Youth’s Life Offered Few Portents of Its Violent End

Bobby Steele was swinging the bat well and, by Sunday, was on a nine-game hitting streak with his baseball team, the Sun Valley Park Pirates.

On Monday, the 16-year-old was able to parlay a dental appointment into a whole day off from school. The grandparents who raised him didn’t mind that he spent the rest of the day at home.

But by 9 p.m., he was ready to get out of the North Hollywood home where he had lived his entire life. He baked himself a batch of cookies and then left to meet a friend. When he walked out the door of the house in the 6900 block of Radford Avenue, he left behind everything that appeared to be routine about his life.

A few hours later and a few blocks away, Robert Jay Steele killed a policeman. A few hours after that, the police killed him.

“It doesn’t make sense,” his grandmother, Pauline Steele, said Wednesday as she sat on her grandson’s bed and looked at the collection of baseball trophies and All-Star citations he had proudly displayed on his bureau.

‘2 Separate People’

“It seems like we are talking about two separate people,” said his sister, Lori Lyn Steele of Sylmar.

Such is the incongruity that family and friends of Bobby Steele faced a day after his death. They offered a description of a mischievous boy who had minor troubles in school and with authorities, not the picture of a cop-killer.

But at 12:20 a.m. Tuesday, according to Los Angeles police, the teen-ager grappled with a rookie police officer for control of the officer’s gun. The struggle lasted only a few seconds and, when it was over, Officer James Beyea, 24, fell to the ground, fatally shot in the head.

Steele, suspected of having just burglarized a nearby electronics store, then fired the weapon at the police officer’s approaching partner and ran off. He was later cornered in the attic of a vacant home and shot to death by police officers when, according to authorities, he repeatedly tried to pick up the gun.

Those who knew Steele could not explain his actions.

‘He Was Scared’

“He had been in trouble before, but never anything like this,” his 23-year-old sister said. “I feel that what happened was that he was scared. He got in with the wrong people, did something wrong and got scared.

“He was not some tough kid,” she added. “He was a very sensitive kid.”

Police declined to say whether Steele had a juvenile record. His family said he had only minor scrapes with authorities, including a fight with a teacher and his arrest when a police officer found a pair of brass knuckles in a car in which he was riding. Both incidents happened in the past year, but other details were not available Wednesday.

Until May 9, Steele was a student at North Hollywood High School, where he frequently missed classes, administrators said. He then was placed in a school program supervised by Los Angeles County juvenile authorities. Citing confidentiality laws, school officials declined to say what prompted the transfer.

Ricardo Davis, recreation leader at Sun Valley Park, met Steele eight years ago when he coached the boy in sports at Victory Elementary School and watched him steadily develop as an athlete who was particularly good in baseball.

‘Little Bit of Mystery’

“He liked sports and to goof around. But there was a little bit of a mystery about him,” Davis said. “He came to the park right before his games and he left right after. I don’t know if the friends he had on the team were his really close friends or just friends while he was here.”

Police said one of his friends away from the park was Alberto Hernandez, 19, of North Hollywood. According to investigators, after Steele left his home Monday night, he and Hernandez broke into Alpha Electronics at 7261 Lankershim Blvd., about six blocks northwest of Steele’s home.

A burglar alarm at 12:20 a.m. Tuesday brought Beyea and his partner, Ignacio Gonzalez, an 18-year veteran, to the shop. After searching the premises, the officers saw someone running away and gave chase.

The officers split up, Beyea on foot and Gonzalez in the car, at the nearby intersection of Hinds Avenue and Wyandotte Street. When Gonzalez began to drive back to the intersection a short while later, he saw Steele and Beyea struggling in the street. From a block away, he heard two gunshots and saw his partner fall, officers said.

Investigators said they may never know exactly what happened when Beyea attempted to arrest Steele. The teen-ager and police officer were described as being similarly built at about 5 feet, 9 inches and 150 pounds.

Gunfire Exchanged

After Beyea fell to the ground, Steele exchanged fire with Gonzalez and ran through the area to a vacant house on Runnymede Street. A police dog tracked him to the house’s attic at 4:30 a.m.

Police said the K-9 officer, Jon Hall, and Sgt. Gary Nanson, a Devonshire Division officer who had driven to the area to help search for the suspect, took a ladder from the garage of the vacant home, propped it in the attic entrance in the hallway ceiling and climbed up.

Using their flashlights, they spotted Steele lying between two rafters near a corner of the attic’s sloping crawl space. Only his face and an arm were visible over the wooden rafter.

Police said Steele began to comply with an order to surrender and told the officers that another suspect was in the house, but then suddenly attempted to grab a gun that was by his side. Hall fired once, hitting Steele in the face.

According to police, Hall and Nanson then crawled over to Steele and, after examining him, believed that he was dead. They left the gun, which was later identified as Beyea’s weapon, next to him and backed away to leave the scene undisturbed for investigators.

Reached for Weapon

Police said Hall then climbed out of the attic to search the house while Nanson stayed in the crawl space. About three minutes after the first shot, according to police, Steele stirred and reached for the weapon again despite a warning from Nanson.

Police said Nanson fired his gun, hitting Steele in the face again. Two other K-9 officers who had by that time entered the house, Sgt. Mark Mooring and Officer Salvador Apodaca, heard the second shot and climbed into the attic. Police said both officers saw Steele still attempting to grab the gun and both fired. One shot hit Steele in the face for the third time and the other shot missed.

A search of the house found no other suspects. Hernandez had been captured hiding in some bushes near the scene of Beyea’s shooting. He is in Parker Center Jail and is scheduled to be arraigned on a murder charge today.

On Wednesday, Steele’s family questioned whether the officers needed to repeatedly shoot him and exactly how many shots were fired. But they also did not have exact details of what happened.

“We’ve been crying and crying,” Steele’s grandmother said. “Why did it happen?”

Steele’s brother, Larry, 22, went to the house where the teen-ager was killed and inspected the attic. He said he saw three bullet holes through the ceiling and questioned the official account of what happened.

“I don’t see how it could have happened like they say,” he said.