MENDOCINO CO., 9/4/26 — The two people found dead Aug. 30 in a vehicle that went off a hillside outside Willits were Phillip R. Colvard, 68, and his wife, Bernice D. Colvard, 57, of Willits, the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office said Friday. Family members had identified the couple earlier in public posts on Facebook.
Both died of blunt force injuries, the sheriff’s office said in an email answering questions from the Voice. The cause of death for both is listed as an accident, sheriff’s Capt. Quincy Cromer, the office’s spokesman, said. The final findings are pending further testing.
Investigators haven’t established when the couple died, Cromer said. The date and time on the coroner’s paperwork is when they were found and pronounced dead.
The call came in at 3:57 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 30, and the location logged was the 1300 block of Mariposa Creek Road at Bear Canyon Road, Officer Olegario Marin, public information officer for the California Highway Patrol’s Ukiah Area, said in a phone interview Friday. The vehicle went down a 150-foot embankment, he said. It came to rest on its roof, and both occupants were dead at the scene, CHP told the Voice the day after the crash.
The CHP dispatch log for the call shows the person who reported it had been searching for their father and found the vehicle below the road, out of sight from the pavement, reachable by a dirt road off Bear Canyon Road. A Cal Fire aircraft crew had the wreck in sight from the air by 4:17 p.m. and redirected ground units that were headed the wrong way, the log shows. The sheriff’s office was notified at 4:09 p.m.
Yolanda Lynn Colvard, commenting on the Voice’s Facebook post about the crash, wrote that Phillip was her brother, that the crash happened on land the family has owned for more than 57 years and that he had lived there all his life. He “loved the property and so did Bernice,” she wrote.
Another commenter, Michele Orlando, wrote that Phillip was also her brother and that Bernice had been her best friend in elementary school in Willits.
The cause of the crash is under investigation, CHP said.