In the early days of training, the two trainees quickly bonded over insider beach knowledge. Shockley had grown up in Santa Monica and Venice, and he and Steve would talk about lifeguard stations 25 and 6, known for being a certain kind of surf break and hangout. But beyond that, there wasn’t much small talk with Steve. He was a serious student, a fastidious one, and never got into trouble. For instance, Shockley recalled, unlike some of the other guys, he never had to write a five-page paper about having a thread hanging from his clothes. In addition, he was quick to spot and warn his classmates about slacker behavior that could get them into trouble. “He was the first to say, ‘Your briefcase isn’t locked.’” Yet his concern went beyond rules and regulations. “When he said, ‘How are you?’” Shockley recalled, “he meant it.”
When Steve graduated from the academy, his first assignment was the same one given to all new members of the LASD: working in detention as guards. The idea is that everyone has to deal face-to-face with men behind bars, rather than simply arresting people, testifying at trials, and then never seeing them again. The assignment took Steve from the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic (or Wayside) to Mira Loma in Lancaster, the largest penitentiary in the county and one that housed a number of men who were in the United States illegally. This was probably where Steve learned firsthand about problems that plagued Hispanics. Later, as he settled into his new beat in Lake Los Angeles, he would take up the cause of Hispanic locals in a battle that reached a fever pitch shortly before he was killed, with Sorensen filing a defamation lawsuit against several members of the town establishment and announcing that he feared for his life.
After putting in his time at county jails, Steve followed the trail of the beginning deputy, assigned to ride-alongs at the Temple and Santa Clarita stations, which took him into a gritty and racially mixed part of Los Angeles and a mostly white suburban area with more wide-open space. At that point it was on to patrol training in the Altadena station. Next to Pasadena and abutting the San Gabriel Mountains, which separated LA proper from the Antelope Valley to the north, Altadena is a beautiful enclave known for its tree-lined streets and Craftsman cottages, including the home of Zane Grey, now a local landmark where the noted writer penned some of his best works, stories that continue to bring young boys to the west, just like L’Amour’s. The town is residential and equestrian-zoned, but under the iridescent jacaranda blooms and on certain thoroughfares there is also a notable gang presence—and the Altadena station had more action than, say, Malibu or Topanga Canyon.
Sergeant Rob Hahnlein, his partner during that period, recalled Steve as a cop who was driven and conscientious, generally wearing a tight uniform—a preference that might have made him look more muscular than he already was and given him an edge on the streets. He was often the first to volunteer for extra work and would use his old Toyota pickup when he was undercover. His main worry was that someone would steal it. That didn’t happen, but there were plenty of drug busts on this busy beat, primarily on the notorious Squiggly Lane—a haven for local dealers. Once, Hahnlein recalls, at the corner of Glenrose and Harriet, there was a particularly gnarly episode in which he, Sorensen, and several others went to break up a drug sale. As Steve arrested a suspect, the guy bit him on the bicep. Sorensen refused medical treatment, and the man was charged with aggravated assault. “On a scale of one to ten,” Hahnlein says, “everything was a ten for Steve. There were times I would tell him to relax, but it was always go go go. He was a superman who did not want help.”
In 1999, word came that the Lancaster station in the Antelope Valley was looking to fill a new and first-of-its-kind resident deputy position. The beat was Lake Los Angeles. Already living in the area, Steve applied, was interviewed, and got the job. In March 2000, he began his patrol, immersing himself in the community, introducing himself to local business owners, pastors, town council members, and other residents, getting to know a broad range of citizens. By all accounts, he liked the solitude of the desert and was thriving on his new assignment. He and his wife adopted a baby, and the ex-surfer from Manhattan Beach sank roots deep in the Mojave, becoming the ultimate citizen, buying groceries for poor people, doing yard work for seniors whose limbs no longer permitted it, bathing the infirm when they went off their meds and no caretaker was in sight, investigating Section 8 real estate scams, brokering deals between minor scofflaws and offended parties when others might have hauled the small-time crooks off to jail. Many locals considered Sorensen a godsend, and some in the community literally thought he had been sent by God to carry the cross of goodness into a parched desert wilderness of evil. Among those who held that view were two residents, Connie Mavrolas, an Antelope Valley native and reporter at the Lake Los Angeles News, and John Wodetzki, a pastor at the Twin Lakes Community Church. Sorensen had met them shortly after he began to patrol his patch of the Mojave, and together they soon formed a tight trio of community crusaders who wanted more than anything to clean up the Antelope Valley, purging it of tweakers, bikers, Section 8 troublemakers, and squatters, and also to do right by the valley’s often ignored Hispanic population, including those in the country legally and illegally.
Although not welcome by many in the town’s establishment, at the time of Deputy Sorensen’s murder, Hispanics comprised 65 percent of the population in Lake Los Angeles and owned a portion of its small businesses. Not all of the Hispanics were in the country legally, although some had been in the Antelope Valley for years, working in the fruit, vegetable, or alfalfa fields, or local restaurants and other establishments. Steve’s tenure in Lake Los Angeles had begun before 9/11, when laws regarding immigration and migrants were not as stringent as they are now, and the issue of who has a right to live and work here and who does not was not as heated. Nevertheless, in California, which has a large Hispanic population scheduled to overtake the white majority by the year 2025, the issue, if not front and center, is generally just below the surface. In the Antelope Valley, with its cities partly the result of white flight from LA proper, some in various communities had no desire to share a zip code with Hispanics, documented or otherwise, while others were simply adamant about following the rules and acquiring citizenship through normal channels, as their forebears had done decades earlier.
In the years before 9/11, Sheriff Baca, an iconoclastic guy among heads of law enforcement agencies and part Hispanic himself, did not want his department to operate as an arm of ICE, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, which was later subsumed by the Department of Homeland Security. In other words, it was not the mission of the LASD to track down, arrest, and deport undocumented workers. That didn’t mean that immigration laws weren’t enforced, but LASD’s attitude was different from, say, LAPD’s, which was operating under the more stringent Special Order 40, which meant that if a Hispanic-seeming person were arrested, he or she could be asked to prove citizenship.
While Steve was a stickler for rules, he knew that often enough rules were outdated or didn’t make sense in some way, or were arbitrarily followed and, when they were, would cause undue problems for people who were holding on but just barely. In Lake Los Angeles, Steve had gotten to know various Hispanics on his beat, and received a quick course on their history in the region, meeting a farmworker who was a colleague of the late César Chávez, and friends of this man who themselves had eked out a living in the fields and later at their own small establishments—feed and dry goods stores—in the high desert. One of them, José Gomez, owned a store in Lake Los Angeles called The Hitching Post. It had been in business for over a decade, and many ranchers and equestrians depended on it for supplies. The store was also a way station for residents en route to other errands; often they stopped in just to catch up on local goings-on and chat with José and his wife, Nellie, who welcomed strangers and friends into their store as if all were members of their family. The pair could make small talk with anyone, even though they didn’t speak much English. José was quite the vaquero and loved most of all to talk about
horses. He had one, and he and Steve instantly hit it off, mostly because of José’s animal, who had been trained with Spanish commands. The deputy didn’t speak much Spanish but began to pick it up as he watched José interact with his horse, and soon Steve took to the horse, one more animal he had a kinship with, communicating easily with the big bay and the bay responding. One day José offered Steve his beloved steed. Steve was embarrassed by the generous and unexpected offer, and refused it. But José persisted. Why did he live in the desert if he didn’t want a horse? José asked. After a while, the deputy relented and one day José brought the horse over and from then on it was Steve’s and he called it Cinnamon. José was a frequent visitor, teaching Steve to ride, often arriving on his own horse, and sometimes the two of them would head out into the desert for an afternoon jaunt, but often enough Steve would head out on his own.
Some long-time white locals were surprised that the blonde, blue-eyed surfer would take up the Hispanic cause. But Hispanics got little respect in town and Steve took it personally. As much as he couldn’t stand to be teased or take a joke during the old days on the beach, he didn’t like it when people ragged on those who couldn’t defend themselves—or risked it all when they did. With his heightened sense of right and wrong, and propensity to take offense when either he or his friends were disrespected, the path became clear as he found out about something that was going on in Lake Los Angeles: an attempt to shut down some Hispanic-owned businesses because of their failure to comply with an ancient county code having to do with outdoor lighting after dark. It wasn’t that they were being targeted for being Hispanic, but they happened to own the establishments that were in violation, and some in Lake Los Angeles were happy to see them go. But in a town where people still rode their horses to the store, hitching them up while they shopped for supplies and groceries, the attempt to suddenly enforce the ordinance made little sense. “Why has Regional Planning suddenly decided to attack the honest business owners of Lake Los Angeles?” José Gomez wrote in a public letter with the help of a more accomplished English speaker. “Perhaps I should open a liquor store. The County seems more than eager to grant operating permits for these types of businesses. I say this because there are three locations in town where you can buy hard liquor, beer and wine. However, if the County has its way, you will not be able to buy feed for your animals or get your car fixed. Please stop by the Hitching Post and sign your name to the petition I am circulating concerning this issue.”
At the time Steve became resident deputy, there were two newspapers in town—About Town and the Lake Los Angeles News. About Town was the predominant periodical, and, recalls Connie, “the editor had a weird hold on the town.” That was about to change, as Steve came to the defense of José and other business owners who had been cited, entering a cauldron of small-town politics and turf battles, with the two rival newspapers fighting over who would get the first exclusive interview with the new resident deputy and, in doing so, appear to have him in their corner. Connie got the scoop and it was the beginning of an unlikely alliance, with Steve enlisting Connie’s aid in a campaign to restructure the way business was done in Lake Los Angeles.
Perhaps it was to be expected that Connie Mavrolas would become involved in such a battle. The daughter of migrant farmworkers in the region’s onion fields—the very fields Joseph Wambaugh memorialized in the title of his classic book about the murder of two cops in 1985—Mavrolas had grown up in a two-bedroom house in Palmdale, sharing one of the bedrooms with her five siblings as her parents slept on the other side of a thin wall. The house was on Avenue M between Thirtieth and Fortieth Street East near the Rockwell testing grounds. For shade in the relentless summer sun, the family planted an oak tree; it’s still there today, along with the house, as well as an old petroleum tank next to the living room window. To Connie’s parents, the house was a palace. They had grown up in a small pueblo in Chihuahua, Mexico. Her father came to the Antelope Valley when he was fourteen, working as a ranch hand and also in the alfalfa fields, sending the money back to his family. Several years later, he went back to Mexico, married, and returned to the valley with his bride. They had children and continued toiling in the onion fields—for twenty-five years, in fact. During the 1960s, the fields were being sprayed with pesticides, and Connie’s mother started a boycott. “When the planes showed up to spray,” Connie says, “my mother told people to walk out.” She was fired and blackballed, though with her onion field wages she was able to buy a fifteen-person passenger van where workers could be housed during certain times of the day. She was ultimately hired back by the farmer.
Connie and her brothers and sisters also worked in the fields. “You’ll work here so you’ll never come back,” Connie’s mother would tell them, wanting her kids not just to have a better future, but to appreciate where food comes from. Today, Connie’s mother is disabled. But the children are not working in the fields; Connie excelled in the local public school system, graduating with honors and then attending Antelope Valley Community College. Her dream had been to become involved with civic matters and to write, especially about what was going on in her hometown. In 1995, she joined the staff of the local paper, as well as the chamber of commerce, and it wasn’t long before she began speaking up for the valley’s Hispanic population, some of whom were still working in the region’s fruit orchards, vegetable fields, and vast plains of alfalfa. But others had become business owners, running mini-marts, feed stores, and restaurants, and by the time Sorensen had become the resident deputy in Lake Los Angeles, the town’s commercial establishments were about 65 percent Hispanic-owned. By then married with kids, Mavrolas was often covering events and nursing with a notebook in her hand. In the desert, people are often known for their gigs—Twentynine Palms has “Water District Judy” for instance. In certain parts of the Antelope Valley, energetic and high-spirited Connie became known as “the reporter with the kids.”
As she made her rounds, it wasn’t long before she met Pastor John Wodetzki, who had recently bought a house from Steve Sorensen in Lake Los Angeles. Pastor John had just moved to the area from Colorado Springs, arriving with his wife and three children on the day before Thanksgiving, just a couple of months after 9/11. It was a time of great purpose in the Antelope Valley, home of Edwards Air Force Base and a region where many veterans and active members of the military live. Their service is honored across the valley: in downtown Lancaster there are murals honoring pilots, a Walk of Fame with sculptures of Chuck Yeager and Jimmy Doolittle amid a beautiful desert garden, a Stealth bomber parked at the corner of Avenue K and the Sierra Highway—a frank and stunning monument to power. Now the country’s military was revving up for what has turned into our longest war, and with downtown Manhattan still smoldering, the urgency was palpable. Eight months prior to making the move to Lake Los Angeles, John and his wife felt that God was telling them to move back to California, where he was from. A graduate of Fullerton Seminary in Pasadena, he applied for a job at the Twin Lakes Community Church in Lake Los Angeles but was turned down. After 9/11, he reapplied and was hired, moving with his family into a rented house while scouting for a home to buy. “Have I moved to Egypt?” John thought when he first arrived. Although he had grown up in the Mojave, in a small mining town called Eagle Mountain near Joshua Tree National Park, this was different—more spare, more urgent somehow, perhaps a kind of Old Testament trial. In the wake of the attack on America, his wife, Tish, a member of the Air Force, was deployed to Addis Adaba. John soon found a suitable home on 171st Street, and he bought it. As it turned out, the seller was Steve Sorensen—a man whom he would tearfully eulogize months later. Their initial meeting suggested no such connection.
One day after purchasing the home, John spotted Steve in his SUV on the corner of 170th Street and Avenue O, where he often parked so people could stop and talk to him. For Lake Los Angeles, it was a busy intersection, with mini-marts on the corners and a steady stream of traffic. John introduced himself through the driver’s
window and Steve extended a hand. “Would it be okay if I moved in a bit early?” he asked. It was ten days before the closing. “My wife was just sent to the Middle East, and my kids and I are really cramped where we are now. It would really help if we were in our new house.” Deputy Sorensen said no—and in a way that was direct and off-putting. Surprised, John walked off and wondered why the resident deputy was such a prick. They would not become friends until a year later, and soon Steve explained his refusal to have the new buyers take early possession of his house: he was concerned about an early move-in, lest the new owners wanted to change things or decided not to close—or worse, refuse to move should a dispute arise. By then, he and John were allies in a greater battle—and good friends. John completely understood Steve’s position. But at the time, one thing was clear to the new pastor in town: the local deputy was a man who did things by the book, and if you didn’t like it, too bad.
In the months prior to Steve’s death, some members of the Twin Lakes congregation were reading a novel called This Present Darkness. Written by Frank Peretti, the book was first published in 1986, and by the time Steve became resident deputy in Lake Los Angeles, it was a monster of a best seller among evangelical Christians across the country. Several years after his death it became a musical on Broadway. It tells a suspense tale of spiritual warfare in a small town plagued by the never-ending duel between angels and demons. In this case, a local reporter and pastor take on New Age figures who are bent on seizing control of the town. They are aided by prayers from concerned citizens, whose supplications bolster the physical strength of those who are fighting against evil. The title of the book derives from Ephesians 6:10–12 in the New Testament; in the English Standard Version, it says this: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
A Desert Reckoning Page 13