Tuesday, Jul. 25, 2006

The man who found Kennewick Man (w/video)

By Anna King, Herald staff writer

Will Thomas was standing in knee-deep water trying to finish off a couple cans of Busch Light.

He saw a roundish brown rock in the river near his foot and thought he would play a joke on his buddy Dave Deacy who was standing nearby onshore.

"I thought I could pull it off like it was a head," Thomas said.

The rock was stuck in the thick mud, so Thomas had to take a firm right-hand grip to free it while clutching his beer safely in his left hand.

Oddly, the rock wasn't heavy.

Then he saw teeth.

"It was a jaw dropper," Thomas said. "It was a human skull, no doubt about it."

Thomas found a 9,000-year-old skull that would spark a nine-year legal clash between archeologists, the federal government and Native American tribes who claim Kennewick Man as their ancestor.

Since then, Thomas said he has been asked to recount the tale about finding Kennewick Man at least a hundred times. He told the story again on a recent afternoon over a dinner of fried chicken and noodle salad near the site of his famous find.

On July 28, 1996, three friends arrived late to Columbia Park in Kennewick with a half-dozen others to watch the Water Follies hydroplane races.

Thomas, Deacy and Joe Wicks decided to wade along the Columbia River shore to reach the park to avoid paying an entrance fee.

Fighting their way through Russian olive trees, deep mud and sharp rocks proved difficult, and Wicks turned back to join the others, who had gone to the park's entrance gate. Everyone planned to meet at the beer garden.

Thomas and Deacy continued walking along the river about 10 feet off shore. They noticed some bones along the riverbank, but thought they were animal bones.

Then the two young men from Richland stumbled across the skull.

As globs of mud dropped from inside the skull cavity back into the water, "Dave said, 'No way,' " Thomas recalled. "There was a quiet moment of shock there."

Thomas made sure to keep the sepia-colored skull at arm's length so it wouldn't contaminate his drink. He wasn't sure how recently the person had died. "I didn't want to get any of that skull gunk on my beer," Thomas said.

Deacy looked around the river briefly and picked up what he thought was a stick and then threw it back in the water. The stick turned out to be one of Kennewick Man's femurs, Thomas said.

The young men - Thomas was 21 and Deacy 19 at the time - stood for a few minutes sipping beer and contemplating the situation.

Wanting to meet up with their buddies in the beer garden, they decided to leave the skull behind.

Thomas noticed some children playing in the river nearby. He didn't want them to find it.

"I picked up a bunch of dead weeds and set it there on the river bank," he said.

When the men got to the boat races, they told many of their friends about the skull they had found. A few doubted their tale.

After the races ended, the men returned to their friend's truck.

One friend, Bill Davidson, said he didn't believe the skull story and wanted to see it.

The men walked back to the spot and showed Davidson the skull. Thomas cradled the skull in the crook of his arm, teeth-up, back to the pickup. There they put it in a white 5-gallon bucket.

Thomas, Deacy and their friends hung out and played Frisbee by their truck, while the skull sat nearby.

They spotted an off-duty Richland police officer and showed him the skull. The police officer called other officers.

Floyd Johnson, the Benton County coroner, showed up and examined the skull.

"They were excited to see it," Thomas said. "They could tell it was old right away."

Johnson took the skull to the house of Jim Chatters, an anthropologist, for confirmation of its age.

"He thought it might be an old settler, because it had a slanted forehead and a long narrow nose," Johnson said.

After seeing the skull, Chatters and Johnson returned to the park to look for more of the skeleton.

Thomas and Deacy led Kennewick police and other officials in a patrol boat back to the site where they found the skull, upstream of the race course in Columbia Park. Then Thomas and Deacy were allowed to go home.

Johnson, Chatters and others stayed nearly until dark to recover more bones.

A month later, scientists tested them and discovered the skeleton was about 9,000 years old.

Thomas and Deacy have become somewhat famous because of their find. But news stories rarely use their names.

Thomas says he's usually "the guy who found Kennewick Man."

Both were interviewed repeatedly after the significance of their find became clear.

In 1997, they even were paid $100 each by a Korean television show to re-enact their discovery. The producers flew Thomas to the Tri-Cities from Gonzaga University in Spokane for the shoot.

"We were kind of getting burned out," Thomas said. "When we met the Korean camera crew, we were being so goofy on purpose."

The half-dozen crew members wanted take after take of Thomas and Deacy pulling a plastic skull out of the river. It was spring, so their feet were going numb with cold.

"They made us get barefoot; it was cold water and jagged rocks," Thomas said.

Later, the film crew had them play out a scene in Richland where they ran to a police car and talked with an officer - something that never happened.

"We repeatedly made sure the film would never be shown in America," Thomas said. "I would like to get a hold of that video. It would be bad."

Thomas - now 31 - is married to Angela, 27, and they live in a new house in West Richland with their 5-month-old daughter Gloria. He works for the Parsons Technology Development & Fabrication Complex in Pasco as an instrumentation and controls engineer.

Deacy, 30, recently moved to Denver, where he works as an account manager for Jeld-Wen Windows & Doors.

They remain good friends whose attempt to get into the boat races for free led to a discovery that is changing theories about human history.

"It's a story I would like to tell Gloria someday," Thomas said. "It's like I've accomplished something by accident."