew scrambled out the bedroom window and rushed to a neighbor's house for help.
Rescuers, struggling on unstable ground, were unable to recover Chellew's body until late Sunday. By that time, the pit bottomed out at 20 feet deep, with a diameter that had more than doubled to 30 feet.
At an afternoon news conference, the family described Jason Chellew. He was a graduate student in psychology at California State University, Sacramento, and had served in the Peace Corps in Kyrgyzstan. He and Kathy met when he spent five years teaching at a private school in Taipei, Taiwan. They were married March 12, 2005, in Taiwan and came to the United States last July.
Melinda Chellew, Jason's mother, said her son had a soft heart for animals. She displayed a photo of her son with an elephant at Marine World Africa USA in Vallejo, where he worked as an apprentice elephant trainer from 1991 to 1994. He especially loved dogs, and had six of them. One is believed to have perished with him.
Placer County Sheriff's Lt. Rich Tornberg, one of the commanders for the recovery effort, said urban search and rescue teams initially determined the house was too unstable to allow recovery of the body until the house was torn down. He said they had removed most of the household contents from the upstairs to lighten the load on the house. Only then did a team with sensitive monitors determine that the underpinnings were adequate enough to allow the body to be removed.
Speculation on what could have caused part of the house to suddenly sink continued to grow Monday, but scientists and historians said the evidence strongly points to a man-made cause - remnants of the region's mining past that honeycomb the region.
"What you can say is that it would not be surprising if it is proved that a mining shaft or tunnel was involved because the history of the entire Nary Red Placer mining claim is of a series of hydraulic and drift mining," said Douglas Ferrier, a forestry consultant and regional history buff.
The Chellews' property falls within the 224-acre Nary Red Gold Placer Mining Claim, said Ferrier. His research shows it was mined from about 1860 intermittently into the 1940s.
As the story goes, the Nary Red was so named because it produced very little of value - or "nary a red cent," Ferrier said. For those who live in mined portions of Placer County, the perils of mining have always been a part of life.
In such heavily wooded areas with mostly single-family homes, Gold County dwellers are often reminded of the area's roots. Parents have been known to band together to fill in mining sinkholes that appear, sometimes after heavy rain seasons.
"I think people are more shocked than concerned about whether it could happen again," said Thomas Warwick, 62, who lives a few blocks from the Chellews' home. "I just can't imagine anyone ever dying like this."
Growing up in the area during the 1950s, Warwick, 62, remembers his parents warning him to watch for mine shafts.
According to the latest estimate of the Abandoned Mine Lands Unit, an arm of the state Department of Conservation, 84 percent of California's 47,000 abandoned mines present physical safety hazards.
In the past three to four years, the state has worked to reduce hazards at about 216 such sites, often by plugging the openings, said Doug Craig, assistant director of the state Office of Mine Reclamation.
For private property owners, there is little that regulators can do in the way of warning them.
Bill Schulze, Placer County's chief building official, said the county doesn't study whether mines run beneath home building sites. "We don't have any policies for homes because we don't have good maps or access to that information," Schulze said.
He said that some maps of tunnels near the Alta house exist, but that they probably aren't accurate: "I don't think those old maps include everything."
Whenever a sinkhole forms in the United States, the telephone usually rings in the office of David Weary or his colleagues at the U.S. Geological Survey headquarters in Reston, Va.
"If you want to speculate, this house (in Placer County) probably had a void that's been opening up under the slab, and maybe this latest bout of rainy weather could have been the straw that broke the camel's back," Weary said.