The Manhunt for Christopher Dorner
A disgraced ex-LAPD officer swore revenge on those he blamed for his firing. He vowed to kill them all … and their families.
The Manhunt
A Killer Vanishes
The Mountain
Chapter One: Murder in Irvine
A double killing, a vengeful plan, a wave of fear
By Christopher Goffard, Joel Rubin and Kurt Streeter
Illustrations by Doug Stevens
December 8, 2013
Police are baffled by the slaying of a young couple with no known enemies. The more they learn, the more ominous the crime becomes.
Manhattan Beach
The man emerged from a charcoal-gray pickup and approached the hotel check-in counter. He wanted a room and the Internet pass code. He was 6 feet tall, with a weightlifter’s build and military posture. But he could transform his soft, round face into a picture of amiability. He struck the night manager as personable and disarming.
Inside Room 116 of the Hi View Inn & Suites in Manhattan Beach, he stared at his Facebook page and a lifetime’s worth of grudges. It is not clear how long he had labored on the unusual document on the screen.
It was a rambling, free-associating screed in which he asserted firm opinions on politicians, journalists, comedians and television shows. It was a brew of hatreds, a sustained cry of self-pity and self-justification, and a blueprint.
One touch of a button would make it public, once people knew where to look.
It was 1:15 a.m. on Monday, Feb. 4.
Click.
Irvine
Hours earlier, Irvine Police Det. Victoria Hurtado was crouched in the evening chill, studying an enormous diamond ring on a dead woman’s hand. It was one of her first clues. “This is not a robbery,” she thought.
The victim was in the passenger seat of a white Kia Optima, parked on the rooftop lot of an upmarket condo complex on Scholarship Drive. She was Asian, in a pretty blue dress. Beside her, a young black man was slumped over the steering wheel. Both were riddled with bullets, with fatal shots to the back of their heads.
Stepping carefully amid 14 shell casings scattered on the pavement, Hurtado noticed powder burns around the bullet holes in the windows. It was a close-range ambush, and as cold a scene as the detective had seen in 17 years on the force.
There was no evidence of a fight. It was as if the killer, possessed by an impersonal fury, had not known the victims at all.
Hurtado looked up at the high-rise apartments that towered above the garage. Hundreds of people would have had a plain view of the shooting, if they had peered out their windows. Hundreds should have heard it.
Five floors below, news crews were assembling. Murder was startling news in Irvine, which boasted of being America’s safest midsized city — 65 square miles of gleaming corporate parks and master-planned neighborhoods.
Just after midnight, the department received a call. It was from Randal Quan, a retired Los Angeles Police Department captain. He had seen the news and recognized the condo complex. His 28-year-old daughter, Monica, lived there with her 26-year-old fiance, Keith Lawrence.
Quan had grown increasingly worried. He had been trying to call his daughter. She was not answering. He came to the Irvine police station with his wife and grown son. They were a close family. Detectives led them to a private interview room.
Quan described his daughter. He had seen her earlier that day. She had been wearing a blue dress.
Neither Monica Quan nor Keith Lawrence seemed capable of making an enemy.
He had been a security officer at USC. She had coached women’s basketball at Cal State Fullerton.
A few days earlier, Lawrence had asked her to close her eyes as he led her into their condo. He had arranged rose petals on the carpet in the shape of a heart. He knelt and asked her to marry him.
“There’s no one more right for us than each other,” he told her, in a scene captured on tape by her brother. “You are my winning lottery ticket.”
Perhaps because she had grown up as a police captain’s daughter, she was guarded about her personal life, even with the young women she coached. But before a team trip to San Luis Obispo she had displayed the big diamond engagement ring and enjoyed the screams of excitement.
Detectives considered every possible theory. They scoured police logs for reports of road rage, on the chance that an aggrieved driver had followed the young couple home. They talked to neighbors and friends, co-workers and family members.
They asked Randal Quan who might want to hurt his daughter. He had been the first Chinese American captain at the LAPD, and had run a squad targeting Asian gangs. In recent years, he had worked as a lawyer representing cops facing termination.
Did someone hate him enough to do this? Someone he had busted? A disgruntled client?
Quan struggled. He could think of no one. He saw himself as a cop who had been respectful to people he arrested. Even losing clients knew he had fought for them.
No one had heard anything. A police canvas of the condominium complex and surrounding buildings confirmed that baffling fact.
The couple had pulled onto the rooftop during the final dramatic minutes of the Super Bowl, when traffic was light. The entry gate recorded their arrival about 7:30 p.m. But police had not learned about the shootings until 9:10 p.m., when a resident walking to his car spotted a body slumped over the Kia’s steering wheel.
Who were they dealing with? A professional hit man? The mob?
How had 14 shots gone unheard? Had everybody been that fixated on the game?
Det. Hurtado would have to wait for ballistics tests to be sure, but she began to suspect that the killer had used a silencer. It was an expensive piece of equipment, the province of Hollywood spies and assassins, not real-world killers.
The possibility carried with it a sense of dread. Who were they dealing with? A professional hit man? The mob?
As the department’s 18-member detective squad scrambled after leads, an investigator visited Cal State Fullerton and found a compelling clue — its significance clear only in hindsight — that someone had been stalking Monica Quan.
A few days earlier, a man had called the athletic department from a blocked number. He said his daughter played for the women’s basketball team, but he was unable to reach her because her cellphone was not working.
He asked for the name of the hotel the team was using during its trip to San Luis Obispo. The request was refused. Would he care to give a callback number? The man hung up.
National City, Calif.
About 100 miles south of Irvine, Pedro Ruelas, 32, arrived at Sound Solutions Auto Styling to open for business Monday morning.
Some DUI arrests had cost him his job driving forklifts years back, by his account, and now he worked seven days a week at the small auto-repair lot in downtown National City, a few miles north of the Mexican border. He was the first one in, last one out.
And so, as he did every morning, Ruelas emptied the garbage, wheeling one of the gray trash cans to a small graffiti-scrawled garbage bin in the alley next to the lot.
As he approached the bin, he noticed what looked like police or military equipment lying atop the heap. Most striking was a steel-plated ballistic vest. The shape reminded him of the emblem on Superman's chest.
His first thought was that he might be able to sell the gear. But he reconsidered: The police might want to know about so unusual a find. He flagged down the first cop he saw.
Officer Paul Hernandez pulled on latex gloves and began to look.
One ballistic vest.
Two military-style ammunition cans, each with several hundred bullets.
Two cans of olive-drab spray paint, the kind SWAT members use to camouflage their helmets and rifles.
One military-surplus gasoline container, plastic, empty.
Two mortar-tube containers, empty. One black leather police duty belt, with thigh holsters and an expandable baton.
Two AR-15 magazine pouches.
One dark blue LAPD uniform, extra large.
Watch: Evidence discovered in National City dumpster
“When I looked inside the dumpster, I saw that there was a LAPD uniform that had the nameplate of Dorner on it.” — National City Police Officer Paul Hernandez
One police officer’s field notebook, with a cover bearing two handwritten names and serial numbers:
DORNER #37381
EVANS #31050
Hernandez placed the gear carefully in his squad car and drove to the station house.
He carried the equipment downstairs to the property room and began labeling the items for storage. Another officer might have simply filed a Found Property report and forgotten about it.
Hernandez feared that another cop had been the victim — that someone had stolen the equipment and dumped it in a panic.
At 10:16 a.m. he told the dispatcher to call the LAPD to run down the names and numbers on the notebook.
The answer came back quickly. There was no Dorner now on the force. But there was an Evans.
In keeping with her prework ritual, Teresa Evans had driven to the beach that Monday morning, drank a leisurely cup of coffee and read the Los Angeles Times on her iPad. She saw a brief story about the double homicide in Irvine.
Evans was 48, with short, dyed blond hair, an 18-year veteran of the LAPD. She was a field sergeant, athletically built but physically unimposing, five feet tall, 115 pounds. On the street, her bulky utility belt made her seem even smaller.
Off duty, she spent much of her time hauling her teenage son and his teammates to soccer practice.
Right now, as she was preparing for her late-morning run on the beach, her phone rang.
“I’m just calling about some property,” Officer Hernandez said.
She listened to the strange account of the discarded items. No, she said, she had not been the victim of a theft.
She heard the name Dorner. Anxiety gripped her.
Christopher Dorner had been her trainee six years ago, she said, a problem cop who had been fired. She had no clue where he was now, or why his gear would be in a National City trash bin.
She and Dorner had shared a patrol car in San Pedro, near the ports. He had been a probationary officer just back from a year overseas with the Navy.
She thought little of his abilities. He was sloppy and ham-fisted. He had accidentally shot himself in the hand at the Police Academy. Once, responding to a “man with a gun” call, he had walked directly toward the suspect without seeking cover.
He told Evans that the LAPD had discriminated against him as a black man, and that he intended to sue. He wept in the patrol car. She saw him as unstable, perpetually angry and frustrated, eager to see racism in every encounter.
Dorner was deemed a liar and fired.
After she warned him that he needed to improve his policework, Dorner filed a complaint that she had kicked a handcuffed, mentally ill man in the head and chest during an arrest outside a hotel. During the resulting internal investigation, Evans was put on desk duty and prevented from working overtime or off-duty security jobs. She described the ordeal as a “nightmare.”
The LAPD interviewed hotel employees, who said they had seen none of the alleged kicks. The LAPD found it fatal to Dorner’s credibility that he had waited two weeks after the incident before complaining.
He sat before a Board of Rights hearing in December 2008, accused of making the story up. That session took place on the fifth floor of the Bradbury Building downtown, a place informally called “The Ovens.” It is where, police said, they went to get burned.
Dorner was deemed a liar and fired. Evans knew he held her responsible. She recalled the way he had looked at her during the hearing.
It was not a scowl, not a grimace of anger, but something spookier. Her lawyer described it as the “stare of somebody whose mind is racing 100 miles an hour.”
Armed guards stood watch as Dorner was led from the building.
For the next six months, she had carried her service Glock everywhere. She wore it to the bathroom, to the grocery store, to her son’s soccer games. When she drove home, she circled the block to make sure Dorner wasn’t following her, or waiting to ambush her.
Sooner or later, she believed, he would try to find her.
Evans said goodbye to the National City officer and hung up. She was no longer in the mood for her morning run. She wasn’t sure what to do with the information he had given her, or what it might mean.
She supervised the graveyard shift on Venice Beach that night, the phone call never far from her thoughts.
Point Loma, Calif.
“Is anybody going out?”
The man asking the question stood on a weather-beaten old pier at Driscoll’s Wharf, amid the motley fleet of squid and swordfish boats in Point Loma. It was Tuesday morning.
Dockhand Jeremy Smith noticed the stranger’s shaved head, military boots and hulking size, and thought he must be from Naval Base San Diego, a few miles south. He did not look like the ordinary visitor. Big black dude, he thought. That’s way out of place.
Smith, 41, found the stranger friendly and likable.
He did not seem like the hard men he had met during his stints in lockup for DUI arrests, nor like the men he lived with now at a halfway house.
The big stranger gave his name as Mike, and said he would soon be sent to war in Afghanistan. He wanted to get in some fishing first. He was willing to pay $200 to fish in Mexican waters.
Smith thought he should help a man heading to war. He led him around the docks, past the stacks of steel-mesh lobster cages and piles of netting, looking for a boat.
Nobody was going out for marlin and swordfish; the water was cold, the fish lethargic. One captain found it odd that a man headed to war would want to spend time fishing, rather than with a woman.
Why not a sport boat? Smith asked the stranger. Why not whale-watching?
“I don’t want to whale-watch,” the stranger replied.
The stranger disappeared and came back with a bag of yellowtail and halibut tacos.
He passed them out to the men on Pier 6 and refused to take their money.
Smith explained that he couldn’t take him out on the water himself, because the terms of his jail release didn’t allow him to leave the harbor. He couldn’t risk being spotted by the Harbor Patrol.
“Nazis,” Smith said.
The stranger sympathized. He had a friend who had been fired from the police force, he said, and he didn’t like cops.
Venice
That afternoon, Teresa Evans drove to the LAPD’s Pacific Area station to begin her overnight shift. She suited up and led roll call for the eight officers under her command. She and her crew headed to their cars, preparing their gear.
She overheard a group of cops chatting nearby. The subject was an officer’s upcoming disciplinary hearing. The officer needed strong representation, someone said — a good lawyer like Randal Quan, the former LAPD captain turned attorney.
Quan wouldn’t be available any time soon, another cop said.
“His daughter was murdered.”
The hair prickled on the back of Evans’ neck. She felt vaguely sick.
Until now, she hadn’t known that the young woman shot to death in Irvine two nights ago had been Quan’s daughter.
She remembered that Quan had represented Dorner at his Board of Rights hearing, and she knew that Dorner had blamed everyone involved for his firing, including his lawyer. Was there a connection, somehow, to the stash of Dorner’s gear in the trash bin?
This might be crazy.” — LAPD Sgt. Teresa Evans
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It was a busy night on the Venice beach detail. Fights, drunks, homeless calls. But her mind returned repeatedly to the possibility that Dorner had killed the young Irvine couple.
No, she told herself. It’s too much of a long-shot.
At the station house that night, she paused in her paperwork and told another cop, “Let me run this by you.”
The other cop listened and said, “You’ve got to call.”
By 11:15 p.m. Evans was on the phone with the Irvine Police Department’s watch commander, who called the home of the detective-squad sergeant, who promptly called Evans to hear her story.
“This might be crazy,” she began.
Det. Hurtado arrived at the Irvine station before dawn Wednesday. Her sergeant held out a piece of yellow notebook paper bearing Christopher Dorner’s name.
Hurtado ran it through the databases. He had no criminal record. He was a Navy reservist. He owned a Nissan Titan pickup. He had a house in Las Vegas. He had a mother and sister in La Palma, south of Los Angeles. He owned a lot of guns, including 9-millimeter Glocks. The shell casings at the murder scene had been 9-millimeter.
Watch: No immediate leads in a double homicide
“He had, in a sense, now declared war on law enforcement.” — Irvine Det. Victoria Hurtado
She sent two detectives to National City to examine Dorner’s gear. They learned that an employee at a second auto shop — just down the alley from the first — had found more of Dorner’s equipment in a trash bin. A SWAT-style helmet. A military-style backpack. A magazine with 9-millimeter bullets.
Detectives located a surveillance camera that showed Dorner pulling into the alley in his Titan early Monday, the morning after the shootings. He could be seen climbing out to toss away the items. He seemed to be in no rush.
He had picked an alley in plain view of the National City police station, as if he had hoped to be spotted and confronted.
Back in Irvine, detectives drafted search warrants for Dorner’s home and his mother’s home. If they found him, they were intent on taking him in. But they were not sure they had enough to charge him with murder.
They sought a stopgap measure, to hold him as the case was being built. They found it in the expandable baton Dorner had cast away. He could be charged with possession of a prohibited weapon. When he lost his badge, he had lost his right to carry it.
Hurtado placed calls to the LAPD, trying to find Dorner’s personnel file. She kept getting voice mails. People were out of the office, or on vacation.
She left her call-back number, and tried to keep the details vague. She had no contacts at the LAPD; as far as she knew, Dorner might still have friends there. If she didn’t proceed cautiously, someone might alert him to her interest.
Then she called Randal Quan, and asked:
Does the name Christopher Dorner mean anything to you?
This is a necessary evil that I do not enjoy but must partake and complete... ” — Christopher Dorner
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She heard silence. Then she heard him gasp and say, “Oh my God. That guy’s crazy.”
Quan explained that he had represented Dorner at his Board of Rights hearing. He said Dorner had blamed him for his firing and was a man obsessed with the concept of his own integrity. He possessed “kind of a hero syndrome,” Quan said.
In her notebook, the detective wrote:
“Hero syndrome.”
Hurtado called one of the slain couple’s friends. During the conversation, an email arrived on her desktop computer. It was from a detective down the hall conducting a Web search. It had a link to Dorner’s Facebook page.
“From: Christopher Jordan Dorner
“To: America
“Subj: Last resort
Read Dorner’s manifesto »
“I know most of you who personally know me are in disbelief to hear from media reports that I am suspected of committing such horrendous murders and have taken drastic and shocking actions in the last couple of days,” the posting began.
“Unfortunately, this is a necessary evil that I do not enjoy but must partake and complete for substantial change to occur within the LAPD and reclaim my name. The department has not changed since the Rampart and Rodney King days. It has gotten worse....”
It was 1:59 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 6. Hurtado hung up and called Quan to tell him he was in danger.
Dozens of detectives were getting the same email, reading it on desktops and smartphones. Down the hall, Irvine’s police chief was meeting with his command staff. The detective sergeant ran over and stuck his head in.
“I need some help,” he said.
Chapter Two
Fear and the City
Chapter Two: Fear and the City
A deadly threat ripples through the LAPD
By Christopher Goffard, Joel Rubin and Kurt Streeter
Illustrations by Doug Stevens
December 10, 2013
Officers rush to protect targets of Christopher Dorner’s vendetta. His former training officer, guarded at home, fears for her life.
Los Angeles
Just after 2 p.m. at the LAPD’s sleek, 10-story glass tower, the phones began beeping furiously.
Police in Irvine, an hour south, had alerted their Los Angeles counterparts to a terrifying Facebook post. Its author, a disgraced LAPD patrolman, had vowed to murder his former colleagues en masse.
His targets ran through the ranks. Patrol officers were targets. Sergeants were targets. Captains were targets. The chief was a target. Families were targets.
It was Wednesday, Feb. 6. An impromptu war room sprang up on the fifth floor of LAPD’s downtown headquarters. Detectives in the robbery-homicide squad tore through Christopher Dorner’s online tirade and tallied the names on a white board. They quickly counted 30 people who needed protection.
Sirens screamed across freeways in every direction. About 200 cops went in the first wave of protection details. Specialized units were the easiest to mobilize, so gang squads went. Vice squads went. Twenty off-duty cops from the elite Metro division went. Ordinary patrol cops went.
The potential victims were scattered across thousands of square miles — across L.A. County’s far-flung suburbs, from its northern edge to deep inside Orange County, from the beach cities in the west to Riverside County in the east.
Every target would get a “scarecrow” detail: At least two cops, uniformed and visible. There was no time to ask permission of the many local police agencies whose territories the LAPD would be entering, no time to debate or negotiate.
Get there! commanders barked into radios and cellphones. Go! We’ll clean it up later!
Dorner’s 11,000-word document, which people began calling “the manifesto,” was all at once a confession, an extended threat and a summing-up of the life its 33-year-old author soon expected to depart.
It was an open letter to America, and a ramble through pop culture, politics and personal grievance.
How accurately the document reflected the facts of his life is unclear. But it vividly illustrated how he perceived his life. He was a prideful man who believed the world had failed to recognize his great gifts. Victimhood was his singular theme.
No one grows up and wants to be a cop killer, he wrote. It was against everything I’ve ever been....
Dorner was raised in a series of middle-class cities where, as one of the few black kids, he felt like an outsider: Cerritos, Pico Rivera, La Palma, Thousand Oaks. His mother was a nurse. His father was absent.
In first grade at Norwalk Christian School, he wrote, the principal swatted him for punching a student who had taunted him with a racial slur. The swattings from authority figures continued through junior high, he claimed, when he dared to stand up to bigots.
When he arrived at the LAPD, he wrote, he found it a nest of racists. In the Police Academy, he complained about another recruit’s use of a racial slur and was shunned. On patrol with the LAPD, he complained that his training officer had kicked a mentally ill man, and in response the department conspired to destroy him. He had dared, he said, to violate the Code of Silence.
He vowed to hunt members of the Board of Rights who had heard his case. He would hunt the LAPD hierarchy that had sanctioned his punishment. He was convinced that his former lawyer, Randal Quan, had been loyal to the LAPD rather than to him. He would hunt him and his loved ones.
I never had the opportunity to have a family of my own, I’m terminating yours...
He bragged of his marksmanship and tactical prowess. He would kill Caucasian officers who victimized minorities. He would kill black officers who belittled their Caucasian subordinates and fueled anti-black bigotry. He would kill Latino officers who victimized other Latinos. He would kill lesbian officers who degraded men.
He praised his knee surgeon, President Obama, the first lady’s hairstyle, George W. Bush, Charlie Sheen, Chick-fil-A chicken and Bill Cosby. He told Gov. Chris Christie to go on a diet, and told David Petraeus that his marital failings were human. He told Natalie Portman she was beautiful. He quoted Mia Farrow on the moral urgency of gun control.
He knew he would die, and lamented what he would not get to see. He would miss “The Hangover III,” and told the director not to diminish the franchise with another sequel. He would miss season three of “The Walking Dead.” He would miss Shark Week.
From his 10th-floor office, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck was trying to coordinate the agency’s response and keep his family safe. He called his wife and told her to assemble the family at home, fast.
“He has a vendetta list,” he said. “We’re on it.”
Beck had not been chief when Dorner was fired, but he was the public face of the department. Two of Beck’s kids wore LAPD badges. He ordered them pulled off duty.
Chief Beck, Dorner had written, this is when you need to have that come to Jesus talk with Sgt. Teresa Evans and everyone else who was involved in the conspiracy to have me terminated for doing the right thing....
He has a vendetta list. We’re on it.” — LAPD Chief Charlie Beck
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Studying Dorner’s words, Beck thought, “He’s an injustice collector.” He blamed everyone else for his failures.
Beck was struck by the length of the tirade. This was no fleeting howl of homicidal rage but the chilling product, it seemed, of months-long planning and forethought.
Dorner had invoked the most highly charged controversies of the LAPD’s past. The beating of Rodney King. The Rampart scandal. The specter of Mark Fuhrman.
As chief for more than three years, Beck had helped to transform the 10,000-officer department. In black neighborhoods, its image as an occupying army had abated. Its 11% of black officers now roughly mirrored the city’s demographics.
Yet Beck understood, even at a glance, the combustible elements at play. True or false, Dorner’s accusations would resonate with people predisposed to believe them. And so today the chief turned to his media spokesman and asked:
“Is this the thing?”
If the public turned against the LAPD in the days ahead, Beck knew, he would have to take the blame himself.
He did not need to explain. He meant the thing that spiraled out of control so badly that it forced him from his job. He reckoned the odds at 50-50 that it would happen someday.
Everyone who served as chief in the nation’s second-largest city woke up knowing today might be the day.
Beck sometimes wondered what his predecessor, Daryl F. Gates, had thought on first viewing the grainy footage of his white officers beating Rodney King. Beck had been a sergeant on the front lines in 1992 when the cops were acquitted and rioting swept the city.
Gates had been untouchable. Then he was gone.
Now, a man the LAPD had trained was promising to bring war to its doorstep. If the public turned against the LAPD in the days ahead, Beck knew, he would have to take the blame himself.
“None of us bury our past,” he would say. “You don’t bury it. You carry it.”
Teresa Evans, Dorner’s former training officer, was sitting in her SUV when she got the call. She was outside her home in a Los Angeles suburb, about to leave for her son’s soccer game.
“It’s a credible threat,” an Irvine sergeant was telling her.
She looked around quickly. Would Dorner be coming around the corner, gun blazing? It would be easy for him to find her here. She had to get away, fast.
Her cellphone rang again. Two LAPD captains told her they were sending protection to meet her, and would call her back with a rendezvous point.
“Stay mobile,” they said. “Don’t go home.”
She drove to the soccer field. There, she met her ex-husband and explained. He would watch their son for now. She hoped that if Dorner came, he would come only after her.
She still did not feel safe. She feared that Dorner might take aim from a freeway visible from her window.
Back on the road, she checked the mirrors constantly. She recalled Dorner bragging about his experience in military intelligence. Was he monitoring her phone’s GPS? She flipped abrupt U-turns. She pulled onto the freeway, pulled off, pulled on.
She steered with her left hand, so her right could quickly grab her duty Glock, squeezed in its holster between the driver’s seat and the center console.
She called a hotel in Orange County and booked a room. She headed that way.
Her phone rang again. A security team would meet her in a church parking lot near her home.
She drove to the meeting point, but there were no officers in sight. She waited nearby, her gun close.
Then help came screaming down the block, a pack of patrol cars — 10 or more, she guessed — roaring her way.
Soon there were cops with assault rifles in Teresa Evans’ living room, in her kitchen, ringing her house. They drew the curtains and covered the windows with blankets. They shoved the couch against the window of her son’s room, unscrewed the porch lights and deactivated the motion sensors.
She still did not feel safe. She feared that Dorner might take aim from a freeway visible from her window.
You destroyed my life and name because of your actions, he had written. Time is up.
She dumped her Facebook page. She turned off her phone’s GPS tracker.
When her son came hobbling through the door, his ankle injured during the afternoon’s soccer game, she tried to explain the presence of the SWAT team in vague terms.
Something is going on, she said, and everything will be OK.
She did not say, “Someone wants to murder us.”
People who had known Dorner for years were shocked to see his smiling face on fliers and television screens. One of them was a San Diego police officer named Dulani Jackson. He had been friends with Dorner since they had attended Cypress High School.
Jackson, who is also black, said Dorner had complained about being bullied by racists at his former high school in La Palma. Dorner liked to say that if a girl disrespected him, he would beat up her boyfriend. Or take it out on her family.
After Dorner’s firing from the LAPD in 2009, Jackson had driven to Dorner’s home in Vegas to keep him company. He found him in a deep depression. Dorner blamed the LAPD for tarnishing his name and thereby sabotaging his career in the Navy. Only two days before the Irvine killings, the Navy had officially discharged him.
Dorner had abruptly cut Jackson out of his life, with a text citing a litany of long-simmering grievances. He resented that Jackson hadn’t attended his graduation from Southern Utah University. He resented that Jackson hadn’t visited him in the hospital, after he shot himself in the hand in the Police Academy.
Jackson could picture Dorner alone in his Vegas home, isolated from family, cut off from friends, with nothing to do but seethe. He knew that Dorner had started buying silencers about a year ago. That, he reasoned, was probably when he began to plan his murder campaign.
Like Jackson, many who knew Dorner understood that his memory for slights — real or imagined — was vast. He was always adding up the score.
A former girlfriend, Denise Jensen, remembered that he had been a perfect gentleman at first. He liked to open doors for her. He bought her a nice watch and an iPod. In a tantrum, he seized the gifts and gave them to a stranger at a gas station. Worthier of my kindness, he explained.
He made friends effortlessly but turned on them in an instant. “You just don’t know until he starts turning,” Jensen said.
In July 2009, months after their breakup, Dorner logged onto Facebook and used a fake name — “Mike Crawford” — to lure her to a date at a Las Vegas restaurant. He cornered her in the ladies room and left only after staff threatened to call police.
Another ex-girlfriend had posted a warning on the website Don’tDateHimGirl.com, saying: “If you value your sanity, stay away from this guy.” She described him as “super paranoid always thinking somebody’s out to get him.”
When people asked Dorner about the multitude of firearms he kept close at hand, he would reply that trouble might come any time. J’Anna Hendricks, a manicurist who briefly rented a room from him, discovered guns hidden in the couch cushions.
At first, she found him a model of friendliness. He took her to dinner. She was white, and he jokingly called her a cracker. She called him a wheat cracker and said he was the whitest black guy she knew. She thought it was good fun, though she sensed it annoyed him.
One day he invited her to his room and displayed his laptop. On it were naked photos of himself and some of his girlfriends. He seemed to be testing whether she would sleep with him. She left the room fast. Soon afterward, Dorner stormed into her room and screamed, “I want you out tonight!”
In recent months, Dorner had frequented the Lahaina Grill on the outskirts of Vegas, a dimly lit restaurant where he sat with his back against the wall. He drank bottled water and ate sushi, sharing YouTube clips on his MacBook with other patrons and holding forth on politics.
He said he favored background checks for assault-rifle purchasers, including cops. “Hey,” he told a bartender, “we can snap.”
San Diego
On Wednesday night, not far from the wharf where he had been trying to charter a boat to Mexican waters, the fugitive walked onto the docks of the Southwestern Yacht Club in San Diego.
The ungated club was at the end of an out-of-the-way, affluent neighborhood. A yacht called Vivere II was moored in slip A20.
Inside, the 81-year-old owner, Carlos Caprioglio, was watching television. He would later tell police that he heard footsteps but was not automatically alarmed. He assumed it was his wife, returning from a trip to Los Angeles.
Watch: Fishing for a ride out of San Diego Harbor
“That’s what the question is... was it going to be a one-way trip for the person who took him?” — San Diego fisherman Mike Flynn on his chance encounter with Dorner
Then Dorner was there, pointing a black semiautomatic handgun at him. “I don’t want to kill you,” he said, “but you’re gonna take me to Mexico.”
Dorner took hold of the rope that moored the boat to the dock. A boater of even casual experience knew to throw the rope onto the dock. Instead, Dorner threw it into the water.
Dorner ordered Caprioglio to start the boat. The rope became entangled in the prop. They weren’t going anywhere. It seemed to dawn on Dorner that he had botched his plan.
“Take my car keys,” Caprioglio said. “Take my car.”
“I don’t want to be on the streets,” Dorner said.
He found a pair of Caprioglio’s shoes, and removed the laces. He ordered him to lie face-down, with his right cheek pressed to the sun deck. He tied his hands and feet with the laces, stole his cellphone and disappeared.
By the time Caprioglio had freed himself and had summoned help, just before 10 p.m, Dorner was gone.
Los Angeles
With SWAT troops sitting in her darkened living room drinking soda, Teresa Evans crawled under her bedcovers Wednesday night. She thought this would prevent Dorner from seeing the glow of her iPhone — just in case he was out there, watching and waiting for his shot.
“He’s going to shoot me through my window and kill me,” she kept thinking.
All night she traded texts with cops and friends, searching for any scrap of news. She knew she wouldn’t sleep.
Her son was down the hall. To make things easier on him, she had assured him: “It’s going to be over by tomorrow.”
This was a mistake she would make more than once.
Chapter Three
Longest Night
Chapter Three: Longest Night
On a night of fear, violent ambushes in the streets
By Christopher Goffard, Louis Sahagun, Kurt Streeter and Phil Willon
Illustrations by Doug Stevens
December 12, 2013
In Corona and Riverside, Christopher Dorner fires on police. At 4 a.m., a doorbell awakens a wife. In Torrance, cops make potentially lethal mistakes.
Riverside
Michael Crain’s wife demanded one thing of him, whenever he put on his uniform, secured his badge on his chest and patrolled the streets of Riverside overnight.
He had to text her that he was OK. If she woke she could glance at her phone and take reassurance. He thought the ritual was silly, because he might run into trouble five minutes later, but he did it anyway.
On the night of Wednesday, Feb. 6, as he did before every shift, Crain, 34, took pains to shed every vestige of his non-cop identity. He made sure there were no family photos in his wallet, in case it flopped open in a chase. He took off his wedding ring and put it on his nightstand.
In the streets, it was best to be a man without vulnerabilities.
Suspects would see a muscular, buzz-cut, 6-foot-3 ex-Marine. Not a father who coached his 10-year-old son’s baseball team, made his 4-year-old daughter breakfast every morning and learned to tie her ponytail. Not a man who liked the Food Network, Lynyrd Skynyrd and wearing zebra-striped platform shoes to disco parties.
A suspect had tried to follow him home once. This was safer.
Regina Crain had guessed he was ex-military the day they met, from the way he held out his chest and kept his hair high-and-tight. He had left the Marines before 9/11 and felt guilty he hadn’t stayed to fight, but she was glad he had avoided war. Her first husband had fought in Fallujah, and she had seen too many military funerals.
Tonight, she watched him pack his duffel bag for work — backup gun, badge clip, loose change, hair gel, boot polish, Tums. She knew that he liked the graveyard shift, because it was rarely dull, and that he would be disappointed if he came home saying, “I didn’t find any bad guys.”
Tonight was his last shift with an officer he was training named Andrew Tachias, and he had reassured her that he was an alert, safety-conscious cop. “He’s good to go,” he said. “I’m basically just teaching him paperwork.”
She stood on the stairway step, to reach him, and kissed him and told him to hurry home. They were approaching their second wedding anniversary. She knew he liked to get to work an hour before his 10 p.m. roll call, so he could dress at his locker and practice quick-drawing his gun.
A fanatic for safety, Michael Crain lectured his family never to leave a purse or a Gameboy in the car in plain view. At the mall, his kids knew to avoid his gun-hand side, in case the wrong person recognized him.
Before she went to sleep that night, Regina Crain checked her Facebook page. She saw that police were chasing someone named Christopher Dorner, an ex-LAPD officer who had vowed revenge against his former agency and had killed two people in Irvine.
She didn’t think much about it. Los Angeles was a full hour’s drive west.
At 11:43 p.m. she texted her husband: “Good night sexy man!”
She knew that if she woke up in the middle of the night, his reply would be waiting for her, assuring her he was OK.
Corona, Calif.
In the small hours of that Thursday morning, a self-employed repo man stricken with bladder cancer was beginning work about an hour east of L.A.
Lee McDaniel, 49, the son of a retired Cleveland cop, had just left the side of his sleeping wife. Now he pulled his big Chevrolet truck up to a pump at the Arco station on Weirick Road in Corona.
Since the cancer had invaded his cells, he often felt weak, but he was determined not to lie on the couch and wither away. Work kept him busy and got his mind off his illness.
His first eight-hour chemotherapy session was to begin later that morning. He was on the road now because he wanted to exhaust himself, in order to sleep soundly as the machine pumped poison into his arm.
But first he had a few hours’ work to get through, so he activated the gas pump and let it run as he walked into the AM/PM minimart to buy bottles of 5-Hour Energy. Standing in line at the counter, he felt what he described as a “hulking presence” come up behind him.
He turned. The man behind him was as big as a linebacker. They exchanged a quick look. McDaniel thought he looked vaguely familiar — maybe a neighbor, maybe someone he knew from years of coaching Little League.
McDaniel walked back to his truck, holstered the pump and slid behind the wheel. He was pulling past the door of the minimart just as the large man emerged, walking in front of the truck.
Mounted on the hood of McDaniel’s truck were four license plate recognition cameras with telltale lights, the kind police use to track down stolen cars and repo men use to find cars to repossess. He saw the big man notice them.
Now, he noticed Dorner watching him, standing at the Titan’s open door, holding something McDaniel couldn’t see.
Their eyes locked. McDaniel saw the man walk toward a charcoal-gray Nissan Titan at one of the pumps. It had a roof rack, aftermarket black rims and tinted windows.
McDaniel had seen the news. He knew Christopher Dorner was driving a Titan.
McDaniel was unarmed but accustomed to confrontations and able to function under stress. He pulled slowly past the Titan, and stuck his head out the window to get a look at the license plate. It started with an 8.
He remembered that Dorner’s plate started with a 7, according to police. His truck was also supposed to be blue, and this one was gray.
McDaniel stopped his truck at the edge of the lot, close enough to escape down the street if the Titan owner pulled a gun. On his smartphone, he brought up a story about Dorner and found the plate police were distributing: 7X03191.
He typed it into his laptop, running it through a plate database. Up came a photo of a gray Nissan Titan. Roof rack, cover. It was the truck at the pump behind him.
The police had the color wrong, and McDaniel assumed Dorner had switched plates.
Now, he noticed Dorner watching him, standing at the Titan’s open door, holding something McDaniel couldn’t see.
McDaniel pulled onto Weirick Road. He made a U-turn. He parked across the street from the gas station.
He thought Dorner might follow him. Instead, Dorner turned right out of the station, hooked another quick right and disappeared.
McDaniel was trying to call police when he saw an LAPD patrol car pull off Interstate 15 and head into the gas station. He flashed his lights, to signal them, and drove over the median to meet them.
The officers were in Corona to protect one of Dorner’s targets. The guy you’re looking for was just here, McDaniel said.
Dorner was about 100 feet away, with firepower that vastly overwhelmed them.
At that moment, the Titan reappeared. Dorner drove past the gas station and pulled onto a freeway on-ramp.
“That’s him,” McDaniel said.
McDaniel saw one of the officers drop his notebook and radio as he hurried to the patrol car. McDaniel picked them up and tossed them into the police car.
The officers followed Dorner onto Interstate 15, heading north, hanging back a safe distance. They were trying to confirm it was Dorner’s truck.
Five miles along, the patrol car followed Dorner down the Magnolia Avenue offramp to the street. Dorner was waiting at the curb beside his parked truck. He opened fire with his assault rifle, riddling the patrol car with .223-caliber rounds.
The officers ducked. They tried to fire back with their handguns, futilely. Dorner was about 100 feet away, with firepower that vastly overwhelmed them. His rounds pierced the squad car’s windshield, punctured a tire, blew out the radiator. It was immobilized in seconds. One bullet grazed an officer’s head. Dorner sped away down Magnolia.
The officers’ radios were out of LAPD broadcast range. They had to rely on cellphones, one of them borrowed from a passing motorist. The delay probably cost minutes in sending a warning.
The 911 call went in at 1:24 a.m.
Riverside
About 10 miles east, Michael Crain and his trainee, Andrew Tachias, were sitting at a red light in their Riverside Police Department patrol car. It was foggy at the intersection of Magnolia and Arlington avenues.
They had ridden together a month, and shared an easy camaraderie. Tachias had plans to marry. His father was an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy, who had excited his son’s boyhood imagination with stories of the job and then tried to talk him out of wearing a badge because of the toll it took on a man’s personal life.
Tachias’ favorite film was “End of Watch,” a violent, harrowing cop drama about a pair of L.A. cops on the job. He watched it before shifts, to psych himself up.
Tonight, Tachias was in the driver’s seat, Crain in the passenger seat. To their left, also stopped at the red light, a 42-year-old Riverside man sat in a Chevrolet Cavalier with flaking paint and missing hubcaps. He was a food-truck driver returning home from work. He glanced at Tachias, who smiled, looking like a man who loved his job.
It was just after 1:30 a.m. Inside the squad car, the radio crackled with news: Dorner was in the area and headed their way.
Parked at the red light, on the other side of the intersection, a 33-year-old man named Karam Kaoud was sitting alone inside a white Crown Victoria with the words BELL CAB CO. on the door.
A Palestinian raised in Dubai, Kaoud had been an American citizen for four months and driving a cab for six. He had a degree in mechanical engineering from Cal State Northridge, but couldn’t find work in the field.
So he put in 15-hour shifts in his father’s cab, often covering 400 miles across Riverside and San Bernardino counties. It was supposed to be temporary.
His father worried about graveyard-shift muggers and crazies. He had called this morning and said, “Please be careful.”
“Inshallah,” Kaoud had replied. God willing. “Don’t worry, Dad.”
A devout Muslim, the cabbie kept the Koran in the glovebox and prayed five times a day. When he couldn’t get to the mosque, he removed the car’s floor mat and flipped it over on the pavement of a quiet parking lot. Then he knelt, a smartphone app pointing him to Mecca.
He lived with his wife, parents, two sisters and his four-month-old son. He had just dropped off a customer at a Denny’s and decided to head to a downtown Riverside restaurant to wait for fares.
As he pulled out of the restaurant parking lot onto Madison Street, he debated which way to go. It made sense to turn right, which would take him to the 91 Freeway and get him there fast. It didn’t make sense to turn left, because the stoplights on Magnolia might cost him three extra minutes.
For reasons he couldn’t explain, he had turned left. That is why he was here at this hour, facing a Riverside police car across an intersection.
He noticed Officer Crain sitting bolt-straight in the passenger seat, completely still.
He was preoccupied with his GPS when he half-noticed the Nissan Titan pulling up on his right. Then he saw the Titan moving forward, as if the light had turned green.
Reflexively, he took his foot off the brake and began to follow. Then he stopped. The light was still red. He watched the Titan cross the intersection and pull up beside the food-truck driver’s Cavalier and the patrol car. At first, he did not understand what he was seeing.
He watched the cold air warped by the heat from a rifle muzzle, just outside the open window of the Titan’s driver’s-side window. The driver was firing over the hood of the Cavalier at the patrol car, in quick, muted bursts.
Within seconds, the Titan was pulling away down Magnolia.
The bullet-riddled patrol car rolled slowly into the intersection.
The cabbie jumped out. Inside the patrol car, he saw the wide-open eyes of Officer Tachias as he sat paralyzed behind the wheel, struggling to breathe, his foot off the brake. He noticed Officer Crain sitting bolt-straight in the passenger seat, completely still.
The cabbie had not heard the name Dorner, and he avoided trouble. He did not know if he could touch a police car; he might be sued. Still, he reached into the car and forced the gear shift into park, producing a grating sound as the car stopped.
He touched Tachias’ shoulder and asked what he could do.
“The radio,” the policeman managed to say. “The radio.”
The cabbie reached for the walkie-talkie at Tachias’ side.
“The other radio,” the policeman said. He meant the walkie-talkie on the dashboard.
The cabbie grabbed it. He pushed the button on the side. He held it to Tachias’ lips. Tachias struggled to form the words.
“Officer down,” he said. He looked at his motionless partner.
The cabbie knew how to work the radio, because he had one just like it, but in his fear his finger was frozen on the button. His eyes darted around the streets. What if the shooter returned? What if there was more than one of them? He noticed the gun on the policeman’s belt. He might have to grab it to defend himself.
“Release your hand,” Tachias said.
He obeyed. A dispatcher said help was on its way.
The cabbie looked at Tachias and knew he was dying. He told him to hang on. He saw the lights of a police car, speeding toward him on Magnolia. He held his hands in the air to show he was unarmed.
He noticed Dorner had been wearing a heavy camouflage jacket and wraparound goggles. It looked like he had been grinning.
He saw two policemen staring in at Crain, then exchanging a look that told him the officer was dead. He saw rescuers pull Tachias onto the ground and heard him say “I’m cold, I’m losing my breath,” while a policeman said, “Keep talking to him.”
Judging from the .223-caliber casings found at the scene, Dorner had fired at least 13 times with his armor-piercing assault rifle. Both officers were rushed to Riverside Community Hospital. Tachias slipped in and out of consciousness. Bullets had struck him in the back, legs and arms, blowing out his shoulder.
Crain had no pulse. Rescuers worked on him frantically for half an hour before pronouncing him dead, but he had probably died right away.
Seven rounds had struck him. They grazed his head, hit his shoulder and thigh, and severed his jugular vein.
One bullet had pierced his badge, ripped through his ballistic vest, and punctured his heart. He had not drawn his gun.
Dorner had disappeared again. The Cavalier driver, Jack Chilson, had tried to pursue him but had grown afraid and stopped.
From just feet away, he had seen Dorner firing at the patrol car. He had seen the bullets punch a circle in the window the size of a paper plate.
He noticed Dorner had been wearing a heavy camouflage jacket and wraparound goggles. It looked like he had been grinning.
San Diego
About 40 minutes after the shooting, a shuttle driver near San Diego International Airport saw a wallet in the road and stopped to pick it up. Inside was a photo ID of Dorner and an LAPD detective’s badge.
The badge turned out to be real, but it was not Dorner’s. He had never been a detective.
Was he playing some kind of game, taunting police with scattered clues? Share this excerpt
The detective who had earned it was dead; the widow could not recall how it had vanished.
Police guessed that Dorner had probably purchased it from a police-memorabilia dealer, and had used it to masquerade as a detective.
Why had Dorner dumped the wallet here, on a well-traveled route where it was likely to be spotted? Did he want them to believe he had flown out of town?
Why, soon after his first killings, had he dumped his police and paramilitary gear in two National City trash bins? Had he been scuttling possessions in hopes of fleeing the country? Or was he playing some kind of game, taunting police with scattered clues?
Torrance
About 5 a.m. Thursday, three and a half hours after the shooting, about 60 miles west of Riverside, an aluminum blue Toyota Tacoma rolled slowly down a wide, well-lit street in Torrance.
In the back seat was Emma Hernandez, 71, who was handing copies of the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal to her daughter, Margie Carranza, 46, who was driving with one hand and tossing papers onto porches with the other.
They were both small women, the mother under five feet tall, the daughter just a little taller. They were from El Salvador and spoke little English.
They had risen that morning in a Torrance tenement with a graffiti-scratched elevator. Hernandez shared the single bedroom with her granddaughter; Carranza slept in the living room near her teenage son.
The women were squirreling away money so that the boy could afford college. They did the two- and-a-half-hour shift seven days a week, 365 days a year, and held down separate jobs as housecleaners.
They drove to the newspaper distribution center to pick up their stack of 400 papers, and began their route. Their custom was to drive with headlights and hazard lights on.
The daughter noticed a police car parked at the corner of Redbeam Avenue and Norton Street, all four doors open, with no officers in sight. She was apprehensive. She never saw police here.
The women did not know that a team of LAPD officers was on the block guarding the house of a captain who had been targeted in Dorner’s manifesto. The police also had just received a radio call that a truck resembling Dorner’s had left the freeway and was headed their way.
The daughter told her mother to stand beside her, fearing they would now be executed.
The truck windows were open, and yet the women heard no orders to stop, no commands to surrender. They heard only the sound of gunfire exploding through the truck.
Glass shattered, and the air filled with splinters of plastic. Bullets flew through the seats, the headrest, the glass. “I am just the newspaper woman!” the daughter yelled, but the shots kept coming.
In the back seat, the mother saw her daughter’s head sway from side to side, and feared she would be shot in the head. “No tengas miedo!” she cried. Don’t be afraid.
She hugged the back of her daughter’s seat, to shield her from the barrage of bullets. She did not want her grandchildren to lose their mother. “God have mercy on our souls!” she said.
One bullet went in high on the right side of her back, and emerged just above the collarbone. Another bullet struck her lower back, close to the spine. A small fragment of glass flew into her eye.
Neither woman could tell how long the shooting lasted. By one estimate, police officers — eight of them — fired more than 100 rounds, and 30 of them missed t