A Desert Reckoning

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A Desert Reckoning Page 24

by Deanne Stillman


  Throughout the week, Kueck had been phoning, strung out and crying and apologizing for never being able to see her again, saying how much he loved her and recounting a bizarre although possible version of the murder in which he had shot the deputy with Sorensen’s own gun, suggesting that there was hand-to-hand combat before he opened up on him. “He kept coming,” Kueck had said, “and I said, ‘Stop, man, stop.’” Cops later attributed the story to Kueck’s attempt to lay the groundwork for a defense, should he be taken alive, but some of his friends and relatives and a few online regulars who had been tailgating police scans believed that that’s how it had gone down, affirming their unfettered belief in the right—and beyond that, the necessity—to bear arms.

  Now, in Kueck’s last hours, Rebecca Welch was walking an emotional tightrope, trying to help the sheriff’s department and at the same time calm her father down as he threatened to go out like Scarface. Meanwhile SWAT was closing in, setting up a perimeter with snipers after moving into place early that morning. In fact, they had figured that Kueck would return one more time to C.T.’s compound. To make sure he didn’t elude them again, they had embarked on a sensitive operation two days earlier in which they switched places with the family who lived in the adjacent house, under cover of darkness. Detectives had been in contact with the woman who lived there—Steve’s friend, who worked in a church thrift shop—since her sightings of Kueck earlier in the week. To take Kueck down, they knew there had to be an element of surprise. The surprise was being at C.T.’s place when Kueck arrived. So a Spanish-speaking detective contacted the family and explained that they had to get out of the house—that night. Within minutes members of the SWAT team arrived to help them vacate. They had two dogs and several cats, and they wanted to take them. This was not allowed, to the sorrow of the children. The family piled into their white Toyota minivan, and six SWAT guys in full gear climbed in with them for protection, lest Kueck—or anyone else—had them in their sights. Then they drove to the convent, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. But the fifteen-minute ride was frightening—for the family and for deputies. “We were crammed into the van and couldn’t move,” Bruce Chase recalls. “We talked about what could happen if Kueck opened up on us. We knew we were Swiss cheese.”

  Arriving safely, SWAT dropped off the family with the sisters at Mount Carmel. The kids were crying and asked again if they could go back and get their animals. The answer was no. Now SWAT had the cover of the family’s van, and they headed back to C.T.’s place and parked in their usual place. They had told the family to leave the house unlocked, and entered the house through the front door. Kueck, they feared, may have returned when he saw the family and could have been lurking. Avoiding the use of lights in case that had happened, they staked out positions at each room in the house, then cleared them one by one in the darkness. Kueck did not come back that night, and the following morning, the red team returned, ramming down doors to all of the structures on the property and clearing them. Again there was no sign of Kueck.

  Now, one week after Steve Sorensen had been killed, SWAT was ready. Snipers had returned to C.T.’s place in the white minivan, then staked out their positions. It was time for the heavy artillery. A SWAT commander placed a call to the LAPD, requesting the BEAR, the Ballistic Engineered Armored Response, a tactical vehicle that weighs 28,000 pounds and can rapidly deploy up to fifteen cops against urban combatants armed with assault weapons. In the open terrain of the desert, law enforcement had been at a disadvantage all week, even though in terms of manpower the odds had been overwhelmingly in their favor, with hundreds of cops trying to hunt down one man. But they were unprotected, not trained in wilderness tracking, and easy targets as they walked skirmish lines across the valley flats. The BEAR had been rolled out during the Gulf War, and at the time of this incident, few police departments had one. LAPD—the law enforcement agency that first deployed tanks in the city—was one of them, and they had just gotten the vehicle a week before this call. Within minutes, the massive tank was being driven up the freeways to the Antelope Valley and into the desert, tested in a foreign land and now deployed for another desert war on the home front.

  Bear power cannot be underestimated in this, the final act. For just as our hermit had his team of animal allies—creatures whose ways he knew so well as to have been helped along his wilderness path—so too did his hunters invoke animal spirit. Regardless of the acronym, it was not for nothing that the tank used in modern street and desert warfare is called the BEAR. In California, where the grizzly was exterminated long ago, the bear had become an official symbol, like many a bygone creature, forever depicted on the state flag. Gone as a physical presence, its energy is drawn on in mysterious ways. Like the ancient warriors who donned eagle feathers and skin of wolf and head of elk and painted their horses with lightning bolts and arrows, the six-man SWAT team—tan, on this, the last day of the manhunt, with experienced deputies from other teams added to the crew—climbed inside the BEAR, heading to the final siege. The tank gave them an edge, named for a fearless apex predator, covering them with metal skin that can repel fast-traveling bullets—or so they were hoping as the fierce gun battle soon broke out.

  But it wasn’t only bear medicine that was being invoked in this assault; other animals were being called on from inside the tank and in other ways. There was dragon, an elaborate version of which lay coiled in ink around the arm of Deputy Mark Schlegel, eyes glowing and presence conjuring breath of fire, deployed later that day. And there was dog, in the physical form of Rik, the Malinois, returning with Joe Williams after searching on the first day of the manhunt and finding Sorensen’s belongings.

  Other team members that day called on other powers in their own way, each seeking an edge and protection for an event involving mortal danger. Years earlier, Bruce Chase had served with team scout Rick Rector when they were partners at the Century station in South Central LA, a violent beat. Several times they had been involved in shootings where people tried to kill them. They had a bond, and although he had Saturdays off, he readily agreed when Rector called him early that morning and asked him to step in on this, the final siege. As he climbed into the BEAR, he thought of Psalm 23, which helped him calm the adrenaline rush that arrives with fear, just as he had when he and his team entered the compound two nights ago in the dark, now delving deeper into the channels of the Old Testament watchwords. “You prepare a table before me,” went the familiar words, “in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil . . .”

  Deputy Fred Keelin found comfort in the BEAR itself. Two days earlier, his pager went off moments after taking his son to get his driver’s license on his sixteenth birthday. He was asked to report in for a SWAT operation, and he tossed his son the car keys and headed out to the command post on Palmdale Boulevard. At the age of fifty-five, he was the oldest member of the SWAT team, having been on the force for twenty-one years and involved in all manner of deadly situations. For Keelin, the tank was a thing of religious ferocity. “The BEAR was like God to us,” he recalls several years later. “Kueck was in his element, and we were not.”

  As the vehicle headed across the sands to the compound where Kueck had staked out his position, police radios were going berserk with news that the fugitive was cornered. Deputies from three counties burned down the highway, racing toward the site, where they joined other law enforcement personnel and stood arm to arm at the outer perimeter, a human barrier through which no one could escape. Across the way at a nearby house, an arrest team was in place, ready in case the day concluded with Kueck’s surrender. With everybody positioned, an announcement was made—“DONALD KUECK, THIS IS THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. WE KNOW YOU ARE IN THERE. COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP.” There was no response, no movement. Was Kueck really in there? Many of the frazzled deputies wondered. Or had he escaped the noose once again?

  At 1:20 PM, Rebecca Welch got another call. It was her father. He had been trying to contact police on Sorensen’s
radio. After exchanging greetings, Don launched into a disjointed stream of thought about what happened, his fears about returning to jail, and regrets, stating that he was calling from the house of an old acquaintance where he had gone to get some food. “The SOB came at me with his gun pointed at my head,” he said. “So I dug up the gun and put it together. . . . I was gonna kill a rattlesnake. . . . What was I gonna do—let him starve to death? . . . They found me yesterday morning when I was asleep. I put cardboard over me. . . . They can’t read the thermal thing. . . . The cardboard blocked me. . . .”

  “I heard from Bill,” Becky replied, referring to Don’s brother, and trying to stop the train. “He said to tell you he loves you. Lynne told me to tell you don’t hurt anyone else.”

  “They froze me to death in jail,” Don said. “Gave me food I couldn’t eat. . . . For the past few years I’ve been getting signals that my life is over. I didn’t think I’d live this long. . . . There is an afterlife—I know that. . . . a scientific fact . . . You suffer for the pain you caused and then . . . Tell Ann I love her,” he continued, referring to another sister, a prison guard in Arizona. “They gave her hell for going by the book. . . . I made it to the grocery store once, and it wiped me out. . . . I was backing up. . . . I didn’t have nothing in my hands. . . . When I got close enough to the car, I grabbed his gun, and I shot him. . . . He wouldn’t quit. . . . If only cops would follow the law . . . Only low-income people know . . . The ex-con who attacked me in the parking lot . . . I opened the bolt cutter just to scare him. . . . I’ll shoot myself in the head first before going to jail. . . . I had the snake for three weeks. . . . I considered dumping him, but he might have bitten a hiker. . . . Don’t worry about me—they’re gonna kill me. . . . I’m not scared. . . . I’m not even nervous. . . .”

  “Your granddaughter Lolly was crying all night,” Becky said. “Someone told her you killed a cop.”

  “I wish my family had never found me,” Don said, then continued his downward spiral, conflating various experiences from different periods of his life in a continuous timeline. “I love it in the desert. . . . It’s warm. . . . I’m too exhausted, honey, to talk. . . . I love you, baby. . . . Lynne tried to help. . . . I left money in the trailer. . . . I could hear their voices. . . . They circled me for about an hour . . . wider and wider. . . . It was two days ago, or it might have been this morning or yesterday. . . . There were two choppers less than a hundred feet right over me, and I was lying on my side. . . . I have to sleep with my legs curled up because of the cot in jail. . . . When the black-and-white got there, the guy said, ‘I’m gonna pepper spray you.’ . . . “

  “Can we get through this without you dying?” Becky said.

  “I won’t live for long,” Don replied. “I tried to stop him—knock him down—I said stop stop stop. . . . We’re losing the signal. . . . I went to my neighbor. . . . Everyone out here is stupid. . . . They have no morals. . . . Don’t ever move out here. . . . I was walking. . . . I got as far as one-quarter mile, a hundred or two hundred yards, at some guy’s house because I knew the hose was on in the backyard. . . . The TV was on, and I was on it. . . . It was a struggle to get water. . . . I had a one-gallon water container. . . . I’m laying down. . . . I feel great. . . . It’s 80 or 90 degrees, ideal, with less than 20 percent humidity. . . . I’m ready to die. . . . I wish I had died sooner. . . . If I’m still alive, I’ll call you back. . . . I’m close to C.T.’s house . . . can’t go no further. . . . He’s not involved. . . . He gave me some water and tea and a potato. . . . He doesn’t have much. . . . They’ll find my fingerprints at his house. . . . I can’t sleep in the daytime, not with this noise. . . . I’m in my right mind. . . . I’m in the shade and sage brush . . . laying down. . . . I don’t want a cop to kill me. . . . I’d rather have anyone else kill me but a cop. . . .”

  “Dad,” Becky said, “don’t kill someone else.”

  “Would killing Mengele or Hitler be bad?” Don said. “Sometimes I get better for a week or two. . . . Sudafed helps a little.”

  “I love you, Dad,” Becky said. “Your granddaughters love you.”

  “I never wished anyone any harm,” Don said, now crying. “I have a hard time killing a rattlesnake. . . . I’m glad I’m with God now. . . . Bye, baby, I love you.”

  There was another brief exchange in which Don again talked about the conditions in jail. He added that his phone was giving out and that he was trying to contact law enforcement, noting that he had Sorensen’s walkie-talkie. “I’m sure they’ll respond,” Becky said. “They don’t want to kill you. . . . Wait, someone’s at the door. . . .” Detective Lillienfeld had just arrived. “Dad, the sheriff’s right here,” Becky continued. “You talk to him.” By now, every satellite van in Southern California was racing toward the scene.

  Who among us thinks about the last conversation you might have before checking out? What topics would be covered, beyond the usual round of farewells? And, perhaps more importantly, with whom would you be speaking? Of all the last conversations Donald Charles Kueck found himself having, it was with a cop—the figure with whom he had been shadow wrestling for years. Now a member of law enforcement was his final buddy, deathbed confessor, and possible savior.

  Kueck was fortunate in that the person he ended up talking with was Detective Mark Lillienfeld. They were of the same generation—Mark was fifty-two to Kueck’s fifty-three (in fact the negotiation occurred on Lillienfeld’s birthday)—and in other circumstances, they might have learned that they shared a similar trajectory, at least in terms of geography. Like Kueck, Lillienfeld had come west as soon as he could. He spent his childhood in Illinois, with many a fondly remembered summer watching baseball at Wrigley Field. As a teenager, he moved with his family to Waco. At seventeen, he headed for California, longing for the coast. He didn’t know anybody there and had no place to stay, except his car, a Pontiac station wagon, which he parked in Elysian Park. He spent six months on the streets, using the showers and restrooms at USC and UCLA when necessary, and working at various construction jobs around town. “It was great,” he recalls in one of many conversations we had at a cop hangout near the Firestone station where he was working a case. “I was in LA!” Some time later, a friend suggested he join the LASD; always a person who wanted to stand up to the bad guys, he took the test and entered immediately.

  In talking with Kueck, he brought something beyond their love of California. A cop with a different manner, more brash, for instance, would not have been able to stay on the phone with the fugitive for more than five minutes. Lillienfeld was a self-effacing guy whose unobtrusive nature gave no hint of his accomplishments as a homicide detective with twenty-five years of experience in the LA County Sheriff’s Department. For instance, in 1998, he was called to the scene where racing legend Mickey Thompson and his wife had been murdered in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. For the next thirteen years, he followed the killer’s trail, until their business partner was finally charged. While on the prison gang strike force during the 1980s, Lillienfeld investigated the Aryan Brotherhood—one of the Big Four gangs in the country, all of which had coalesced in California. At the time, there had been forty murders over a ten-year period, all of them in prison. The victims were “unappealing,” he told a reporter at the time. “Bad men.” Most people couldn’t care less that they had been whacked. “But I worked on the case for three years,” he said. “You develop compassion for the victims. They weren’t that different from you or me. They had families, hopes, dreams—they just happened to turn left where you or I turned right.” In the final hours of the manhunt for Donald Kueck, it was more than his identification with the other guy that permitted a conversation, strange though it was, to unfold. It was his very voice itself. Quiet and soothing, it may have provided Kueck with a few moments of grace before he went up in flames. Beyond that, after listening to the tapes of the conversation many times and hearing Kueck’s voice waver and then come back strong, I can say that it may have even caused
him to think twice about his decision to make a last stand.

  The situation was equally unexpected for Lillienfeld, not that homicide cops are surprised by much. But here it was, his birthday weekend, and he gets a call because the regular hostage negotiator is not available. He figured something might come up on the weekend, because not a Saturday night goes by without someone getting whacked in Los Angeles County. But still, getting called to a crime scene was a lot different from having to get on the phone and negotiate with a fugitive. Plus, there wasn’t really a hostage, other than the man himself. Quite simply, Mark Lillienfeld was tasked with convincing a man who had vowed never to return to jail into surrendering and possibly facing the rest of his life in prison—without taking a few more cops out before he gave up or killed himself. Then there was the possibility that Kueck wanted to kill himself—commit suicide by cop—and that the entire episode had been one prolonged version of this increasingly common way to go out. According to the Annals of Emergency Medicine, at least 10 percent of the shootings involving the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department are such incidents. Of course, if that was the goal, Kueck was about to get his wish.

  But the end was hours away.

  For over five hours, as Kueck tried to recharge his faltering cell-phone battery with the one in Sorensen’s radio, there were dozens of calls made back and forth from Lillienfeld to the staging area at Mount Carmel in the field. All the while, the detective was sitting on the couch in Welch’s small living room, with Rebecca right next to him, taking care of her children and toddler while at the same time watching the siege unfold on television and wondering what her father was going to do—and receiving periodic calls from him on her land line. It was hot in Riverside that day, over 90, and there was no air conditioning in the apartment. “I drank a lot of water,” Lillienfeld recalls months later. “I got very hungry.” At one point during the siege, a local cop stopped by, and Mark gave him some cash for a pizza run. When he returned with replenishments, Rebecca’s kids devoured the food, leaving a slice for the detective. Throughout the negotiation, he was holding a phone in each ear—one for talking to Kueck, and the other an open line to SWAT command HQ in the field, through which he was relaying what Kueck was saying, and then they in turn would relay the information to LASD headquarters in Commerce. At times, there were problems with connections, with lines cutting out and a ten-minute delay between SWAT, staging from the convent, and HQ. Whenever contact was lost, Lillienfeld had to wait for Kueck to call back. It was not possible to call the fugitive; wanting to avoid a situation where the GPS tracking could pinpoint his exact location inside the general vicinity of the compound, Kueck initiated all of the calls, and maintained contact for brief spurts only, which eliminated the ability to zero in on his whereabouts. Although everyone knew he was on the grounds of a complex of sheds at a certain address, they did not know if he was calling from a tunnel, a bedroom, or behind a creosote bush.

 

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