Norco '80

by Peter Houlahan

  A pew near the front was reserved for the wounded. Glyn Bolasky came, his arm in a sling. Herman Brown still walked with a noticeable limp. Ken McDaniels filed into the pew beside them, hairlike strands of copper shards still inhabiting his shoulder. Darrell Reed was brought in by ambulance and lay on a gurney in the center aisle, half of a round from a .308 still imbedded in his elevated left leg, an IV dripping antibiotics into his arm. Rolf Parkes stood beside him. A. J. Reynard had had surgery on his left elbow the night before and despite protests was not allowed to attend due to the possibility of infection. D. J. McCarty, his elbow wrapped in gauze, drove to the funeral with his roommate and partner Mike Lenihan. Both had witnessed Jim Evans die. They stayed with the other San Bernardino Sheriff’s deputies and brass in the pews farther back.

  Bill Crowe led the contingent of Riverside County Highway Patrol officers into the church, not just because of his role in Norco, but because of his close friendship with Evans. Crowe had expected to enter the church along with Doug Earnest, but at that moment his partner and surrogate big brother sat alone in a darkened bedroom staring into the carpet. The big patrolman had put on his dress uniform and polished up his wingtips, but when the time came to leave, he simply could not face it. It was not just the immeasurable sadness of losing Evans, whom Earnest had also known well. Earnest could not forgive himself for that moment when he thought he had led Crowe to his death at the intersection of Bellegrave and Dodd.

  Dave Madden and Chuck Hille were among those who stood honor guard beside Jim’s casket. Don Bender, the narcotics detective who had manned the CLEMARS radio up Lytle Creek, helped serve Communion. Seated beside Mary in the first pew was Bob Boytor, a friend and fellow deputy who had stood for Jim at their wedding in Las Vegas. Boytor was so stricken with grief that he could not bring himself to speak at the service. Evans’s friend and first commanding officer at the RSO, lieutenant Bernard Bueche, gave the eulogy instead.

  Evans lay in an open casket, dressed in his RSO uniform, his Stetson beside him and a photo of Jim Jr. placed in his folded hands. He still looked as handsome as ever, Mary thought, even with the piece of gauze covering the bullet hole in his right eye. At the close of the service, Mary kissed her husband’s face, laid a single red rose in the coffin beside him, and was led from the church by Boytor as a recording of Pavarotti singing “Ave Maria” filled the cathedral.

  The funeral cortege from St. Catherine’s to the cemetery stretched for miles, led by 225 police motorcycles and cruisers, their light bars whirling, sirens off. Buses carrying 250 more Riverside deputies followed. As their limousine reached the intersection of Washington and Van Buren, Jim’s father motioned silently to an open field where a dozen police and military helicopters had set down, the crews standing beside their craft saluting the passing hearse. Entering the cemetery grounds several minutes later, they heard the whining of aircraft engines high above and a dozen orange parachutes blossomed open against the gray sky, the paratroopers drifting just feet over the procession of vehicles to land over the fence on the grounds of March Air Reserve Base.

  Two state troopers knelt before Mary to offer her the American and California state flags that had flown at half-staff over the capitol building in Sacramento a few days before. There was a sharp crack of gunfire as seven National Guardsmen raised M16 rifles with fixed bayonets toward the sky and fired the first of three salvos. Alone on a hillock overlooking the service, a trumpeter from the Los Angeles Police Department sounded taps. Mary watched the crowd breaking up as the ceremony ended. Well, she thought, things are about to get very lonely.

  DEPUTY ANDY DELGADO STOOD AT THE BOOKING DESK FILLING OUT PAPERWORK to process the prisoner standing handcuffed beside him. He glanced up at the two segregation cells located along the wall on the other side of the long, high counter. From that angle, Andy could see only a small slice of space behind the bars of the cells. He handed the paper and the prisoner over to the booking sergeant. Andy turned toward the elevator that would take him back down to his patrol car, but then paused and looked back at the two segregation cells. Inside one of them, a shadow moved across the wall and a tall man with black hair appeared and then receded again. Andy knew he should leave. There was nothing to find there, nothing to be learned from the men inside those cages. But the need to understand overcame him again.

  Andy was not exactly sure what was drawing him to the segregation cages. He did not hate them. He was not there to taunt or tease or seek any kind of revenge. He had even considered leaving them a pack of Marlboros, the way a soldier offers a smoke to a prisoner of war. Not a peace offering, just a humanitarian gesture along with a subtle reminder of who the real losers had been that weekend. Mostly, Andy felt he needed to see who these people really were. What he had fought against in front of the bank was just a bunch of military ponchos and black ski masks—formless, faceless, and indistinguishable from each other. But inside those segregation cells were the human beings behind it all, real flesh and blood with blue and black eyes that stared back from their steel and concrete cave. Maybe if he could just get a good look at these guys, it would help him understand what the hell had happened to his life.

  Andy approached the segregation cells and saw Chris Harven pacing the tiny room. Chris stopped and stared directly back at Delgado. When Andy did not move, Harven walked up to cell door and curled his fingers around the bars. One of the officers at the booking desk saw the two mad-dogging each other and gave Andy a little head nod to move on.

  IT ALL MIGHT HAVE WORKED OUT IF ANDY HAD JUST TAKEN A FEW DAYS OFF after Norco, but he was back on the streets the next day. If you didn’t take any lead, you didn’t take any time. That was pretty much the rule. Besides, all Andy wanted to do was resume the life he had before the 211 tone dropped. Along with his promotion to detective had been the promise of a first assignment as an instructor at the Sheriff’s Academy. Andy loved his training assignments in the Marine Corps, and it would give him a couple years away from street patrol, some time to lick his wounds before he was back fighting the bad guys.

  If he had taken a few days off, he would have missed the flurry of second-guessing, exaggeration, and outright bullshit that started before Jim Evans’s body had even been brought down off the mountain. Deputies who had never seen the yellow truck were suddenly telling tales of bullets cracking the sky above their patrol cars and near-death encounters. Others recklessly offered up opinions on what they would have done differently if it had been them at the bank, or at the intersection of Fourth and Hamner, or chasing armed suspects up a narrow mountain road. Why the fuck didn’t Bolasky wait for backup? Why didn’t CHP shut down I-15 or San Bernardino throw up a roadblock on Sierra? What the hell was Evans doing charging up a fire road completely outgunned? Why had Andy reported two hostages in the truck? I’d have iced those fuckers in Mira Loma if I’d known there were no hostages.

  It wasn’t true. No one had iced those fuckers in Mira Loma, San Bernardino, or anywhere else because no one had been in a position to take a shot from the time Andy fired his last slug at Fourth and Hamner to when Jim Evans emptied his .38 at the washout on Baldy Notch Road. “At that point, those guys were trying to kill anyone they saw,” said one of the deputies in the pursuit. “If we’d had a shot, we would have taken it.” Andy never acknowledged the second-guessing on the subject, but others knew some of it must have gotten back to him. “I’m sure he heard about it,” said dispatcher Gary Keeter, who had no such criticism of Andy. “He had to know.”

  There were other developments that were far more concerning to Andy than all the big talk and second-guessing. On that first day back after the shootout, detective Joe Szeles was acting as shift supervisor and assigned Delgado to cover Rubidoux. “Hey, I’m the traffic car in Norco today,” Andy told him. “The department doesn’t want you guys in Norco for now,” Szeles said. A few days later, there was another order from the department: They were no longer assigning Andy to the academy as a trainer. He was going straight into robbery
detail, which meant right back on the streets. “The department wants you Norco guys close by, so we can keep an eye on you.” Andy was bitterly disappointed, but he also saw a darker implication in the order. “So what are we now, damaged goods?”

  WHETHER OR NOT THEY HAD “DAMAGED GOODS” ON THEIR HANDS WAS SOMETHING the RSO was only just beginning to understand in 1980. Along with no SWAT team, no helicopter, no bomb squad, no interagency communication system, and no high-powered weapons, the Riverside Sheriff’s Department had no specific program for treating officers involved in traumatic events. If an officer felt he needed psychological counseling, the department’s health insurance would cover it, but it had no set policy or contract with any trained psychiatric professionals. In this regard, the RSO was only slightly behind in a profession that had yet to address a condition known about for decades. Earlier that same year, the condition made its first appearance in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders under a new name: posttraumatic stress disorder.

  Whether referred to as “soldier’s heart,” “combat fatigue,” “shell shock,” or “combat stress reaction,” PTSD was known as far back as ancient times. After a particularly brutal and prolonged campaign, Alexander the Great’s men were said to have mutinied after suffering “battle fatigue.” Greek historian Herodotus wrote of an Athenian spearman named Epizelus who, at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE, went blind after the soldier beside him was brutally killed, although the blinded soldier himself “was wounded in no part of his body.” But it was not until the 1980 publication of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-III, that the psychiatric community clearly acknowledged causal events beyond just military combat.

  Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (309.89)

  Essential Feature. Characteristic symptoms following a psychological distressing event that is outside the range of usual human experience. The original stressor is usually experienced with intense fear, terror, and/or helplessness.

  It was also noted that “The disorder is apparently more severe and longer lasting when the stressor is of human design,” as had been the case with Norco. The symptoms had not changed much from the older editions of the DSM: anxiety, depression, feelings of detachment, isolation, recurrent dreams or recollections of the events. More acute symptoms included flashbacks, irritability, outbursts of anger, hypervigilance, and exaggerated startle response. The number and severity of the symptoms could vary from person to person, but many were already beginning to show up in the Norco deputies. Some recognized what was happening to them. Others, like Andy Delgado, did not.

  IF THE RSO WAS BEHIND THE TIMES IN ADDRESSING PTSD IN ITS DEPUTIES, assistant sheriff Floyd Tidwell had made sure that the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Office was not. Even before Norco, Tidwell realized involvement in shootings and exposure to violence was exacting a physical and emotional toll on personnel, resulting in increases in heart attacks, domestic violence, suicides, permanent disability, and early retirements. Tidwell’s son had been involved in a shooting and he had seen close up the impact it had. He wrangled up $27,000 from the department budget to begin an evaluation and a counseling program. Psychiatrist Alice Pitman, an expert in the field of PTSD, was put on retainer. The department was now telling officers involved in violent situations that they were expected to participate in the program. “We’ve made it almost a mandatory thing,” Tidwell said.

  The need for compulsory participation was obvious. Without it, the deputies would not accept the help. “If you do, they’re going to think you’re crazy and you’ll never get anywhere in this department,” was the general feeling, according to deputy Jim McPheron. D. J. McCarty had a more succinct way of explaining the real reason most refused to even acknowledge they were having a problem to begin with. “Nobody wants to be seen as fucking weak.” “Weak” if you had a problem, “crazy” the minute you stepped into a psychiatrist’s office. Seek counseling in Riverside, RSO deputy Dave Madden said, and you were likely “to end up on the ‘Rubber Gun Squad,’” the euphemism for a desk assignment given to cops deemed too psychologically unstable to carry a weapon.

  Tidwell was having none of this macho bullshit. Having brought these horses to water, he was going to make damn sure they drank. The message for his deputies involved in gunfire on May 9, 1980, was simple: You’re going. When psychiatrist Alice Pitman suggested a group session, Tidwell extended an invitation to all the agencies involved in the Norco incident. Most sent at least some of their men.

  The session took place at the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Training Academy two weeks after Norco. The deputies, city cops, and CHP officers filed in and milled about talking with others and exchanging stories. Andy Delgado avoided the group and took a seat ahead of the others. Pitman told the participants they should say whatever they wanted about the experience, how it made them feel, and, if they felt comfortable enough, any issues they might be having in its aftermath.

  As they went around the room, some of the men lowered their heads and spoke only briefly about their experience. For others, it just poured out. Rolf Parkes broke down in tears remembering how his wife had been informed that he had been “shot in the head” and was then unable to locate him for hours. D. J. McCarty was reserved in his comments. He was just sorry he could not have done more to save Evans. McCarty had something else he wanted to make very clear: “The only hero on the mountain that day was Jim Evans.”

  When it came to Andy’s turn, he spoke in halting, measured tones. “I’m just sad that all this happened,” he said, surprised at the tears suddenly welling up in his eyes. Pitman asked how he had been feeling since the incident. He paused for a long time, regaining his emotions and considering his words. “I’m sick of the shit,” he said, unable to hold back his frustration, anger, and disillusionment with some of his fellow deputies. “I’m sick of being let down, people not backing me up when they should. I’m supposed to be able to depend on people in this department . . .” His voice trailed off. He might as well have been talking about all the people in his childhood who had let him down, just as he felt Bolasky and Hille had abandoned him in Norco. “I’m just sick of it all,” he said, standing up from his chair. “I’m sick of the fraud.” With that, he walked out of the session.

  FOR GLYN BOLASKY, THE NIGHTMARES BEGAN JUST TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AFTER the shooting. Lying beside his wife after all the local stations had gone to test patterns, he finally drifted off into a fitful sleep, his body awash in painkillers. In the dream, men were shooting at him, but he became paralyzed, unable to escape or fight back. He woke up with a start and then drifted off again. In the next dream blood was squirting in his face like a garden hose, the warm sensation of liquid so real it jolted him awake. It took even longer to get back to sleep this time, but once he did, it just started up again, the same goddamn dreams over and over. He thought that once he was off the painkillers, the nightmares would subside. They did not.

  After Jim Evans’s funeral, questions and doubts began to creep into Bolasky’s consciousness. How was it possible that he was first on scene, had his car hit with more than forty rounds, and was wounded in five places, yet he survived while the deputy patrolling the farthest away from the robbery got killed? What if he had just stayed down and let the bank robbers drive off in the getaway van? Or what if he had been able to kill them all? Bolasky could not help thinking that if he had done either one, Jim Evans would still be alive.

  Bolasky also had to come to terms with shooting a seventeen-year-old high school kid in the back of the head. No one was questioning Bolasky over the death of Billy Delgado except for Bolasky himself. Eventually Bolasky would come to a fragile understanding over the killing of Delgado, although he still found it too painful to say the boy’s name. “That person didn’t really die at my hand,” he told Press-Enterprise reporter James Richardson. “I pointed the shotgun. Where the pellets went from there, I honestly believe God took it from there.�
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  After two weeks off for his injuries, Bolasky returned to desk duty only to find himself overwhelmed being back in uniform. Just three days later, he walked into his supervisor’s office and said it was too soon, he needed more time to straighten himself out. They gave him two more weeks and told him to see Alice Pitman. He went once. After the two weeks off, he still could not face it, so he used vacation time for an additional two weeks and went to Hawaii with his wife. There, he sat on the white sand in the shadow of palm trees waving in the tropical breeze, about as far away as a man could get from the dirt fields and traffic-choked intersections of Norco. It did no good. He continued to think about Evans and Billy Delgado and dream about warm blood squirting into his face. Bolasky also began to think about something else: How the hell could the department have let this happen to me?

  GLYN BOLASKY WAS NOT THE ONLY RIVERSIDE DEPUTY QUESTIONING WHY the department had left them so ill prepared to take on a gang of heavily armed bank robbers intent on fighting to the death. What had started as grumbling escalated into widespread finger-pointing and accusations by rank-and-file deputies against their own department and sheriff Ben Clark.

  In some ways, Ben Clark was an easy target for the fiasco of May 9. Although he began his career on the streets, Clark had risen to the top of the department through the administrative ranks. He was plainspoken and direct, his actions led by cold logic rather than momentary passions. Clark was widely acknowledged as the man responsible for the modernization of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department from a freewheeling organization severely short on procedures and training into a disciplined, well-organized law enforcement agency. Clark later brought his success to the state level and served as chairman of the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training. By 1980, he was in his seventeenth year as the Riverside County sheriff, having been elected to the post four times. Much of Clark’s appeal among voters was his budget efficiency and commitment to progressive policing and community relations.