An Orange County priest and his female traveling companion were found dead in their car Sunday, apparently victims of a car accident in a remote Oregon logging area near where they had disappeared more than three weeks ago.
David Schwartz, 52, and Cheryl Gibbs, 61, appeared to have died after the priest's 2005 Toyota Corolla ran off the road and down a 15- to 20-foot embankment on Highway 26, about 60 miles west of Portland, said Deputy Don Taylor, a spokesman for the Tillamook County Sheriff's Department, which conducted the search.
"They probably died instantly in the car wreck," Taylor said. "There were no skid marks and no indication of their being intoxicated. Our best guess is that they probably fell asleep."
The wreckage had not been seen earlier because it was covered by brush, he said.
Schwartz, a Jesuit priest and director of the Loyola Institute for Spirituality in Orange, and Gibbs, a longtime friend and traveling companion who supervised death investigations for the Alameda County coroner's office and lived in the Oakland suburb of Union City, had gone missing last month on the final leg of a monthlong tour through Nevada, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and California.
It was to have ended with a visit to Schwartz's niece in Carpinteria on the one-year anniversary of her wedding, at which Schwartz had officiated.
Relatives sounded the alarm, however, when the pair failed to show up for an expected reunion with the priest's mother in Sacramento on June 16.
On Friday, Taylor said, Schwartz's sister, searching for the pair along their announced route in Oregon, found Gibbs' signature in the guest book at the Tillamook Cheese factory, on U.S. 101 about 75 miles west of Portland. The entry was dated June 8, one day after they had left most of their possessions in a two-bedroom hotel suite in the city to go sightseeing.
On Saturday, authorities said, a cafe owner in Wheeler, Ore., contacted them to report that the two had stopped for coffee there shortly after leaving the cheese factory.
She said they had asked for directions back to Portland, where they said they planned to pick up their belongings before proceeding to Bend.
And the same day, Taylor said, a deputy located a local winery where the two had stopped after leaving the cafe and bought two bottles of wine. "They each paid for their own," he said. "The woman [at the winery] didn't see which way they went."
