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Tests to Show if Fugitive Died in California Cabin
Fugitive’s Threats Against Police Drew Enormous Response
(about 3 hours later)
BIG BEAR LAKE, Calif. — Investigators on Wednesday were examining the charred human remains found in a burned-out cabin here to determine whether they are those of Christopher J. Dorner, the former Los Angeles police officer sought in the region’s largest manhunt, who is believed to have been inside the cabin as it burned down around him after the authorities pinned him down inside.
LOS ANGELES — Christopher J. Dorner had a long list of grievances and potential victims, most of them police officers he had once worked with, and he was already suspected of killing the daughter of a retired police official and her fiancé. So law enforcement officials moved rapidly to protect their own, removing officers from the streets and setting up the largest security detail in any city in recent history.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office said that identification of the remains “will be attempted through forensic means” — although investigators say there is little doubt they belong to Mr. Dorner.
“I’ve not seen anything like this in my time anywhere,” said Bill Bratton, a former police chief in Los Angeles and New York. “The threats being made against families, the actual commission of murder, that is a line that is not crossed in America. The department had to create a plan of historic proportions.”
As the authorities continued efforts to identify the remains, Lt. Andrew Neiman of the Los Angeles Police Department said Wednesday that the police were focusing on their homicide investigation, sifting through “over a thousand” clues, and noting that the police “don’t just stop a murder case because we think the suspect is no longer with us.”
Some 50 police department officials each had as many as eight plainclothes officers assigned to protect them and their families by patrolling their neighborhoods — an unprecedented level of protection for such a large group of officers. The focus meant that hundreds of officers were taken off regular duties, leaving some nonemergency calls to go unanswered. And the presence of plainclothes officers transformed life in dozens of suburban neighborhoods, as the police stood guard on porches with shotguns and used dogs to sniff for bombs in backyards.
“We have a case to close,” Lieutenant Neiman said in a briefing with reporters.
Most of the officers stayed off the street, forgoing their normal work to protect themselves. Some had their children stay home from school, and several went out of state.
Mr. Dorner, a self-described survivalist believed to be heavily armed, had holed up in the rental cabin hours earlier and engaged deputies in a shootout, killing one deputy and wounding a second.
In all, as many as 500 officers — roughly 5 percent of the entire Los Angeles Police Department — spent the last week focusing on protecting one another from Mr. Dorner, a former police officer and Naval reservist. Law enforcement officials said Wednesday that they believed Mr. Dorner died the day before as he barricaded himself in a cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains.
The dramatic chain of events, which included hostage taking and a chase in vehicles and on foot, played out on Tuesday in the sun-dappled, snowy San Bernardino Mountains.
“We believe the investigation is over at this point,” Sheriff John McMahon of San Bernardino County said at a news conference on Wednesday.
It was unclear how the fire at the cabin began, but the authorities said that no one escaped the blaze and that Mr. Dorner was believed to be alone inside.
Still, more than a dozen officers will remain under protection until the body is officially identified, a process that could take days, perhaps weeks.
Officers, shouting orders through loudspeakers for Mr. Dorner to surrender, heard what they believed to be a single gunshot from within.
“We don’t just stop a murder case simply because we think the suspect in that case is no longer with us,” Lt. Andy Neiman of the Los Angeles police said Wednesday.
News organizations widely reported that Mr. Dorner’s body was found in the building, but a spokesman from the Los Angeles Police Department said on Tuesday evening that they did not have the body.
Los Angeles officials would not comment on the details of the security force, for fear that it would compromise security. But interviews with several police officers, neighbors and crime experts suggest the vast scale of the undertaking and how serious the city took the threats from Mr. Dorner, who was believed to be heavily armed.
Lieutenant Neiman said that any questions related to the events that unfolded in the mountains should be directed to the San Bernardino authorities, such as questions about the gunfire, the body recovered and the flames that engulfed the cabin. It was “horrifying” to listen to the firefight, Lieutenant Neiman said.
Mr. Dorner’s training and knowledge made the search even more complex, officials said. Not only did the police believe that Mr. Dorner, who was fired from the force in 2008, was listening to news media reports, but he would have also known the right frequencies on the police radio.
Even after officers retrieve the body, it could take days or weeks to identify it, officials said. Cindy Bachman, a spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County sheriff, said in an evening news conference, “We believe that he was still inside the cabin,” but that it was not safe to enter because of the heat.
Patrol officers were pulled from regular duties like securing murder scenes, or from simply monitoring their regular areas, to provide extra officers for the security detail. In several cases, plainclothes officers were sent to crime scenes to protect the area, because detectives in uniform feared being targets. The police believed their marked cars would be targets themselves — Mr. Dorner is accused of shooting two Riverside police officers who were sitting at a red light last Thursday, as he continued to elude authorities. One of the officers was killed, the other wounded.
Both the suspect and the police were believed to have used smoke grenades during the shootout. The two deputies who were shot were airlifted to Loma Linda University Medical Center; the second deputy’s condition was not disclosed on Tuesday evening, but he was expected to recover.
Hundreds of officers were put on overtime as they were asked to cover extra shifts. Officials say it is too early to measure the costs of the security precautions, but Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa estimated it would be around $2 million.
The standoff drew scores of police officers and sheriff’s deputies from surrounding jurisdictions, led by the San Bernardino Sheriff-Coroner Department. The tension heightened as the day wore on, and local schools were locked down.
“I told the chief to spare no expense,” Mr. Villaraigosa said in an interview Wednesday. Over the last week, the mayor spoke to nearly all of the officers who were under protection, and he said many of them felt “terrorized by this individual.”
Law enforcement agencies ordered news helicopters to keep their distance for the protection of the officers involved. The sheriff’s online feed to the department’s radio scanner was shut down for the same reason. Reporters were asked to stop posting updates on Twitter.
“Every one of us would put our body in front of our kids if we feared something would happen to them,” he said. “These people go into the line of fire every day, but they do not expect concrete danger for their families.”
The police believed that Mr. Dorner was monitoring the news, and Cmdr. Andrew Smith, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department, addressed him directly at a news briefing on Tuesday afternoon.
The department may have been forced to put officers in administrative desk jobs out on the street, said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. The practice is routine for visits by heads of state, for example, but is otherwise rare.
“Enough is enough,” Commander Smith said. “It’s time to stop the bloodshed and let this incident be over.”
“This is about as traumatic an event as you can think of for a police department, when you have a former police officer looking to kill other police officers,” Mr. Wexler said. “They’re going to put anyone they can on it — everyone is vulnerable.”
Officers had been searching the Big Bear area since last week, when Mr. Dorner’s burning truck was found on a forest road. Mr. Dorner, a former reservist in the Navy, had boasted about his sharpshooting and survival abilities.
While officers who focus on gangs and organized crime are often threatened, Mr. Bratton said, it is unusual for such threats to be carried out and rarer still for family members to be targeted. On Tuesday, Mr. Dorner seemed to make it clear that he was focusing on those connected to law enforcement — he apparently did not harm the maids who entered the apartment he had been hiding in near Big Bear Lake, or the man whose truck he stole while trying make his getaway.
Days ago, Mr. Dorner apparently broke into a couple’s home on Club View Drive, the authorities said on Tuesday. The street is nestled beside a golf course in a community called Moonridge near Big Bear Lake. Mr. Dorner reportedly tied them up as his hostages and stayed out of sight until Tuesday afternoon.
Last week, after the police concluded that Mr. Dorner seemed to be hunting officers, they began to flood the neighborhoods of the assumed targets. There were patrol cars at nearly every intersection of the Long Beach neighborhood of Theresa Evans, Mr. Dorner’s former supervising officer who disciplined him and who he later accused of kicking a mentally ill suspect.
Shortly after 12 p.m. Tuesday, the authorities received a report of a stolen white pickup truck and a description that fit Mr. Dorner’s. Soon after, he was spotted driving a white 2005 Dodge pickup by an officer with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The suspect was driving toward the officer in the opposite lane, said Andrew Hughan, a spokesman for the department. The officer recognized Mr. Dorner, stepped out of his vehicle and fired at the suspect, who returned fire. Neither was injured, Mr. Hughan said.
“We were sitting here, and all of a sudden 11 squad cars showed up all over the area,” said Arthur Chadbourne, a neighbor. “They blocked off the whole area. They hit every cross street, every exit. We had no idea what was going on.”
The officer and a colleague chased the man, who crashed the pickup, fired at them and ran into the cabin.
In some cases, neighbors did not even know they had a police officer living among them until the plainclothes security detail showed up, many of them wielding shotguns. And while other law enforcement officials have said that officers were understandably on edge, the police department has come under harsh criticism for an incident last week in which officers shot two women they believed were driving cars that matched the description of Mr. Dorner’s vehicle.
More officers arrived and surrounded the cabin, and more gunfire was exchanged. Mr. Dorner fired out a window of the cabin before trying to flee from the rear, throwing a smoke bomb to hide his escape, but police gunfire drove him back inside, The Los Angeles Times reported. The newspaper also reported that deputies used smoke bombs to cover their evacuation of the fallen deputies.
The tight security continued on Wednesday, even as the police believed Mr. Dorner had been killed the night before. At the funeral for Michael Crain, the Riverside Police officer Mr. Dorner is suspected of shooting last week, there were scores of police officers from as far away as San Diego and Las Vegas.
At the news briefing, Commander Smith said the Los Angeles Police Department had officers ready to be deployed from the San Bernardino airport, several miles from the cabin. He said the San Bernardino County sheriff had not yet asked for help from the Los Angeles force. Commander Smith would not say how many officers were at the airport because they did not want to “tip their hand” in case Mr. Dorner was watching.
Jennifer
Medina reported from Los Angeles, Ian Lovett from Big Bear Lake, Calif., and Fernanda Santos from Angelus Oaks, Calif. Erica Goode contributed reporting from Washington, Rebecca Fairley Raney from Riverside, Calif., and Kitty Bennett from Tampa, Fla.
The standoff came while officers investigated over 1,000 clues and tips about Mr. Dorner’s whereabouts, past and present, Commander Smith said.
The standoff capped a week of sightings, shootings and false leads in the hunt for Mr. Dorner, who was dismissed from the Los Angeles Police Department in 2008 after investigators concluded that he had lied in his claim that a training officer had assaulted a homeless person.
In a 6,000-word manifesto that Mr. Dorner published on his Facebook page, he complained that he had been dismissed wrongfully. He cited racism and corruption in the department and threatened several police officials and their families.
Los Angeles police officers guarded 50 families around the clock, taking up a significant amount of department resources.
While Lieutenant Neiman said that he had no information related to any accomplices who assisted Mr. Dorner, there were still witnesses to be interviewed and “key pieces” of evidence to be analyzed. The police were also still “in the very early stages” of re-examining the allegations that were in Mr. Dorner’s manifesto. Several officers were named in the manifesto were still under protection, he added, and their families have been “traumatized.”
On Feb. 3, the police in Irvine, Calif., discovered the bodies of Monica Quan, 28, and her boyfriend, Keith Lawrence, 27, in their car in a parking garage near a condominium complex where they lived. Ms. Quan was the daughter of a retired Los Angeles police captain who played a role in the disciplinary process that led to Mr. Dorner’s dismissal.
Last Wednesday at 10:30 p.m., the police believe, Mr. Dorner tried to hijack a boat at a marina in Point Loma, a community in San Diego. The man mentioned to the boat’s captain that he intended to take the craft to Mexico. But the boat became disabled as he was trying to steal it, so he fled instead.
On Thursday at 1:45 a.m., two officers in a protection detail for one of the people threatened by name in the manifesto confronted a man they believe was Mr. Dorner near the person’s home in Corona. Shots were exchanged, and one of the officers had a graze wound to his head. The gunman fled.
A short while later, two police officers in Riverside, Calif., were sitting in their patrol car at a stoplight when they were attacked by a man they believe was Mr. Dorner.
One of the officers was killed, the other injured. Again, the gunman fled.
At 5:20 the same morning, Los Angeles officers mistakenly shot and wounded two women delivering newspapers, thinking the pickup truck they were driving matched the description of the one Mr. Dorner was driving.
Late that afternoon, the police found the suspect’s truck in the San Bernardino Mountains near Big Bear Lake. The hunt then focused on that area, which has only a handful of access roads.
Ian Lovett reported from Big Bear Lake, Jennifer Medina from Los Angeles, Michael Wilson and Christine Hauser from New York, and Fernanda Santos from Angelus Oaks, Calif. Rebecca Fairley Raney contributed reporting from Big Bear Lake.
