A University of California, Berkeley police officer whose suspicion of Phillip Garrido two weeks ago led to the discovery of the woman he has admitted kidnapping 18 years ago has been honored by the San Francisco Bay area city where she lives.
Officer Allison Jacobs was given a motorcade through Brentwood and a key to the city on Tuesday night. Jacobs also received several standing ovations from the audience during a City Council meeting where she was honored.
Jacobs and Lisa Campbell, UC Berkeley's special events coordinator, set off the astonishing chain of events that led to the Aug. 26 arrests of Garrido and his wife, Nancy, in the 1991 kidnapping of 11-year-old Jaycee Dugard.
Campbell met with Garrido two days earlier when he visited campus seeking a permit to hold a religious event. Campbell told Jacobs that Garrido and the two daughters her brought with him were acting strangely. Jacobs looked into Garrido's record and found out he was a registered sex offender and parolee. She contacted his parole agent, who did not know that Garrido had children.
Jacobs says she is humbled being honored for doing her job.
Also Tuesday, an independent expert has determined that a bone fragment found in a backyard near the home of suspected kidnappers Phillip and Nancy Garrido is probably human, Contra Costa County sheriff's spokesman Jimmy Lee said.
The sheriff's office is sending the fragment to the state DNA laboratory for further testing.
Investigators searching for evidence linking Garrido to a series of unsolved murders said they found a bone fragment on the property next to Garrido's last week.
The bone was discovered after officials brought cadaver dogs to the property. On Tuesday investigators confirmed the bone came from a human but cautioned about jumping to conclusions.
"The expert has determined that the bone fragment found in the backyard of Garrido's neighbor is probably human," said Jimmy Lee, the director of public affairs for the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office. "It should be noted that it is not uncommon to find Native American remains in Contra Costa County."
The bone fragment was analyzed by an outside expert. The sheriff's office is requesting the state to examine the bone to see if it can develop a DNA profile of it, according to Lee.
Dugard, now 29, was allegedly forced to live in a series of makeshift sheds and tents in the backyard of the Garridos' home on Walnut Avenue in unincorporated Contra Costa County just outside Antioch, where she was repeatedly raped and gave birth to two daughters fathered by Garrido, authorities have said.
Pittsburg police said last week that they did not find any evidence to link Garrido to the murders.
