Let’s do it.
—Gary Gilmore at his execution before a Utah firing squad, January 17, 1977
I will meet them as a bear that is bereaved of her whelps, and will rend the caul of their heart, and there will I devour them like a lion: the wild beast shall tear them.
—Hosea 13:8 (King James version)
“MRS. WELCH, GET OFF THE PHONE.” HOMICIDE DETECTIVE Mark Lillienfeld was calling Kueck’s daughter on the special cell phone that another investigator had given her the day after Kueck killed Sorensen. The trap and trace operation that was running since Day Two of the manhunt had picked up a signal from Don’s cell and traced it to Rebecca’s phone. Kueck, it told them, was back at C.T.’s place, but this time, his buddy was gone; fearing for his life, he had moved to a local motel. Inside his unmarked Crown Vic, Lillienfeld was tearing through a mountain pass across the 60 to Riverside and then placing the urgent call. “Your father is trying to call you,” he said. Becky knew from the tone of Lillienfeld’s voice that things were reaching a finale. But one of her kids had knocked the receiver on her land line off the hook, and the phone was busy. She immediately replaced it and awaited her father’s call.
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.
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.