Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [142]
NORTH OF LOS ANGELES—the studios, the beaches, Rodeo Drive—lies a sparsely populated region that comprises fully one half of Los Angeles County. Sprawling across 2,200 square miles, this shadow side of Los Angeles is called the Antelope Valley. It’s in the high Mojave Desert, surrounded by mountain ranges, literally walled off from the city. It is a terrain of savage dignity, a vast amphitheater of startling wonders that put on a show as the megalopolis burrows through the San Gabriel Mountains in its northward march. Packs of coyotes range the sands, their eyes refracting the new four-way stoplight at dusk, green snakes with triangle heads slither past Trader Joe’s, vast armies of ravens patrol the latest eruption of tract mansions you can buy for NOTHING DOWN!
Many have taken the Mojave’s dare, fleeing the quagmire of Los Angeles and starting over in desert towns like Lake Los Angeles, population 14,000. Nestled against giant rocky buttes studded with Joshua trees and chollas and sage, Lake Los Angeles is a frontier paradise where horses graze in front yards and the neighbors say howdy. For the most part, its many longtime residents—a mix of fighter pilots, ranchers, real-estate developers, winemakers, Hispanics who work the region’s onion fields, and blue-collar crews who grease the engine of the Hollywood studio system “down below”—get along just fine. But Lake Los Angeles is also a siphon for fuckups, violent felons, meth chefs, and paroled gang-bangers who live in government-subsidized housing. For years, law-abiding locals felt they were under siege as the city and its problems climbed Highway 14 into the desert, an underpatrolled area where if you called a cop, it might take two hours for a black-and-white to arrive. In 2000, the beleaguered town finally got its own resident deputy—Stephen Sorensen, a ten-year veteran of the sheriff’s department. “Resident deputy” meant that you lived where you worked, a gig that was undesirable to some because it involved solitary travel to remote locations on calls involving violent people. “Out there, you’re a loner,” says Sgt. Vince Burton of the area’s Palmdale station. “Whatever happens you have to deal with it yourself.”
But Sorensen liked the solitude of the desert and was thriving in Lake Los Angeles. He lived in a sprawling, Bonanza-style ranch surrounded by pine groves. He built a corral for his horse and animal runs for the stray dogs and other critters that he always brought home. With his wife and baby, the forty-six-year-old ex-surfer from Manhattan Beach became a desert Andy of Mayberry, buying groceries for poor people, doing yardwork for seniors, brokering deals between minor scofflaws and offended parties when others might have hauled the small-time crooks off to jail. Some residents thought Sorensen had literally been sent by God to carry the cross of goodness into a parched desert wilderness of evil. “Looking back on the whole thing,” one resident recalls, “I see why Steve was in such a rush to do so many things. He didn’t have much time.”
Nobody knows why Sorensen decided to drive onto Donald Kueck’s property on Saturday, August 2, 2003. It was Sorensen’s day off, but when a neighbor of Kueck’s named Wayne Wirt called him that morning with a request, the deputy said no problem, as he always did if someone on his remote desert beat had a need.
Wirt wanted Sorensen to make sure that a squatter who was living between his property and Kueck’s had vacated the premises that day, as required by an eviction notice. The guy had been leaving piles of trash everywhere, taking dumps all over the desert, turning the view from Wirt’s forty-acre spread into one big toilet. The area—a far-flung outpost called Llano—wasn’t really in Sorensen’s jurisdiction, but he lived two miles away, and that meant it was in his back yard.