Norco '80

by Peter Houlahan

  RUDDY AND JAY HANKS DECIDED TO TELL THE STORY OF MAY 9, 1980, THROUGH witnesses called in order of the events as they unfurled. Bank customers and others told of having rifles stuck in their faces by masked men, teller drawers emptied at the end of a shotgun, being paraded into the vault and dumping all the cash into a bag, and a man who walked the floor calling out “time” before the bandits fled to a waiting van. The only traction the defense was able to get out of several of the early witnesses was to sow some doubt as to which side had started the firefight outside the bank. Several, like customer James Kirkland, stated they thought the robbers had already climbed inside the van when the shooting started. One said she had seen Bolasky standing behind his unit firing while still in the parking lot.

  However, others backed the prosecution’s version of events by testifying to hearing the gunshots that blew out Bolasky’s light bar moments after turning left onto Fourth Street. The parking lot directly outside the bank entrance also happened to be littered with spent shotgun casings and rifle shells matching only the suspects’ weapons, while cartridges from Bolasky’s two guns had been found only beside his vehicle in the middle of Fourth Street.

  Still, the defense had no other choice than to hammer away on the issue with every witness, just as Alan Olson said they would. “There’s a big question in my mind who fired first,” Olson told reporters. “I’m going to dispute every bullet fired.”

  Within minutes of Gary Hakala stepping down from the witness stand, Glyn Bolasky took his seat on it. Again, Ruddy guided his witness through the events of the day. Again, the three defense attorneys attempted to discredit the testimony. The defense contended that Bolasky entered the bank parking lot, got out of his car, and opened fire on the van before the suspects fired a shot. Unable to shake Bolasky’s version of events except for inconsequential inconsistencies, they turned to attacks on his character.

  Clayton Adams tried to portray him as a psychiatrically unstable cop with an itchy trigger finger. “Now you no longer work for the Sheriff’s Department, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “In fact, you quit the Sheriff’s Department?”

  “I resigned.”

  “And after you left the Sheriff’s Department, did you take another job?”

  “I did.”

  “With who?”

  “Riverside city as a police officer.”

  “And were you terminated from that job?”

  “I was,” admitted Bolasky. Bolasky explained that after observing him out on the streets, RPD felt he had become a “vicarious liability” due to what happened to him in Norco and terminated him to avoid financial responsibility.

  “Any mention of erratic behavior?” Adams wanted to know.

  Bolasky said there was nothing in the termination papers to that effect. When pressed later by Michael Lloyd on specifics related to his termination from the RPD, Bolasky said they “only told me that the Norco bank robbery might have had some scarring on me.”

  “And did they enlighten you on what scarring effect it might have had on you?” Lloyd asked.

  “Very briefly. Just said that the Norco shooting, or after getting shot five times, or five different areas, and killing a subject, may have caused [me] to no longer enroll in police work anymore.”

  On redirect, Ruddy asked Bolasky if the termination had anything to do with his performance during the probationary period. “They said job performance regarding anything that had been done wrong, they said, no,” Bolasky answered. “Everything was going well in that area.”

  Adams attacked that characterization on re-cross. “You indicated that you did not meet or make your probation?”

  “Correct.”

  “But there were other reasons, isn’t that true, that were told to you, either behind closed doors or in some other fashion?”

  “There were other reasons I was told, yes.”

  “One of the reasons stated was your erratic behavior?”

  “Yes. There was an evaluation report.”

  “And in that evaluation report, did it mention erratic behavior on your part?”

  “It may have regarding driving,” Bolasky conceded.

  “Did it also mention an inability on your part to deal with blacks or other minorities?”

  “I don’t know if it said that in that fashion,” answered Bolasky. “It mentioned an item that I may have had—if I recall correctly—a conflict regarding a black juvenile.”

  Adams did not have any evidence to pursue the line of questioning further, a direct result of having had his request for access to police disciplinary reports and psychiatric files on all the police officers rejected almost two years before.

  With his testimony finished, Glyn Bolasky had satisfied all duties and responsibilities related to his career in law enforcement and left the profession, never to return. All that his heroic actions in front of the Security Pacific Bank had gotten him were nightmares, an accusation that he had abandoned a fellow officer, and the destruction of his career. He had received no recognition by the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department in the two years since the gun battle that almost killed him, only a final gratuitous insult from Alan Olson. “From his testimony, you would think he was a hero,” Olson told reporters afterward. “But nobody is calling him a hero. Why is that? Maybe he was trigger-happy at the time.”

  Chuck Hille’s testimony essentially corroborated Bolasky’s. He recounted what he had found when he first reached Bolasky. “Deputy Bolasky looked like he was going into shock. He was pale and white. As he spoke he made little sense. He said numerous times he had been hit. The blood was squirting out.”

  On January 25, detective Andy Delgado entered the courtroom wearing a dark suit and striped tie, with his hair grown out over his ears, a full beard, and large-frame eyeglasses. It was a sharp contrast to the clean-shaven, short-haired deputy who had repeatedly emptied his shotgun into a group of bank robbers while under heavy fire. Although well groomed, Andy looked as though he might have been working undercover to infiltrate a Mexican drug cartel. In truth, he had not been doing much of anything related to police work for weeks. After years of swimming upstream against what he saw as racism and incompetence among some of his fellow officers, Andy knew he needed a break. He was wrung out from scratching and clawing to stick up for himself ever since he was a small child. When the psychiatrist he had been ordered to see recommended that Delgado take some time off, Andy took him up on it. He stayed away from the department, took and taught classes, stopped shaving, and let his hair grow out. It was in this state of career purgatory that Andy Delgado took the stand.

  After the accusation that Andy was stalking their cell and the stare-down with Chris Harven through the bars at the Riverside County jail months before, the defendants had a rather low opinion of the deputy they tried to kill on Hamner Avenue. “He was the one we all thought was your typical psycho cop,” Harven said. But after nine hours on the stand, most of it on cross-examination, the defense was unable to make any of those sentiments stick. Despite his fiery personality, Andy was as cool a customer in court as he had been on the streets. The thrust of the defense position was that Andy had been firing wildly from so far away that it was one of his shotgun pellets that had wounded Glyn Bolasky. Alan Olson even went so far as to imply that it was Andy who shot fifteen-year-old Jody Ann Tygart in the back as she was crossing Hamner during the driving lesson with her father.

  On February 4, 1982—one week after testifying in the Norco trial—Andy was back in the offices of the RSO in a meeting with sheriff Ben Clark and deputy chief Cois Byrd. Standing before the two top-ranking members of the department, Delgado knew what was coming. You’ve done a good job for us, Andy, Byrd said, but you have to go. Byrd and the others were sorry to lose one of their best detectives and a man they liked personally and admired professionally. But those around Andy could see things he was not entirely able to see himself. He was spiraling, and being at the RSO was making it worse. They want
ed him to take a voluntary medical retirement for posttraumatic stress disorder.

  Andy resisted. He was too much of a fighter, and this felt too much like giving up. You can’t force me to retire, he protested. But Andy could see the writing on the wall. When he left the office, he filled out the forms making it official. Detective Andy Delgado had been medically discharged by the County of Riverside for posttraumatic stress disorder. Cois Byrd made sure all the paperwork went through smoothly so that Andy received all his retirement and pension benefits.

  It had taken twenty months, but now two of the three deputies who had shot it out with the escaping bank robbers at the intersection of Fourth and Hamner were out of the only career they had ever wanted. For Andy, the source of his disillusionment and unhappiness might have been building for years, but like Bolasky, it was impossible to ignore the moment everything seemed to change. “Before, it was like I could do no wrong,” Delgado told a psychiatrist. “But ever since Norco, it seems like I can’t do anything right.”

  WITH THE BATTLE BETWEEN DEFENSE AND PROSECUTION OVER WHO FIRED the first shot in front of the bank over for now, the prosecution methodically walked the jury through the pursuit into Wineville, Mira Loma, onto Interstate 15, and up Lytle Creek. One by one, civilians and cops told the harrowing details of their encounters with the armed men firing from the yellow truck. Along the way, the defense continued to badger the prosecution witnesses.

  The law enforcement officers, mostly experienced veterans on the witness stand, generally kept their answers short and their tempers in check on cross-examination. It was the civilian witnesses who were most likely to punch back when the defense attorneys went on the attack.

  As predicted, Clayton Adams was as crafty as he was combative. James Kirkland was barely eighteen when Chris Harven aimed the Heckler in his face. Adams did his best to make Kirkland out to be a confused teenager who could not tell the difference between movies and real life.

  “Now, James, you watch a lot of war movies and a lot of TV, don’t you?”

  “I watch TV, yeah.”

  “You watch a lot of war movies?”

  “Not a whole lot.”

  “You like them?”

  “I see them every now and then.”

  “See movies about bank robberies and stuff like that?”

  “Sir, everybody has, haven’t they?”

  Adams abandoned the line of questioning when it became obvious that Kirkland was not some kid he could push around. In fact, before it was over, Kirkland seemed as though he might be the only adult in the room.

  Janice Henker (Janice Cannon at the time of the bank robbery) was driving up Hamner Avenue when she passed the yellow truck while the men in the back fired at deputy Darrell Reed’s vehicle and then turned and fired upon her. Like most victims of a violent crime, Henker did not anticipate being victimized all over again in the courtroom.

  Adams quickly went after Henker for having met briefly with the prosecution in the hallway prior to testifying. “Did they show you a police report or anything to help you for your testimony?” Adams asked.

  “I have had nightmares for years,” Henker shot back. “I didn’t need any preparation.”

  It was a mistake that opened a can of worms Adams was happy to spill out for the jury to see. “And it is your dreams that you are testifying about today, isn’t it?”

  “No. My dreams were created by the problem that brought us here today,” Henker snapped, growing agitated.

  “You have been having a lot of emotional turmoil because of this event and the dreams you have been having, isn’t that right?”

  “On occasion.”

  “And yet, it was you that went and contacted the sheriff? They didn’t contact you, did they?”

  “That’s right. It was me that got fired at,” Henker replied. She looked over to the defense tables. “I would be glad to tell you how I became a witness in this case,” she added, as if to say the only reason I’m here is because of those fuckers right there.

  From there, things boiled over between the two, with Henker’s voice rising with each answer in a rapid-fire exchange.

  “Excuse me, Your Honor,” Ruddy finally intervened. “This is really degenerating.”

  Hennigan agreed and tried to calm Henker. “Just answer the question and don’t get mad at Mr. Adams.”

  “I love it when she gets mad at me, Your Honor,” Adams said, baiting the woman. “You are more than welcome to get mad at me, Mrs. Henker.”

  Alan Olson, who most everyone other than Russell Harven had been convinced was in way over his head, had finally found his footing. Olson seemed anxious to prove himself early on. Like a pipsqueak on his first day at a new school deciding to walk up and punch the first kid he saw, Olson picked a rather unlikely target to attack.

  Kimberly Scott got off work at the Westminster Mall the afternoon of May 8, only to find the rear license plate had been stolen off her car. The plate later showed up on the bumper of Manny Delgado’s Matador parked at the Little League lot on Hamner. Her testimony was simple and brief: I walked into the parking lot and my license plate was gone. But Olson chose to harangue and bicker with the woman. “Did you report this incident?”

  “Immediately. Both the police and the Motor Vehicles.” Olson asked for an exact time. “I drove home first, I think,” she answered, trying to think back. “I don’t recall. That was a very long time ago.”

  “So, you wish to change the ‘immediately’ then?” Olson challenged her, as though the woman were intentionally lying about such a trivial matter.

  Scott was taken aback by the reproach. “Pardon? No. I don’t recall. I stated that.”

  “Well, a moment ago you stated that you called the Motor Vehicles Department and the police immediately.”

  “I told you. I think it was after I got home,” Scott said.

  “Okay,” Olson said doubtfully.

  “Okay?” Scott parroted sarcastically.

  Mikel Linville, who had his yellow pickup truck stolen at gunpoint by Chis Harven, got into it with Olson over whether anyone had ever really aimed a gun at him that day. “So, he wasn’t taking any careful aim at anything then?” Olson asserted as much as asked.

  “Do you want to hear what I have to think about that?” Linville said. “I think he was pointing it directly at me.”

  “But you really don’t know where he was pointing it, since there were so many vehicles?”

  “That’s what you might say.”

  “It’s an assumption on your part, is it not?”

  “It’s an assumption on your part,” Linville fired back.

  The long-haired Linville then had the added indignity of Olson randomly asking him, “Had you been using any drugs that day, Mr. Linville?”

  “No, I had not,” a surprised Linville answered.

  The only witness to be treated gently by both sides was Sheila Deno, the bank customer who had entered the lobby in the middle of the robbery and frozen when an inattentive Russell Harven pointed the “Shorty” AR in her face. The naturally nervous Deno had practically begged Ruddy not to make her testify and entered the courtroom in the third trimester of pregnancy with a note from her doctor stating that the stress of testifying could cause her to miscarry. Hennigan attempted to calm the trembling young lady while at the same time cautioning the attorneys not to step over the line. “Mrs. Deno, I assure you nobody is going to jump on you today,” Hennigan said in a fatherly voice. “I’m sure that counsel, for their own sake, are not going to do anything which will upset you.” Deno’s testimony was brief and uneventful and she left the building just as pregnant as when she had walked in.

  The issue of dreams surfaced again when deputy Rudy Romo took the stand later in the trial. Romo was speeding down Bellegrave alongside Bill Crowe and A. J. Reynard when he ducked just before a bullet blew the headrest off his seat. Romo was asked by Ruddy to described what George Smith looked like when he saw him firing from the truck on May 9. “In my own words
? Scumbag.” He was pressed on why he could give no details before but could now make a positive ID in the courtroom. “I kept flashing back to the face in the dreams I was having,” Romo said. Hennigan ruled that the identification of Smith and Harven based on dreams was inadmissible. “I don’t have to be a psychiatrist to know this,” Hennigan remarked. “The trauma of how close he came to death, plus seeing the photos in the newspaper, there’s no question it all feeds into our dreams.” The story was picked up by the AP wire and blasted across the country.

  Prosecution witness testimony had its colorful and dramatic moments. Rolf Parkes told of being trapped against the corral fencing while the truck methodically drifted into his lane and a .223 round creased his scalp at close range. Dave “Mad Dog” Madden told of bullets zipping over his head and sparred with Adams in his usual irreverent deadpan delivery. Adams referred to Madden as a “creature.” Madden just smiled; it was not a nickname the Klingon-speaking deputy necessarily objected to. When asked if he could identify the gunman who shot him, CHP officer Bill Crowe raised his arm and pointed directly at Russell Harven. “Seated there.” Detective John Burden held up George Smith’s samurai sword found inside the van. Riverside PD bomb squad sergeant Bill Miller used an unloaded shotgun and dowel-mounted beer can bomb to demonstrate how it would be used as a grenade launcher. Both images ran in the Riverside Press-Enterprise as the paper chronicled the events of the trial on an almost-daily basis.

  On March 18, 1982, a silver-haired, elderly gentleman in a three-piece suit entered the courtroom and took a seat in the spectator gallery. “I want to see the defendants and get a general feel for the proceedings,” the father of James Evans told James Richardson of the Press-Enterprise. “My principal purpose is because of Jim,” said Bernard Evans. “It’s a little hard for me to explain. It’s just something I feel I should do.” As they took their seats at the defense tables, Evans laid eyes on George Smith and the Harven brothers for the very first time. “I sort of caught my breath. There’s the guys responsible for my son’s death.” Evans attended for several days and stayed at the prosecution’s house in the Vista suburbs as a guest of Jay Hanks. Jim Evans’s mother, Martha, stayed home in Texas. “She doesn’t feel like she can go through that,” Bernard Evans said.