Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [149]
Then, shortly after the bagpipes sounded and an honor guard placed the deputy’s coffin into the hearse for his last ride, they got their break. On Friday, August 8, a signal from Kueck’s cell phone was picked up coming from the dilapidated compound where Ron Steres lived. Maybe it was because Kueck’s birthday was in two weeks and he couldn’t face the idea of another year, or maybe he was just tired of hiding, tired of the whole thing. According to the Annals of Emergency Medicine, at least ten percent of the shootings involving the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department are cases of “suicide by cop.” If that was the goal, Kueck was about to get his wish.
It was the third time that week that Kueck had shown up to see Steres; a woman who lived in the house next door saw him appear on a bicycle like a desert mirage. This time, though, Steres was gone when Kueck arrived: fearing for his life, he had moved to a local motel. The SWAT team closed in, setting up a perimeter with snipers. It was time for the heavy artillery. A SWAT commander placed a call to L.A. police, 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.
Around noon, Detective Mark Lillienfeld called Kueck’s daughter on a special cell phone that he gave her the day after Kueck killed Sorensen. “Mrs. Welch, get off the phone,” he told her. “Your father is trying to call you.” Detectives had been following every lead, and this one was the strongest—Kueck had been calling her while on the run, 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 said, “and I said, ‘Stop, man, stop.’” Now, in Kueck’s last hours, 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, as the radios went 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. With everybody positioned, an announcement was made—“Donald Kueck, this is the Los Angeles 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 P.M., Welch got another call. It was her father. He had been trying to contact police on Sorensen’s radio. They spoke for a couple of minutes and then Detective Lillienfeld arrived. “Dad, the sheriff’s right here,” she said. “You talk to him.” By now, every satellite van in Southern California was racing toward the scene.
A twenty-five-year veteran of the department, Lillienfeld is a self-effacing guy with a quiet and soothing voice—one that may have provided Kueck with a few moments of grace before he went up in flames. Kueck seemed most concerned about returning to prison. “Once I get in there,” he told Lillienfeld, “those Asian doctors are worse than Mengele.”
“We got all kinds of doctors in there,” Lillienfeld told him. “Why don’t we let you see some non-Asian doctors?”
For the next several hours, as Kueck tried to recharge his faltering cell-phone battery with the one in Sorensen’s radio, there were dozens of