Dinelli’s shooting leaves brother baffled

Seated on a sunny bench by the open kitchen door of his rural Penngrove home, Larry Dinelli said his trusting and outgoing sister would have happily opened the door to anyone who knocked, if the door was even closed at all.

Olga Dinelli, 84, spent her life at the family’s 1910 farmhouse where she helped raise her nephew and could look out at her meticulously groomed rose bushes from the kitchen window as she cooked Italian classics like pasta and meatballs.

“She is this home,” Larry Dinelli, 75, said. “Part of this home is gone. And there is no reason for it.”

Larry Dinelli said he was told his sister was tied to a chair and shot in the head as unknown intruders Thursday ransacked their rural Rose Avenue home. He said the intruders opened every drawer, dumping even T-shirts and socks onto the floor, and left in a car they took from the garage with jewelry, his tax returns and other such items he said had little to no monetary value.

“If I was here, could I have helped or would I have been killed, too?” said Larry Dinelli, who was visiting a friend when his sister was killed. “It’s just sad that there are people in the world like that. Senseless and tragic.”

Dinelli, who worked as a pressman for The Press Democrat for about 20 years, said he does not recognize the names of the two men authorities have so far identified as suspects in his sister’s killing. He said he does not know why they would target their home.

John Bruno Martinez, 27, of Richmond was scheduled to be arraigned in Sonoma County Superior Court Tuesday on charges of murder, assault, weapon possession, conspiracy and receiving stolen property, records show.

Another suspect was being held at an Arizona jail.

Victor Silva, 27, of Greenbrae in Marin County was arrested after a lengthy, high-speed chase that ended on a desert highway near the Arizona border. Silva surrendered but a woman with him, also a suspect in Dinelli’s killing, was shot and killed by a Riverside County sheriff’s deputy. Authorities said she brandished a gun and didn’t follow orders to put it down.

La Paz County sheriff’s staff Monday said that coroner detectives were having trouble locating the woman’s family and were not yet able to release her name.

The pursuit spanned 100 miles, and witnesses reported the suspects were shooting from the vehicle as they fled.

Sonoma County sheriff’s officials have said little about the case. Officials Monday would not elaborate on a suspected motive, confirm how Olga Dinelli was killed or discuss any details of the case.

On Monday, there was no sign that the intruders had to force their way through a door to get inside.

The door stood open, letting the afternoon sun filter into the kitchen where a portrait of Larry and Olga’s mother rested on an old 1930s stove. Magnets on the refrigerator read: “God bless the Dinelli family” and “Happiness is being Italian.”

Plastic tarps covered the doorways into the room where Dinelli’s sister was killed. The hum of a ventilation system rumbled from within.

Larry Dinelli said that each shirt put back on the hanger and each framed family photo righted in place restores the order and care his sister brought each day.

“She was the caretaker. Now it’s up to me,” Dinelli said.