From the archives

A bomb scare forced a two-hour evacuation of the San Mateo County Hall of Justice in Redwood City the morning of Nov. 2, 2001 after an anonymous call alerted police.

Redwood City police called in the sheriff’s bomb squad, but bomb-sniffing dogs failed to find an evidence of the alleged bomb. The courthouse was evacuated shortly before 9 a.m. after Redwood City police received a call from a pay phone saying there was a bomb in the building.

Many streets were blocked around the Redwood City building while several hundred employees, attorneys and members of the public milled around outside. Prisoners in the courts were returned to the jail next door.

"When we let things like this disrupt our lives we are doing what the terrorists want,” Mike Nevin, president of the Board of Supervisors, said with indignation.

Slain SJ officer mourned

Thousands of police officers from the Bay Area and as far away as Modesto filled the streets outside a Redwood City church Oct. 31, 2001 to pay tribute to San Jose Police Officer Jeffrey Fontana, who was shot and killed in the line of duty earlier in the week.

St. Pius Catholic Church was filled with family, friends and hundreds of San Jose police officers. Fontana, who was born in Burlingame and attended elementary and high school in Redwood City, was described as a highly competitive young man who liked deer hunting, Western music and dancing. He met his fiancee, Crystal Littleton, at the Saddle Rack, a Western bar in San Jose. Fontana was only on the police force for a few months when he was shot patrolling a quiet neighborhood in Santa Clara County. He was the first San Jose Police officer to be killed in the line of duty in 12 years.

Reward raised for deer killer

Despite increased attention and escalating rewards for information about previous attacks, two more deer were shot — including one killed — within 48 hours of each other late the week of Oct. 30, 2001.

A resident on the 800 block of Crystal Springs Road in Hillsborough called the humane society to report a dead deer on his lawn with an archer’s rubber-tipped arrow lying nearby.

The next day, a resident on the 100 block of Pine Street in San Carlos reported spotting an injured deer with an arrow in its leg.

The two new shootings brought the total of deer attacks in residential neighborhoods to fiveduring the past month, four of those shootings occurred within blocks of each other.