Norco '80

by Peter Houlahan

  They passed Joe Szeles to take the lead in the pursuit, but had plenty of company now. Riverside deputy Jim Evans had taken the Pomona Freeway all the way from Moreno Valley and was third in the pursuit line after entering Interstate 15. He soon began to overtake Parkes and Chisholm. Other fresh horses began to enter the pursuit, most notably the California Highway Patrol. The freeway was CHP turf. Units flooded onto I-15 from all directions. Riding together in an auto-theft unit, patrolmen Steve Batchelor and Peter Vander Kamp merged off Interstate 10 northbound onto I-15. To Vander Kamp, the bullets flying by their vehicle sounded like the buzz of giant bees. Patrolman Ronald Kauffman was out of his vehicle manning a roadblock to keep civilians from entering the freeway when the truck went by. Bullets kicked up dirt around his feet. After taking cover, Kauffman jumped in his unit and joined the pursuit.

  Along with the CHP, units from five additional police agencies entered the chase, most taking fire the instant they came within sight of the truck. Ontario and Riverside city PD units joined at the Jurupa Road on-ramp. North of Highway 10, San Bernardino County Sheriff’s deputies out of the Fontana substation began to appear along with Fontana city PD. A police unit from the town of Perris far to the south had somehow caught up with the pursuit.

  RSO detective Mike Jordan entered Interstate 15 in an unmarked vehicle with red and blue dashboard lights whirling. Although the suspects were nowhere in sight, Jordan heard rounds striking the asphalt around his vehicle. At the same time, a radio transmission put the location of the truck at the Interstate 10 interchange. Jordan was astonished. The men shooting at him were almost a mile away. Others had noticed the range and accuracy the suspects’ weapons were capable of. Keep your lights off, they’ve been firing from a half mile hitting units, an RSO unit radioed. Jordan killed his emergency lights.

  Operating over separate radio frequencies, officers from different agencies resorted to hand signals or mouthing words to get urgent messages across to the each other. With all these amped-up cowboys joining the chase, the message Rolf Parkes frequently found himself trying to get across was “slow down before you get your ass shot off.”

  When the CHP unit driven by Joe Haughey came charging up the fast lane with a Riverside deputy just behind, other Riverside units tried to warn them off.

  Be advised, they are firing. I wouldn’t get too close, Joe Szeles cautioned.

  Haughey and the overly aggressive RSO deputy advanced past Parkes and Chisholm’s 2-Edward-13 unit. Whoever’s ahead of 13, you’re getting too close, they were warned. That’s the vehicle right in front of you, man, look out.

  Is that the bright yellow one just in front of the next car? the Riverside deputy asked.

  Yeah, that’s it. Watch out, they’ll shoot at you.

  Chris Harven saw the two units racing up behind him and was having none of it. He slowed the truck sharply, drawing the two cop cars in precariously close to the gunmen in the back. All three opened fire, spraying the police units with gunfire. Haughey and the RSO deputy dropped back.

  After pulling the wounded A. J. Reynard out of the shot-up 511 car at Van Buren and Bellegrave, Riverside deputy Bill Eldrich had managed to catch up to the pursuit and was only one hundred yards behind the suspects when he entered I-15 from the Baseline Avenue on-ramp. Within seconds, Eldrich heard bullets whizzing over his unit and then rounds smashed into the front of the vehicle. They’re still firing, I just took two, he radioed. A mile later, steam hissed out from under his hood and the car lost power. Eldrich managed to roll his dying vehicle onto the center median. 2-Edward-71, this unit is hit and down. Officer is 10-4, he transmitted, indicating he was okay.

  I’ll pick you up, Joe Szeles radioed, pulling in behind him. Eldrich grabbed his shotgun and jumped into the passenger seat of the brown Ford. Together they rejoined the chase.

  Two Highway Patrol units accelerated past Parkes and Chisholm side by side toward the head of the pack. As they passed, Parkes motioned them back, mouthing, “They have high-powered rifles.” As the patrolmen pushed forward anyhow, Parkes saw something fly out from the back of truck and explode in the air just in front of them. Shrapnel peppered the body of Chisholm’s unit, sounding as if someone had thrown a handful of gravel against it.

  They’re throwing explosives out of the vehicle, a deputy who saw it reported.

  Have they got explosives? another asked, surprised.

  That’s affirmative, Parkes responded. They’ve thrown one explosive device out the rear.

  Okay, that was a similator, Jim Evans radioed in his West Texas accent, mistaking the explosive for a harmless training device.

  Similator, my ass, thought Parkes.

  An RSO lieutenant monitoring the traffic from back in Norco decided he had heard enough and ordered all pursuing units to fall back and give the fleeing suspects plenty of room. The unmarked units were told to back off even farther. Dispatcher Gary Keeter asked for a roll call of Riverside units still in the pursuit. Eight acknowledged.

  A sergeant suggested they figure out what we’re gonna do here.

  Wait until they run out of gas or ammo, Szeles responded.

  A mile short of Sierra, Fred Chisholm’s unit began to cough and lose speed. After taking multiple rounds and shrapnel from a fragmentation grenade, the Plymouth Fury had finally had it. Other black-and-white units began to overtake them. Rolf was despondent. This was his chase, goddamn it. He and Chisholm had been in it the longest. Parkes told Chisholm he might as well keep riding the accelerator hard until the fucking thing died. Parkes had already had one car shot out from under him that day.

  Over the radio, RSO units tried to figure out where the yellow truck might be headed.

  Where are they, Joe, I can’t see them, one radioed Szeles.

  Get off on Sierra? another unit wanted to know.

  That’s affirmative, Jim Evans answered, his unit speeding up to fall in behind two CHP units leading the pursuit.

  As Chisholm limped off the freeway and down the ramp at Sierra Avenue, Rolf eyed the San Gabriel Mountains towering above the valley floor just two miles to the east. Like Szeles, Parkes had a strong suspicion that was where the truck might be headed. He hoped to God he was wrong. The next transmission put the yellow truck heading under the Interstate east on Sierra Avenue. Now there was no doubt: These guys were headed straight up Lytle Creek Canyon. Instantly, the pursuit took on a more ominous feel. When it came to law enforcement, nothing good ever happened in Lytle Creek.

  9

  AMBUSH

  May 9, 1980. Lytle Creek Canyon, California.

  LYTLE CREEK CANYON IS A PLACE THAT MAKES NO ATTEMPT TO HIDE THE madness of its origins. Geologically speaking, the San Gabriel Mountains through which Lytle Creek has carved itself are “new” mountains, part of the Southern California Transverse Ranges created when the North American and Pacific tectonic plates shifted direction along the San Andreas Fault, crashing and grinding their way into each other. The result was a transtensional force so awesome it rotated an entire section of the Pacific Ranges anywhere from 80 to 110 degrees in a northwesterly direction from its original north-south orientation.

  The Transverse is a freak of nature, a miracle of geologic deformation that is still actively moving, forming, heaving up, and tumbling down. The mountains rise abruptly from the valley floor, reaching elevations over four thousand feet so quickly that a 7.5-minute topographical map of the range looks more like a solid blotch of ink than it does the usual concentric figures separated by white space. The wide creek bed is strewn with boulders of white and gray granite, for which millions of years of water and wind is not nearly enough time to settle or make smooth. It all makes for extremely uninviting terrain, unstable and unpredictable enough to give experienced climbers pause before taking it on and outwardly forbidding enough to let inexperienced hikers know that they might very well die trying. Only the bighorn sheep want anything to do with it.

  Not much farther up Lytle Creek, the elevation of the nearby mountain
s soars to over eight thousand feet at Ontario Peak and almost nine thousand feet at Cucamonga Peak. Above it all, at just over ten thousand feet, is Mount San Antonio, more popularly known as Mount Baldy. On a clear day, Baldy is visible for miles in all directions, the highest peak in the San Gabriel Mountains. It is bisected by the San Bernardino County–Los Angeles County line, with the summit and northern side lying within L.A. County. Rain and snow fall on the southern side of the mountain lands in San Bernardino County, much of it flowing into Lytle Creek Canyon. The hillsides above the creek bed are covered with California chaparral made up of scrub oak, manzanita, buckbrush, sumac, and sage. In some places it is taller than a man’s head and impenetrably thick. At higher elevations, the ecosystem changes to scattered pine groves of Douglas fir, ponderosa, and sugar pine.

  Lytle Creek has never been an easy place to inhabit for man or beast. It still experiences frequent earthquakes, rockslides, wildfires, and flash floods. Freezing temperatures and snowfalls measured in feet can come in quickly and late in the season at higher elevations. Hard rains and quick snow melts sweep sediment, shrubbery, and dead trees down feeder streams, transforming the main channel of the creek bed from a trickle to a torrent that tears the hell out of roads, trails, and bridges before sweeping out into the flatlands. The city of Fontana owes its southward-sloping elevations to the fact that it is built atop the alluvial fan of rock and debris swept out of the mouth of the canyon since the Cretaceous period. Serrano Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, and Mormons have all tried to call Lytle Creek Canyon their home, all with eventual failure.

  Many of the streams, ridges, campsites, and trails in the area are named for early settlers, pioneers, gold miners, trappers, moonshiners, scoundrels, and horse thieves who hid their stolen animals up the canyon. Meyers Canyon, Nealeys Corner, and the tiny Happy Jack settlement, named after miner Joseph “Happy Jack” Pollard, all reference early inhabitants. The Applewhite Campground was named after a family related by marriage to the Glens of Glen Ranch. The relationship did not stop James and Ollie Applewhite from shooting John and Silas Glen to death in 1893. Twenty years earlier, a dispute over a productive gold claim ended when a driverless team of horses pulling a wagon arrived at the Texas Point mine with one of the contestants to the claim lying dead in the back. These were not the first murders in Lytle Creek and far from the last. In fact, it got worse. Much worse.

  As dangerous as it is beautiful, Lytle Creek is notorious for both its geological and manmade violence. The place has always attracted loners, outsiders, and outlaws. The wanted and the unwanted. Like any wilderness area in the west, guns have always been part of life in the canyon due to the practical need to hunt and to protect oneself from wild animals and bandits intent upon taking one’s property, livestock, or life. But as the population grew in the Inland Empire below and the Kaiser Steel mill began filling up with blue-collar workers, more and more people came up Lytle Creek just to blast away at shit. Many were responsible recreational gun enthusiasts, but a lot of them were reckless, untrained, and unsafe. Many ignored the formal shooting ranges in favor of pulling their cars off the road at any old place to fire illegal automatic weapons or toss an occasional pipe bomb into the canyon without regard for who or what might be down there. In addition to pumping rounds into the appliances, automobiles, propane tanks, and watermelons they dumped down the hillside, they often sent rounds into the houses of residents or tents of campers. People and pets died. By the 1970s, any trip into Lytle Creek Canyon was accompanied by the crack of gunfire and the frequent sight of impromptu firing lines of gun nuts alternately shooting and wandering into the wash to set up a new target while their fellow yahoos continued firing over their heads. And if you did not have a semiautomatic weapon of your own, you could always upgrade by shooting someone who did and taking theirs. That happened more than a few times.

  The explosion of illegal street drugs starting in the late 1960s represented an even darker turn for Lytle Creek. Drug traffickers moved into the canyon alongside the population of six hundred or so permanent residents and began growing marijuana plants up the side canyons and brewing up batches of crystal meth in their bathtubs. Their friends joined them—addicts, dealers, parolees, and bail jumpers hiding out from the law. The busiest day at the Lytle Creek Post Office became the day the welfare checks arrived. Sirens of San Bernardino County Sheriff’s units became more common as they raced up Lytle Creek Road responding to one unpleasantness or another. Other times they snuck up the canyon to serve a warrant on some wayward felon or to raid another meth lab, often resulting in standoffs and shootouts.

  Visits from the county coroner’s van also became more common. If they were not rolling their cars down hillsides or shooting themselves, their friends, or strangers, the really bad guys were dumping bodies in Lytle Creek Canyon. It was a plague common to any mountain wilderness area that ran up against big population centers, the preferred dumping ground for drug gangs, child murderers, psychos, and serial killers. Kill a hitchhiker or a hooker down in the flatlands and dump the body off the side of a mountain road up in one of the canyons and it might not be found for months, if ever. When San Bernardino sheriff’s deputies patrolling the canyon came upon unaccompanied young women in Lytle Creek, they usually ordered them to leave and shadowed them all the way down to Fontana to make damn sure they did. It might have seemed unfair, but the chances of a young woman being raped or killed up there were simply too great.

  SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPUTIES D. J. McCARTY AND JIM McPheron both had their taste of death in the canyon. At the end of a long shift that same year, McCarty had been dispatched to Lytle Creek on the report of a missing person. A long-time Lytle Creek resident said her husband had gone up the canyon to shoot for a bit but never came back. D.J. found the man’s car by the side of the road, empty gun cases resting on the trunk. He did not have to go far to find the body, shot and dragged into the chaparral, his guns gone. McPheron located the bloated body of a drug dealer dumped into the creek bed only a few hundred yards into the canyon. Another time, McPheron responded when a teenager’s handgun went off while the youngster was carrying ammunition boxes down a canyon trail, blowing the top of his head off. Neither man wanted much to do with the place, so they were not happy when they heard the pursuit of the Norco bank robbers was headed into the canyon.

  Despite holding the commandeered M16 rifle between his knees with the muzzle pointed up at the roof and four fully loaded ammo magazines on the seat beside him, D. J. McCarty’s main concern was not the gun. He and McPheron’s immediate task was to get to the front of the pursuit. Until they did that, it made no difference whether D.J. was holding a machine gun or a slingshot; it would be of no use to anyone. In the meantime, the last thing McCarty wanted was a loaded rifle bouncing around in the front seat of a Ford Fairlane blowing stop signs at seventy miles per hour.

  For the man blowing the stop signs, Jim McPheron’s strategy was simple: drive as fast as possible in the oncoming traffic lane. By the time he caught up with the pursuit on Sierra Avenue just beyond Interstate 15, there were close to forty law enforcement vehicles strung out through Lytle Canyon, all of them also moving as fast as they could in the same direction.

  One of the first they came upon was Fred Chisholm’s shrapnel- and bullet-ridden patrol car, smoking and dead on the side of the road. Chisholm and Rolf Parkes were standing dejectedly beside it, shotguns in hand. Moments after McPheron blew past, the two were picked up by Riverside detective Mike Jordan in his unmarked vehicle. By that time, the whole pursuit pack had already passed their location, leaving them far back in the chase.

  In addition to having the living shit scared out of him by McPheron’s driving, D. J. McCarty had another problem. Among the pack of vehicles in front of them now were units from no less than half a dozen law enforcement agencies, only one of which McCarty had any ability to communicate with. He was having no problem getting his fellow San Bernardino units to pull over, but word that a marked SO unit
with an automatic weapon was trying to make its way to the front was slow to spread through the phalanx of other agency vehicles moving up the mountain. McCarty’s only option was to shout at each of them through the PA speaker until they finally got out of the way. “Let us pass! We have an automatic rifle! Let us pass!”

  It was the same old problem: Each agency was operating on a different radio frequency. The few with scanners could hear select frequencies but not communicate back. Riverside deputies had been fussing and griping about the limitation for years, but none had been more concerned about the situation than Jim Evans.

  We are a quarter mile from the ranger station on Sierra Road in the National Forest and they are firing like crazy.

  With Evans’s cool West Texas country drawl and calm delivery, there was no question in the minds of the Riverside deputies which one of their men was now the lead RSO unit in the pursuit. It was only the content of Evans’s reports that betrayed just how perilous his situation had become since plunging into the mouth of Lytle Creek Canyon.

  Jordan: Do you have visual contact with the suspect?

  Evans: That’s affirmative, we’re right behind ’em.

  Evans: 2-Edward-74, they’re firing.

  Jordan: Watch out they don’t bail out when you come around the corner.

  Evans: I think my unit just got hit with three rounds.