On the afternoon of Friday, July 27, 1979, two men robbed the Bret Harte Market at 93 Woodland Avenue in San Rafael, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. One fired a shot at the store owner, who ducked behind the counter. A woman customer fainted. The two men fled in a car.

Mill Valley police spotted it on Camino Alto and gave chase. One suspect surrendered at Sycamore Avenue. The other, Jonathan Ward, 29, raced to Homestead Valley, ran through the gate at 207 Melrose Avenue, kicked the front door open and disappeared inside. Seconds later, he shoved Orville Erringer outside at gunpoint and retreated into the house with Orville's wife, Letty.

Officers dispersed a crowd of children playing around Homestead School, now Marin Horizon School, and sealed off the neighborhood. More than 35 sheriff's deputies, California Highway Patrol officers and Mill Valley police filtered into the wooded streets. A command post went up at the Tamalpais Fire District station next door. Ward's parents and a sister were brought from Santa Rosa.

Ward told negotiators he was coming off heroin, had recently been released from a state narcotics treatment facility at Corona and would not be taken alive. He also said he didn't want to hurt anyone. Sheriff Al Howenstein asked radio and television reporters to broadcast that no one had been injured in the robbery, so Ward would feel more secure hearing it on the news.

The negotiators said later that their job was considerably easier because of Letty Erringer, the San Francisco Examiner reported. She had a background in counseling and was able to help keep Ward calm.

At 7:13pm, deputies in jungle fatigues carrying rifles scurried into positions around the front door. Two minutes later, Letty walked slowly out of the house and dropped a .45-caliber automatic gingerly into Howenstein's hands. The gun was cocked. She went back inside briefly, then came out again to join her family. At 7:50pm, a squad car backed into the fire station and sped away. Ward was lying handcuffed, head down, on the floor of the back seat. He had spent 30 minutes with his family first, as agreed.

The Erringers and their three children - Alan, Elizabeth and Mary - refused to speak to reporters, according to the Mill Valley Record. They said they were going out to dinner together.

Eric Newton, who lives in Homestead Valley today, wrote that Record account. He was 21 years old and two months into his job as managing editor - fresh out of San Francisco State's journalism school. He had been to big stories before. "The Dan White riot, for example," he told the Mill Valley Briefing this week. "But this was the first big media event I was covering for my own publication. I think the energy in the story reflected how jarring it was to the residents. It was a media scene the likes of which the neighborhood had never seen."

The Mill Valley Historical Society published its own account of the episode in 2005, noting that the neighborhood's dogs - usually chain-barking at dinnertime - had gone silent, and the kids who normally gathered around Homestead School were gone.

Letty Erringer died October 20, 2021, at the age of 92. Her family's obituary in the Marin Independent Journal noted that her training as a counselor "came in useful in an event where a frantic young man with a gun burst into their house in Homestead Valley." Of her passing, Orville said: "She's my love, my light, and my life."

Sources: San Francisco Chronicle, July 28, 1979 (Don Wegars); San Francisco Examiner, July 28, 1979 (Alice Yarish and Tim Reiterman); Mill Valley Record, August 1, 1979 (Eric Newton); Mill Valley Historical Society, December 2005 (Chuck Oldenburg); Letty Erringer obituary, Marin Independent Journal, October 2021.