The former owner of the Masonic Avenue home that was searched by police on Tuesday in connection with the disappearance of 10-year-old San Francisco boy Kevin Collins nearly three decades ago said he was shocked to hear the house could be tied to the famous case.
Public records show that Daryl McCurry, 63, owned the duplex at 1106-1108 Masonic Ave. in the city's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood from 1977 to 1988. Kevin went missing in 1984 after leaving basketball practice at nearby St. Agnes School.
San Francisco police and FBI agents executed a search warrant at the home on Tuesday, and cadaver dogs from the Alameda County Sheriff's Office uncovered bones under the concrete floor of the garage.
Police said a preliminary assessment of the bones indicates that they are from an animal, but that further analysis is necessary. Police said the current residents are not suspects in the disappearance of Collins.
McCurry said he has never been contacted by police in the case. He said he rented out the units but did not recall much about the tenants at the time of the disappearance besides that the residents in the lower unit were two men named Jack and Kelly. "They were there for some time, eight or 10 years," he said.
"They were the kinds of tenants that took care of most of their own things. If they had something, they took care of it." McCurry said he remembers the time when Collins disappeared, and called it "a huge surprise" to hear the house was being searched.
"I never noticed anything funny going on there," he said. "If someone had broken up the concrete and replaced it, I'm sure I would've noticed that," he said.
"It just seems like if something happened there it would've been more obvious. Someone would have heard something."
McCurry said the records he keeps do not go far back enough to provide any other information about the tenants, Jack and Kelly, but said he remembered Jack as "fairly young, 26 or 27, about 5 feet 9, with short, sandy blond hair." He said he did not remember what Kelly looked like, saying, "I mostly dealt with Jack."
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Police remained tight-lipped today about what prompted the investigation at the home, and said the search warrant remains sealed. Chief Greg Suhr said only that an inspector was looking at the cold case file when something "tickled his interest."
Suhr said the medical examiner's office will be able to determine "sooner rather than later" whether the bones are from an animal. If the bones are determined to be human, DNA testing will be conducted, he said.
