Well into the negotiation, Lillienfeld’s cell phone was fading as well, and a black-and-white was sent to Riverside to deliver new batteries. With Kueck’s cell phone dying by the minute, he kept trying to talk on Steve’s radio. But he couldn’t read the small channels because sometime during the past week, he had lost his reading glasses, which he may have been carrying in a backpack he took with him on the day he fled the crime scene. Toward the end of the lengthy negotiation, Lillienfeld’s arms were tired from holding phones up all day in the heat. Kueck himself was spent—“dehydrated, scared, mentally ill, and surrounded by thousands of cops,” as Lillienfeld said. The detective kept prompting him to surrender before dark. “I wanted a good legal admission,” he tells me months later at LASD HQ in Commerce. “I’ve just spent six hours in a hot room with a cop killer.”
Pieced together, the abbreviated exchanges between the two adversaries, recorded on tape, comprise a kind of two-man drama, a play within our play, involving a character who was throwing out lifelines and a man who was wavering between coming in and not, and degenerating as the hours ticked by.
MARK: Hi, sir, how are you? My name is Mark, and I’m a detective with the LA Sheriff’s Department.
DON: My cell phone battery is on its last legs.
MARK: Talk to me as long as you can.
DON: No, sir, please, can you turn the walkie-talkie on? It has many channels.
MARK: To talk on the radio, you push the red button on the side. Is there something we can do for you?
DON: I don’t want to be rude, but you can’t because once I get in there, those two Asian doctors are worse than Mengele. . . .
MARK: We got all kinds of doctors in there. Why don’t we let you see some non-Asian doctors?
DON (making an allergy reference): I can’t use a wool blanket. I need cotton.
MARK: Are you allergic to Top Ramen?
DON: I can’t eat beans, tomatoes, MSG.
MARK: The sheriff is telling me he agrees to all that.
DON: Put me in solitary, not with four Crips. I’m really weak. . . . I have chronic fatigue syndrome. . . . I take Ritalin. . . . Some of those cops are gonna shoot me on sight.
MARK: No, they won’t.
DON (crying): Don’t tell my mother. . . . My father was in the Air Force. . . . I gotta go. . . . You’re breaking up.
MARK: Look at L-TAC1 on the radio. . . . I can have the sheriff phone back in ten minutes. Keep the phone on for five minutes. Donald, do you still have the deputy’s gun—the Beretta and the other gun? We don’t want a little kid to find it.
DON: I don’t either. . . . I’m gonna get my glasses so I can see. . . . I’m in the desert. . . .
MARK: Talk around L-TAC1. Hang on, Donald. Stay with me. . . . You’re gonna hear someone talk on the radio. . . .
DON: I have a question about mode 7 star.
MARK: You gotta quit moving channels around. We’ll find the one you’re on.
DON: It says “mode 7 emergency.”
MARK: Don’t touch any other knob. . . . We’re a bunch of dumb cops—you gotta bear with us here. . . .
DON: I gotta take a leak. It might be a minute before I answer. [back on the line] The radio’s getting hot.
MARK: That’s typical of our equipment. . . . We’d like to kind of resolve this thing before it gets dark out. It’s 3:20 now. . . . You sound like you’re smarter than I am when it comes to police radios.
DON: I don’t wanna get arrested or killed before sundown.
MARK: Nobody wants to kill you. . . . There’s probably a million cops out there. . . . Why not come out now? It’s light out.
DON: I’m too damn weak to walk. . . . I’m peaceful, but if you’re lying to me about this radio, I might have to defend myself with the little thing I have.
MARK: I’m an old detective, and I haven’t carried one of those radios before. . . . When I was in patrol, I walked a foot beat, and I’m just not that familiar with it, or else I’d be smart enough to tell you how to work it right. Honest to God, I’m just not that bright as everyone knows. That’s why I’m here at Rebecca’s house and not out there with you and all the other cops. . . . All we want to do is see you stand up and walk with your hands up. . . .
DON: They’re gonna shoot me.
MARK: They’re not gonna shoot you. . . . Can you hit the button so it says not to scan? Push the menu button and see what it says. . . . Turn on the channel one click at a time. . . . What happened on Saturday?
DON: I was in bed. He says come out. I said, ‘What’s up, buddy?’ He wouldn’t say. . . . I alternate my meds. . . .
MARK: Talk around Seatac 2. . . . Hey Donald, is there an orange button at the top of the radio? . . . Is there any way I can convince you . . . I understand you know how to defeat the infrared.
DON: Well, I barely did. . . . The helicopter was going exactly over my position at a low altitude that woke me up, and that’s when I put cardboard over my head.
MARK: I’d really like to end this silliness in about five minutes . . . get you some water and take care of you. . . .
DON: Five minutes won’t do it.
MARK: Nobody’s out to do bad stuff to you. . . . I drive a desk. I’m not good at being out there in the field. . . . This getting old is not for sissies. . . .
DON: Yeah . . .
MARK: How old are you?
DON: I’m almost fifty-three. . . . My health is so bad. . . . [crying] My son passed two years ago. . . . I’m fucked up.
MARK: Tell me what you want, and I’ll do it. I give you my personal guarantee that I’ll make it happen.
DON: (possibly not hearing Mark): This is Donald. Can anybody hear me? If I had an hour or two, I could wire this battery to my cell phone.
MARK: I’m sure you could. Donald, push the red button and say, “This is Donald. Can anybody hear me? Emergency.” . . . If you push the button and you key the microphone, they’ll hear you. . . .
DON: It’s an emergency. Please respond. This is Donald. Can anyone hear me? . . . I wanna say something. . . . The first day I came by C.T.’s . . . he had cleared out. He had nothing to do with this. He ain’t no saint, but he wasn’t in on this. . . . The Antelope Valley is a fucked-up place to grow up.
[Connection lost; Kueck recharges cell phone, calls again.]
MARK: Hey, Donald, tell me what I can do to get your butt out of there and get you to the hospital. What would it take? No one’s gonna put you in a cell with a buncha Crips. . . . I don’t want you out there after dark. It’s dangerous for you; it’s dangerous for cops out there. . . . It’s 4:36 right now, Donald. . . . We got till about 8. . . .
DON: Let me tell you something, buddy. . . . The last few years [choking up]—excuse me . . . Since I got out of jail . . . all the tools and everything I needed to live was gone. . . . I knew it was my time to go, or it was getting close, so I’ve made my peace with God. . . . All they have to do is believe me and not look at my long hair and think I want dope. I promised a friend who went to Nam that I’d cut it when he came back. He never did. Twenty-five years later I thought about cutting it, but I couldn’t do it.
MARK: Twenty-five years is a long time to go without a haircut. . . . Where are you? Near C.T.’s or out in the desert?
DON: I can’t tell you. Some of those cops are gonna shoot me on sight. . . . I love the desert. The first time I went out there I was with my buddy and his older brother. He was racing a dirt bike. . . . I loved the desert so much and wanted to move here. . . . I even started racing and got a good bike. . . . We had two bikes so you’d have parts. . . . I was at the Vegas 400 race. . . . Too many rats are coming down from the mountains now. . . .
MARK: Those dirt bike promoters made a ton of money. Did you race with guys from LAPD?
DON: They were probably out in some of the races.
MARK: I guess the heat is good for your back pain.
DON: I have chronic fatigue syndrome. . . . The desert makes me feel good, like a piece of toast. . .
. The disease affected my body temperature. . . . I can barely get a charge, and these guys are moving in . . .
MARK: Can you see deputy sheriffs moving in?
Earlier that afternoon, Sheriff Baca had flown to the staging area on Palmdale Boulevard and 180th Street. At 3:30 PM he stepped out of the Air 5 chopper and was escorted to a bank of microphones to address the news media. He gave an assessment of the situation and the suspect, and ended the press conference with a terse summation: “We’re down to what’s known in this business as dead or alive.”
At 5:05 PM, SWAT commanders positioned the BEAR and set up a tactical plan. Ground intel was telling them that Kueck was making spider holes and burying himself, and that comported with what Lillienfeld was hearing from Don on the phone—that he was moving from location to location and maybe the signal was cutting out because he was underground. SWAT was ready to deploy gas. But there had been a delay—the battering ram wasn’t rigged to send in the fuel. To arm a delivery system, team members scoured a safe zone beyond the perimeter and found baling wire. Then they loaded the burnsafe—a large metal canister—with gas and attached a 550 parachute cord to the pin. With the burnsafe ready to go, they would punch through each of the four sheds on the property, deploy gas, let it cook, and wait for a response. Back in Riverside, Mark Lillienfeld tried one last time to get Kueck to surrender. The connection was lost. At 5:26 PM, the loudspeaker began blaring—“DONALD KUECK, COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP.” As the announcements continued, SEB and patrol sounded a roll call, and a gun shot rang out. By 5:43, over fifty announcements had been made. Three minutes after the shot was heard, Don activated his phone and called Mark Lillienfeld. “Hey, tell those guys—” he said, and then the call cut out again as the loudspeaker kept telling Kueck to surrender. He called back one more time. “I can’t get much charge,” he said, and then the connection cut out, and the penultimate line of the final conversation of Donald Kueck’s life was Mark Lillienfeld asking, “Don, can you hear me?”
Now the BEAR was on the move, lumbering across the sands and heading toward the sheds where Kueck was making his last stand. The first round of tear gas was deployed, quickly followed by a second. As the gas billowed through the main compound, Kueck called Lillienfeld at 6:14 PM claiming to be in the bushes and daring him to “send in the dogs.”
SWAT launched another volley of tear gas and then backed away from the location to discuss the next action. At 7:23 PM, Captain Spencer okayed a request to knock down the walls of the sheds and the BEAR moved in for the kill. At 7:27, two more shots were heard, and roll calls for SEB and patrol were immediately taken. Three minutes later, another shot was heard by containment positions, and deputies tried to locate the shooter. By then the BEAR was rolling toward the main compound. Kueck opened up with his automatic, spraying the giant assault vehicle with gunfire. “How many rounds can these windows take?” someone asked inside the BEAR. LAPD sergeant Rick Massa, piloting the vehicle, didn’t know, and tried calling his command post for the stats. Meanwhile the situation in the BEAR was growing more tense. At the sound of the first gunshot, the team had figured Kueck wanted to make them think he had killed himself so they’d get out of the vehicle. Through a porthole, Bruce Chase returned the fire. When Kueck responded, they saw the heat signature—not a bright orange flame, since it was daytime, but a small circle rippling from the weapon—and they knew his location. They blasted off a volley of .308 rounds from their long rifles, the firepower pouring out of the tank and through the compound. As the shots screamed over the sand, Chase couldn’t shake the feeling that all along, he had been chasing a ghost; now, for the first time in his career, he wasn’t able to see the man who was trying to kill him. Hot shell casings poured down his back as the weapons ate up the rounds, and the team kept reloading and firing, trying to bring their lone adversary down. At some point SWAT started to run out of ammo. A call went out on the police band, and Sorensen’s academy classmate Bernard Shockley heard the news. As the heated firefight continued, he headed west across the 15 from his home in Victorville to deliver more ammunition. Shockley got a flat in Hesperia and pulled over, followed by an old couple in an old car, offering help. “Turns out the man had a huge floorjack from Pep Boys,” Shockley says years later, recalling the bit of good fortune. He changed tires and raced to the scene, thinking that the episode was a mirror image of what Steve had done in his life—Samaritans on the road, and elderly ones at that, stopping to help a stranger in need.
By the time he got there, the place was on fire.
Inside the BEAR, Rik the Malinois had his hack up, way more than usual. Like Joe Williams and the others on the team, he had never been in tight quarters like this, in extreme heat, with hundreds of hot rounds going off around him, heading toward an enemy as gunfire screamed off the surrounding metal skin. Joe tried to calm him as shells from the firestorm fell down the collar of his uniform and onto his back, a painful occurrence that precluded a normal response lest Rik sense danger and react in the enclosed space.
Meanwhile Rick Rector was undergoing another first. Because LASD did not have their own BEAR, he and the others hadn’t been inside one until today. Now he was up in the turret and felt vulnerable. As a deputy in LASD during the Rodney King riots in 1992, he had walked the streets of Compton, exposed and a target. But this was different; he was confined to the BEAR and could not escape. From his vantage point he was throwing flashbangs into the compound—a diversionary device—to try to flush Kueck out. But the tactic wasn’t working, and in fact after lobbing a flare into one of the sheds, he watched in amazement as Kueck appeared, grabbed it, and tossed it aside. He continued to launch tear gas canisters by hand, but that wasn’t working either; the high winds were blowing the gas away from the sheds along with the fuel from the burnsafe. But the BEAR kept moving until the walls on all four sheds were knocked down. Inside it, although protected, Bruce Chase wondered if the vehicle would suddenly plunge into a sinkhole or tunnel, to be consumed by that mysterious system that Kueck had been in and out of all week long and that some of the men had seen firsthand.
By 7:42 PM, Air 5 and 6 were hovering over the sheds as fires broke out in one shed, then two, then a third, as Kueck—perhaps shot himself—darted in and out of the flames, continuing to blast off rounds. “He has a shitload of ammo,” Fred Keelin was thinking, and by then SWAT had gone through so much of their own that they had been leaving to reload at a supply line and then returning to engage. By 8:45, the entire compound was on fire, and the fire grew, and as the moon appeared above the Mojave, almost full, it became a conflagration with giant freak-show flames that scorched the heavens, and some wondered if it was the Twilight of the Gods, and the news choppers came to the fire like mechanical moths, relaying the image to millions who watched the flames dance on television, the phony hearth that interrupted regular programming with coverage of The End. Around the perimeter of Kueck’s last stand, hundreds of deputies and law enforcement personnel watched the grisly bonfire burn and wondered if they had finally got him. A few miles away at Mount Carmel, the nuns watched the flames in the distance and prayed, and out in Riverside, a few hours later, Mark Lillienfeld delivered the news to Rebecca Welch, who had stopped watching television when the gunfire erupted and left the room. “It’s over,” he said and then after a while, he and Rebecca said their good-byes and he hit the road. Like Steve Sorensen, Mark Lillienfeld rescued dogs. There was one he had recently adopted from the pound, and as he headed west on the 60 out of Riverside, he was looking forward to seeing her when he got home.
AFTERBURN
Eddie would go.
—Tribute to fallen lifeguard and big-wave surfer Eddie Aikau
AT MIDNIGHT—MORE THAN THREE HOURS AFTER THE FIRE BEGAN raging—SWAT was ordered to search the area. Now, two teams were sweeping the field. They still didn’t know if Kueck was alive or had escaped yet again. They formed skirmish lines and began walking through the rubble. Once again, they felt vulnerable. Yet odd things can go t
hrough your head at any given time. At least half of the men on site were planning to leave for a golf trip in Nevada later that day. They had put down their deposits months ago. “We gotta hurry up,” Bruce Chase was thinking. “If we don’t, we’ll miss our plane.” But of course what they were doing had no timetable, and on they walked, as if into a literal representation of the twenty-third psalm, the one that Chase often though of when in danger.
Strangely, although all four sheds had burnt to the ground, the main house where the Hispanic family lived was completely intact. In fact, as the compound had gone up in flames that night, Bruce remembers watching the blaze get bigger and bigger, moving toward the main house, while noting that a tree next to the house was on fire but the house was not, even as more of the tree’s branches began crackling with heat and flame. Except for a propane tank next to it, the tree was the only thing between the house and the rest of the bonfire. Oddly, the tank did not erupt either. Now, as Chase walked across the fallen timbers and ashes, the tree was still smoldering—and only half of it at that. There weren’t many trees in that part of the desert, in fact hardly any at all. This one was a mesquite, a tree with a root system than can run deep and run wide in order to tap into water. Far away in another desert there is a mesquite known as “the tree of life.” It’s the only tree for miles, and residents of the town of Bahrain where it lives have long regarded it as the marker of the Garden of Eden. Here in the Mojave, it was as if the tree had been protecting the house where Carmen lived, Steve’s friend, the devout woman who toiled in a church thrift shop that helped provide the destitute people of the valley with clothing and other provisions. It was some kind of miracle, Bruce figured. Yet that was not the only one. Inside the house were the family’s animals, left behind when they evacuated, safe and alive and well, waiting for everyone to come home and start over.
A Desert Reckoning Page 25