Norco '80

by Peter Houlahan

  Just as Szeles expected, once on the Pomona Freeway, the truck stayed in the right lane heading for the transition ramp to I-15 North, just a quarter mile ahead. With traffic unusually light for a Friday afternoon, Szeles followed the truck on the Pomona Freeway. Driving at over fifty-five miles per hour, Szeles looked on in amazement as one of the gunmen in the back of the truck suddenly climbed on top of the metal cabinets, leaned far over the side, pulled open the passenger door, and swung inside. The truck took the sweeping on-ramp onto Interstate 15 and accelerated to sixty-five miles per hour. Moments later, the passenger door flew open again and the man climbed back over the cabinets and into the bed of the truck. Szeles was so stunned he never even radioed it in.

  Szeles would have been even more amazed to know that Manny Delgado had actually made the trip three times, once while holding a rifle. After climbing from the cab to the back of the truck, George had yelled at Delgado to go back and ask Chris where he was headed. That’s when Manny began the round-trip journey witnessed by Szeles. He knows where the fuck I’m going! Chris barked at him after Manny reappeared in the cab beside him. Manny opened the door and returned to the rear.

  George handed the Heckler back up to Manny. Without a word, Delgado began firing on the only cop car still chasing them, a brown Crown Victoria with its dashboard light flashing. George set his .308 to the side, dug deep into the pockets of his duster, and pulled out the two beer-can grenades he had carried into the bank. Ducking low behind the cabinets to shelter the wind, Smith used his Zippo to light the fuse and then tossed the hissing grenade over the tailgate before it went off in his hands. The bomb skipped over the asphalt, trailing the truck for a few seconds before losing speed. The Crown Victoria gained on the grenade and then drove directly over it.

  To Joe Szeles, it sounded like a shotgun blast going off just behind his car. Suspect throwing something out of the back of the pickup truck, he radioed. Northbound on Interstate 15 toward Interstate 10.

  Just after tossing the grenade, George Smith discovered he had a bigger problem on his hands than the brown narc car following them. This particular problem had just come in from the east to replace Baker-1 and was now eight hundred feet directly above them.

  LIEUTENANT JON GIBSON AND FLIGHT SERGEANT RON HITTLE RAN OUT TO THE Hughes 500 helicopter parked on the tarmac at the Rialto Airport and began preparing for launch. RSO dispatcher Sharon Markum had contacted San Bernardino minutes before to request a chopper to replace Baker-1, which was running low on fuel. When the order to launch San Bernardino County Sheriff’s helicopter 40-King-2 finally came, pilot Gibson and observer Hittle had their craft in the air within seconds.

  The yellow truck was just entering the northbound lanes of Interstate 15 as 40-King-2 took to the air. Hittle contacted Paul Benoit on Baker-1 over the Ontario Airport frequency and got the rundown. A bunch of bank robbers in the back of a yellow pickup truck with automatic weapons were shooting the hell out of everything in their way. Was it true they might have a CHP officer hostage? Hittle wanted to know. No, but there had been radio chatter from the units on the ground about possible hostages. Benoit had one other thing to tell 40-King: We’re not sure, but it’s possible we took fire from these guys over Mira Loma.

  Lieutenant Jon Gibson knew all about taking fire in a helicopter. Gibson had done twenty months of heavy combat flying Hueys in Vietnam. Like most experienced combat chopper pilots, his senses were supernaturally tuned to the subtle aeronautics of a bullet in flight, especially one aimed in his direction. Even with the noise of the spinning blades, Gibson could detect a bullet passing by his Huey Cobra and determine the caliber of the round from the concussion the projectile made as it flew by. If he did come under fire, he knew when he could fly through it and when it was time to get the hell out of there. Most importantly, on those occasions when he did catch a round, Jon Gibson usually knew whether he was about to go down and how much time he had before he did.

  As Gibson swept the Hughes 500 over the sprawling grounds of the Kaiser Steel plant, spotter Ron Hittle got his first visual on Baker-1. The Riverside PD chopper acknowledged its San Bernardino counterpart and did a low run over the yellow truck to identify it before peeling off to return to base for fuel. Gibson moved in at an altitude of eight hundred feet and engaged the suspect vehicle by shadowing it directly overhead. Hittle confirmed three men in the bed of the truck armed with long guns, possibly AR-15s. That was when Lieutenant Gibson heard that familiar noise.

  The first four were in rapid succession. A thick whooshing sound as they flew by close to the cockpit. He felt the concussions deep in his chest. This was not .223 fire. It felt bigger, more guttural. Like a .308, maybe.

  We’re taking fire, Gibson said calmly, pulling sharply to the right in an evasive move. There was a fifth whoosh and then a loud crack, as if someone had hit the bottom of the chopper with a baseball bat. The cockpit began to fill with blue smoke. Gibson recognized it by the smell. Electrical. Check the radios and panel, he said.

  Hittle began to comb over the controls while Gibson pulled the craft away from the freeway and back over the empty Kaiser plant, testing its airworthiness and responsiveness. It seemed to be holding up okay for now, but Gibson knew things in a wounded airship could change in an instant. As the smoke began to clear, he checked his fuel and oil gauges for signs of leaks.

  We lost our Riverside radio, Hittle reported. Also, a hole through the bubble, he said, pointing to the plexiglass encasing the front of the craft. Hittle looked around some more and spotted another hole through the belly of the airframe directly between his knees. A .308 round from George Smith’s Heckler had passed through the titanium alloy landing skid below the cockpit and fragmented into three parts that penetrated the airframe, ripping apart electrical panels and wiring. We got one down here, he said, relieved he had not just had his dick shot off.

  I knew we should have put a chicken plate on this thing, Gibson said, referring to the protective metal plating that can be fitted onto the underbelly of the Hughes 500. He angled the helicopter back toward the freeway but kept his altitude up. Get King-1 in the air. We should be able to stay engaged until they get here.

  Hittle got on the working radio and reported in to the Ontario com center. Ontario copied Hittle’s request for King-1. There was a long pause. 40-King-2, 10-9 your transmission. Did you say your craft has been hit by gunfire?

  That’s an affirmative.

  John Plasencia, the spotter on 40-King-1, came on the radio. They were already in the air, coming up on King-2 from the south. Be careful, Hittle warned their replacement. These people will shoot at you.

  Two minutes later, San Bernardino County Sheriff’s helicopter 40-King-1, with Ed Mabry piloting, descended and fell in behind 40-King-2. Jon Gibson pointed his wounded craft northeast toward Rialto Airport. It would have been closer to land at Ontario Airport, but Gibson and Hittle had just heard another transmission from the Ontario com center. The largest passenger airport in the Inland Empire was shutting down their airspace and diverting all air traffic to Orange County. They did not want any commercial jetliners getting shot out of the sky by a bunch of crazy bank robbers from Norco.

  SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPUTY D. J. McCARTY STOOD IN FRONT of his locker in the Fontana substation dressing room, slowly unbuttoning his uniform shirt, one ear on the scanner feed coming over the squawk box mounted on the wall. It was just after 4:00 p.m. and McCarty was coming off the two-shift, changing back into street clothes before heading out. From the radio traffic, it sounded like there was some serious shit going down just over the county line in Riverside.

  McCarty took his cowboy boots out of his locker and thought about what he might do that night. Maybe he’d go down to the local bar for a few pops with his old high school buddies, maybe land in bed with a new girl or one of his regulars. Maybe he’d just go home and watch some TV. Any was just as easy as the other for a handsome twenty-six-year-old with a quick wit and magnetic personality.

>   One of the other men coming off shift came into the room. Riverside’s getting their ass kicked. McCarty hadn’t heard a thing about it while in the field; he did not have a scanner in his unit. It had never made any sense to him that San Bernardino and Riverside could not communicate with each other, considering how often cases, criminals, and pursuits crossed county lines.

  D.J. took off his uniform shirt to reveal an undershirt bearing the Zig-Zag Man, a bearded seagoing chap smoking what appeared to be a marijuana cigarette. Zig-Zag was an old brand of cigarette rolling papers but had become a favorite among joint-twisting stoners everywhere.

  Nice shirt, the sergeant said sarcastically.

  D.J. shrugged. It had been gently suggested that he stick to regulation clothing, but, you know . . . whatever. He really couldn’t give a fuck. Even though he had only been on the force a little over a year, D.J. remained an irreverent Inland Empire shitkicker. He was instantly popular on the force, a local boy with a sweeping Glen Campbell hairstyle who knew the flatlands and mountainsides of San Bernardino County well. He was also an adrenaline junkie, young and inexperienced enough to be excited that the pursuit going on in Riverside might be coming their way.

  San Bernardino dispatch came over the radio with reference to a Riverside pursuit with armed and dangerous suspects northbound on Interstate 15. Holy shit, McCarty thought. He threw a bright red windbreaker over the Zig-Zag shirt. A few seconds later, D.J. heard the radio transmission from deputy Jim McPheron that sent him running out of the locker room in search of the only assault rifle in the entire department.

  SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPUTY JAMES MCPHERON WAS JUST starting his 4:00 p.m. shift as D. J. McCarty was getting off his. The two men were very different. At thirty-seven, McPheron, “Mac” to the guys on the force, was a dozen years older than McCarty with seven years’experience working the streets of San Bernardino County. Named for two military generals—James Doolittle and Douglas MacArthur—James Douglas McPheron was the son of a preacher. Tall and soft-spoken, McPheron always knew he wanted to be a cop, but he sure took a long time getting there. He was almost thirty years old when he quit his job as a grocery clerk and signed on with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. McPheron had married his wife, Patricia, two years before and they were on their way to building a family that would include two children. While tough, McPheron’s nature tended toward the quiet and gentle as compared to the brash and colorful McCarty.

  Mac was an old-school cop who always referred to himself as a “peace officer,” but the half dozen years of law enforcement were beginning to take a toll. He was starting to feel as though maybe he had seen too much. In 1975, McPheron had watched one of his closest friends on the force, a huge, likable deputy named Frank Pribble, die on the emergency room table after a shooting. And there was the time a four-year-old girl died in McPheron’s arms after her drunken father tried to race a train through a crossing at eighty miles per hour. Or the man Mac had shot in the head after a pursuit when the suspect tried to back over him in a stolen car. It was all starting to get to him, but he was a cop and he didn’t want to do anything else.

  McCarty and McPheron were not especially close, but they bullshitted together in the locker room and chatted when they ran into each other in the field. They patrolled the same terrain, frequently backing each other up on tough calls. Both liked working out of the Fontana substation for the same reason: action. Even by Inland Empire standards, Fontana, including Lytle Creek, was extremely rough turf.

  McPheron thought the pursuit going on in Riverside might be headed into San Bernardino County via Interstate 15. He was halfway to the freeway when he heard the report from 40-King-2 that they had been grounded by gunfire and heavier weapons would be needed.

  McPheron wheeled the Ford Fairlane patrol unit into a sweeping U-turn across the four lanes of Foothill Boulevard and grabbed the mic of his radio. I’m headed back to Fontana station. Somebody get the AR.

  The San Bernardino Sheriff’s Office, or SBSO as it was referred to, had not approved automatic weapons for use in the field and had no such high-powered rifles, at least not officially. But Fontana did not always play by the rules. Several months before, deputies had seized a fully automatic Colt M16 rifle stolen from the U.S. military and ditched out a car window by a drug dealer during a high-speed chase. Other than some unsightly road rash, the thing worked just fine. After the military said they didn’t want the damn thing back, the .223-caliber rifle hung around in the evidence locker along with the four twenty-round magazines.

  Pulling his duty boots back on, McCarty heard McPheron’s request for the AR, a generic reference to the class of weapon that included the M16. McCarty knew the weapon was currently residing in the trunk of a shift sergeant’s vehicle parked outside in the vehicle lot. As a nonregulation weapon, no one in the department had been trained on the M16, but there were plenty of Vietnam vets on the force who knew how to fire one. D. J. McCarty was not one of them. He had only a passing familiarity with other rifles in the AR class. How different could this one be?

  D.J. found Sergeant Mendoza in a hallway and they ran out to the vehicle yard. Mendoza popped the trunk and handed McCarty the weapon. D.J. dug around in the trunk until he found the four magazines taped together in pairs, jungle-style. He grabbed the magazines just as McPheron came racing into the vehicle lot, the passenger door of the Fairlane flying open like something out of a TV cop show. D.J. jumped in the passenger seat.

  Let dispatch know we have the AR, said McPheron, tires screaming as they tore out of the lot. They need to tell everyone to get the hell out of our way.

  McCarty steadied the unloaded M16 between his knees and relayed the request over the mic while McPheron sent the Fairlane racing down Alder Avenue. At Foothill Boulevard, they blew through the only traffic light between the station and the Sierra off-ramp of I-15, where they thought they might be able to intercept the pursuit. McPheron quickly had the Ford Fairlane reaching an exceedingly high rate of speed as they headed toward the mountains, Taco Bells, 7-Elevens, and IHOPs blurring past. McCarty sat pinned in his seat, wondering which he should be more worried about: a band of heavily armed bank robbers or Jim McPheron’s driving.

  OF ALL THE DEPUTIES WHO ENGAGED THE NORCO BANK ROBBERS IN RIVERSIDE County, the only two to continue into San Bernardino County were Rolf Parkes and Fred Chisholm, both now in Chisholm’s unit. The reason they had not ended up at the Can Do Market like the others was because Fred Chisholm inadvertently missed a turn and ended up at the major intersection of Bellegrave and Van Buren Boulevard. As they entered the intersection, Baker-1 radioed another change in direction, but spotter Paul Benoit was not familiar with the neighborhood and called out an incorrect street name. Confused, Chisholm began circling the intersection while Parkes tried to figure out what direction the pursuit had really gone. Go north on Van Buren. Wait, back on Bellegrave. Shit, I think he means southbound. Hold on. Goddamn it! They circled the wide intersection three, four times with lights and sirens, to the stunned amazement of their fellow motorists. After the fifth time around, Parkes yelled, Stop! Chisholm hammered on the brakes and they came to a dead stop in the middle of the intersection. Fuck the radio transmissions. Parkes stuck his head out the window and got a visual on Baker-1’s location in the sky and instructed Chisholm to go northbound on Van Buren.

  Van Buren took the two deputies directly to the Pomona Freeway on-ramp at Mission and onto Interstate 15 a half mile behind Joe Szeles and the yellow truck, but gaining fast. Without any visual on the suspects, Fred Chisholm was growing jumpy behind the wheel. Parkes understood. Chisholm, only a few months on the force, had never been fired on. The guy had every right to be frightened; Parkes sure as hell was.

  “Is that them?” Chisholm kept repeating. “What about right there, is that them?”

  “No, it’s not them!” Parkes snapped after already answering the question at least five times. A semitruck in front of them changed lanes, revealing the yellow
truck a quarter mile ahead. Immediately, rounds began striking the pavement around them, bullet fragments and asphalt hitting their vehicle. “That’s them!” Parkes said.

  “Get me my helmet, Rolf. I need my helmet.”

  “It won’t help you,” Rolf told him, trying to keep his eye on the truck.

  “I need my helmet,” Chisholm insisted.

  “Your helmet’s not going to help you, Fred,” Parkes told him again. More rounds struck the pavement around them. “All right!” Parkes said, fishing around on the floorboard among all the equipment that had been tossed around during the pursuit. He handed him the helmet, but Chisholm never put it on.

  Gunfire was not the only thing Chisholm and Parkes were contending with on the Devore Freeway stretch of Interstate 15. All around them, civilian cars were jamming on their brakes, swerving wildly, and bailing off the freeway. Harold Phibbs was driving with his girlfriend in his wine-red 1977 Dodge van when a yellow utility truck began to pass them in the number 2 lane. As it slowly edged past, Phibbs caught sight of two men in black ski masks standing in the bed of the truck, each holding what looked like military rifles. Phibbs’s girlfriend, Elizabeth Campbell, gasped at the sight of them. As the truck continued to overtake them, one of the men looked down at Phibbs, making eye contact. The man lowered the rifle, firing a round into the front of the van just below the windshield. Steam immediately hissed from the radiator. Phibbs jammed on the brakes and pulled into the breakdown lane.

  A few hundred yards behind Phibbs, Parkes and Chisholm began taking fire again. “Fall back behind that semi so they can’t see us,” Parkes instructed. Chisholm took his foot off the accelerator and then drifted behind the cover of a big tractor trailer. It didn’t work. The men in the truck simply turned their fire on the semi. The truck took two rounds into its engine compartment, slowed sharply, and then veered onto the median, exposing Parkes and Chisholm yet again. Another bullet struck their unit. Parkes was stunned; the yellow truck was at least a half mile ahead of them. He leaned over and turned off the switch to their light bar, realizing that’s what was drawing the fire.