Norco '80

by Peter Houlahan

  IT WAS 10:00 P.M. BY THE TIME ANDY DELGADO REACHED THE RSO. HE SAT alone in the pit outside the dispatch room waiting to be taken upstairs to be interviewed. Dave Madden came into the pit, stopped, and stared. Shit, Andy, I thought you were dead.

  Rolf Parkes entered from the outside door. After having his head x-rayed and the glass fished out of his eye, he had been driven back to Riverside for one last departmental interview and to get his car for the drive home to Long Beach. Rolf had not seen anyone from his own department since being flown off the mountain and was eager to talk to someone. He sat on the bench next to Delgado. Evans is dead, Rolf told him. I know, said Andy. He sure came a long way just to get killed. Did we kill any of those guys up there? No, Rolf said. They all got away. A detective came into the pit and motioned Andy to follow him. Andy paused at the door and looked at Parkes. We just got our asses kicked, didn’t we?

  THIRTEEN MILES UP LYTLE CREEK CANYON AT A COMMAND CENTER SET UP AT Glen Ranch, preparations were being made to make sure Saturday, May 10, would be very different than the day before. Hundreds of heavily armed men were arriving with helicopters, dog teams, mounted search-and-rescue squads, and the most advanced equipment available to support them. The military offered up a helicopter gunship, night vision goggles, and a truckload of arctic parkas to help with the massive manhunt that was to commence at first light. Just after midnight, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office put a call into the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office, or LASO, with a request. In the predawn darkness with a cold rain falling, LASO SWAT personnel began arriving at Glen Ranch in buses. The L.A. Sheriff’s Office had a fancy name for the specially trained two-man units they had been asked to send in, but most cops called them by their specialty: the Hunt & Kill teams.

  11

  SHOT THROUGH THE HEART

  May 10, 1980. San Bernardino National Forest, California.

  GEORGE WAYNE SMITH WOKE WITH A START. HE OPENED HIS EYES AND blinked up at a sky just beginning to streak with purple light over the ridgeline to the east. He was confused and disoriented. How long had he been on this mountain? Had he slept through an entire day and into the next? He could not be sure of any of that, but there was one thing he did know: He was dying.

  George sat up on the steep hillside and looked out over the blackness of Coldwater Canyon. A dusting of snow fell from his green military poncho. He remembered waking up in darkness, seeing the crystals of ice and snow sparkling as they fell around him and thinking perhaps his soul was being lifted up to meet his Lord in the sky. But then he lost consciousness and awoke to a hard, freezing rain. With the coming of daylight, it was a heavy, wet mist but still cold as hell, the temperatures hovering just above freezing. Even with the rain poncho, heavy boots, and gloves, he was soaked through, drifting in and out of a dream world of hypothermia.

  He licked his lips. They were chapped and dry, his mouth parched. That had started while he was bleeding out in the back of the truck. It was the dehydration that goes along with hypovolemia. He reached down and felt the makeshift tourniquet tied around his thigh. The bleeding had mostly stopped, but the leg had a sickening numbness to it. Looking out over the canyon and contemplating his fate, George felt none of the comfort of a man destined for the Kingdom of Heaven; he felt like a man who had seriously fucked up. He leaned back and drifted into darkness.

  “TRACKERS, REPORT TO YOUR COMMAND POSTS. TRACKERS, REPORT TO YOUR command posts,” the temporary PA system blasted as the first slivers of light began to appear over Lytle Creek Canyon. The deputies, SWAT teams, and support personnel at the command post at Glen Ranch slowly emerged from wherever they had been seeking shelter throughout a night of frigid drizzles and downpours. The truckload of arctic parkas had helped somewhat, but it had been a miserable night.

  Around midnight, a burst of gunfire was heard from somewhere in the mountains and rumor spread that the fugitives might be signaling to each other or perhaps had even killed one of their own. After that, it was just waiting for dawn to arrive and the expectation of an armed confrontation against four desperate men with nothing left to lose.

  SWAT members made their way to a command vehicle, checked out M16 rifles, snapped in high-capacity magazines, and donned bulletproof vests. Others stood scarfing down plates of scrambled eggs cooked up by county jail inmates in a nearby chow trailer. Bloodhounds and German shepherds strained at their leads and circled their Fontana Police Department handlers, sniffing the ground around them. Mounted police teams gathered around a line of horse trailers. Trackers from the San Bernardino Mountain Rescue Team kicked at the dirt and waited to be teamed up with heavily armed escorts. After giving his men a final briefing, San Bernardino assistant sheriff Floyd Tidwell looked up from the terrain map laid out on the table. “Now go get those assholes and protect those trackers,” he said.

  At the head of one search team was sergeant Larry Richards of San Bernardino PD SWAT. Along with three of his men and three San Bernardino sheriff’s deputies, Richards began his search at 8:00 a.m. at the site of the ambush on Baldy Notch Road. Richards’s team would advance up the grade in the direction of a second tracker team equipped with cold-weather gear working its way down from the 7,800-foot summit of Baldy Notch.

  At the washout itself, Richards’s trackers picked up a trail of blood leading up the narrow fire road. If they had not already been on high alert, they were now. Not only were they at ground zero of the search, but there was a good chance that whoever had lost this much blood had not gone far. They fanned out and began creeping up the road while others swept the hillsides over the sights of their M16 rifles, looking for movement or muzzle flashes. After a few hundred yards, they came to the hairpin turn on the outside edge of the mountain leading to the backside of the ridge. It was the last place the fleeing suspects had been seen and therefore the first place they might be found. Richards and the others had been briefed on the terrain on the other side of the bend: a wide-open valley of steep hillsides dotted with pines and sloping into thick underbrush where they would be exposed on three sides. The suspects had explosives, shitloads of ammunition, and a strong preference for ambushing pursuers. Anyone engaging the suspects should be prepared for a ferocious firefight. And another thing, Richards was informed: The thick mist hanging in the canyon would prevent any early-morning helicopter support.

  It was under these conditions that Richards and his team entered Coldwater Canyon. What they encountered was nothing like what they had been told to expect. Almost immediately, Richards heard a voice calling out from somewhere on the hillside. “Here!” it seemed to be saying. At first, the men thought it must be another law enforcement team. But then one of the trackers spotted something a few hundred yards down the embankment.

  The men dropped low, spread out, and took positions. Within seconds, four high-powered scopes mounted atop M16 rifles were trained on a figure seated behind a thick manzanita bush waving his hands above the top of the brush line. The shouting continued. They waited, gun barrels steady.

  Richards radioed command that they had made contact with a possible suspect, giving them his location. At Stockton Flats, personnel immediately deployed to positions at the top and bottom of the mountainside to reinforce Richards’s team. Once in place, Richards signaled to one of his SWAT officers, Jess Hernandez, to follow him down the hill. There was no need for Richards to remind his men of the standing order for dealing with an armed cop killer: If he makes one wrong move, shoot him dead.

  It was slow going down the hill, traversing over loose shale and weaving between granite boulders and clusters of California chaparral. When they were close, Richards shouted for their suspect to raise his hands and keep them in the air. The suspect complied. When Richards and Hernandez got within a dozen feet, they ordered him to stretch out facedown on the hillside. “Please, I’ve been shot,” the man said as his wrists were pulled behind his back and cuffed. “I’ve lost a lot of blood.”

  Hernandez searched the suspect, removed the Browning .45 from a s
houlder holster. Richards popped the magazine out and then removed a live round from the chamber. When Hernandez rolled the suspect over, the cops got their first good look at one of the men responsible for the madness of the day before: round face grimacing in pain; dark eyes that seemed to be going in and out of focus; wild, curly black hair. He was shivering uncontrollably, wet blood staining his pants from crotch to knee. This dude is fucked-up, Richards thought. Richards radioed a “Code 4”: situation stable, suspect neutralized, all law enforcement personnel okay. George Wayne Smith, the man who had vowed never to be taken alive, had just surrendered.

  SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY SHERIFF’S HOMICIDE DETECTIVE ROSS DVORAK had just reached the command center at 9:00 a.m. when the call came in. A wounded suspect had been apprehended on a remote hillside in Coldwater Canyon and needed to be questioned before he died on them. Dvorak was told to report to chopper 40-King-1 for immediate transport to the area. A Vietnam combat veteran with eleven years on the force but only a year and a half in Homicide, Dvorak had a preference for Hawaiian shirts, a strong resemblance to actor Burt Reynolds, and a talent for creative interrogations that somehow still held up in court. After being choppered in to the base of the mountainside, it took Dvorak forty-five minutes through thick brush to reach the spot three hundred yards upslope where the suspect was being led down by two San Bernardino SWAT officers. The man was so weak he could be moved only forty to fifty feet at a time before needing to stop and rest, each time requesting that he be allowed to sleep. When he reached Smith, Dvorak switched on a tape recorder.

  “George, I’m Dvorak from Sheriff’s Homicide, you understand that?” he said. “What’s your full name?”

  “George Smith. Wayne Smith,” George answered, panting heavily. “Ahh,” he groaned. “Let me catch my breath.”

  “George, there’s a possibility that you may die. Do you realize that?”

  “Yeah,” George answered.

  “With that in mind,” Dvorak said, “do you want to tell me anything about what happened?” Dvorak’s strategy was to bait Smith into a dying declaration right there on the mountainside.

  “Helicopter,” George said, nodding down the hill at 40-King-1. “Then we’ll talk.”

  “We’re going to do what we can, George,” Dvorak said doubtfully, “but the helicopter can’t land here and we have quite a ways to walk before we can get you to where you’re going to be picked up. Do you understand that?”

  “Ahh, goodness,” George groaned.

  “What happened, George?” Dvorak asked.

  “I took three in my leg at the bank.”

  “Did you get in a shootout with the cops at a bank in Norco? The Security Pacific Bank?”

  “Yes,” Smith acknowledged.

  One of the officers took Smith’s elbow, anxious to get his suspect moving down the hill again. “George keeps saying he’s going to pass out on us,” he told Dvorak.

  “How many of you were there?” Dvorak went on.

  “Chris, Billy, Manny, George, and Russ.”

  “Do you know their last names?”

  “There’s two Harvens, Chris and Russ. Two Delgados and me, Smith.”

  “Do you know that an officer has been killed?” Dvorak asked.

  “What? I don’t . . .” George stammered, breathing heavily.

  “I’m telling you now an officer has been killed,” Dvorak said, “and you will be taken into custody in San Bernardino County for the murder of one officer. Did you see them kill the officer?”

  “No. I . . .”

  “Did you fire at any officers in this canyon area?”

  “I fired but it was just . . . There wasn’t . . .” George’s voice faded off. Whatever hope he might have been harboring about ever walking the earth as a free man again had just vanished. “Ahh, ahh,” he grunted, partly in pain, but also out of sheer despair at the situation in which he now found himself. “No more questions,” he said.

  Dvorak shut down the tape recorder while Smith and the SWAT officers moved another forty feet down the hill. When George again requested time to catch his breath, Dvorak clicked on the record button and read Smith his Miranda rights. George did not acknowledge that he understood his rights when asked. Dvorak moved ahead with more questions anyhow. “How many other banks have you hit, George?”

  “None. I’m not a criminal,” George asserted weakly, edging down the hill, grimacing with each step. “This was just a desperate move for me.”

  “George, I find that hard to believe. You robbed the Security Pacific Bank in Norco, though, didn’t you? You got in a shootout which killed a cop, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know if I did, no.”

  “You don’t know that you didn’t, though, do you?”

  “No, I don’t,” George conceded.

  “Somebody killed him,” Dvorak said, “and you were shooting at him, right?”

  George did not answer.

  It was 10:45 a.m. by the time they reached 40-King-1 waiting at the bottom of Coldwater Canyon. In all, it had taken them more than two hours since his capture to bring George three hundred yards down the hillside. After a short ride in 40-King-1 to a larger landing area, Smith was hauled out and roughly carried to a larger Huey helicopter with medics on board to treat him. Dvorak climbed in with them. Someone warned him not to slip in all the blood. The Huey lifted off.

  As the medics worked away, Dvorak tried to pin George down on the killing of Jim Evans. “That first car that showed up on scene, the officer got out, were you shooting at him?”

  “Yes,” George said.

  “Did you hit him?”

  “I just sprayed bullets, you know. Just a wild firefight.”

  “How about back at the bank?”

  “Bullets everywhere,” George responded weakly.

  Dvorak asked him if they were firing automatics. “None,” George answered. “They might have sounded like automatics ’cause all those guys was throwin’ lead. But I didn’t fire at the pin-down part,” he added, contradicting his statement moments before that he had. “When the firefight started there, I just kept walking. I was in a kind of half a daze, getting ready to pass out. I was so bad hit I’d lost just boo-coo blood.”

  The recorder was turned off again as the chopper set down on the landing pad at San Bernardino County Medical Center, and Smith was transferred to a guarded room in the ER. Doctors and nurses worked on Smith, changing him into a gown, attaching EKG stickers to his body, starting IVs of saline and antibiotics. They sat George up in bed while detectives photographed him, his dark eyes looking directly into the camera. Investigators from other agencies entered the room. Dvorak turned the tape recorder on again.

  “You planned the operation yourself?” asked agent Robert Gray of the Riverside office of the FBI, a heart-monitoring device beeping rhythmically in the background.

  “Yes, I did,” answered George, his voice soft and clear now. “It was mine. I told them what to do in the bank. I cased the bank. I made the bombs. I did all that.”

  Dvorak wanted to know about the others. “We’re all really good friends,” George explained. “And then we all ran into really bad luck all at once.”

  “Who got killed at the scene?” Dvorak asked.

  “Billy, unfortunately.”

  “He was the driver of the van?”

  “And one of my best friends, yes. And that officer that was . . . Like I said, that wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  “Huh?” said Dvorak.

  “That officer wasn’t supposed to happen. Billy wasn’t supposed to happen. None of that was supposed to happen. I fucked up.”

  “How?” Dvorak asked.

  “I should have made it a minute and thirty seconds instead of two minutes.”

  RUSSELL HARVEN AWOKE SOMETIME IN THE NIGHT TOO, BUT HE SAW SOMETHING different than crystals of ice falling. Curled beside a log for shelter and without a rain parka, Russ was soaked through and shivering in bursts that shook his entire body. He had dug a shallow tr
ench under a fallen pine and piled dirt and rocks over himself for warmth, but it was no match for the bitter cold at seven thousand feet. That he might have just dug his own grave for the second time in twelve hours was an irony not entirely lost on Russ. He needed food immediately and another insulin injection within the next few hours. But insulin, along with everything else he needed, was in the trunk of his brother’s Z/28 in the parking lot of a Little League field in Norco. When he dozed off, it was just his body giving out from sheer exhaustion. The sleep never lasted long. Every time he opened his eyes and looked down Coldwater Canyon, he could see the headlights of vehicles moving slowly up Lytle Creek Road, the beams of searchlights sweeping the brush far below. All those people are here for one reason, Russ thought: to hunt me down and kill me.

  But this time when Russ awoke in the predawn darkness, he decided he’d had enough. Slowly making his way back up the hillside, he reached Baldy Notch Road and began walking down with the intention of surrendering or being shot to death trying.

  Then something caught his eye far below where the hillside leveled out into the dry wash of Coldwater Canyon. There, a small orange glow danced in the darkness among a stand of pines. Russ crouched low at the edge of the road watching the flickering light of the campfire. It could be cops. It could be some oblivious camper.

  When he eventually made it to the clearing, it did not surprise him to see his brother huddled near the flame. Slumped against a fallen tree trunk, Chris was breathing in shallow, quick breaths, each one a conscious effort. He adjusted his position, grimacing in pain. You got shot? Russ asked. Chris coughed and spit blood onto the dirt. Yeah.