A Desert Reckoning

by Deanne Stillman

  Across the region, Sundays at Llano were becoming legendary; there were theatre productions, literary readings and talks, and mandolin and guitar concerts. As anyone who has ever heard an impromptu desert symphony can attest, such an experience is transporting and mysterious and necessary; many a cowboy on the old cattle drives noted that when they broke out the fiddle under the starlight, people and animals alike wandered in and were calmed for a spell, especially the cows, whose days were numbered. Years later, Aldous Huxley moved to the region and regained his sight, attributing the miracle to the purifying and harsh glare of the sun in the Antelope Valley as it refracted off the endless white sands. From his house across the bajada, he gazed at the faltering and empty city of Llano and chronicled the story in his essay “Ozymandias,” after the old poem about a pharaoh who laments the march of time. “What pleasure,” he wrote, “to sit under one’s privately owned cottonwood tree and listen, across a mile of intervening sagebrush, to the music of the Socialists. . . . The moon is full, and to the accompaniment of the steady croaks of frogs along the irrigation ditch and the occasional shrieks of coyotes, the strains of Sousa and Sweet Adeline transcribed for mandolins and saxophone come stealing with extraordinary distinctness upon the ear.”

  Alas, by 1917, the ship of Llano was sinking as the band played on, riven by internal quarrels and factions, outside enemies who had burrowed in, and forces beyond everyone’s control, such as constant water shortages and disputes with neighbors over the limited supply. There was also a shortage of money and housing. The small down payments did not cover the costs of building material, and new houses could not be built quickly enough to accommodate everyone. Many of the colony’s eight hundred residents were still living in tents or temporary adobes. Moreover, not all of the able-bodied people were working; there were deadbeats who were either angry at colony officials or just wanted to hang out in the desert. Lawsuits were filed, people vied for control of Llano, some colonists could not live on $4 a day and left to find work elsewhere, and others were taken by the draft to serve in World War I.

  Meanwhile, certain powerful outsiders hoped for Llano’s collapse. As early as 1915, the LA Times had proclaimed the end, with headlines such as “Red Utopians Are Disgusted” and “New Wail from Reds’ Utopia.” Over the months, the paper continued the drumbeat, soon running a doomsday photo of dilapidated row-boats stacked up in the colony’s sand.

  In 1917, some colonists decided to start over elsewhere and made their way to the site of New Llano in Louisiana. The record does not tell us exactly how many made the exodus out of the desert—perhaps there were as few as sixty-five or as many as six hundred. About seventy-five stayed in the Mojave and pressed on. But by 1924, the last communitarians of Llano were gone, and desert scavengers descended on the site. Job Harriman died of tuberculosis in 1925, in the end described by a colonist as “a brokenhearted man, bowed down with the tragedy of the human race, and knowing that there would be a long, weary struggle with the changing of habits before mankind would ever find happiness.” Over time, Llano began to appear on certain maps as a Mojave ghost town, and to this day, desert rats describe it as “the socialist Stonehenge,” knowing little of the true story of the vanished empire just north of Tweaker Highway.

  Today the desert’s many feral dogs seem to find comfort near the old hearth at Llano, one of the few remaining features. Perhaps they are drawn by the way the wind whistles through the failing stone walls or the dreams only they can see in the ghost smoke of the chimney. But lest you think the legacy of our devoted communards is simply a nice story involving well-meaning though perhaps naïve people, think again, for it is that and more: you see, tract housing—the great scourge often pegged to the evil empire of Levittown—was actually a desert dream, and it came right out of Llano, cooked up by a student of Austin’s who grew up at the commune.

  His name was Gregory Ain, and he lived with his family in the futuristic community. Under Austin’s tutelage, Ain grew up to become an architect, believing that architecture could forge a just and egalitarian world through well-designed homes for the masses, a dream whose building blocks were his early years at Llano. To that end, with the help of other architects, he designed the famous Mar Vista tract in Los Angeles called Modernique Homes. It was a grand plan for ordinary people. The average size of the house was 1,060 feet, costing $12,000. Each resident could have from one to three bedrooms, with folding and sliding panels. The houses were painted in different color combinations, invoking the famous harmonic color concepts introduced by LeCorbusier, the Old World master whose New World ideas had influenced all the LA modernists. Thinking of mothers as Austin had taught him at Llano, Ain designed an open kitchen so they could keep an eye on children. As for children themselves, Ain planned for them too, incorporating the parenting philosophy of Dr. Spock into his designs for the kitchen and living room cabinets. The community’s landscape was designed by noted modernist Garrett Eckbo, who created a parklike atmosphere along the streets with plantings of magnolia, melaleuca, and ficus. Full-page ads for the tract were splashed across the pages of the LA Times. “Only Modernique Homes Have These Convertible Features,” the ads said, going on to itemize such things as living, dining, and sleeping areas, indirect lighting, unique bath, closet space, and, most importantly, the great California promise of flexible financing.

  Today, the dream homes cooked up in the sands of Llano are available to all—or were until the market collapsed. Thousands of them were marching toward its ruins in the summer of 2003, when Donald Kueck and Steve Sorensen had their deadly encounter. In the days preceding it, both men had expressed misgivings about the way things were going in the Mojave, perhaps sensing that they were in the wrong place, or that something bad was about to happen, and they lamented to various associates that it was getting too crowded, filling up with people fleeing the city or something or some place else, and they complained about too much riffraff in the desert, and really, they both said in their own ways, the lowlifes had to go.

  What was it that they longed for? Like plants to the sun, they were drawn to a simpler time, a time without trouble, a time, really, that none of us have experienced except that we all have in our bones, the time when the valley was a valley and not a grid, before the numbers and letters came, before KB Homes and Martha Stewart interiors, before the last herds of antelope that gave the valley its name were mowed down in a canyon—yes, long before that, the time when the Indians of the valley, perhaps even the very shaman whose remains were unearthed as ground was broken for the development on Avenue S, walked the sands on which both men now tried to make their respective ways, living on porridge that they made from acorns in the eastern Mojave which they visited on trade journeys as they crossed the mountains and deserts that were home. Mountain man Jedidiah Smith described the Indians of the region as poor but friendly. They would be gone soon and so would the Spanish, who were saved by the Indians’ gruel and then killed them, replaced by the white man, his laws, and those who enforced and broke them—the never-ending cycle of winner and loser in a play that has run for a very long time.

  BAD DAY AT BIG CREEK WASH

  It doesn’t matter—man or woman, white, black, brown, or yellow. We all bleed blue.

  —Law and Order

  AT THE REPORT OF GUNFIRE, A CODE 3—“DEPUTY DOWN. . . . Deputy needs assistance”—went out across the region. Within minutes, dozens of patrol cars from nearby towns and counties were screaming across Highway 138 toward Kueck’s trailer. In Long Beach, a Sikorsky H-3 helicopter took off carrying five LA County deputies for its regular run up the mountains to Barley Flats in the San Gabriel Mountains, but diverted to Llano as the repeated Code 3s were broadcast across the Mojave and up and down the PCH. Every cop on the West Coast from Tijuana to Port Washington knew that a brother was in trouble, clinging to life or, quite possibly, had just been whacked, and many of them grabbed their vehicles and headed for the desert as the chopper’s crew of sergeant, two deputy pilots, and a pai
r of EMS deputy paramedics prepared to debark and fan across Kueck’s property. Ten minutes later, a SWAT team of three from LASD headquarters in East Los Angeles boarded another chopper and was on its way. Homicide detectives Joe Purcell and Phil Guzman, investigating another murder in the town of El Monte, dropped everything when they got the call and hitched a ride out on an LAPD chopper, as by now LASD helicopters had already deployed to Llano or were busy with other crimes—after all, it was Saturday, the night when someone in LA County always gets killed.

  The first to arrive was Sgt. Larry Johnston, followed by Officer Victor Ruiz of the California Highway Patrol. Johnston spotted spent shell casings and human tissue all over the blood-soaked sand in front of the trailer. There was Sorensen’s SUV, its passenger door flung open, his two-way radio gone. But the Dodge Dart was missing, and Sorensen himself was not in sight. Was he being held hostage? Was he bleeding to death in a nearby desert wash? Did the assailant have them in his sights just waiting to ambush two more cops? Other deputies arrived and helped Johnston set up the first perimeter. Ruiz got in his Crown Victoria on the 138 and headed east, siren shrieking, turning north at Two Hundredth Street and then east again on Avenue T, where pavement turns to sand, staying with the chopper as both vehicles headed toward the trailer, and listening to his radio, which was crackling with updates from the nearby glider airport. Within seconds, he made a turn, following a set of deep and freshly made tire grooves leading away from the bloody site, north toward Palmdale Boulevard, a major thoroughfare in the valley, where a fugitive could jack someone and get a ride out of town.

  As the SWAT team landed in the brush, Officer Ruiz saw the body. At that point, his radio lost its signal, one more reminder that he had entered a dead zone. With the suspect possibly lurking, Ruiz stopped his vehicle and jumped out, hoping to save his brother and employing his training as an EMT. In a quick scan, he noticed that the deputy’s eye was pushed in, right where he had taken a round. And his head was flat. Few could survive injuries like this. Still alert to a possible ambush, Ruiz listened for his carotid. There was no sign of life. He spotted two or three pink stains in Sorensen’s abdomen, around his bullet-proof vest. If he were alive, there would have been excessive bleeding. There was not. Then he looked inside the skull. “I saw that the brain was missing,” Ruiz later told me. “That stops the heart.”

  Trying again to reach someone on his hand-held, Officer Ruiz could not get a signal. A highway patrolman for over a decade, he had been called to scenes in which other cops had been shot at or seriously wounded a number of times, but this was the worst he had ever witnessed. Within minutes, the shaken officer was joined by fifteen other sheriff’s units and five CHIPS vehicles converging at the scene, as SWAT swarmed the trailer.

  Arriving around the same time as Ruiz was Deputy Melissa Sullivan, who had been in her patrol car when she heard dispatch calling, “114 Boy,” and getting no answer. Knowing that was Sorensen’s code, she was concerned and headed right to headquarters at the Lancaster station. En route, she learned that Sorensen had been killed; she diverted and drove to the scene, racing toward her colleague’s body and shocked to see that he was wearing the same uniform she was wearing—a Class B LASD rig with a cloth star. Gazing at the mangled corpse, the veteran cop was overtaken with thoughts ranging from disbelief to the personal. “Why would someone shoot you for wanting to protect them and their family?” she thought. Then she recalled the lonely beat that deputies traversed in the Antelope Valley. “This could have been me.” For example, there was the time she had to wait thirty minutes for backup on a domestic violence call in Lake Los Angeles. The situation hadn’t been safe, and months after the incident, the thought of it still nagged her.

  With cops fanning out across the desert, Deputy Sullivan and several others remained with Sorensen’s body to protect it—and the crime scene, now one of at least two, including the site of the murder. Among those surrounding Sorensen were members of SWAT. Some teared up at the sight of a fellow lawman reduced to a pile of mangled flesh. A commander told them to suck it up, and someone said a prayer, and then they put a blanket over Sorensen lest the news media, now swarming the skies like vultures, broadcast the scene on the evening news. Amid the creosote and fresh tire tracks and footprints in the Mojave furnace, with Steve’s body stiffening on the path behind her, Melissa Sullivan phoned her family to let them know that she was all right. Then she and the others surrounded the scene with yellow tape, attaching it to bushes and scrub as they marked off a strange new grid in the wilderness. As Sullivan performed the task, she wondered if she really was all right. When she had first seen Sorensen’s body, she cried briefly but made herself stop; “suck it up” was the law enforcement mantra and this was not a time to ignore it. Soon there would be more grisly news, a discovery that would crank a manhunt that was gathering steam into a fever pitch. For now, Deputy Sullivan left to get drinks and crackers from an RV that was the command post at the corner of Palmdale Boulevard and Two Hundredth Street, and then returned with replenishment for the crew.

  At the same time, another SWAT team was racing across the desert in the Peacekeeper, following the tire tracks that had led Ruiz to Sorensen’s body and then continuing on into the wastes. The armored jeep carried a team of six, as well as two Emergency Services Division paramedics and a K-9 handler. The vehicle was packed with gear; except for the driver, the men were not inside it. Instead they were standing on foot rails that ran along the back and sides of the vehicle and holding onto a handlebar as the Peacekeeper coursed over the sands. SWAT teams are color-coded; among the men on the rails was Deputy Bruce Chase, an eleven-year SWAT veteran and number four on Team Gold, which was assigned to that day’s task. In that position, he was in charge of intel for the day’s plan. The plan was to keep following the tracks and try to avoid an ambush or being shot at; outside the vehicle, the men were totally exposed—a vulnerability that Chase and the other men on the hunt would feel for the next seven days, in every minute that they were trekking through the wide open expanse of the desert. Essentially they were moving targets.

  Another part of the plan was to deploy the lone passenger inside the Peacekeeper. This was Rik, a Belgian Malinois, a sturdy and stouthearted breed that has become the preferred dog in law enforcement, the canine that is said to have accompanied Navy SEALS in their takedown of bin Laden, trained to engage in combat as well as detect human scent. His handler was Sgt. Joe Williams, an ex–Air Force MP; together, he and Rik looked like a GQ ad—a rippling and handsome man in uniform and a beautiful four-legged sentry by his side—and in fact they were a couple, of sorts: at LASD, dogs live with their partners, and together they are on call at a moment’s notice. At the time of the incident, Joe and Rik had been a team for three years, deployed many times but never to anything like this. It wasn’t just the gruesome nature of the crime that made this call different, or even the bizarre pursuit that would go on for seven days in the high summer heat of the Mojave. Early on, Joe realized that the man they were up against was a remarkable character; in his view, Donald Kueck was calculating, not afraid, and willing to die.

  Less than two hours after Kueck shot Sorensen, the SWAT team found his yellow Dodge Dart two and a half miles from the deputy’s body. Rik picked up a scent, then led deputies to an abandoned shed about fifty yards away. “Zuken,” Joe said, issuing the Dutch command for “search,” and Rik headed through a dilapidated doorway and began coming back with items belonging to Steve. First, it was his gun belt, empty and covered in blood. “Revere,” Joe said, giving the command for “continue searching,” and Rik ran back and returned with Steve’s hat. It, too, was covered in blood. “Revere,” Joe said again, and Rik headed back through the doorway, coming back with Steve’s bloody notebook. Although Joe knew that Sorensen had been shot and killed, the sight of his personal belongings surfacing sequentially and covered in blood was troubling; the hunters had already seen what happened to their brother, but now they came face-to-face with his remn
ants—the very totems of the job that had called him.

  Still on the scent, Rik led the SWAT team away from the shed and east on a rutted dirt road until the road intersected and ended at 170th Street East, a paved road with occasional traffic. But there the scent vanished, and the search began to unravel. It was 6:14 PM. Had Kueck flagged someone down and hitched a ride out of town? Was there a carjacking? Could he have gotten to the nearby airstrip and literally vanished into thin air? A half hour later, SWAT received some disturbing information—Kueck’s car was dumped a few hundred yards from Sorensen’s home. Now they were gripped by other questions. Sorensen was married, and he had a two-year-old son. Was his wife, Christine, being held hostage? Where was the child? They raced to the house and kicked down the door, mounting a room-to-room search in the carefully wired compound, but no one was there. A few minutes later they got a tip that Kueck was hiding out next to his property, on the site of the recently evicted squatter. The SWAT team tore back across the desert in off-road vehicles, converging on the squatter’s trailer and turning it upside down. An elaborate tunnel system splayed out before them, a demented leprechaun’s world of canned food, a piss-stained mattress, Hustler centerfolds taped to the crumbling walls, and a cockatoo at the end of a hallway. The labyrinth was one that they would continue to hear about as the manhunt unfolded, as tip after tip poured in, alluding to ancient subterranean causeways, unmarked and classified underground missile silos, and a myriad of other strange Mojave hideouts.

  Word of the incident had swept through the region, and cops from other desert precincts were converging in the Antelope Valley. News choppers were buzzing in from Los Angeles. Locals monitored the situation on their police band radios; learning that a fugitive was at large, they retrieved their weapons from wherever they kept them and placed them at the ready, lest a desperate stranger—or maybe even someone they knew—showed up, looking for aid and comfort.