Explosion of Rage : After His Rampage, Rafael Hernandez and a Policeman Lay Dead

The young Mexican who shot and killed a Torrance police officer a week ago and then committed suicide had come to Torrance to get a gun to kill the man who fired him the day before, a friend said.

He had been dismissed for threatening to kill a fellow worker with a pair of shears, according to the clothing company official who fired him.

Until his explosion of rage, Rafael Hernandez Navarro was known to family, friends and co-workers as a dutiful son, helpful employee and shy youth who--particularly in recent weeks--was homesick for brothers and sisters living in Mexico, and torn between the country he wanted to adopt and the one he had left behind.

Last Thursday, one friend said, Hernandez held him at gunpoint while he grimaced menacingly and rambled disjointedly about the Ku Klux Klan, a refrigerator that Hernandez said was a computer, a traffic accident, fears that soldiers were following him and revenge against the man who had fired him.

Half an hour later, the slight, boyish-looking Hernandez burst into the Torrance Sports Shop at 1421 Marcelina Ave., waving a pistol and shouting: “I want some goddamned bullets. I want an automatic rifle. I’m an American. I’m not a wetback.”

Shot, Killed Officer

A few minutes later, using an M-1 carbine that he had grabbed in the store, Hernandez shot and killed Torrance Police Officer Thomas Keller, 25, who had been on the force almost four years and was planning to get married in August. Then, wounded in the legs by police shotgun pellets, Hernandez turned the carbine on himself and shot himself in the heart, according to the Los Angeles County coroner.

“This was something that just came up and no one can say how or why,” his stepmother, Rosa Hernandez, said in an interview at the Hernandez home in Escondido.

“He was never in trouble before,” said his father, Agustin Hernandez Barba.

Torrance Police Sgt. Wally Merkur said investigators had interviewed many of the people who spoke to The Times. Merkur said the investigators were supplied with the same information that was given to The Times and they are preparing a backround report on Hernandez.

The path that ended at the sporting goods store began 22 years ago and 1,600 miles away in Tepatitlan, a small agricultural city perched on a plateau in the mountains near Guadalajara in the Mexican state of Jalisco.

Tepatitlan, where the per-capita annual income is about $1,000, has a long tradition of migration to Southern California, according to Dr. Jorge Bustamente, director of the Tijuana-based Center for Border Studies of Northern Mexico.

A Happy Childhood

Rafael Hernandez Navarro was born in Tepatitlan on Feb. 23, 1964, and apparently had a happy childhood there, a friend recalled, until his mother died in 1972.

“I know him since he was 3 or 4 years old. Sometimes, we call him ‘Smiley’ because he was smiling all the time,” said Jesus Gonzalez, who later shared his apartment near Torrance with Hernandez.

In the mid-1970s, Hernandez’s father made the journey millions made before him--to Southern California to escape high unemployment in Mexico.

He brought along Rafael, settling as a permanent resident in the San Diego County city of Escondido where, with his immigration green card, he found work as a greenhouse employee.

About 1980, Rafael moved to Gonzalez’s apartment in a four-unit building in the 20600 block of Western Avenue--in the Los Angeles city strip just across the street from Torrance.

Neat, Clean Person

Gonzalez, 31, a foreman at Phillips Brothers Plastics Inc. in Gardena, said Hernandez found work at the plastics firm.

Gonzalez remembered the adult Hernandez as a neat, clean person who lifted weights, played soccer and occasionally smoked marijuana. “He was a nice guy. I don’t know what happened to him,” he said.

Plant manager David Phillips said Hernandez worked as an injection molding machine operator between July, 1980, and January, 1981, making $3.10 an hour.

The job did not work out.

The company fired Hernandez for disciplinary reasons relating to marijuana use, Phillips said. “He was smoking in the restrooms,” the company official said.

After losing his job, Hernandez decided to go back to Mexico and join the country’s volunteer army.

That didn’t work out, either.

His stepmother, Rosa Hernandez, said Hernandez, who was thin, looked especially gaunt during his army service. “Rafael left the army because he was being treated poorly,” she said.

He returned to the United tates and stayed with his father, stepmother and stepsister in a two-bedroom apartment in Escondido, sleeping in the living room on a folding bed.

Although Hernandez was technically an illegal alien, his father said he wished to emphasize that his son recently applied to establish his status as a permanent resident.

In May, 1985, Hernandez got a job at Spanjian Sportswear, a clothing manufacturing firm in San Marcos where his brother Jose had worked before returning to Mexico.

For almost a year, all went well.

At work, Hernandez received satisfactory reviews and raises that boosted his pay from the minimum wage he was hired at to $3.85 an hour. So said Spanjian personnel director James Donnely, the man who eventually would fire Hernandez and, according to Hernandez’s friend, trigger homicidal rage.

“He was a regular employee,” Donnely said. “(He) came to work, didn’t say much, never got into trouble that way, did his work. No problems. Nobody outstanding but not a poor employee either. He went by the rules, punched his card, not a line-walker, not a marginal employee.”

Hernandez made friends with a co-worker, John McClelland, and John’s wife Susan, who “adopted” him.

John, who later started a maintenance business, employed Hernandez after-hours on jobs, and talked about setting up some sort of partnership. Susan said she considered Hernandez part of the family, and he was a frequent guest at their house, where he delighted in playing with their 2-year-old daughter.

Hernandez kept up with his friends in the Torrance area, dropping in once or twice a month at his old apartment or at the rented house of friends in the 1600 block of West Del Amo Boulevard.

He began studying English at night at Escondido High School, painstakingly copying his lessons into a $1.69 spiral-bound notebook. Hernandez was hoping to pass the equivalency test for a high school diploma, according to notations he made in the notebook.

‘There Was Anguish’

But beneath the surface, Hernandez was pulled by his roots.

Susan McClelland asked him what he wanted for Christmas.

“My family. I just want to go home,” he said.

She said she looked at him closely after he made that remark.

“You could see it in his eyes. There was anguish,” she said.

In March, his supervisors at Spanjian noticed that he appeared preoccupied.

“They couldn’t put their finger on it,” Donnely said. “They would give him things to do and they wouldn’t get done. So they counseled him.”

His father and stepmother also noticed a change about this time. His father asked him if he was sick. “I’m OK. I’m OK,” Hernandez replied. “I want to go to Mexico.”

Six days before he burst into the sporting goods store, Hernandez, who had filled 78 pages of his notebook entirely in English, switched to Spanish. He copied the words of a poem that appears at the beginning of “Braceros” by Ettore Pierri, a book about illegal immigration:

Mexico, my fatherland where I was born gives me the blessing.... I go to the United States to make my living. Goodby, my beloved soil. I will carry you in my heart. Do not condemn me.... The blame is the poverty and the necessity.

On Monday and Tuesday of last week, Hernandez did exceptionally poorly at work--machines he was tending jammed because he wasn’t paying attention. Supervisors had to take Hernandez off his station, Donnely said.

On Wednesday morning, he argued with a fellow employee and threatened to kill him with a pair of clothing shears, the official said. Hernandez calmed down and went to lunch.

When he came back, he was fired.

“He came in mad after we stopped him at the gate,” Donnely said. In Donnely’s office, Hernandez became enraged when he learned that he was fired, but calmed down eventually, Donnely said. “I was sitting next to him asking what he was going to be doing (next). He informed me that he was going to Mexico to be with his family.”

Hernandez saw the McClellands that afternoon, and talked about working on a car with John McClelland and about going with his father to Mexico on Friday. He did not appear distraught about being fired, Susan McClelland said.

Arrested for Speeding

Later that night, at 2:30 a.m. Thursday, his father got a call in Escondido.

For some reason, Hernandez was 150 miles away in Malibu.

The California Highway Patrol had arrested him at 1 a.m. for speeding on the Pacific Coast Highway near Corral Canyon Road. Deputies confiscated a .22-caliber rifle they found on the floorboard behind the driver’s seat. His father said Hernandez kept the weapon in his pickup truck as a matter of course.

A check of criminal records showed no entries that would prohibit Hernandez’s release, a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Department said, and he was let go at 7:45 a.m., shortly before his father arrived.

Father and son met for the last time at a gas station on Pacific Coast Highway near the Malibu sheriff’s station, where Hernandez was filling up.

Hernandez told his father that he would look for work in the area and come back to Escondido on Friday for their planned trip to Mexico.

Account of Bizarre Behavior

His movements from then until about 3:30 p.m. Thursday are not known in detail, but he apparently had a minor accident on a freeway and became involved in an altercation, according to what he told friends.

He arrived at the house on West Del Amo Boulevard about 3:30 p.m., according to Ignacio Gonzalez, a tenant of the house who gave the following account:

Gonzalez and two other men who live in the house noted Hernandez’s entrance as unusual. “He was carrying his shoes,” Gonzalez said.

“Don’t look outside because someone is following me,” Hernandez said, explaining that he was afraid of the people he had collided with on the freeway.

His behavior became more bizarre.

He said the refrigerator was a computer, that he couldn’t eat because he hadn’t eaten for a month and that he was going to give a tortilla offered to him “to the devil.”

‘I Never Saw Him Like That’

“He was acting crazy,” Gonzalez said. “I never saw him like that before.”

Gonzalez said marijuana was the only drug that Hernandez used. (The coroner’s office, which is conducting routine tests for drugs in the Hernandez case, will not have results for several weeks.)

Several months earlier, Hernandez had talked about a buying a .380-caliber Colt automatic pistol from one of the people who shared the house. Hernandez began rummaging through the man’s dresser drawers and found the gun.

Then Hernandez pulled out a jackknife and held the blade to Gonzalez’s throat, threatening to kill him if he told the owner of the gun that the weapon had been taken.

Hernandez began stretching his face in ominous grimaces and speaking rapidly in a jumbled sequence of thoughts.

“A man is not supposed to fear death,” Hernandez said. “I belong to the Ku Klux Klan because they are not scared to kill people.” (Hernandez did not belong to the klan, his stepsister said.)

‘He Wanted a Gun’

Hernandez said he had been laid off and “was going to get a gun and kill the guys” who dismissed him, Gonzalez said. “He came to get a gun. He wanted a gun to kill the guys in Escondido.”

At one point, Hernandez said that he had found a wire in the back of a friend and he had cut the wire and birds flew out. Gonzalez said he had no idea what Hernandez meant.

The agitated Hernandez said the three men owed three months rent and he was going to collect it. He had no connection with their landlord, but to calm him one of the men said the money would be ready the following day.

Hernandez asserted that the house was surrounded by soldiers who had been following him and asked the three if they didn’t see the soldiers. There weren’t any.

Hernandez declared that he was an American.

‘Don’t Kill Me’

“Sure,” Gonzalez replied. “I don’t care where you are from or what you are, don’t kill me.”

Hernandez lined up the three men and told Gonzalez that he would kill him if he went for help.

Gonzalez began thinking of how to get away.

“I was scared,” he said.

He managed to get out the kitchen door and ran. The others somehow also escaped.

The gun had three bullets in it. Gonzalez said he heard three shots fired and thought that one of the other two had been shot. Apparently, the gun was fired into the air.

By the time neighbors checked on the gunfire, Hernandez had left in his pickup and the house was empty. One of the tenants called police and filed a report about their disturbed friend.

But it was too late.

Rafael Hernandez Navarro was on his way to the Torrance Sports Shop.