Norco '80

by Peter Houlahan

  A TWENTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD HEAVY-MACHINERY MECHANIC NAMED MIKEL Linville was driving a service vehicle northbound on Hamner coming back from a job at the Ontario Airport when he stopped at the light at Fourth Street. The company vehicle was a 1969 Ford F-250 pickup mounted with steel utility cabinets on the sides of the bed, an air compressor in back, and tall cylinders of compressed oxygen and acetylene secured upright just behind the cab. Sundry welding equipment, a five-gallon can of gear oil, and tools of the heavy mechanic trade lay scattered about the bed of the truck. The truck was painted a yellow-orange similar to that of local road maintenance departments. The company name, Pascal & Ludwig, was painted on the doors of the cab.

  Linville slowed to a stop in the far-left lane with only one car in front of him. His mind was on dumping the truck at the yard in Upland, cashing his paycheck, and starting his weekend when he heard the popping of gunfire and saw men standing next to a green van firing their rifles down Fourth Street. Linville lay across the bench seat of the truck as the shooting intensified. When he peeked his head up again, he saw a man in a ski mask and drab-green poncho holding a military rifle walking into the center of the intersection as though there were not a damn thing anyone there could do to stop him. Then he spotted three other men—two wearing ski masks and the other, Hispanic, with his face exposed. All three were carrying duffel bags and rifles. They fanned out and began moving through the lanes of stopped traffic, leveling their guns at passengers. One was headed directly for Linville.

  To Mikel Linville, the man headed in his direction seemed huge, at least six foot three, 250 pounds. It might have been the ski mask or the poncho that made Chris Harven look that big, or it could have been the semiautomatic rifle he lowered and aimed directly through the windshield. Either way, Linville knew it was time to leave. He threw open the door to the truck and jumped out, in the process popping the clutch, which made the truck jump forward, strike the car in front of it, and stall out. The athletic Linville darted between cars, making sure to stay clear of anyone else wearing a fucking ski mask. He sprinted for the parking lot of the Security Pacific Bank, scrambled up a cinder block wall, and vaulted onto the roof of the Century 21 Real Estate offices.

  From there, Linville could see the big man who had aimed the rifle at him climb into the driver’s seat of the truck. Another man in a ski mask ran for the truck, hurled a duffel bag over the side cabinets, and scrambled into the bed after it. The one without the mask climbed into the passenger side of the cab. But the one in the intersection, he just stood right where he was, firing from the hip in small bursts, one after the other, over and over, in the direction of a lone cop hiding behind the door of his sheriff’s vehicle.

  THERE WAS A SUDDEN BREAK IN THE SHOOTING. ANDY DELGADO PUSHED HIMSELF up and looked over the door to his unit. The man in the intersection no longer had the rifle on his hip and had turned to face the other direction. There was some commotion around some sort of service vehicle. One of his suspects was standing beside the driver’s door waving a gun around. It appeared to Andy as though he was aiming the gun in the direction of the passenger seat, forcing someone to get back inside. Andy figured it must be a hostage because the person who jumped back inside wore no mask, no green field jacket. He saw another gunman in a ski mask run through traffic toward the yellow truck and jump into the bed. But had there been a second guy with him? A second hostage? The man in the intersection turned and fired another burst of gunfire in his direction and Andy ducked down again.

  Andy tried to tally it up. Two shooters in the back. The one who was waving his gun around must be the driver, so that’s at least three. The guy in the passenger seat makes one hostage and very possibly another in the bed of the truck. Shit, so where were all the other suspects? He had guessed anywhere from four to six. They must still be in the area, maybe inside that tan Cadillac he had seen before or in Murphy’s Hay & Grain.

  Out of the chaos, Andy saw the yellow truck lurch forward, swing out of its lane, and pull into the intersection. The truck slowed while the man standing in the center of the intersection walked to the rear and handed his rifle up to the man in the back. He seemed to be in no hurry at all. He stepped up onto the bumper and swung himself over the tailgate and disappeared into the bed. The truck accelerated, angling back into the northbound lanes heading toward Andy’s location. God almighty, Andy thought, these guys are coming to kill me. Andy lay down on the pavement between his cruiser and the curb, using as much of the front wheel as he could for cover. He could hear the engine of the big truck as it drew closer. He put his head to the pavement, holding the .38 and peering under the patrol car, looking for any boots that might hit the ground. If they did, he would shoot at them.

  The truck never slowed down, but there was a rapid Bam! Bam! Bam! of gunfire as George Smith fired the Heckler over the tailgate of the truck, one .308-caliber bullet gouging a deep, five-inch trench in the metal roof of Andy’s unit. Andy could hear the truck accelerating away, the big 360-cubic-inch V8 engine straining up the low grade between Fourth and Fifth Streets. Andy grabbed his shotgun off the pavement, aimed at a figure in the bed of the truck, and fired the last shotgun slug as the truck crested the hill and disappeared.

  Andy grabbed his radio mic and breathlessly communicated the best information he had been able to gather under the circumstances. 3-Edward-51, three suspects fled, a yellow pickup north on Hamner. They have two hostages.

  Gary Keeter parroted the transmission for all units to hear. Riverside t’all, yellow pickup has fled with two hostages northbound on Hamner.

  THE INTERSECTION AT HAMNER AND FOURTH WAS EERILY QUIET EXCEPT FOR the crackling bursts of radio traffic coming from Andy Delgado’s shot-up cruiser and the wail of sirens closing in fast. The whole event had taken just four minutes and two seconds from the time of Gary Keeter’s 211 dispatch to Andy Delgado’s broadcast that the robbers had fled the scene. But to the officers flooding the scene minutes later, that seemed almost impossible to believe.

  Hundreds of empty shell casings littered the bank parking lot, Fourth Street, and the intersection at Hamner. To Riverside City PD officer Fred Grutzmacher, it seemed as though he could not take a step without crunching at least one underfoot. In the end, only fourteen shotgun cartridges and three spent .38 shell casings were Riverside county-issue rounds. The others, more than five hundred spent shells in all, had come from the private collection of George Wayne Smith and Christopher Harven.

  There were bullet holes everywhere—forty-six having hit Bolasky’s car alone, several in each of Hille’s and Andy Delgado’s units, one in Darryel Tygart’s Thunderbird, another in Chris Evans’s El Camino, and more in civilian vehicles abandoned or parked in nearby lots. Six rounds had whistled through the walls of Murphy’s Hay & Grain and another through the radiator of an employee’s truck parked out front. Others went into houses, cars, sheds, and storefronts. In the row of apartments just behind the bank, John Leighton herded his family to a back room after a bullet smashed through a bedroom window, cutting a metal lamp in half.

  On Fourth Street, a Thunderbird was crashed against the curb with Darryel and Jody Ann Tygart still lying across the front seat, the daughter telling her father she was okay, but pleading with him not to stick his head up again. A little farther up, a two-tone Buick Regal was facing Hamner, its driver’s side smashed in by the Thunderbird, Marvin and Ernestine Holtz trembling inside. Bolasky’s Chevy Impala was sideways in the road, riddled with gunshot holes, every window and three of its tires blown out, with blood on the front seat, on the side of the door, splattered on the asphalt beside it, and trailing away in droplets to a row of trees.

  Inside the Security Pacific Bank, customers and employees were only now daring to get off the floor. The teller drawers and bank vault were still open and empty. Denise DeMarco picked up a ringing telephone. It was the Corona branch. “Did you guys just get robbed?” Elaine Jones, the woman who had been in the drive-through lane when she spotted Manny Delgado waving a shotgun
around, had jumped from her truck to stop a group of small children from running straight into the gunfight and was now shielding them behind a cinder block wall.

  Adjacent to the bank, Jim Lyon had almost forty bystanders lying on the carpet and behind desks in his Century 21 office, while Mikel Linville was crawling down from its roof. Dozens of others, including Chris Evans and Jennie Lewis, were wandering out of the Carl’s Jr. while restaurant manager Chuck Anderson tried to calm those still too frightened to come out from under the tables. Cowering in the bathroom at Murphy’s Hay & Grain were two mothers and their Cub Scouts who had been at the entrance to the bank when it all began. Others were coaxed out of closets and phone booths, from under cars or behind houses, trees, and walls.

  With responding units from Riverside Sheriff’s Department, Riverside PD, Corona PD, and California Highway Patrol now flooding the intersection of Fourth and Hamner from all directions, there was a radio transmission from Chuck Hille as he raced to the hospital with Glyn Bolasky. 2-Edward-59, Bolasky is shot in the shoulder, leg, and arm. He needs AB blood.

  On Fourth Street, the green van, still stuck in drive, was rhythmically rocking back and forth against the chain-link fence, rolling a few feet forward until the tension of the fence rolled it back. Slowly forward, slowly back. Over and over. A teenage boy sat slumped in the driver’s seat convulsing, a .45 Colt semiautomatic strapped to his ankle, an AR-15 on the floor beside him. In the cargo area in back, a cabinet door still bulged from the weight of the man taped up inside. Scattered across the floor of the van was the cause of it all, a sad little mix of wrapped and loose bills and coins. What was already one of the most violent bank robberies in history had yielded one of its shittiest takes: $20,112.36.

  Through the glass doors of the Security Pacific Bank, eighteen-year-old James Kirkland watched the green van rocking back and forth against the chain link fence. And then something very peculiar happened. A head emerged out the back window of the van and seemed to be shouting something. Moments later, a man with his arms and legs bound in packing tape, a rope tied around his neck, squirmed his way out of the window and flopped onto the pavement below.

  Andy Delgado was the first to catch sight of Gary Hakala on the ground and advanced toward him, gun drawn. Having no reason to expect anyone other than a bank robber to come out of the van, Andy leveled his .357. Then he saw the arms and legs bound with packing tape. This was no bank robber. This was a hostage.

  “Come toward me! Come toward me!” Andy yelled at the man, his gun still drawn as a precaution against God knew what else might come out of that van. Several of the cops who had just arrived on scene turned toward the van and leveled their sidearms and shotguns at the screaming man emerging from behind the suspect vehicle.

  “I’m a hostage! Help me!” Hakala continued to call out, relieved to see so many cops. Hakala bunny-hopped his way toward Hamner Avenue before his feet, asleep after five hours bound in tape, went out from under him and he flopped onto the asphalt. He felt the rope slip from his neck and began rolling across Hamner Avenue while dozens of bystanders and cops looked on dumbfounded at the spectacle of a bound man crossing a major boulevard like a rolling pin.

  After rolling almost the entire width of the wide avenue, Gary Hakala’s ordeal finally ended when a Corona PD cruiser advanced into the intersection, two officers running alongside, weapons drawn. When they reached Hakala, they scooped him up like a giant sausage, chucked him onto the back seat, and drove him a few hundred yards north on Hamner.

  INSIDE THE VAN, BILLY DELGADO’S BODY WAS COMING TO THE END OF ITS struggle. With a dozen jittery lawmen now inching forward with their guns drawn, Billy drew his final bubbly breath. It had taken fifteen horrifying minutes for his heart to pump enough blood through the hole in his trachea to fill his lungs and suffocate him to death. A moment later, the van’s engine also gave up its futile struggle against the chain link-fence, and it died too.

  6

  WINEVILLE

  May 9, 1980. Wineville, California.

  SIX THOUSAND MILES AWAY FROM CALIFORNIA, A MEETING WAS TAKING place in a vacation home on a lake in Velden, Austria. The owner of a modest manufacturing facility specializing in curtain rods and army knives had gathered together a collection of Europe’s leading military, law enforcement, and sporting firearms experts. The Austrian military had just opened contract bidding to choose the supplier of a new sidearm to replace the outdated Walther P38. The man hosting the meeting had a single question to ask the assembled group: What would be the ideal characteristics of a new handgun?

  Gaston Glock had no experience whatsoever designing or manufacturing firearms, but he had recently retooled his shop and begun working with advanced synthetic polymers whose strength and lightweight characteristics he was sure could be applied to create a superior weapon. Within months, he had. The semiautomatic Glock 17 pistol was lighter, more durable, and more reliable than anything before it. Glock won the contract.

  But it was another feature of the Glock 17 that would cause it to sweep through American law enforcement in the years that followed, eventually reaching an industry-leading 65 percent rate of use by police agencies. Feeding from a double-stock magazine housing NATO-standard 9 mm rounds in the grip, the Glock 17 allowed the user to peel off seventeen rounds of semiautomatic fire before pausing to reload, an action that took only seconds to execute.

  Glock was certainly not the first firearms company to manufacture a semiautomatic pistol, but when a string of lethal shootouts in the 1980s proved the need for law enforcement to increase round capacity, it was the Glock 17 that had the right performance, specs, and price point. The first in that string of shootouts to usher in the militarization of America’s police forces occurred the same day as the meeting from which the Glock 17 was born: the Norco Bank Robbery.

  Of course, the Glock 17 would arrive too late for the deputies shooting it out with four heavily armed bank robbers on the streets of Norco. To say the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department was outgunned on May 9, 1980, is to vastly understate the situation. Like most local law enforcement agencies at the time, the RSO was still arming its deputies with two weapons: a six-shooter and a shotgun. The standard county-issue Smith & Wesson .38 Special revolver and Remington 870 Wingmaster shotgun both experience ever-diminishing accuracy and penetrating capability, making them nearly ineffectual at distances beyond forty-five yards. Neither will accommodate high-capacity magazines, requiring frequent and time-consuming reloading.

  In contrast, a bullet fired from the HK91, HK93, or Colt AR-15 assault rifles used by the Norco bank robbers travels at almost three thousand feet per second, close to three times the speed of sound, and can kill a man from five hundred yards away. A .308-caliber round from George Smith’s Heckler HK91 strikes a target with a staggering 2,200 pounds of energy, eight times that of a Smith & Wesson .38 Special, punching through car doors like aluminum foil.

  Both the .223 and .308 are “full metal jacket” bullets with hard copper sheathing and a soft lead interior that tumble and fragment upon impact, sending shards of metal on random, homicidal journeys throughout the human body. Armed with forty-round magazines taped together up-down-up “jungle style,” any of the Norco bank robbers were capable of firing 120 rounds in just over a minute.

  GEORGE SMITH SAT IN A POOL OF HIS OWN BLOOD IN THE BACK OF THE STOLEN pickup and watched the Security Pacific Bank recede into the distance. The Ford F-250, now being driven by Chris Harven, was a three-quarter-ton pickup with a powerful 215-horsepower V8 engine and a body clad in fabricated steel. Metal utility cabinets mounted on the sides were filled with heavy tools providing three-feet-high impenetrable cover for the full length of the bed on both sides, the perfect height and width for steadying a weapon upon while firing. The thick cast iron of the four tall cylinders of highly pressurized oxygen and acetylene gas mounted upright against the back of the cab could never be penetrated by what law enforcement was firing. Instead, they provided excellent cover for anyo
ne shooting over the top of the truck and protected the driver from gunfire from the rear. For all intents and purposes, the yellow truck that rolled northbound on Hamner with four heavily armed men on board that day was the equivalent of a military vehicle in both armor and firepower.

  George released an empty magazine out of the bottom of the Heckler and snapped in a fresh jungle clip. They crested the hill and continued north. There was no sign of any police cars, no sound except for the wail of distant sirens closing in and the V8 engine straining to keep the heavy truck moving. All they needed to do was make it one mile more up Hamner, switch to the cold cars parked at the Little League field, and get the fuck out of Norco.

  George looked up and saw Russell Harven standing behind the cab of the truck holding the “Shorty” AR. We stayed too fucking long in the bank, George yelled.

  Russ just stared at him through the hole in the ski mask, studying the man who had talked all of them into this bullshit to begin with.

  I can’t stop the bleeding, George said, motioning to his blood-stained pants.

  Russ knelt beside George and checked the wound on his inner thigh. Warm blood stained George’s pants from his crotch all the way down to his left knee and smeared the bed of the truck beneath his leg. George pulled a red bandana from his pocket and Russ helped him tie it tightly high up on his left thigh to put pressure on the wound, but it did little to stop the bleeding.

  Did you get hit? George asked him over the wind whipping through the open bed of the truck.

  I got shot in the head, Russ said flatly.

  You got fucking what?

  Russ went back to his post, setting the barrel of the “Shorty” AR-15 on the roof of the cab between two acetylene tanks and scanning the road in front of them.

  Behind the wheel, Chris shifted into fourth as the truck finally reached a higher speed. His eyes darted between the side mirrors and the road ahead of them, scanning for cops. Just one mile, he thought, a minute and a half, max, and they’d be at the cars.