The names of the two men whose bodies were found in a pickup truck in the Santa Cruz Mountains a week ago were released Tuesday by the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner’s Office.
The identities of the victims, previously identified by family members, are Colter White, 53, and Sean Pfeffer, 45. Family members said both men lived in Boulder Creek.
In a Sunday telephone call from her home in Texas, Nicki Dorris, Peffer’s sister, called her younger brother a loving father who was loyal to his friends and family. She had not yet heard from detectives investigating the deaths of her brother and White.
Six days after the discovery of the two friends’ bodies at a mountain ridge turnout along Skyline Boulevard (SR 35), Dorris said, “I just want to know what happened. I want justice for whoever did this to him.” April 1 would have been Pfeffer’s 46th birthday.
This past Sunday would’ve been White’s 54th birthday.
One week after the bodies were found, the California Highway Patrol, which is investigating the double homicide, declined to discuss any details of the case, such as suspects, a murder weapon, or where or when the actual killings occurred.
In a March 26 report, the coroner officially classified the incident as a double homicide.
Pfeffer was killed by a “gunshot wound of the left chest,” while White was killed by “gunshot wounds of torso and left upper and lower extremities,” according to medical examiner records.
Over the weekend, a small roadside memorial—with photos, candles and flowers—appeared at the Highway 35 turnout where the truck and bodies were discovered.
On March 24, just after 6:50pm, the California Highway Patrol was notified of an abandoned truck located along Skyline, on the Santa Clara/Santa Cruz County boundary.
When CHP officers arrived on scene they discovered two deceased individuals in the bed of a Ford pickup. After the bodies were examined, photographed and transported to the Santa Clara County Coroner/Medical Examiner’s Office in San Jose, the truck was processed for evidence and towed away on Tuesday afternoon, said Sgt. Andrew Barclay, a spokesperson for CHP’s Golden Gate Division.
Because the crime scene was next to a state route, CHP detectives are investigating the case.
One week after the grisly discovery, investigators were releasing few details about the killings.
Information about the victims has been compiled from families, friends, court records, newspaper archives and social media.
Pfeffer left a chilling message on Facebook one day before his body was found. Four days before that, he’d updated his Facebook profile photo.
At 2:10pm on March 23, Pfeffer wrote on his Facebook page, “If today isn’t work out know that it was (name withheld by this publication), the piece of crap that I invited to this mountain that still hasn’t left it and is working the f*** out of my f****** cousin. I’m rolling down there right now (name withheld) I hope you shoot me.” It was his last social media post.
At a weekend vigil at the mountain crime scene, Janelle Sanford, who described herself as a friend of White’s, told a KTVU-TV reporter that Pfeffer and White were friends.
“It seems like he just got Colter caught up in things that he shouldn’t have been,” she speculated. She said Pfeffer “had problems with people and he wanted Colter to come be his muscle and back him up.”
Dorris posted to Facebook, “If you or someone you know lives in the Boulder Creek area in California and knows anything that can help find the people responsible for murdering my little brother, Sean Pfeffer, please call it in! He was a son, a brother, an uncle, a father and a friend to many and did not deserve this.”
The CHP would not comment on the Facebook post or any other aspect of the case.
“The investigation is active and ongoing,” Barclay said in a telephone interview on Friday. “Based on what we know at this time, there doesn’t appear to be any danger to the public.” He declined to elaborate Monday, though he said no suspect is in custody.
The CHP, citing standard procedure, has not formally identified the two victims, except to say they are males, deferring to the coroner for the identification. Families have been notified, and supplied the names to local media.
Sean Pfeffer’s Gilroy childhood
In an hour-long interview Sunday, Dorris said she is devastated by the sudden loss of the “baby brother” she grew up with in Gilroy.
“I just want to find his killer—or killers.”
Dorris said that as children, she and her brother were as close as can be.
Their parents were frequently away for work (their dad was a traveling plumber). So, the siblings had to rely on one another.
“He was my world,” she said. “He just knew all my secrets.”
She described Pfeffer as a somewhat of a shy kid who got embarrassed easily, but was also a jokester.
“He was so different when he was a child,” she said, adding he had “the best laugh ever.”
They attended Gilroy High School, but after a “family incident” were sent to live with their aunt in Santa Rosa.
“I feel like that’s when everything went to shit,” she said.
She was 17 years old. After a few months, Pfeffer moved to San Jose.
“He dropped out of school,” she said. “He just started hanging out with not the best people, and just making really bad decisions.”
Dorris stayed in Santa Rosa and, after graduation, got her own place.
‘He was loyal to the people he loved and cared about.’
—Nicki Dorris, Sean Pfeffer’s sister
Pfeffer would come up for visits, staying overnight.
“Those were some of the best times,” she said, recalling their newfound independence. “He loved me and knew that I cared.”
She remembers how their mom hated purple candy, so she’d always give them the purple items to eat.
So, they joked about how now they wouldn’t have to eat the purple sweets anymore.
One day, Dorris bought Fruity Pebbles cereal (Pfeffer’s favorite) and ice cream, and left for a while.
Upon returning, she discovered her little brother had devoured all of it.
“And the milk was completely gone,” she recalls fondly. “He loved all ice cream. He loved all sweets.”
By this point, she believed that there were drugs in the picture for her brother, but she says he shielded her from what he was up to.
“He tried to just kind of protect me from what he was doing,” she said. “He always tried to brush things off.”
She says she never saw those darker elements at her place.
“I tried to get him to move in with me,” she said, but noted these pleas fell on deaf ears. “He’s a stubborn kid—just like myself.”
Pfeffer married his longtime girlfriend and they had a daughter together.
“He was extremely happy,” she said.
Dorris said she has this image in her head of the time he walked out of the delivery room and embraced her.
Their own father hadn’t been around so much. And now Pfeffer was going to be a dad himself.
“I was holding him,” Dorris said. “He was holding back tears.
“It’s just these little moments that are the sweetest.”
But, according to Dorris, Pfeffer was gutted by an acrimonious divorce that followed.
“He cried many times on the phone to me,” she said. “He’s not a man who can keep his emotions inside.”
Even though she’d left California in 2015, they remained in close contact.
“He was going through stuff. I was going through stuff,” she said. “He was loyal to the people he loved and cared about.”
Over the years, a theme began to emerge: This idea that getting him “off the hill”—referring to the San Lorenzo Valley area—might not be such a bad idea.
Pfeffer had taken up residence on the property of a friend who was dying of cancer.
“He was actually helping take care of him,” Dorris said, “—until he passed away.”
The passing of this best friend was another major blow: despite their hardships over the years, death wasn’t something Pfeffer had had to deal with much before.
“He was devastated,” Dorris said.
And then, there was the time Pfeffer told her he’d almost died himself.
“He got stabbed on New Year’s,” she said, when asked about some of his misadventures “on the hill” in Boulder Creek. “I’m sure there’s good people, but there’s also not great people.”
Dorris says he told her he thought he might die in the ambulance.
“It’s not like the movies,” he told her. “My brain just went completely blank.”
We “just need to get you off the hill,” she thought.
“My mom and I both tried to get him to move to either of our houses,” she said, adding it seemed there was a familiarity to the San Lorenzo Valley life for him, no matter how rough and tumble. “It was the chaos that he was accustomed to.”
A few weeks before his death, Dorris messaged Pfeffer about a painting project she’d been working on.
He complimented her on one of the dressers she’d spruced-up to flip in his own way.
“That’s sick a** furniture,” he wrote, razzing that maybe she was just passing off an item from a catalogue as her own.
“You are very sweet… All me… Who knew, right?” came her response.
White: former cause celebre
Pfeffer’s friend, Colter White, had been a local celebrity 16 years ago, gaining fans and publicity for apparently turning his life around following years of run-ins with the law.
Hundreds marched to support his release from the Santa Cruz County Jail in October 2009 where he was serving a month for parole violation. He was freed, and the violation dismissed, thanks in part to letters of recommendation from the then-Cabrillo College President Brian King, and popular politician Fred Keeley—now mayor of Santa Cruz—and hundreds of students and faculty. There was even a Press Banner editorial written in support of White.
At the time it was reported that he’d spent most of his adult life in trouble with the law, and had been in prison for battery with great bodily injury during a bar fight. In 2004, while serving his sentence, White earned a GED and started college courses. White spent 15 years in prison.
After his parole, White lived with relatives in Boulder Creek, worked construction and earned A’s at Cabrillo College. He transferred to Santa Clara University in 2009, and graduated with a communications degree in 2012. Two student filmmakers, SCU classmates, made a 2012 documentary film about White’s turnaround.
But in recent months he was back in trouble with the law. On Jan. 14 he pleaded not guilty to felony grand theft and five enhancements.
“Colter White did unlawfully take money and personal property of a value exceeding Nine Hundred Fifty Dollars ($950), to wit a boat the property of Jarred Sumida,” reads the Nov. 6 Complaint.
The next day prosecutors successfully argued for stolen property terms to be added to his $10,000 surety bail.
According to another Complaint filed Feb. 4, White “did unlawfully bring and possess a weapon, to wit, knife…upon the grounds of, and within a public and private school providing instruction in kindergarten and grades 1 to 12” on Jan. 23.
In addition to $5,000 bail for this case, on Feb. 6, Superior Court Judge Nancy de la Pena told him to “Stay Away, from Boulder Creek Elementary,” according to court minutes, also ordering him, “Do not own or possess any firearm, body armor, ammunition, or any other dangerous weapon, firearm or ammunition.”
On March 7 he pleaded not guilty to the charge of possessing a weapon at a school and denied the several enhancements that came along with it.
Final frantic post
Pfeffer faced felony vandalism and misdemeanor domestic violence charges in 2023.
However, it was the DA’s Office that requested this be dismissed due to “insufficient evidence.”
Pfeffer’s final Facebook post on March 23 shocked his friends and family. Dorris said she was so alarmed she tried to reach out to see if he was okay.
“Sean, just pick up your fricking phone,” she thought.
She says she even tried—unsuccessfully—to crack his T-Mobile account to see if she could intercept messages that might give her a clue about what was going on.
Dorris even went as far as to file a missing persons report with local authorities here.
And then her mom called with the tragic news. Her little brother was dead.
“That was a blur moment. I just remember pleading with her that she was wrong,” Dorris said. “It was awful. It was terrible.”
She says at that point she flipped into robotic mode: notifying their father, their stepdad and others about the killing.
Dorris says she’s frustrated with the pace of the investigation.
“I don’t want this to go in the back page of the newspaper,” she said. “There’s a murderer out there.”
Barry Holtzclaw contributed to this report.
