CORONA NORCO : Will Officials Get Message? : Cooper Verdict Leaves Chino Neighbors Wary

The state prison from which Kevin Cooper escaped before murdering four people is about a dozen miles from their homes. Many of their backyards face another state prison.

And the residents of Norco, in the northwest corner of Riverside County, are afraid that corrections officials may not get the message they see in Cooper’s conviction Tuesday: that convicts pose a substantial threat to prison neighbors.

“I feel like (the verdict) was the right thing,” said Cindy North, who from her front yard can watch activities two blocks away in the medium-security California Rehabilitation Center in Norco.

Cooper’s trial, she said, “shows the problems in the (correctional) system.”

Those problems, North and other area residents said, include prison officials who fail to recognize their inmates’ potential for violence, laws that place convicts’ rights above those of prison neighbors and a bureaucracy that inadequately informs neighbors about prison disturbances and policies.

“They are not informing the public well about how the prisons are run,” said Joyce Knotts, also of Norco.

Cooper, convicted Tuesday by a San Diego jury on four counts of first-degree murder and one of attempted murder, walked away from the minimum-security wing of the California Institution for Men in Chino on June 2, 1983, three days before his victims’ bodies were found in the Chino Hills home of three of them.

He had been serving a three-year sentence at Chino under an assumed name. But by the time of his escape, officials already had learned of Cooper’s true identity and of a criminal record that included charges of an earlier escape from a Pennsylvania mental institution, after which Cooper allegedly kidnaped and raped a woman.

Pennsylvania authorities had begun to file extradition papers for his return when Cooper escaped from the Chino prison.

‘Isolated Case’

One Norco resident dismissed the now-infamous Chino Hills Massacre as “an isolated case, so it doesn’t bother me. It just doesn’t bother me.”

Nor does living next door to Norco’s state prison, added R. J. Williams. “It was here when I got here.”

And Grace McCurry of Riverside said, “There’s so many sick people out there, I don’t know if it’s worse here than anyplace else.”

But nearly every other Norco, Corona and Riverside resident interviewed Wednesday said the Cooper case has deepened their concern about living near the state correctional facilities.

“It’s kind of scary, but there’s not a whole lot you can do about it,” said Rhonda Smith of Norco. “You just have to go about your life. . . .”

“When people escape, they naturally go to Ontario, Mira Loma, Corona and Norco, Riverside,” North said. The residents of those communities, she said, have a right to know more about what happens in the nearby state prisons.

And Margie Fuhr of Corona said she was glad to hear of Cooper’s conviction, which has reinforced her concerns about her family’s safety. “I just trust God to take care of what we cannot,” she said. “And I keep the doors locked.”

Guards at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco arrested 10 prison visitors last weekend on felony charges of possessing weapons and drug, a spokesman said Wednesday.

The guards borrowed six trained dogs from the U.S. Customs Service, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, the Anaheim Police Department and Northrop Corp. to search the vehicles of visitors to the medium-security state prison, said Richard Jones, acting public information officer for the jail.

“It’s a fairly common thing,” Jones said. “. . . It’s a way to reduce the amount of drugs that comes into the institution.”

Loaded Gun Found

One visitor was arrested for possessing a fully loaded .22-caliber pistol and two-thirds of a bottle of brandy on the state prison grounds, and another for carrying an unloaded .38-caliber gun, Jones said.

Eight others carried Darvon, a prescription painkiller, cocaine, alcohol and marijuana, he said. “None of these were in large amounts,” he said.

The possession charges, filed this week with the Riverside County district attorney, would in most cases be misdemeanors, but they were upgraded to felonies because the incidents occurred on state prison grounds.

In a series of similar searches in October, guards at the state facility made five arrests and issued 12 citations, Jones said. And one day last May, they arrested 12 people after borrowed dogs sniffed out contraband.

Less systematic searches of visitors and their vehicles take place daily, Jones said, when prison guards deem them necessary.