The attempted kidnapping at Grandview elevated the blood pressure of the already tense ranger serving as the incident commander. Within four days Horning had stolen and crashed two cars, forced his two hostages from Flagstaff to stay overnight with him in the El Tovar Hotel, attempted to kidnap at least four people, and shot at three park rangers. The potential danger to park visitors was one of many reasons the incident commander and an FBI agent drafted a memo asking the superintendent to temporarily close the park. If they evacuated the entire park, these two lawmen figured, innocent civilians would be out of Horning’s reach and authorities could scour the entire South Rim with a dragnet of cops and hounds until they flushed out the fugitive. It seemed like a sensible plan—if it weren’t so bad for business.
Not unlike what happened when Chief Brody urged the mayor of Amity to close public beaches in the movie Jaws, upper management howled at their suggestion. It’s the peak of tourist season for Christ’s sake! Fourth of July is next week! The taxpayers will tar and feather us in front of Congress. The park concession will submit a “million dollar a day loss of business claim.” Are you daft? Have you gone completely insane? The superintendent can’t close the park. Shark you say? Looks like a dolphin fin to me.
Ranger “Brody” was removed from his position as incident commander, the Grand Canyon remained open, and Danny Ray Horning waited for more swimmers to enter the water.
Like Victor Hall, the Desert View Watchtower is the brainchild of architect Mary Colter. Perched on the rim like a stone castle and inspired by Anasazi pueblos, Colter designed the Desert View Watchtower to be exactly what it is: a cool-looking gift shop. In 1932 the first tourists walked through the shelves of knickknacks in order to climb the stairs of the watchtower to see the view. Sixty years later—on July 4, 1992—two female medical students from England drove out East Rim Drive to do the same. The view from the top was splendid. After snapping a few photos, the British women descended the spiral stairway and headed for the parking lot. On their way back to their car, something bad happened. A wild man was pointing a gun at them. He was hijacking their Nissan Sentra. He was taking them hostage. At high noon on the Fourth of July.
Here? In the park?
Welcome to America, ladies. Happy Independence Day!
Horning forced the two women to drive him through two roadblocks. A ranger waved them through the first. At the second, a highway patrolman asked Horning to step out of the car. The petrified hostages watched the highway patrolman compare an emaciated Horning with hair dyed blond to the wanted photo of a well-fed brunette Horning and then let the fugitive go. Outside the park, Horning left the two women tied to a tree. The next day, an Arizona woman reported seeing a raggedy man drinking from her garden hose. A Border Patrol officer found the fugitive sleeping under the deck of someone’s house. (In 1994 Horning was convicted of the Stockton homicide and dismemberment. He remains on death row inside a California prison.)
Before Horning was captured, a reporter from a Phoenix station interviewed Chris. The ranger described the fugitive as “a disgusting child molester. A racist. A classic sociopath who murders people, kidnaps tourists, and shoots at park rangers.” These quotes didn’t make it on the evening news. Instead local papers published “Go Danny Go” letters to the editor, and a reporter stalking the lobby of a park hotel interviewed an attractive young woman wearing a Harvard sweatshirt. “[Horning’s] not so bad,” the woman said on camera. “He hasn’t murdered anybody yet. He’s becoming a folk hero.”
To Chris it was a slap in the face. Horning had been convicted of molesting a five-year-old girl. He had sawed off the head and limbs of a husband and father. He had shot at Chris and his friends. And here was this cute coed, someone a ranger might like to date, calling the bad guy a hero. What a bitter pill to swallow. Of course the ranger took it personally. He was tolerating crappy housing and accepting shitty pay in exchange for risking his ass to protect the public—only to have them cheer on the creep who had tried to kill him. Un-friggin’ believable.
15
CRUEL WORLD
Chris Fors was off duty, enjoying a leisurely drive along the West Rim while listening to Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” As he drove by the overlook known as the Abyss, he noticed a blue Honda parked there. Chris continued to the road’s end at Hermit’s Rest. On his way back, he saw the same car parked at the same overlook. It was 10:30 at night. Perhaps the guy was lost, or out of gas. Chris slowed almost to a complete stop to offer his assistance if needed, but the Honda’s driver glared at Chris as he passed, giving him the nastiest look.
It was October 1990, near the end of Chris’s first summer at the Grand Canyon, but the young ranger already had superb instincts. He would have called this in to dispatch but was afraid he’d sound paranoid or silly when he reported, “Hey, there’s a man parked at the Abyss who glared at me when I slowed down my personal car in the dark of night to stare at him.”
Early the next morning, the Honda was still parked at the overlook when a park maintenance employee stopped to collect the trash. The maintenance employee found a piece of paper taped to the guardrail. On the paper note someone had drawn an arrow. The arrow pointed down, over the rim. Next to the note was a rope. One end of the rope was tied to the guardrail; at the other end was a rifle. The note asked authorities to return the rifle to a relative. Below the rim, rangers found the writer of the note.
Sometime the night before, the man had stood up on the railing, shot himself with the rifle, and then fallen. The man’s leg was caught in the rope, so he fell only ten feet. The man had a handgun in his pocket and body armor in the car. When Chris heard this, he concluded it was probably for the best he didn’t call in his observations the night before. The guy seemed like the type who wouldn’t have minded taking a few rangers with him.
* * *
In 1993 you could walk into any video store and rent the film Thelma and Louise. In this movie two women take a road trip that launches them into a violent crime spree. In the end, Thelma and Louise find themselves caught between an army of macho cops and what Louise calls, with awe and admiration, the “Goddamn Grand Canyon.” A sympathetic male detective tries to convince the women into turning themselves in, but Thelma and Louise choose to drive their green 1964 Thunderbird convertible into the abyss. Their suicide is a bittersweet metaphor—a refusal to accept a gloomy existence of compromise and confinement. Many didn’t appreciate the movie’s depressing end. Others liked it all too well.
* * *
In May 1993 Chris was giving his girlfriend, a blond he met at graduate school, a ranger-guided tour of the park when another ranger spotted something five hundred feet below the rim. Chris dropped his girlfriend off at a point along the rim where she could watch the rangers work. Ranger Keith Lober rappelled down a rope. Five hundred feet below the rim, he found a rental car. The car had landed on its top and it looked as though it had been compressed in a junkyard compacter. The car and the occupant were now two feet tall and had been that way for nearly the entire month of April. Removing the body from the crushed steel required the use of heavy machinery flown in by helicopter. The body was identified as a young male recently diagnosed as HIV positive.
In January 1993 a thirty-six-year-old woman watched Thelma and Louise multiple times before attempting to drive her Suburban off the rim at the Abyss. When a rock blocked her dramatic launch into the canyon, the woman walked to the rim and jumped. Then in November a tourist called 911. A man had driven a car off the rim near the South Kaibab trailhead parking lot. The tourist said the man nodded to him as he accelerated his 1967 Pontiac Tempest toward the rim and rocketed it into the canyon.
Some people drive to their death. Others prefer to go on foot. A few bring a long plastic tube and duct tape. They tape one end of the tube to their muffler and put the other end in the car via the driver’s-side window and
seal it tight. Then they park at some lonely overlook with the engine running. (To Chris this last method didn’t make any sense. Why would you drive all the way to Arizona from Ohio to do something you could do in your own garage?)
* * *
Whether or not a rope, a gun, a helicopter, or a motor vehicle is involved, the Sierra Club would agree: Suicide is not an appropriate use of a national park. Yet, although the Grand Canyon is sixty miles from the nearest interstate, it remains a popular natural wonder for those planning to do themselves in. As ranger Patrick Suddath put it to one reporter in 2009, “. . . toward the end of someone’s life, when they are feeling a total sense of despondency, they want to return to a place of natural beauty.”
Once a week on average, Grand Canyon park rangers receive a BOLO (Be on the Lookout) for a person heading to the park with the intention of committing suicide. Although many suicidal people come prepared with a desperate and elaborate plan, a disturbing number of suicides may be the result of an immediate and impulsive act. According to a University of Houston study, 24 percent of suicide survivors contemplated the act for less than five minutes before doing something drastic. This statistic summons an unsettling question: How many fatal falls labeled accidents are spur-of-the-moment suicides? Can peering into the Grand Canyon enchant or depress you to the point you can’t resist the urge to leap into its dizzying depths? In 1993 rangers responded to more fall fatalities than in any other year in the park’s history. Three of these falls were unintentional suicides, like the man who jumped from one rocky pillar to another rocky pillar for the benefit of picture-taking tourists. “Watch me!” he shouted just before he missed his target and fell 360 feet.
Local and state governments have effectively deterred suicides by installing barricades, nets, or security cameras at dangerous sites. But the NPS cannot, nor should it, barricade or conduct twenty-four-hour surveillance along both rims of the 277-mile-long Grand Canyon. Thus, once a suicidal person enters the park, the last barrier between him and his sad goal often will be a park ranger.
Although successful suicides garner more media attention, observant and caring park rangers prevent scores of people from killing themselves every year. In January 2009 Grand Canyon rangers stopped three suicidal acts within one month. Occasionally rangers must respond to the suicidal inclinations of one of their own. In 1997 a Grand Canyon interpreter committed suicide by hanging himself on the North Rim. In 1999 park rangers prevented a peer from leaping off Yaki Point.
On March 25, 1994, a seventeen-year-old from Ohio walked to a pay phone near the Bright Angel trailhead and called a friend. He had hiked out of the Grand Canyon, the boy told his friend, and he now intended to kill himself. As soon as the boy hung up, the friend called the police. Minutes later two rangers found a car matching the description of the suicidal boy’s silver Hyundai parked at the visitor center. When rangers addressed the boy, he said, “Leave me alone.” Then he accelerated the Hyundai, nearly running down ranger John Piastick on his way out of the parking lot.
Three rangers pursued the silver Hyundai as it traveled south on Arizona Highway 64. In the lead car was Chris Fors. Once the chase headed out of the park entrance gate, a county deputy and two Arizona state troopers took the lead. Thirty miles later, the Hyundai ran out of gas. The boy pulled the car into the parking lot of a trading post that was really a gift shop. The trading post sold a plethora of souvenirs, including Native American jewelry (both real and fake) and cattle skulls (both real and fake). Chris pulled his ranger car in behind the silver Hyundai. Heavy-metal music blared from the Hyundai’s speakers. A teenage boy with blond hair sat in the driver’s seat. He held a .22-caliber pistol in his hand. Before long, a half dozen cops and rangers were standing behind the bumpers of their patrol cars. The cops pointed their guns at the Hyundai and yelled, “Get out of the car. Drop the gun or we’ll shoot you.”
“I’m not going to hurt you guys,” the boy said. “I just want you to go away.”
When a hostage negotiator from the state highway patrol arrived, he initiated negotiations, but Chris and Ranger Piastick had built a rapport with the boy, so the highway patrolmen coached the rangers. The boy stepped out of the car and paced back and forth, but he did not drop the gun. Acting as the primary negotiators, the rangers engaged the boy with talk about cars and music until the cops and the rangers began to feel that they were making progress. They were going to save this kid.
“I thank you guys for what you’re doing,” the boy told them. “But after what my father did to me . . . I’ve already decided.” The boy stuck the barrel of the German Ruger in his mouth.
“Don’t! Don’t!” The rangers pleaded. “If you do this, it’s going to bother us for the rest of our life.”
“I’m sorry. I have to do it. I came here to do it.”
“Please, son. Drop the gun.”
The boy calmed down, and negotiations continued. This went on for three and a half hours. It grew dark—a cold desert night. The highway patrol lieutenant took over for Chris so the ranger could retrieve his jacket from his ranger car. When Chris returned, the boy placed the gun down on the hood of the Hyundai and walked away. Five feet. Ten feet. Twenty feet. Once the kid put thirty feet of distance between himself and the gun, two officers, the highway patrol negotiator, and Ranger Piastick made their move. But the boy was quicker than they expected. The boy pounced on the gun. The ranger and the highway patrolmen pounced on the boy. One shot rang out. The highway patrol lieutenant said, “Oh, shit.”
With guns drawn, Chris and the other officers approached. The lieutenant was okay. Ranger Piastick was okay. The boy was not okay. He was on the ground, blood pouring out of his head. Piastick, a park medic, immediately started emergency medical treatment. It was another “tough moment” for Chris. He and Piastick had put their hearts into talking the boy out of it. The boy still had a pulse when he was loaded into a rescue helicopter, but he was pronounced dead at the Flagstaff Medical Center.
Months later, Chris made a grocery run to Flagstaff. When he passed the trading post he saw a kitschy work of yard art at the spot where the boy had shot himself. The art was a large rusty water pipe in which an artist had cut out an image of Kokopelli. A thousand years ago, Native Americans painted Kokopelli on a few sandstone panels. Today the Arizona tourism industry prints the humpbacked flute player’s likeness on everything imaginable—T-shirts, bath towels, earrings—making Kokopelli ubiquitous to a nauseating degree. This was enough to ruin Kokopelli for Chris, but the rusty metal pipe scraped away the last vestiges of benevolence the flute player may have represented. From then on, any time Chris drove through Valle, anytime he went to see a movie, do some shopping, or transport a prisoner to Flagstaff, he saw that damn Kokopelli pipe. And every time he saw that pipe, it reminded the ranger of a dead boy lying in the dust in front of a gift shop parking lot.
16
CRASH
Chris Fors snatched the radio mike out of its clamp, brought it up to the soft blond hairs of his cop-style mustache, pushed the button with his thumb, and said, “Copy.” This came out more like “Caahpy,” but the dispatcher was as familiar with the ranger’s Massachusetts accent as she was accustomed to the deliberate lack of emotion in his voice. Despite its urgency, the call did not bring on the adrenaline fix Chris craved. The Grand Canyon airport was the third busiest in the state of Arizona. Rangers responded to emergency landings several times a year. Usually the planes landed safely.
On February 13, 1995, a plane returning to Las Vegas from a trip to the Grand Canyon lost power to one of its engines. A Taiwanese family had chartered the flight as part of their whirlwind tour of several American parks. Eight were on board—the pilot and seven passengers: a father and his three daughters, two sons-in-law, and an aunt. Soon after takeoff from the Grand Canyon airport, the pilot informed air traffic controllers that he was going to attempt an emergency landin
g in the forest a few miles south of the airport. It was the last radio communication the pilot made.
Witnesses saw the plane disappear into the forest north of the runway. When the park dispatcher passed on this information, Chris grimaced. Chances were, there would be no survivors. Chances were, it would be another damn fatality. And it wouldn’t be pretty. The crash site was three miles from the nearest paved road. From the air, a helicopter pilot directed the ground rescuers to the scene. A recent winter storm had blanketed the South Rim with two inches of snow, turning the ground into a slippery, sloppy mess.
* * *
Every winter tropical storms gather moisture from the coast of Mexico and haul it inland, sometimes dumping two feet of snow on the South Rim. At seven thousand feet, the winter nights are bitter cold. In the morning the cold air, which is heavier, sinks—to the disappointment of travelers paying the park entrance fee before they realize their view of the Grand Canyon is obscured by low clouds.
With a New England upbringing and Nordic genes, ranger Chris Fors preferred the winter weather. For one, the slower season allowed time for all the social events he missed during the hectic summer—potluck dinners, holiday parties, short vacations back home to visit family. After the storms, he could ski the trails near the rim on his days off, taking time to contemplate the park’s beauty and stopping long enough to appreciate how a dusting of snow made the canyon reds seem even redder.
Sometimes the snows caused trouble. Earlier that winter, Chris responded to an accident involving a family from his home state. A few miles outside the park boundary, a Jeep Cherokee slid across yards of icy road until it was stopped by a pickup truck. Inside the Jeep was a family of four from Massachusetts. Three of them were dead or dying. Someone wrapped a scratchy government-issue wool blanket around the survivor and put her in the ambulance. When Chris stepped inside the ambulance to retrieve something, he saw a five-year-old girl sitting on the gurney. “Ranger,” the girl said, looking Chris in the eye. “What’s wrong with my mommy and daddy?”
Ranger Confidential Page 12