Police Shooting Victim Described as Troubled, ‘Mixed-Up Kid’

Dwayne Earl Davis, the La Habra teen-ager who was fatally shot by a police officer Sunday, was a described by a friend as a tormented young man who was “like a kid in a grown-up’s body--not being able to relieve frustration.”

On Saturday night, the 19-year-old from La Habra was spending another weekend with Donna Allen, his girlfriend. Like most nights, he was drinking. When the drinking led to a fight and Davis fired her father’s gun, Allen became scared and summoned police to her parent’s Yorba Linda home.

‘Wasn’t a Hardened Criminal’

Police surrounded the house and asked Davis over the telephone to come out and surrender, his mother, Sarah Beardsley, said Monday. She said police told her that her son came out of the house, but that when he was ordered to freeze, he spun around with the gun and a Brea police officer shot him.

“He wasn’t a hardened criminal,” Beardsley said in an interview Monday, her voice breaking into sobs. “Just a kid who sometimes drank too much. Just a mixed-up kid.”

According to authorities, Davis was shot once at 2:40 a.m. Sunday by the unidentified officer, who was responding to a report of a man with a gun. Davis died en route to a hospital.

Yorba Linda contracts with the Police Department in neighboring Brea for police protection.

Brea police gave no further information Monday on how the shooting came about, saying that the incident is under investigation by the Orange County district attorney’s office. Assistant Dist. Atty. Maurice Evans declined Monday to comment on the shooting, confirming only that a routine investigation is under way.

Authorities have said that no one else was hurt in the incident. Allen’s parents were on vacation this weekend, and she and Davis were alone in the house, according to neighbors. Neither Allen, who was described as in her early 20s by neighbors, nor her parents could be reached for comment Monday.

But friends and relatives of Davis described the strapping, brown-haired teen-ager as a walking powder keg, a young man filled with anger and frustration, yet who was also warmhearted and sensitive. Without direction in life, and seemingly afraid to make decisions, he always seemed to be looking for someone to take care of him, they said.

William Stack, 42, a truck driver who lives in a pleasant, two-story home in Yorba Linda that Davis was using as his mailing address, said Monday that he met Davis when the boy was 13.

“He was filthy,” recalled Stack, who was a police officer for 18 years. “He always wore the same clothes and stank so bad you could hardly stand next to him.”

Stack, who was then an Anaheim police officer, said that he befriended the youth after questioning three of Davis’ friends about a petty theft. He recalled that the youth broke down and described a home life with an alcoholic stepfather who beat the kids and his mother.

Stack said that the boy had only recently been returned to his mother after being placed in a foster home for two years. When Davis’ stepfather died, Stack took the boy, then 14, into his Anaheim home, with two other teen-agers for whom he was a foster father.

Stack said he often took the three boys to a dry lake bed in Yorba Linda located at the end of the street where Sunday’s shooting occurred. There, they raced their bikes with other neighborhood kids, flying off dirt overhangs and jumping plywood ramps.

“He was one of the better riders,” recalled Jack Volder, whose house borders what the bike riders called “The Bowl.” It was there that Davis first met Donna Allen.

Already things seemed to be troubling the youth.

Volder said he found Davis and a girlfriend one day in 1982 drinking vodka. Another time, he caught Davis after vandalizing one of the ramps that Volder had built for the bikers.

“I asked him why he did that,” Volder said Monday, “and he mumbled that he was sorry. He wasn’t mad at me, he was just mad about something. He was a real nice, polite kid, but he seemed destined for trouble.”

Davis drank through his teens and started with drugs, according to Stack.

“I started to see the behavior, that he was starting to follow what he had seen when he was younger,” Stack said of the alcohol and drug use.

The youth was in and out of trouble with the police for various minor infractions while he stayed with Stack through his junior year at Anaheim’s Esperanza High School. Sometimes, said Stack, he ended up in Orange County’s Juvenile Hall.

‘Going Through a Living Hell’

“His actions were self-destructive, designed to end it all,” Stack said. “He was going through a living hell with himself. I loved him as if he were my own. It was frustrating to watch this going on and not be able to do anything.”

Beardsley said that while her son was in high school, he and a girlfriend named Tina had a daughter, Amy, now 2.

When he was 17, Davis was arrested in connection with a La Habra gang shooting incident, Beardsley said. No one was injured in the incident, she said. Tried as a juvenile, he spent the next year in a California Youth Authority facility in Whittier, she said.

After his release, Davis was sent to a halfway house in Dana Point called Straight Ahead, Beardsley said.

“I don’t like to say this,” Stack said, “but Dwayne seemed to be at the greatest peace with himself when he was locked up with no decisions and a routine.”

Beardsley said her son was bewildered by the responsibility of taking care of himself this spring, after his release on parole in the La Habra case.

“When they released him, he had no knowledge of how to cope,” she said. “He was used to being given a bed, his clothes, his food. And all of a sudden, he’s thrown outside to do it all himself.”

Beth Walker, an assistant supervisor with the Youth Authority in Orange County, confirmed Monday that Davis was a parolee and said that he had failed to keep in touch with his parole officer and had been considered “missing” since July 31. She declined to say what Davis had been charged with and what sentence he had served.

In May, Davis received a ticket for drunk driving, according to the state Department of Motor Vehicles.

Beardsley said her son had seemed to be in a good mood Saturday when she last talked with him on the telephone. He was worried about the ticket and wanted some money, but otherwise he seemed happy, she said.

Beardsley said her son had been dating Donna Allen seriously for the last year and often stayed the weekends with her.

Paul Carmichael, Davis’ friend of seven years and one of Stack’s foster sons, said Monday that Davis had no job skills and could barely read or write. Carmichael shook his head when asked if his foster brother had any goal in life.

Davis, Carmichael said, was a quiet, inarticulate boy trapped in a man’s body. “Without being able to communicate,” he said. “you can’t express your emotions.”