THE SUMMER OF 2001 IS KNOWN FOR A COUPLE OF THINGS, mainly because it is now seen in light of the attack on 9/11, which forced an examination of the months preceding it. Let us recall that it was a period of intense celebrity coverage in the media, some of the most intense that we have experienced, with the topic of Britney Spears dominating the news ethers. There was also the subject of shark attacks, which had reportedly reached an all-time high that summer, forcing swimmers up and down the coasts to stay out of the water at some of the country’s preferred beaches. Among the many things that did not make the news that summer was the death and ensuing memorials for Jello Kueck. It is noteworthy that during that period there was not just the one service in Seattle for Jello Kueck, but several, a testament to the impact that this lost child of the Inland Empire had on the lives of those in his various circles. They did not all know each other, but in addition to knowing Jello, they had one thing in common; they were trying to carve out a new world, with the personal and cultural deck stacked against them. Now one of their own was down, and they honored him that summer on at least three different occasions. One of them was a memorial party at his friend Aaron Blair’s house in Long Beach, this one for close friends and family members. Other than trying to retrace Jello’s path in downtown Los Angeles, Don had once again sequestered himself in Llano and was reluctant to attend this tribute. But his daughter, the surviving amigos, and various other friends and relatives of Jello sent him a series of letters about why they wanted him to be there, and he consented. Chris Smallwood drove out from Riverside to pick him up. “Hey, man, check this out,” Don said when Chris walked into Don’s trailer. Chris was struck by how bad Don looked; always lanky, he had lost a lot of weight, and it really showed in his face, with a look that was kind of grizzled and more intense than before. Now from a compartment in the trailer, Don retrieved an assault rifle. Chris knew that Don had guns but was surprised to see this one. “Wow, dude,” he said, “that’s like the A-team.” Don stashed the gun away and then they headed out of the desert and down the 14 to the 405 to the 710, arriving in Long Beach for the afternoon celebration. All the while, Don was carrying a container of Jello’s ashes.
As they sat in Aaron’s crowded living room, each person spoke somberly or humorously about their recently departed friend. At the conclusion of the ceremony, Don, visibly upset, stood up and thanked everyone for attending the event and having been a friend to his son. Virginia Smallwood took Don aside, having noted how drawn and strange he looked. She asked him if he were sick, and he said yes he was—he had desert fever. She wasn’t sure if that was a joke, and Don assured her that it wasn’t. But don’t worry, he said; sooner or later, everyone picks it up out there and now it was his turn. Well, Virginia wondered, who wouldn’t be sick after finding out that their son had OD’d, but she didn’t say it out loud, because she figured that Don didn’t need to hear it. Then someone suggested making a time capsule of Jello’s life; a canister was retrieved and people wrote remembrances and deposited them, along with wallet photos and some tapes and CDs that were his favorites. The capsule was sealed and handed off for future burial—no one remembers exactly who received it—and Jello’s uncle passed out urns of his ashes. Don made special entreaties to certain people, those who knew Jello best, inviting them out to the desert and asking if it was okay if he stayed in touch. It was a way, they realized, for him to connect with his son. They were happy that Don had reached out; they liked him, even though they knew that a big part of what destroyed Jello was that his father had vanished into the desert and the kid had been fending for himself for years. But they promised to maintain contact and come out and visit; for them as well, it was a way to keep Jello’s spirit alive. Yet, in the words of Chris Smallwood, Don was now “leaner and meaner” than they had ever seen him and he and his sister were convinced that “it was only a matter of time” before Kueck went off the rails.
After the tribute in Long Beach, the crew headed back to Riverside and continued to party at the Smallwoods’ house. A few of Jello’s friends were huddling in a corner. Someone was playing Alice in Chains or maybe it was Soundgarden; Chris can’t remember, but whoever it was, it made them realize that the punk scene that Jello had so much been a part of was over. “Dude,” someone said, “I’m gonna smoke him,” reminding everybody that one of the many requests Jello had made about his impending death was “when I die, put my ashes in a cigarette box.” Someone else had a pipe and they packed it up with weed and ashes of Jello, alternating layers, and then someone fired it up and inhaled and then they passed around their departed amigo, with each taking a hit, a long one. “This is to you, you son of a bitch,” someone said, and soon the party broke up. The next morning, Chris had a sore throat. Jello had returned.
Within twenty-four hours, Don erupted. After the service, Don had headed to his daughter Rebecca’s place in Riverside to spend the night with her family. The following day, he drove her to the county Department of Public Social Services, where she had some business with a social worker. Everything seemed to catch up with Don in the building’s parking lot, where a heated exchange of words led to a violent altercation with a wanted man. Several weeks later, he was sentenced to hard time, joining California’s ever-burgeoning felon population and later returning to the desert, like many other parolees, as an unstable figure whose grudge against law enforcement was now a living thing.
What happened was this: a Riverside local named Gilbert Arias—a parolee at large, wanted on a felony warrant for burglary—drove into the lot and parked his red 1990 Plymouth Voyager minivan in a No Parking area. Like Kueck, he was on a family errand, dropping his wife and kids off so they could enter the building to attend to a social service matter. After they went inside, he got out and closed the passenger door, taking a few minutes as he rearranged some items in the van. Someone began yelling at him through the open driver’s window of an adjacent car. “What did you say?” he called out, over the loud music in his own van. “You’re in a No Parking zone” came the reply. Arias explained that he was dropping off his family. By then the man, Donald Kueck, was out of his car and approaching Arias. A security guard outside the entrance yelled at the men to stop, but the incident was rapidly escalating. “You son of a bitch,” Kueck said, swinging his right arm and making a wide, arcing, and slashing motion at the stranger’s abdomen. Arias staggered slightly, looked down and saw that he was bleeding. “Man, he cut me,” he called out to the guard. A cop arrived and trained his weapon on Kueck, who put the box cutter into a back pocket, refused to get on the ground, pushed the cop away, and began to flee. The cop subdued him with pepper spray as two other members of law enforcement arrived. “I told him to move his van, man,” Kueck said by way of an explanation. “He got mad and walked towards me.” Afraid, Kueck pulled the blade from his pocket and swung it when Arias was “close enough.” Then he ran.
Anyway you looked at the incident, the theme was Don’t Tread on Me: don’t park in my space and don’t enter my personal space. For a man on the edge it was serious fuel. Both men were arrested on the spot; Arias was taken to the hospital, where he received ten stitches for the laceration across his stomach, and then locked up on the outstanding warrant. Kueck was taken downtown. He was charged with a felony knife attack and two misdemeanors involving the use of force against a peace officer and interfering with a peace officer and an EMT in the discharge of their duties. A deal was made, and Kueck pled guilty to the felony, receiving a three-year sentence, reduced to one year and credited with time served. He then entered the Robert Presley Detention Center in Riverside County, becoming a member of the prisoner nation of California—one of the biggest and most notorious in the world, frequently mentioned with countries such as China, Singapore, and Malaysia in studies of penitentiary conditions and what happens to the incarcerated.
By the end of the year 2000, 1 in every 143 US residents was behind bars in a state, federal, or local jail, with California—always blazing the trail—along with Te
xas and the federal penitentiary system holding 1 in every 3 of the incarcerated. At the time of Donald Kueck’s entry, disturbing news about life in the padlocked shadows of the Golden State had been coming to the surface for months. In 1999 there had been riots at Norco state prison, an otherwise scenic and bucolic location in Orange County where locals can still ride their horses into town and hitch them up at a local bar. Later that year at Corcoran, the state prison that was then housing Robert Kennedy’s assassin Sirhan Sirhan and some of the Manson women, guards were busted for staging gladiator fights in which inmates were pitted against each other in death matches. In Riverside, where Kueck was doing time, there were rumors of such fights being staged in the old wing of the detention center; at one time in the center’s history, one of these fights involved two old men, according to Jello’s friend Rande Linville, who witnessed it when he was held there during the era of the three amigos in Riverside. In the newer and more modern section, where the cells surrounded a pod where guards were stationed, as opposed to a row of cells with hallways that the guards walked up and down every fifteen minutes to half an hour, such activities did not happen. With his chronic fatigue syndrome and other ailments, Kueck may have been housed in the medical wing. It may also be that he was not provided with the pain-killers he depended on—a typical jailhouse situation—and he certainly had no official access to drugs that would amp him up or had the ingredients for speed, such as certain nasal sprays. But he could have acquired them through the jailhouse underground, or prison doctors may have provided him with drugs that took him in the opposite direction, quieting his mind—a not unknown jailhouse practice. Still, with nothing to do but think, and in a place that was the antithesis of the desert, Kueck was probably going mad.
But the decline had begun long ago. In the years before Jello had died, and even in the years before Don had reentered the lives of his children, his sisters noticed the downward slide. While stationed in San Diego, the navy nurse Lynne would visit Don in the desert every month during a period stretching from 1996 to 1999, driving up the freeway in her pickup truck with her dog Nimitz, named after the carrier she had served on. Sometimes Don seemed fine, carrying on with his rockets and discourses as always, clearly meant to be living in the wide-open space, off the grid, and free like the ravens and bobcats and rattlesnakes all around him. His brother, Bill, occasionally visited as well, and he and Don would go hiking and deepen their connection under the big welcoming sky of the Antelope Valley. But other times there were signs of illness; for instance during a couple of winter visits, Lynne noticed buckets of frozen vomit outside Don’s trailer. He complained of headaches, and some of his behavior seemed obsessive and focused on a grim albeit touching plan—amassing gems from the Home Shopping Network as a legacy for his daughter. Lynne began to suspect that maybe Don had a frontal lobe tumor; as a nurse, she knew that it caused certain symptoms and headaches and obsession, and planning for the end fit the general pattern. Sometimes, when she approached his trailer, she made sure to listen for sounds; she feared that he might have killed himself, so any sound at all would have assured her that he was still alive. On a less dire note, she was also concerned about all of the empty peanut butter jars around the premises; there was a chemical in peanut butter, she learned from a relative who was a chemist, that could cause dementia, and if that was all you were eating, a serious problem could ensue. Don’s sister Peggy, sometimes visiting from Florida, noticed that Don seemed paranoid at times, not just gripped by the usual round of fears and phobias, but convinced that the universe was sending him signs that the end was near. These signs, to others, were minor—lost or missing mail, things that didn’t work. During various visits, Peggy would drive him to doctor appointments or appointments with social workers to make sure he’d continue to receive disability checks. But there was often lost paperwork or some other snafu—more proof that forces were conspiring against him and there really was no reason to be here. Once, when Don went on a vacation for a few days, he returned to find that scavengers had broken into his trailer and stolen some things, confirming a fear that he shouldn’t have left. By then so many things had gone wrong in Don’s life that Peggy was beginning to think that he was indeed stranded in a cycle of bad luck, bad choices, and more. Whatever was going on, it all served to amp up his edge, and others too had noticed a problem. For all of his mellow, seemingly Buddha-like nature, Don could snap easily—and sometimes did, frightening people as he veered close to something they did not want to experience. And so they steered clear of him, for a while at least, until he simmered down and became the guy they revered as a wise old hippie with strange thoughts and stories and a serious way with animals.
When Don got out of jail, one of the first things he did after returning to the desert was make contact with his daughter Rebecca and Jello’s friends. He held tightly to Rebecca especially, bringing her kids odds and ends from the desert and trying hard to have a relationship with them. He started to make good use of the cell phone his sister Peggy had gotten for him in earlier years, calling Jello’s friend Angela Asbell every day. Often he spoke of his time in jail, sharing with Angela a passion for radical politics, refined during the period of his incarceration. She looked forward to the calls because she too had concerned herself with the political situation in America; as a lesbian activist and writer, she had penned many pointed and funny essays for a way-out zine she edited called Bitch Kingdom, under the pseudonym of Angela Chaos. Like Jello, both she and Don had taken note of the “injustice, racism, and classism” in the country, and Don was especially concerned with racism, a thing that was most apparent to him while he was in jail, where there is no pretense among inmates of trying to get along in a diverse society and the population divides itself into race-based tribes. Their conversations sometimes went on for hours, with Don citing chapter and verse from various historical tracts on a wide range of subjects, but sooner or later it all dovetailed back into a general obsession. What is government for and what is the role of the individual? These were rich questions but there was something underlying them, a thing that Don seemed to be dancing around. Like all of Jello’s friends, Angela knew that Don loved rockets but now his passion had gone beyond the dream of possibility and flight. “People need rockets for protection,” he told Angela one day. “Government can’t be the only people with weapons.” For the first time during their many conversations, Angela felt kind of nervous as Don spoke about such matters, and there were some others who did as well. He was reading books about how to disarm a policeman, he told a couple of friends, and he was giving himself a refresher course on search-and-seizure law.
It was around this time that Chris Smallwood happened to pay Don a visit in the desert, and once again, there he stood with the assault rifle. At the very least, it was a parole violation; once released, felons were not allowed to possess firearms, and if found to have possession, they could be returned to prison for a long time. In Don’s case, it would be a second strike (with three felony counts meaning a mandatory life sentence), but there was no sign that such a thing concerned him. As Chris approached, Don was out behind his trailer, taking aim at a large Porky the Pig cutout planted in the sand. It was wearing an ATF hat and badge, and when Don finished off some rounds, he handed the weapon to Chris. While Don watched quietly, Chris shot off a clip. He left later that day. The next time he saw Don he was on television, wanted by every cop in the country.
DAY
SIX
REQUIEM FOR A COP
These old people I talk to, if you could of told em that there would be people on the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses speakin a language they couldn’t even understand, well, they just flat out wouldn’t of believed you. . . . All of that is signs and wonders but it don’t tell you how it got that way. And it don’t tell you nothing about how it’s fixin to get, neither.
—Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
ON AUGUST 8, 2003, DEPUTY STEVEN SORENSEN WAS LAI
D TO rest. In addition to the vigil in his honor held in the middle of the manhunt, there had already been a funeral at the Twin Lakes Community Church in Lake Los Angeles, where his friend John Wodetzki was the pastor. Wodetzki and Connie Mavrolas—the two surviving members of the trio that had come together with Steve to take on what they saw as a corrupt local government—were still concerned that townspeople who had been making threats against Steve might have been responsible for his death. They also pondered their own fate. Law enforcement—aware of the ongoing battle in Lake Los Angeles as well as the civil suit in which Steve had announced that he feared for his life—placed Pastor John, Connie Mavrolas, and Steve’s family under twenty-four-hour protection for several days after Steve was killed. Although Kueck was wanted for his murder, at that point there was still a lot of speculation. Was Kueck acting alone? Maybe some bikers were involved; after all, you can’t be a cop in the Mojave and not piss off certain constituents. Better to play it safe than to risk more violence.
But behind it all, given what Connie and Pastor John knew about the area and the fact that there was a continuing endeavor on the part of many concerned citizens to keep the desert from becoming one big parking lot for transients, they were convinced that Steve’s mission on behalf of people who had lived in the region for generations was righteous. If he had a previous run-in with Kueck, so be it; by then it was common knowledge that he had gone out to Llano to deal with a long-time squatter, and perhaps, some theorized, he had even made that turn down Kueck’s driveway to warn him about a problem drifter in the area, letting bygones be bygones, knowing exactly who was living at the end of the gravel path with the “No Trespassing” sign but fearing not. Or maybe it was just plain simple: “He let his guard down,” some cops told me many months later. “It just happens sometimes.” After all, they said, cops are human, and sometimes that’s just the way it goes. At the church in Lake Los Angeles, friends of Steve’s, including many of those he had helped over the years, gathered to pay their respects. In front of a banner that depicted the Lion of Judah, a band played a song, and Pastor Wodetzki eulogized the man who had become such a close ally in a short period of time. He praised Steve’s short-lived mission and talked about his devotion to community and family. “His best friend Christine was always with Steve when he was not at work,” he said. “They shared and told each other everything. Together they worked tirelessly on a list of projects to complete: trees to plant, walls to paint, animals to care for. . . . St. Jerome said, ‘A friend is long sought, hardly found, and with difficulty kept.’ . . . Had I known this day was coming, I would have done it all again.” Then Pastor Wodetzki asked for prayer that he and the congregation be used by Jesus to turn the tragedy into a victory for the kingdom of the Lord.
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