Norco '80

by Peter Houlahan

  “How’s Mom doing?” Russ asked.

  Mae Harven was inconsolable and fell apart every time someone stopped by to offer their support or drop off a sympathy casserole. She could not bring herself to make a trip to the jail just yet, Walt told him, and had not gotten around to writing him because she was still so shaky she was unable to hold a pen. She had developed a stutter. “She’s snapping out of it, slowly but surely,” Walt said, with false optimism. “She’ll come around.”

  “I’m really sorry that this happened,” Russ told his father.

  “Yeah, well, it happened.”

  “Well, I’m kinda sorry and I’m kinda glad because now I’m back to Christ,” Russ brightened. “Instead of going to hell, I’m on my way to heaven now.”

  “Yeah,” Walt said doubtfully.

  Russ asked if his father could get him a book by Carlos Castaneda and a copy of the Jerusalem Bible. They talked about cashing his tax return, his insulin dosages, and what they should do with his perpetually dead Volkswagen. Russ threw out a mishmash of quotes from Revelation, regurgitating George’s old interpretations. The awkward pauses grew longer as the conversation continued.

  CHRIS AND HIS STEPFATHER MAY HAVE BUTTED HEADS PLENTY OF TIMES through the years, but Chris knew if it were not for Walt, he and his brother would have had a pretty rough childhood. “How you doin’, Dad?” Chris greeted him, and then immediately got down to business. “Well, I guess I ought to tell you what happened.” He was desperate, he said, out of money, no job, wanted to die. So he went ahead with it. “I don’t really know what got into me and Russ to get into this,” he said. “It might be a small consolation to know that I, or I believe Russ, never shot anyone.” The campaign to blame Manny for everything was already in full swing. “Once Billy got his brains blown out in that van, Manny went nuts.” He said the only one firing at the washout site was Delgado. “Manny was just walking down the road, blasting away. So, both the Delgado brothers are dead,” he added matter-of-factly.

  “I didn’t know them,” Walt said. “Have I ever met them?”

  “They’re the two smaller Mexican guys that came over to visit Russ a couple of times before we got involved in this crap. They recruited him. I didn’t recruit him; I didn’t have the nerve.” There was a pause. “So here we are.”

  “Yeah,” Walt said sadly. “Yeah.”

  Chris filled the dead air with a recitation of biblical prophecy almost identical to Russ’s minutes earlier. “I know that you have never really been one to be into God or Jesus or anything like that,” Chris said. “But in this time of consolation, it would really do you a lot of good, Dad.”

  “You might be right,” Walt answered, sounding unconvinced.

  “Read Revelations, that’s all this coming down now. You know that. You can see it. All the predictions are coming true.”

  Walt made a halfhearted attempt to engage on the subject of religion but soon gave up. He mentioned that there was a girl waiting to visit Chris and that he had offered to split his visiting time with her. So he and Chris would have only fifteen minutes together rather than thirty. But eight minutes in, both seemed to have run out of things to say.

  “Anything you want to know?” Chris asked.

  “No. Not really.”

  There was an excruciatingly long silence.

  “Well, I guess I should talk to that girl, huh?” Chris said.

  “That girl” would soon turn out to become Chris Harven’s most loyal visitor. He had met Olivia Estrada just three months before the robbery and juggled her along with Nancy Bitetti right up until the end, each woman unaware that he was spending two to three nights a week with the other. Allowed only a half hour of visiting time a week, and his not-yet-ex-wife Lani also wanting to bring little Timmy to see him, Chris’s juggling act was even more complicated now that he was behind bars. Estrada was eight years older than Chris, a born-again Christian with a ten-year-old daughter and a good job at technology giant Hewlett Packard. She was smitten with Chris from the start. One of their first times out together had been a trip to the gun store where Chris picked up the Smith & Wesson .45 Long Colt that, unbeknownst to Estrada, would be used in a gun battle with the cops. But hers was an affection seemingly undiminished by forty-odd felony counts, including first-degree murder. In their visit, Olivia seemed more than willing to continue the relationship, albeit now with a sheet of plexiglass between them.

  “Everything got pressing,” Chris tried to explain at the start. “I just went berserk. Things were going down in my life that I didn’t like.”

  “I thought I was going to die when I found out,” she said.

  “What do you think now? Sorry you met me?”

  “I won’t ever be sorry of that. I’ll just never understand why, that’s all.”

  “I don’t think I will ever understand why myself,” he said. “I don’t know where I went wrong. I strayed off God’s path and here I am.”

  “I hope you are praying, Chris,” she said.

  “I am praying every night,” he assured her. “I’m not alone. I have got my brother and God in this cell with me.”

  “When are you going to have surgery?” she asked, referring to the bullet still visibly lodged beneath the skin of his chest.

  “They are not going to give me surgery. That bullet is going to stay there as long as I live.” He told her that the slug “went into my back and around my rib cage and went around all my organs.” He shook his head in wonder that it had not killed him. “Too many miracles have been happening to think that is it. I was just talking about Revelations before all of this came down. Something is going to happen down here. All the predictions, Israel and Egypt have all come true. Rioting in Miami. They beat a black man to death and let everyone go, the cops go, you know. Mount St. Helens erupted. All the predictions are coming true.”

  Time was up. A guard told Olivia she had to leave. “Take care,” she said.

  “Some miracle will happen,” Chris said. “I know it will. And I will see you.”

  She looked at him through the plexiglass barrier. “Read the Bible, please.”

  “I have been. I have been,” he assured her.

  A few weeks later, Harven was scratching at what had become abscessed and inflamed tissue surrounding a visible lump under his left nipple. The skin suddenly opened up in an eruption of pus, and a .38-caliber slug of county-issued lead fell into Chris’s hand.

  WALTER SMITH HAD BEEN FOLLOWING THE STORY OF THE NORCO BANK ROBBERY on television for two days before he found out his own son had been hunted down and arrested for the crime. As he watched a reporter read off the names of the captured outlaws, Walter felt the blood drain from his face. It didn’t make any sense. George was intelligent, the one everyone liked, the one the other children looked up to. George was the son who had taken it upon himself to attend church at an early age and never missed school. It was impossible that George would do something like this.

  It took almost twenty phone calls and twenty-four hours before Walter was informed that George was at San Bernardino County Medical Center. Together with his younger son, Steve, Walter went to the hospital on Sunday afternoon and waited until he was allowed to see George. San Bernardino deputies stood in stony silence guarding the hospital room, hallways, and perimeter of the building. After being thoroughly patted down, Walter and Steve entered the room. What they saw shocked them. The son Walter had thought so highly of was pale and shackled to the rails of a hospital bed, naked except for a thin sheet covering his midsection. Walter held back tears and asked George how badly he was injured.

  I’m all shot up, he told them. With his free hand, George pulled the sheet aside and showed them the bandaged wounds in the groin area and on his right thigh. There are no exit wounds. Those bullets will be in there forever. He did not mention that the “bullets” were actually only shotgun pellets. There were other injuries he was less clear about, suggesting they were additional gunshot wounds rather than simple lacerations from t
he brush in Lytle Creek Canyon. He told his father he was shot in the back by a police sniper and lost more than three thousand cubic centimeters of blood, about half his body’s total volume. After his capture, he said he had been tortured on the hillside, told he would not be taken down or given medical attention until he confessed.

  Did you do it? George’s little brother asked him.

  Yeah, George reluctantly conceded. He was there, but it wasn’t his fault. The cops had overreacted and shot first. George had only tried to defend himself. He had been so badly wounded in front of the bank that all he could do was lie down in the truck and try not to die. I never even fired the gun, he told them.

  Had Walter or Steve been allowed to read the medical chart in the room, they would have seen the following notation from Dr. Rudolph Holguin, who oversaw the evaluation of George Smith: “TM’s showed bilateral perforations and dry blood in the ear canal secondary to concussion syndrome of the gun firing.” In other words, George had fired the Heckler so many times that the concussion waves from .308 rounds going off next to his head had punched holes in the temporal membranes of both ears.

  Walter was locked in a cognitive dissonance between the George he thought he knew and the one who had just tried to rob a bank. Why would you do that, George? Walter wanted to know.

  Because of what I have been telling you for years, George said. The end of the world is upon us. The signs are everywhere you look, the fulfillment of the prophecies is at hand. He didn’t have a choice, he said. It was a matter of life and death. Without the money to buy that land and cabin in the mountains, how would he have been able to save them all from the catastrophes to come?

  Walter knew all about George’s plan for the remote mountain cabin in the hills. “Son,” he had cautioned him earlier, “there is no such thing as a perfect utopia and that’s what that would be.” Not a churchgoer himself, Walter avoided arguing with George over his beliefs. But, then again, he never thought those beliefs would lead his son to this.

  The detective told them they had to leave. Walter did not know what to say, so he placed a hand on George’s arm. The guards did not try to stop him. It would be the last physical contact Walter Smith had with his boy for a very long time.

  Like Chris, George had also been assigned an attorney to represent him. Unlike the calm and amiable Jay Grossman, the attorney the court handed George Smith was an absolute bulldog, both in looks and in temperament. Clayton Adams was a thirty-nine-year-old career criminal defense attorney with three years in the Riverside County Public Defender’s Office. He had been astonished when he got the call on Sunday, May 11, saying he was assigned to represent the self-proclaimed leader of the most sensational crime the Inland Empire had seen since the Wineville chicken coop murders. Heavyset with a round face and cheeks well on their way to jowls, Adams was brusque and relentlessly confrontational in the courtroom. He had a reputation for being fiercely loyal to his clients with a willingness to scrap with prosecutors and witnesses over even the smallest details. But when it came to defending Smith, Adams began with something very big: the United States Constitution. Leaving the initial hearing in which prosecutors had asked for the death penalty, Adams had a short and direct statement for waiting reporters. “Death as a punishment for crime is nothing more than calculated, premeditated, administrative murder. I cannot and will not let it happen to George Smith.”

  Adams spent his childhood in Wisconsin before a stint in the navy brought him to the West Coast in the late 1950s. After an honorable discharge, he remained in California, earning a law degree from Lincoln University in Oakland. Despite sporting a faded tattoo outline of a spade on the back of his left hand and the accompanying nickname “Ace,” Adams was no rebel or counterculture crusader. But it did not take long for him to reach the conclusion that the American justice system was unfairly stacked against the accused. “The prosecution is, in fact, the government and therefore advantaged with the skills and resources that only a wealthy government can provide.” When it came to the reality of his role in the criminal justice system, Adams offered a mix of poetic pragmatism: “A criminal defense attorney is nothing more than a bracero toiling in the vineyards of justice. Sometimes the best you can do is try to keep the prosecution honest.”

  Their initial meeting on Sunday, May 11, at San Bernardino County Medical Center was brief. Adams laid out the general plan and what George could expect in the days following his release from the hospital. Adams would seek a severance to have George tried separately from the others. He would show a jury that George was wounded far too badly in front of the bank to have participated in any shooting after that, including the murder of deputy James Evans. And, as usual, Adams would contest every count, challenge every witness and piece of evidence from start to finish in hopes of chiseling off a charge here or there. Adams left the hospital impressed by his client’s intelligence and willingness to accept advice. Unlike Walter Smith, Clayton Adams would never ask George why he had done it; such information was irrelevant to the case.

  Clay Adams did one other thing that Sunday afternoon. After meeting with his new client, he made a call to the home of a defense investigator from the Riverside Public Defender’s Office named Jeanne Painter. This was going to be a long and complicated case and the only other person on his team would be the investigator assigned to it. Adams wanted that investigator to be Painter. The thirty-three-year-old Painter was a highly regarded investigator with hundreds of felony cases under her belt. Like Adams, she was known as a fighter. Painter had also attracted attention among the tight-knit legal community in the Riverside criminal court for another reason: She was a very attractive young lady. In a profession still dominated by men, Painter had long bleach-blonde hair parted down the middle, high cheekbones, and a bright smile.

  Like everyone else, Painter had been following the drama of the Norco robbery as it unfolded on Friday and into Saturday. The next day, the call came in from Clay Adams. “Guess which case you’re about to get?” said Adams. “Oh, no,” groaned Painter. The thrill of working such a high-profile case was tempered by the staggering amount of work she knew it would require. Well, she thought, at least I know what I’ll be doing for the next year and a half.

  HOURS AFTER GEORGE SMITH’S CAPTURE, HEAVILY ARMED RIVERSIDE COUNTY Sheriff detectives led by Riverside detective Joe Curfman surrounded the Mira Loma home, smashed windows, and crawled inside to find a radio still blaring rock station KMET. After sending in the sniffer dogs and bomb squad to check for booby traps, Curfman and the others emptied the premises of anything resembling evidence, including guns, ammo, bomb-making equipment, diagrams of the Security Pacific Bank, and a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook.

  The site quickly became a local tourist attraction with carloads of gawkers rolling past day and night. Reporters stood on the roof of neighbor Denise Sparrow’s house taking photos of the backyard fortress, including the now-legendary pit, the bottom of which could not be seen even from that lofty vantage point. Left unguarded, local youths graffitied the exterior walls, broke even more windows, and generally trashed the joint. Eventually, the property was sold and the measly proceeds sent to Chris’s ex-wife, Lani.

  The local press began referring to defendants as “The Norco 3” and sent reporters out looking for anyone who could provide information on the mysterious men responsible for the spectacular and bloody bank robbery. Mira Loma neighbors called them “weirdos” who rarely spoke to anyone and carried guns out to their mailbox. Of George, another said he was an unfriendly man, “nasty and foulmouthed,” who beat up his German immigrant wife and threatened to kill her shortly before the two split up. George’s former supervisor, Chuck Morad, said, “He was very violent. He hated authority with a passion.” Morad characterized Smith as a “disgruntled troublemaker, a radical who would have been a real good general in a terrorist army.” “They slept in the day and went out at night,” said another neighbor, Anna Grimley.

  Walter Harven told an L.A. Times reporter t
hat his two sons might have planned and executed the robbery “under the ruse” of going on weekend backpacking trips. He referred to Russ as “an unemployed bricklayer” with a previous arrest for selling drugs and having once robbed a cash register at a shop where he worked at the mall. Walt told Russ it was all quoted out of context, which it was. A letter to the editor in the Riverside Press-Enterprise entitled “A Life for a Life” hailed efforts by a state senator to “get back to the death penalty,” especially for the men who killed deputy Jim Evans.

  The Norco 3 were so universally despised, authorities half expected vigilante townsfolk to storm the jail with burning torches. The only people who seemed to be on their side were a pair of armed bandits who robbed an apartment manager of $4,000 and then commanded their hostage to call television station KABC to demand the release of the Norco 3. Nobody, including the Norco 3, knew the outlaws or why they had made such a request.

  Reporters also attempted to get information about the two dead men but were unable to find much about Billy Delgado beyond his physical ailments. What little they were able to dig up on Manny was positively glowing. Chuck Morad described Manny as “an ideal young man” and “a real nice guy whose mistake was getting in with George.” Acquaintance LeRoy Lovato said Manny was “a hell of a nice guy. He was level-headed and to my knowledge had never been in trouble before.”

  On May 13, the San Bernardino Sun ran an article headlined “Did Norco Suspect Die by His Own Gun?” The article announced that the just-released autopsy report on Manny Delgado listed the cause of death as a self-inflicted gunshot wound through the heart. To the public, it was intriguing to consider the poetic notion of a fugitive bank robber so stricken with anguish and guilt over the death of his kid brother that he would put a bullet in his own broken heart. There was also a touch of Old West romance to be found in an outlaw who would rather die than be taken alive. The more likely possibility, that the weapon discharged when Delgado fell on it, was far less enticing to contemplate.