Norco '80

by Peter Houlahan

  As they approached Fifth Street, Chris saw a problem. Firefighters at a department at Hamner and Fifth Street had heard the RSO radio traffic on scanner and took it upon themselves to position an engine across the southbound lanes of Hamner to block traffic headed in the direction of the shootout. With the northbound traffic stopped at a red light, there was only one thing he could do.

  Ivan Hopkins was stopped at a red light when something struck his Datsun compact pickup from behind. When he whipped his head around to see what it was, a large yellow utility truck pushed up against his back bumper. Hopkins saw something else too. Manny Delgado now sat on the window frame of the passenger door, his entire torso out of the vehicle. He had ditched the riot gun and was using Chris’s HK93, aiming the rifle at Hopkins and screaming for him to move. Before he could react, the yellow pickup began pushing Hopkins’s smaller vehicle forward. Hopkins instinctively kept his foot hammered down on the brake, but the yellow truck was too powerful and continued to push him, tires screaming on pavement, into heavy traffic crossing on Fifth Street.

  With the truck still blocking their way, Russell Harven vaulted over the side cabinets and ran out into the intersection holding the “Shorty” AR. “Move it or I will blow your motherfucking head off!” he screamed, aiming the rifle at Hopkins from no more than five feet away. Hopkins released the brake on his pickup and accelerated through the intersection.

  Instead of running back to the yellow truck, Russ whipped around and leveled the gun at a man named George DeVol standing in the intersection a dozen feet away. DeVol had also heard about the gun battle raging at Fourth and Hamner and, with another man, was attempting to direct southbound traffic down Fifth Street instead. For a moment, Harven and a stunned DeVol stared at each other before DeVol threw himself prone onto the pavement and began to pray. Instead of gunshots, he heard something metal hit the pavement near him. Then the yellow truck pulled up and the gunman scrambled over the tailgate into the back. When they were gone, DeVol found a twenty-round magazine lying in the intersection where the man in the ski mask had been. When he checked, he found it still contained live rounds. Jesus Christ, DeVol wondered, with all the commotion maybe the son of a bitch accidentally hit the release on the magazine port instead of the trigger.

  RUSSELL HARVEN HAD BARELY SCRAMBLED BACK TO HIS POSITION BEHIND the cab before the yellow truck had traveled another half mile to Sixth Street, where more cars were backed up at a red light. This time, there was no fire engine, so Chris swung the yellow truck into oncoming lanes and barreled through the intersection, slamming into the side of a car making a left turn off Sixth Street. The big pickup sent Levester Dietsch’s Plymouth Champ spinning out of its path. Chris Harven shifted the truck into third gear and stomped on the accelerator, roaring out of the intersection.

  Chris Harven had only another quarter mile to reach the Little League field and the cold getaway cars. So far, they had not seen a single cop car on Hamner. Chris pulled into the right lane to pass a slower car. As the truck went by, the driver, Janice Cannon, saw two men in ski masks in the bed. The one standing up began shooting over her car at something on the other side of the road. Cannon looked over and saw a Riverside Sheriff’s unit racing down Hamner in the opposite direction, its light bar flashing. When she looked back, the man standing behind the cab swung his gun around, aimed it at her, and fired. Cannon slammed on her brakes and jerked the car onto the right shoulder. She ducked down, cowering in the front seat until someone from the local VFW post ran to check on her.

  Riverside deputy Darrell Reed had just crossed over the Santa Ana River bottom southbound on Hamner and crested a rise in the road when he caught sight of the yellow truck. He saw at least two men with rifles aimed at him. Both fired. Reed ducked down in his seat and heard four shots in all before the two vehicles passed each other. It was the second of those shots that went right through the sheriff’s star emblazoned on the driver’s door of his unit and straight into Reed’s left leg just below the knee. I’ve been shot, Reed called over the radio, but it was mostly lost among the flurry of other transmissions.

  Reed pulled into the next side street to quickly check the wound. The bleeding was controllable, so he decided not to wait for an ambulance. They’re shooting from the back of the vehicle, he radioed. I’m headed to the hospital.

  He resumed southbound on Hamner until he reached deputy Andy Delgado, gun drawn and crouched behind the door of his patrol unit just north of the bank at Fourth Street. He heard Delgado yell something to him about taking up a position or something. “Andy,” Reed called back matter-of-factly. “I can’t. I’ve been shot.”

  Andy stared at Reed for a second and then darted across Hamner to Reed’s unit after asking a plainclothes narcotics detective to cover him. He opened the door and helped the wounded deputy out onto the pavement. “I’m going to have to cut those pants to get at it.”

  “I just bought these pants, Andy,” Reed protested.

  “Fuck the pants,” Delgado said, searching through his first aid kit. “You got a knife on you?” he asked Reed, unable to find his own.

  “I thought all you Mexicans carried knives,” Reed said, managing to flash Delgado a smile while grimacing in pain from the gunshot.

  Andy shook his head, deciding this was one comment he would let slide.

  AFTER THE CONFRONTATION WITH IVAN HOPKINS’S BLUE PICKUP AT FIFTH Street, Manny Delgado continued to ride sitting on the window frame, aiming Chris Harven’s Heckler over the roof of the cab. When he began firing at Darrell Reed’s patrol unit, Chris leaned across the seat, grabbed Manny by the back of his shirt, and yanked him back inside the cab. What the fuck are you doing? Chris screamed. We’re just about at the cars. Now we can’t stop because you just drew attention to us! Manny wrestled out of his grip and climbed back out to his perch on the window frame just in time to take a last look at his Matador as they passed the Little League fields.

  He passed the cars! George Smith screamed to Russ, watching the Matador and Z/28 parked in the Little League lot fade into the distance behind the speeding truck. Why did he pass the fucking cars?

  Russ leaned out over the side of the truck and hollered something into the window at his brother. He turned back to Smith. Too many people, too many cops.

  Where are we going to go now? George yelled.

  Chris pushed the truck past sixty miles per hour north on Hamner, over the Santa Ana River Bridge and into flat farmland and grazing pasture beyond. When Harven downshifted and swung a right turn onto Schleisman Road, George had his answer. They were headed back into Mira Loma. They were going home.

  DEPUTY DOUG BORDEN WAS THE FIRST TO COME UPON THE YELLOW TRUCK AT a bend in the road on Schleisman. Borden never saw the truck until it was right on him, guns already blasting away. Borden took evasive action by driving his car into the front yard of a dairy farm. The men fired on him as they passed, punching a hole through a water tank twenty feet above him and spraying gunfire into a pen of milk cows. The vehicle is on Schleisman headed toward Etiwanda, a stunned Borden shouted into his mic. I’ve been hit by fire.

  Dispatcher Gary Keeter relayed the information. Riverside t’all, units on Schleisman are being fired on.

  Driving on 68th Street, California Highway Patrol officer Doug Earnest could hardly believe what he was looking at when he saw the yellow truck appear from Schleisman and head toward him. Earnest had been monitoring RSO radio traffic on his scanner and self-dispatched the instant the call turned into an 1199. Only seconds before, he had heard Borden’s report of taking fire and now found himself staring down the barrels of three rifles. With more than a dozen years in the field, Earnest thought he had seen everything. But, Jesus, this was like going up against a tank. And what the hell was that guy doing sitting out the passenger window aiming over the roof?

  There was a muzzle flash and the telephone pole just outside Earnest’s driver’s-side window exploded in a hail of wood splinters. Earnest ducked across his seat and heard more than a
dozen gunshots go off in the seconds it took for the truck to go by. One tore into the roof and a second into the center post separating the front and rear doors of his patrol car. Even after they were past, Earnest could still hear firing and bullets zinging off the pavement and corral fencing around him. When it stopped, he sat back up, U-turned, and fell in with Borden in pursuit. By then the truck had disappeared, passing the site of the Wineville chicken coop murders and veering off 68th Street onto Holmes Avenue, where Riverside deputy Rolf Parkes was waiting for them.

  WITH A NAME THAT BELIED HIS TRUE HERITAGE, ROLF PARKES WAS OF MOSTLY Hawaiian descent, born on the island of Oahu and adopted at birth by a Caucasian, nonnative “haole” couple who lived there. When his parents divorced, Rolf and his mother left the beaches of Waikiki for the beaches of Southern California, where Rolf grew up the only child of a single mother just blocks off the water in the Belmont Shore area of Long Beach. He was a good-looking kid with black hair and dark eyes who, by virtue of local demographics, was assumed to be Hispanic. But once teachers and friends learned he was Hawaiian by blood, it all made perfect sense: the Islander’s smile, the smoky complexion, his love of sun and water. It also explained his middle name: Napunako.

  Rolf developed a passion for flight at an early age and was soloing a Cessna in the skies above Long Beach by age seventeen. He wanted to be a professional pilot, but with all the veterans returning home from Vietnam in the mid-1970s, the labor market was glutted with experienced fliers. Parkes earned a four-year degree from Long Beach State, worked for a while as an EMT, and then decided to enter police work at the encouragement of some cop friends.

  At twenty-seven and with less than two years on the Riverside force, Parkes was highly regarded by his fellow officers. Andy Delgado considered Parkes one of the “lions” on the force: a quiet, brave cop who would be there when you needed him. Reserved by nature, Rolf kept a few close friends on the force but did not fraternize much after work because of the ninety-minute commute back to Long Beach. Rolf liked the ocean, the beach, and his childhood friends too much to move to the landlocked smog belt of Riverside County.

  It was Rolf’s desire to be closer to Long Beach that led him to accept a lateral move to the Irvine Police Department. He was headed into his final week at the RSO when he arrived for the cover shift the afternoon of May 9, 1980. At the shift briefing, Parkes had tried to grab the Norco beat ahead of Glyn Bolasky to avoid working in Rubidoux, but Bolasky was having none of it, pulling rank on Parkes with a sly smile. Bolasky kept his Norco shift while Rolf hit the streets that day with the call sign 3-Edward-13—3 for the three-shift, Edward for Riverside station, 13 for Rubidoux.

  When the 1199 went out, Parkes responded in the direction of Fourth and Hamner by way of Mira Loma. Trying to follow reports of the suspects’ location over the increasingly cluttered radio traffic, Rolf listened as every one of his fellow deputies who encountered the bank robbers took fire or was wounded, maybe even killed. He heard Doug Borden report being fired on at Schleisman. The next transmission put the suspects on 68th Street headed in the direction of Holmes Avenue. Turning off Etiwanda onto Holmes, a two-lane road lined with ramshackle houses, double-wides, and animal pens, it suddenly occurred to Rolf that he might be seconds away from a battle in which he would be outgunned, outmanned, and utterly alone.

  Rolf abruptly slowed and pulled his cruiser onto the dirt beside the metal fencing of a horse corral to give him time to consider his options. Before he could make any decisions, the yellow truck appeared, traveling at an ominously slow speed. To Parkes, it did not look like a vehicle fleeing police as much as it did one daring anyone to get close to it. And now it was 150 feet away, headed directly toward him.

  At once, three men with rifles simultaneously turned their weapons on Rolf. Bullets ricocheted off the pavement in front of him with a singing sound as they fragmented. Others cracked like bullwhips overhead as they shattered the sound barrier on their way to God knows where. There was the tearing sound of rounds striking his vehicle, ripping through multiple layers of metal, plastic, and glass with a guttural, three-dimensional quality. Fragments lacerated the interior and seats while heavier rounds from George Smith’s .308 passed through one side of the vehicle and out the other. Rolf had been around plenty of guns, but this was like nothing he had ever heard before.

  Closing in on him, the truck methodically crossed the dotted line, veering into his lane like a trapper walking up to a snared animal to blow its brains out. The fucking thing seemed to amble, in no hurry at all. These sons of bitches are not trying to get away from me, he thought, they are trying to kill me. He was out of options. In the move of a desperate man willing to put anything between himself and death, Rolf Parkes did the only thing he could think of: he rolled up his side window.

  A calm resignation came over him. He wondered if he would die slowly or quickly and how much it would hurt. He lay across the bench seat on his right side, all the shit mounted on his dashboard preventing him from getting down on the floorboard. Rounds were already tearing through the interior of the Monaco. He reflexively lifted his left arm up to shield his head, peering out from underneath his elbow.

  The truck slowly rolled into his field of view no more than a yard away from his window, drifting by like a pirate ship pulling broadsides on some helpless, wallowing frigate. Time seemed to slow down as they appeared one by one, looking like pirates themselves. The wild eyes of Christopher Harven stared out at him from behind a black ski mask. With one hand on the steering wheel, Harven reached out with the other and fired the .45 Long Colt revolver at point-blank range, the bullets striking the quarter panel and door. Manny Delgado managed to get off a few shots over the top of the cab, gouging ruts in the roof of Parkes’s unit. There was an explosion of gunfire coming from multiple weapons and then the face of Russell Harven appeared above Parkes, looming like some sort of insane hillbilly while aiming his rifle down at a violent angle, shooting fish in a barrel. Broken glass sprayed Rolf in the face. He shut his eyes against it. Something whizzed by, cleaving his scalp right down the middle, just above the hairline. Finally, it was George Smith’s turn, firing over the edge of the tailgate into the body of the Monaco as they pulled away, the last round from the .308 exploding the back window of the patrol unit.

  Rolf could hear the truck accelerate away. He opened his eyes and felt his head. There was only a spotting of blood from a flesh wound on his scalp. A few inches lower and it would have been the proverbial bullet right between the eyes. There was glass all through his hair and a stinging in his right eye, but Rolf Parkes knew the impossible had just happened: He had survived.

  PARKES SETTLED HIMSELF BEHIND THE WHEEL OF THE MONACO. I HAVE ONE week left in this place, he thought to himself. Do I need this shit? With just about every window blown out except the windshield, bullet holes through the doors, fenders, hood, and roof, and his hair parted down the middle by a round from a .223, who would blame him for shutting it down and calling it a career at the RSO? But the thought did not last. Parkes just didn’t have it in him to bail out on his partners in the middle of a fight.

  Fred Chisholm passed Rolf’s position, having just had his own harrowing head-on confrontation with the yellow truck a hundred feet beyond Parkes. Chisholm drifted by, staring in disbelief that Rolf was not dead amid the destruction of the Monaco. You okay, Rolf? he asked over the radio. Parkes nodded yes, pulling a U-turn and taking the lead in the pursuit. Chisholm fell in behind Parkes as the CHP unit with Doug Earnest at the wheel suddenly came flying off 68th Street and onto Holmes, itself riddled with gunfire but most decidedly back in the hunt.

  At the far end of Holmes, Parkes could see the yellow truck, George Smith sitting in military sharpshooter pose with one leg tucked under him, rifle stock resting on the other knee, still peeling off round after round in their direction. Under heavy fire again, Parkes grabbed his mic and radioed that the truck was coming up to the T-intersection at Etiwanda Avenue. 3-Edward-13, behind the vehicl
e. They have fired on us. They have high-powered rifles. It was the first time anyone had mentioned that important fact.

  Approaching the pursuit head on, Dave “Mad Dog” Madden radioed back to Parkes. I’m at Etiwanda and Limonite at this time.

  Parkes responded with an urgent warning to Madden and anyone else who might be in the path of the yellow truck. Get your shotgun out immediately! They are firing numerous rounds.

  Just around the corner at the intersection of Etiwanda and Limonite, Madden along with Riverside deputies Herman Brown and Ken McDaniels were only moments away from finding themselves directly in the path of the yellow truck.

  SIRENS WAILED FROM ALL SIDES AS CHRIS TOOK A HARD LEFT AT A T-intersection off Holmes, northbound onto Etiwanda. Russ flipped the magazine on the AR, locked in a full one, and then steadied the gun between the two acetylene tanks and waited. Coming up on a busy four-way intersection at which Chris had no intention of slowing down, Riverside deputies were suddenly everywhere.

  The first took a right turn off the cross street, Limonite, and was no more than twenty-five feet away when both Manny and Russ opened up on him. Deputy Herman Brown knew the truck might pop out somewhere on Etiwanda, but never expected it to be right on top of him. The moment he saw the truck and the two gun barrels aimed at him, Brown ducked his head and heard his windshield shatter. There was a cascade of gunfire and more bullets tore into his unit. Brown never saw it, but as the truck passed him going the other way, Chris Harven stuck the Long Colt out the driver’s window and fired into his unit.

  Brown attempted to make an evasive maneuver onto a side street, but a pickup truck suddenly pulled up to the stop sign. Brown jerked the wheel hard and threw his car into a sideways slide to avoid the truck, tearing his rear tire off the rim and coming to a stop on 63rd Street facing Etiwanda.