Dave “Mad Dog” Madden was named detective in 1988 and worked in an array of investigation assignments including auto theft, robbery/homicide, major narcotics unit, and criminal intelligence. He served as a sniper in the RSO SWAT unit. He retired in 2009 and currently works in plainclothes executive protection.
In 1985, A. J. Reynard transferred to the Inglewood Police Department in South-Central Los Angeles. During an undercover drug buy, Reynard was shot three times, including once in the back of the head. Regaining consciousness, Reynard and his partner shot and killed the attacker. Tired of being shot at and weary of the bureaucracy and politics of law enforcement, Reynard retired in 1995, went to culinary school, and worked in the kitchen at the prestigious Miramar Resort. After several years, he switched to a career in education, teaching law and criminal investigations for almost twenty years at Yucaipa High School in San Bernardino County. He lives in Big Bear Lake, California.
A week after the Norco bank robbery, Rolf Parkes made his scheduled move to the Irvine Police Department in Orange County, where he worked as a detective on arson investigations and spent seventeen years on the SWAT unit. At the request of his new department, Rolf was instrumental in creating a police training video about the incident that is still used by law enforcement agencies throughout the country today.
RSO deputies Ken McDaniels, Herman Brown, and Darrell Reed, all wounded in the pursuit, recovered from their injuries and went on to long, successful careers in law enforcement. After an equally successful career, Fred Chisholm retired to Arizona. Gary Keeter, the patrol deputy who had found himself behind the dispatch mic that day only because of an injured knee, went on to become one of the top police dispatch instructors in the country. The actions of the dispatch team of Keeter, Gladys Wiza, and Sharon Markum during the Norco pursuit is credited with having prevented an even greater loss of life.
Twenty years after the Norco bank robbery, the Riverside Sheriff’s Department finally officially honored the deputies involved. In a 2000 commemoration ceremony organized by the Sheriffs’ Association, Glyn Bolasky, Chuck Hille, Andy Delgado, and Rolf Parkes received the Medal of Courage for “acts of heroism performed at great risk to life and limb.” Although long overdue, the recognition did much to repair the damaged relationship between the deputies and the department and, in some cases, lingering resentments toward each other. “Some didn’t want to come, they asked why bring this all up again,” said Laura Bakewell, who coordinated the event. “Some of the deputies arrived angry, but by the end of it, they left crying and hugging each other.”
ON A ROUTINE TRAFFIC STOP ON MARCH 14, 1987, CHP OFFICER DOUG EARNEST had his gun taken away by a disturbed marine. Kidnapped and forced to drive on a chase with law enforcement over three counties, Earnest finally convinced the man to throw away the gun and apprehended the suspect himself. That he had been involved in two harrowing incidents in his career says much about how perilous the life of a law enforcement officer in the Inland Empire could be. In each instance, Earnest acted with supreme bravery, although the two events left him shaken. After serving with distinction for more than twenty years with California Highway Patrol, Earnest finally retired. He passed away in 2016.
Patrolman Bill Crowe went on to become the first drug K9 officer for the California Highway Patrol, roaming the highways of Riverside County with his partner Ebbo. Crowe transferred to the Northern California city of Redding and served on the Special Investigations Unit. One day he received a call from Riverside CHP. “You want your dog back?” Ebbo proved as faithful a pet as he had been a partner, helping Crowe and his wife raise their son, born one week after the return of the dog. Crowe retired in 2002. Bill Crowe and Doug Earnest remained lifelong friends.
DESPITE A MULTITUDE OF HEARTBREAKING EXPERIENCES THROUGHOUT HIS law enforcement career and the loss of his home in the Panorama fire, deputy James McPheron maintained his optimism and gentle ways. He served out his career with the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department and continues to live in the area. One of his prize possessions remains the scrapbook and mementos of his life as a peace officer.
Deputy Mike Lenihan rose to the rank of lieutenant at the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Office, most of it in the Homicide division. He retired after thirty-five years of service and passed away in 2018.
Not long after having tracked the yellow truck up Lytle Creek canyon in San Bernardino Sheriff’s helicopter 40-King-2, pilot Ed Mabry and spotter John Plasencia were on routine patrol over the county when Mabry suddenly turned the craft around and returned to the Rialto airfield. Mabry departed the chopper without explanation and disappeared into the control building. When a confused Plasencia asked an officer inside what was going on, the man said simply, “He’s done.” Plasencia believes Mabry’s abrupt departure from piloting was a direct result of the remorse he felt over their inability to warn Jim Evans in time of the impending ambush on Baldy Notch Road.
WHEN D. J. McCARTY WALKED OUT OF THE COURTHOUSE ON APRIL he was done with Norco, but Norco was not done with him. At a SWAT training facility several years later, he found himself sitting in a classroom when one of the instructors slipped a VHS tape into a video player. What flickered to life on a large monitor in the darkened room was the training film Rolf Parkes had made about Norco for the Irvine Police Department. McCarty watched as the face of a wild-haired George Wayne Smith stared out at him from the monitor. “A known and admitted anarchist . . .” a professional narrator informed the viewers. As the film continued, images that McCarty had fought hard to forget began to flash through his mind.
When his name was mentioned in the film, several heads turned to look at him. A fellow officer leaned over and whispered, “You were in that thing?”
Just over thirty minutes into the tape, D.J. heard the voice of Jim Evans for the first time in his life. McCarty listened to the smooth West Texas drawl as the pursuit headed up Interstate 15 and into Lytle Creek. We are a quarter mile from the ranger station on Sierra Road in the National Forest and they are firing like crazy. As the chase went onto the dirt road, Evans’s voice began to grow tighter, asking more frequently about possible ambushes. McCarty’s mind leapt back to those moments riding in the passenger seat next to McPheron trying to get to the front, the M16 held between his knees. Why the hell didn’t he move over and let us pass? Okay, we’re hit! the voice on the tape screamed. D.J.’s heart leapt, and his memories took over from there: Evans jumping from the car as his rear window explodes; backing up in combat stance, emptying his .38; ducking down to reload. Don’t come up the same place you went down, Evans. Don’t come up in the same place.
McCarty knew it was time to get some help. He soon found himself in the office of a therapist named Nancy Bohl-Penrod. “If you could be doing anything in your life right now,” Bohl-Penrod said in their first session, “what would it be?” D.J. thought about it. “Two things. First, I’d be a Civil War soldier on horseback with a rifle riding my way back home west.” What’s the second thing? “Commander of my own starship.” It was the start of the road back.
D. J. McCarty was awarded the Medal of Valor by the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department for his actions on Baldy Notch Road. His career with the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Office spanned thirty-three years. In addition to SWAT, he served in the career criminal division and the Undercover Narcotics Bureau, rose to detective, and retired as a sergeant in 2010. He lives in Arizona with his wife and works in the field of executive protection.
MARY EVANS IS A RETIRED REALTOR LIVING IN SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO. SHE has seven grandchildren and two great grandchildren. James B. Evans Jr. lives in the area with his two young children. Decades after his death, James Evans was posthumously awarded the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department’s highest honor, the Medal of Valor.
AT 11:00 A.M. ON DECEMBER 2, 2015, TWO ISLAMIC EXTREMISTS ARMED with AR-15 semiautomatic rifles, thousands of rounds of .223 ammunition, and homemade pipe bombs burst into the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, and op
ened fire on an employee meeting inside. Within minutes, fourteen were dead and twenty-two seriously injured. The suspects fled the scene, immediately sparking the largest manhunt in the Inland Empire since the search for the Norco bank robbers thirty-five years before.
But this time, law enforcement agencies came equipped with more than just a single beat-up M16. Hundreds of officers from seven different agencies—including Norco participants, San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, CHP, and Rialto and Fontana city police departments—swarmed the region armed with semiautomatic weapons, such as the Ruger Mini-14 .223 rifle and the Glock G22 pistol. Police traversed the streets of San Bernardino in BearCat armored personnel carriers while the skies above swarmed with police choppers now equipped as “gun platforms.”
Trapping the fleeing SUV in a suburban neighborhood four hours later, the two suspects were killed in just over five minutes with a hail of 440 rounds of police gunfire. Afterward, one of the dead suspects was dragged from the SUV using the mechanical arm of a Rook armored critical incident vehicle, while remote control robots from the bomb squad searched vehicles and houses nearby. Had the incident occurred in any major metro area in the country, the response would have been the same.
In the immediate aftermath, local police officials cited the lesson learned from Norco as the genesis of the Inland Empire law enforcement’s ability to rapidly deploy with such overwhelming force to neutralize superior firepower. In a 2017 article for Vice by Daniel Oberhaus entitled “How a 1980 Bank Robbery Sparked the Militarization of America’s Police,” a quote from Rolf Parkes pinpointed the evolution to a specific moment and the actions of a single deputy: D. J. McCarty.
When backup for the responding officers finally arrived, bringing a single AR-15 in tow, the robbers fled into the woods. . . . “When the suspects hear[d] that rifle, they realize[d] their firepower [was] now being matched,” recalled responding officer Rolf Parkes. “There would have been a lot more dead cops on that road if not for that weapon.”
IN A MEDIA STORAGE ROOM AT THE RIVERSIDE COUNTY BEN CLARK TRAINING Center, the possessions of George Smith sit frozen in time. Unopened mail, Mastercard bills, mortgage papers, half a pack of Benson & Hedges menthol cigarettes, a film canister of marijuana and a one-hitter pipe inside a baggie, and a savings account deposit book from the Security Pacific National Bank in Norco. On a piece of lined notebook paper is a list of cities with phone numbers and addresses for parks and maintenance departments he had been contacting for a job: Anaheim, Brea, Fullerton, Norco . . . Beside most is scrawled the word no. Inside an envelope is an uncashed federal tax return check along with a handwritten note. “Hi George. We are doing fine. We went to Catalina, Knott’s Berry Farm, and Farmer’s Market. Monica is doing fine but it is hard on her also. I will call you after my parents leave. See you soon. Hanne & Monica.”
Almost forty years behind bars has given George Smith a perspective that had eluded him in the years immediately following his crime. “I do have empathy,” he would write in 2018. “I am ashamed, embarrassed, and deeply sorry for all that happened on May 9, 1980. It was a tragedy for everyone, especially to the Evans and Delgado families. I wish I could do or say something that would mean something comforting. A great deal of introspection also showed me I need to apologize not only to the Evans family and Delgado family, but to all who were injured and had anything adverse happen to them.” He added that “I had rationalized my actions contrary to my faith” and that he had been “hypocritical and wrong on so many levels.”
George Smith has been a model prisoner active in counseling fellow inmates in their quest for spiritual belief. He is currently housed at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego County. The prison is also home to Robert F. Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan, Manson Family killer Tex Watson, Beverly Hills parent-murderers Lyle and Erik Menendez, and serial rapist Anand Jon. The facility maintains five interfaith chapels.
A MAN WALKS INTO THE ROOM WITH A SLY, ALMOST MISCHIEVOUS SMILE ON his face. He is in his midsixties with a potbelly, the long beard and hair much as it was thirty-five years earlier, only now snow white. The eyes are the same too, squinty with a bit of a sparkle. If he auditioned for Santa Claus at the local mall, he’d probably get the job. But he can’t. This is the Inmate Visiting Center of Unit A at the California State Prison in Lancaster, high on the desert plain east of Los Angeles. Russell Harven has been here a long time, and he is never getting out.
“I appreciate you meeting with me,” the visitor says to the man he has known only through letters. “Yeah, we’ll see about that,” Harven says doubtfully, taking a seat across the circular table. “My brother is giving me a lot of shit for this.” Russ is talking about his older brother, Chris, currently held up north in a Vacaville prison. The two had been cellmates for most of the last fifteen years, and he expects to be transferred up to Vacaville soon where they will be again. Russ sees it as a blessing and a curse. On one hand, at least it’s someone he knows. On the other hand, it’s Chris. The dynamic has not changed all that much in thirty-five years.
The visitor center is full of men in denim shirts and pants, almost all black or Hispanic. They sit chatting with their mothers, holding children, or walking with their wives hand in hand around the caged-in outdoor area. To look at them, most don’t seem like such bad guys at all. But there are others who pimp-roll into the room, badass and menacing. If they think about an old white inmate like Russell Harven at all, it is probably dismissively. But there is not one of them in the room who has a conviction record approaching anything like his.
Harven seems to respond to all the visitor’s questions as best he can, even if the answers are simple and uncomplicated. “I’ve spent most of my life trying not to think about what happened that day.” In his letters and as he speaks, the superior intelligence range in which he tested just after Norco is obvious. He refers to himself as having been “indolent” and “fatalistic” in the years leading up to Norco. He does not lay any blame on his brother, says it never occurred to him that it would end up in a gunfight. If it had, he never would have done it. When asked if he thinks one of them killed Jim Evans, he looks away. “God, I hope not.”
Like his brother, Russell is still angry about the trial. No question the cops lied, covered up, destroyed evidence. The prosecution couldn’t prove who shot the bullet, so they should have gotten twenty-five years to life under the Felony Murder Rule instead. “I am somewhat bitter about getting that sentence,” he says. “I used to be a happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care type. Now I am a bitter old man waiting for my toe tag.”
After two hours, the visitor runs out of questions, so they spend the last hour shooting the shit about seventies rock music and L.A. radio stations they used to listen to, the lousy Mexican ragweed, the smoggy days, sneaking into Disneyland—all the stuff teenagers growing up in Orange County did back then. For a while, they are just two guys sitting around talking about the old neighborhood. They try to figure out if they might have gone to some of the same concerts. Cal Jam II at the Ontario Motor Speedway, the Stones at Anaheim Stadium, Queen, Aerosmith. “What about the AC/DC Back in Black tour at the Orange Pavilion in San Bernardino?” the visitor asks. Harven’s mood changes. He shakes his head. Of course he wasn’t there. It was September 1980. By then, Russell Harven had already thrown his life away.
The guard calls out visitor hours are over and Harven stands. Before shaking hands and thanking him again, the visitor cannot help but ask what is both the best and stupidest question one can ask someone who has done something unimaginable: “Why did you do it?”
“Simple,” Harven says without hesitation. “Because I thought we’d get away with it.”
NOTE ON SOURCES
THIS BOOK IS THE RESULT OF FOUR YEARS OF RESEARCH. THE METHODOLOGY was simple: Track down every document, contact every surviving person involved, and follow any thread wherever it led me. Research sources included forty thousand pages of trial transcripts, dozens of boxes of physical e
vidence and trial exhibits, unedited recordings of police radio traffic and suspect interrogations, and thousands of pages of police investigation reports, photographs, witness interviews, and other documents from five law enforcement agencies. While it sometimes took years to locate or secure approvals, all the agencies involved ultimately allowed me access to everything remaining in their archives, most of which had never before been released.
There are many ways I could have chosen to write the story of Norco, but my intention from the start has been to tell a true story truthfully and transparently. Everything presented, whether in dialogue or narrative, is as factual as I could determine based on a wide range of sources.
Mistakes, contradictions, and inconsistencies in witness accounts and evidence are not uncommon in criminal cases, especially one of this magnitude. Most concerned incidental details. In those few instances where I was unable to resolve through referencing multiple sources, I either decided which was more likely or attributed to their source within the narrative. When concerning more important information, incidents or conflicts and disagreements between people, each point of view or version of events is represented or clearly noted in the narrative. Significant challenges to evidence and witness accounts and testimony by defense attorneys are an important part of the story and contained directly within the accounts of the trial.
Of course, data and hard facts do not tell the whole story. I also spent hundreds of hours interviewing those involved on all sides and facets of the story. Most were conducted face-to-face in diners, private homes, cop bars, prison visiting rooms, and a multitude of other locations. In the case of the major players, there were multiple conversations totaling dozens of hours with each and countless smaller follow-ups to clarify details and facts. Additional information on the people involved came from family, friends, and acquaintances through interviews and testimony transcripts from the penalty phase of the trial.
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