The Night the Dreams Died : To Those Who Knew Them, Nothing Seems to Make Sense in the Deaths of a Cop and a Kid

Their lives began in the same city area, on the same uneven terms.

Jimmy Beyea was born in Reseda. His parents divorced when he was 10 months old. Cathy Beyea raised a son alone on her wages as a grocery checker at Ralphs, taught him the virtues and saw Jimmy through high school and into the military.

“I always told him to do right by other people, to learn right from wrong by not getting into trouble and staying away from drugs,” his mother explained. “Yes, I was nervous when he said he wanted to become a police officer. But all I wanted for Jimmy was to be in a job he liked and to be happy with whatever he did.”

Bobby Steele also was born in the Valley, in North Hollywood. His parents divorced and left him when he was too young to know. But devoted grandparents, building contractor Robert Steele and wife Pauline, raised the boy and gave him his own room and cheered his home runs at youth baseball and found him work on construction sites where Bobby learned to horse a skip loader.

He Especially Respected Police

“He was especially respectful of policemen, and when his grandfather took him out to eat, Bobby would sit and talk to the officers,” Pauline Steele said. “He collected baseball cards from them and he once said he would like to be a policeman.”

On June 7, their lives ended in the same city area, in fatal opposition.

Police reports are adamant: Beyea, 24, who became a police officer, was in a street wrestle with Steele, 16, who apparently had diverted his future to burglary and gang membership. Steele, investigators said, grabbed Beyea’s service revolver. Shots were fired. Beyea died with one bullet in his head, another in his groin.

Close to three hours later, police dogs and officers found Steele in the shallow attic of an abandoned, clapboard ranch home.

Steele seemed to reach for a gun, Beyea’s gun. Police fired. They say the youth went for the gun again. Police fired again. They said he made a third attempt for the gun. Police fired once more.

Steele was hit four times. In the left cheek above his mouth. Beside his nose. Once in the shoulder. Between the eyes. Then Bobby Steele died.

One cop. One robber. It is a bizarre case with an aftermath of secondary victims left to build their own explanations.

A grandmother just cannot accept that this young man who lived for Le Tigre shirts, city park baseball, slot cars, his sister’s pork chops and green bean salad, could die a cop killer and a member of what police say is a violent gang. Lord, she says, up the street was a girl named Linda, and Bobby was the one person who never made fun of her braces.

“He carried my groceries up the stairs, brought me cake from his birthday parties and offered to mow our lawn when we were away,” said a neighbor, Helen Stroker, one floor up in the apartment block across the street from the boy’s home on Radford Avenue. “When we found out that my husband had cancer, Bobby came over to give me a hug and said if we needed help, I could always rely on him.”

A sister, Lori Lyn Steele, 24, will not believe anything she is reading in the papers. Bobby Steele, she says, was the brother who wept for her and begged to be allowed to visit the hospital when her full-term baby was stillborn. Bobby Steele, she adds, could not have been the kid the cops say was Sharky, a full member of the Vineland Boys gang.

“Drugs? He wouldn’t even be around people who smoked because it made his clothes smell. Liquor? I once fixed him a wine cooler and he took one sip and went into the bathroom to clean his teeth.”

Lori Lyn continues: “For the funeral, we dressed him in his red Le Tigre shirt, sneakers, white 501s and his baseball cap. I looked at Bobby in his casket and just felt like shaking him awake. I wanted to tell him: ‘Hey, Bobby, wake up because we got a lot of stuff to talk about.’ ”

On the other side of this shooting, a mother cannot understand why a son dedicated to strength and fitness, an experienced air policeman with the California Air National Guard, an officer just 74 days fresh from the Police Academy, was disarmed and taken so easily by a slim teen-ager.

“It’s a mystery to me,” Cathy Beyea said. “But I haven’t read any of the (newspaper) articles or watched any of the (television) news.”

That is her way of avoiding repeated hurt, confusion and speculation. When the time comes, she said, she will talk to investigating detectives who have promised to answer all questions.

Beyea’s death brought a special agony to LAPD Officer Mike Diaz, who was Beyea’s self-defense instructor at the academy’s physical training unit.

“I heard the news (of Beyea’s death) on the radio on the way in (to the academy) and I had 50 miles to dwell on what went wrong,” Diaz said. “When I got here, I cried like a baby because I felt I’d failed.”

Beyea, named after his grandfather, an LAPD motorcycle officer who died before Beyea was born, was an unusually good recruit. His Physical Fitness Proficiency scores, Diaz said, were never lower than a B-plus. He displayed consistency, knowledge, judgment, discipline, motivation and sufficient leadership to be one of four squad leaders on Course 10-87.

“The traumatic thing is, we do gun take-away (in classes), we do the scenario of fighting for a gun and survival,” Diaz added. Then what went wrong here? “We don’t know what happened. We know his baton was on the ground and his gun was gone. That’s all.”

Diaz’s guess is that Beyea may have been hindered in the final scuffle by choosing to do everything decently, by the book, as he was so recently taught.

“Many things would have been going through his head . . . it would have been like a check list,” Diaz suggested. Was he following department policy? Should he call for backup? Where was his partner? Was this an occasion to justify use of force? Baton or gun?

On the other hand, Diaz said, “the suspect had nothing to think about except escape. He didn’t have to play by any rules. Jim did. And the kid got lucky.”

There is no doubt that the last minutes of Beyea’s life were a comparative routine that went insanely, inexplicably awry.

12:20 a.m., Tuesday, June 7. The AM Watch (11:30 p.m. to 8:15 a.m.) at LAPD’s North Hollywood Division was less than an hour old when a burglary call was received. Beyea, accompanied by his partner and training officer, Ignacio Gonzalez, 44, headed for Alpha Electronics, 7261 Lankershim Blvd.

12:40 a.m. They entered the store through an open door. Finding nothing, they left the building to await the owner of the store who would have keys to a storage room that seemed to be locked from the inside.

12:50 a.m. A man broke from darkness at the back of the building. Beyea and Gonzalez ran to their car and drove around the block to cut him off. Beyea started in foot pursuit. Gonzalez stayed in the car.

12:56 a.m. Two blocks from the store, Beyea caught his suspect. They were across from 7314 Hinds Ave. in an uncertain, residential-commercial neighborhood of lesser apartments and newer rehearsal studios.

The scuffle. Then shots.

“I was watching David Letterman when I heard three shots, repeatedly,” remembered Richard Colson, 26, a struggling musician who is also studying to be an electrician at Western Technical College.

“Bang, bang, bang,” Colson said. “Followed by a pause of little less than a minute, and then another bang. Another pause of 10 seconds and then another bang. Five shots, total.”

The first three shots, it has been surmised by investigators, were aimed at Beyea. The fourth is believed to have been fired at Gonzalez, who approached from a block away. The fifth was Gonzalez returning fire.

The suspect sprinted north on Hinds, tossing a jacket, turning left on Valerio. Gonzalez radioed for help and stayed with his bleeding partner.

1:28 a.m. Beyea was declared dead at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Burbank.

A little later, just one block away, Alberto Hernandez, 19, was found hiding in oleanders. He has been charged with murder and burglary. Hernandez, also identified as a member of the Vineland Boys, is being held without bail.

And at about 4 a.m., Bobby Steele was found and shot in the attic of 11828 Runnymede.

Portraits were quickly drawn.

Beyea--a bachelor who liked double dates to Benihana of Tokyo with good friends, beer busts in Ensenada, action movies from “Platoon” to “Dragnet,” hamburgers and chili, working out, model airplanes and a woman named Cindy Lewis--was lauded as the epitome of whatever today remains typical, honorable and enviable.

“He was very independent, always funny and able to make everyone laugh,” his mother said. “He could also be hard-headed and was opposed to hunting, but not as an activist. He just didn’t care to shoot animals.”

Said academy instructor Diaz: “Here, we train by breaking down and building up. We didn’t have to tear Jimmy down. He was the solid, dependable, consistent type you want to mold, not rebuild.”

Said Dave Porras, an LAPD officer who serves with the California Air National Guard: “I think the last time Jimmy saw his dad, he was 14 years old. His father had some run-ins with police and had been arrested . . . and he (Jimmy) didn’t have too much time for his dad.”

Porras and Beyea met in the National Guard. And it was Guard Sgt. Porras who first interested Guard Sgt. Beyea in an LAPD career.

“He wanted to join CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) and he wanted to go to South-Central L.A. to work there . . . because he felt strongly about kids and because he felt sorry for the (innocent) victims of gang shootings.”

A Different Picture

The media and the police picture of Bobby Steele was as damning as Beyea’s was positive.

He had killed, police said, while already on probation for offenses stemming from auto theft and trespassing. His grades were poor, his school hostilities high and Steele’s attendance at North Hollywood High School was spotty.

Last month, a source close to Steele’s schoolwork reported, county probation officials ordered the teen-ager placed in a Community Care Center, a no-frills, no-leisure, concentrated academic facility on Balboa Boulevard in Van Nuys.

And, said Sgt. Ray Davies of the North Hollywood CRASH unit, Steele was on file as a member of the Vineland Boys, a gang of “between 100 and 300 (youths) from 15 (years) up to 19 . . . a relatively new group, but a particularly violent group from the Vineland and Sherman Way area.”

Steele’s gang name, Sharky, was a new addition to graffiti marking the gang’s turf.

Yet Bobby Steele’s beginnings had been no worse than Beyea’s. If anything, Steele’s background had involved a larger family, a little more money, the same work ethic and certainly more male role models.

Yet Beyea stayed straight. Steele chose to stray.

“I’m 40, and in my day, at the draft age of 18 years, you had to make a choice . . . further education or the military,” Diaz said. He chose the military. Beyea chose the military. “But today, they (young people) can do whatever they want. If they get up and don’t want to go to work, they don’t have to.”

“But with Jim, it seemed to me that he was a man within himself. . . . Jim striving for Jim. And Jim was always the kind of guy who made the right decisions.”

A typical police recruit? Not exactly, Diaz said.

“For some . . . well, where else with a G.E.D. (Graduate Equivalency Degree) and a driver’s license can you start out making $31,000 a year. So it (LAPD) is attractive.

“But some kids come in here because they have to feed something.” They have the attitude, he said, that “I want to be better. I want to help my people.”

“With the Bobby Steeles, I think it’s a lack of patience. They want everything and they want it now. They won’t live life on its terms . . . but it (life) doesn’t work that way.”

Cathy Beyea looks at the differences and any young man’s choices through a mother’s eyes.

‘You Sit Back, Hope’

She said: “At some point, when they (sons) become teen-agers, you kind of lose control. They’re finding themselves, testing themselves. You just sit back and hope that everything you’ve taught them will stay with them.

“Some people are more easily influenced that others. Jim wasn’t.”

Yet if Bobby Steele was easily influenced, if he had, in fact, committed himself to gangs and lawlessness and easy rewards, those weaknesses were not seen by those closest to him.

They admit his imperfections. They do not deny his problems with car theft (and a pair of brass knuckles found in the car), his probation or school difficulties.

But, they insist, he was not a gang member.

And Bobby Steele was not, they say, a cop killer.

“I’ve had two brothers and sisters to deal with and you can tell what kid is capable of violence,” William Barajas said. He had known Steele for 11 years. Now he dates his sister, Lori Lyn. “Bobby was a kid with a conscience, the kind of kid who once went out to look for a neighborhood boy lost on a bicycle. Because Bobby felt responsible. Because Bobby helped the kid put the bike together.”

Steele, according to relatives, held neither anger nor emptiness for the parents who deserted him. For there was the constant attention and care of his grandparents and a single, pleasant home for every one of his 16 years.

He always had a room, a stereo, construction jobs for money beyond his allowance, a cat called Princess, trips with his sister to Disneyland and Universal Studios, autographs of television’s “A-Team,” obtained along with a handshake from Mr. T when an episode was filmed near his home--and enormous stature among his peers for prowess with a baseball bat.

His room remains a showcase. There are 13 baseball trophies. Close to two dozen MVP certificates for softball, baseball and frisball. His Easton bat. His MacGregor glove.

“The last day we say him was a week ago Saturday (June 4),” said Ricardo Davis, a recreation director at Sun Valley Park. He had been Steele’s coach from 1980. “We had been kidding him because he’d said he was going for a nine-game hitting streak.

“He shut us up by hitting a home run. And to celebrate, he bought us Cokes.”

This, Davis said, was a boy who said he wanted a team spot because it would keep him off the streets. He had only one bad habit. Candy.

Any evidence of drugs? “No.”

Any evidence of gang activity after games? “No. After games, he’d go home with team friends or his grandma.”

Gang Involvement

There can, however, be little doubt of Steele’s involvement with the Vineland Boys. There is fresh graffiti on a wall at Valerio and Radford. It appears again on the wall of the house where Steele was shot. It says: “VBS . . . Sharky . . . RIP.”

And police do not think that Steele was a gang lightweight, a hanger-on.

“Based on what we know now,” Sgt. Davies said, “I’d call him a hard case.”

Davies does not share the opinion of some that the Vineland Boys are pretenders and more neighborhood club than street gang. He said they have been involved in a street robbery “where they beat the victim to death . . . his skull was in 30 pieces . . . just a guy walking down the street.”

If there was indeed a later, darker side to Bobby Steele, it would be in records at his school and probation office. But those records remain sealed by laws protecting juveniles. Even dead juveniles.

So Jack Dodds, assistant principal at North Hollywood High, declined to answer questions about his former student. Larry Rothstein, Steele’s probation officer, refused to comment. So did Gwen Richardson, director of the Community Care Center where Steele began studying on May 11.

‘I Can’t Believe This’

But one educator--on the condition that no names or affiliations be published--did say that “there was nothing in Bobby’s behavior, in his dealings with me or his treatment of other kids, that in any way indicated violence or aggression. I’m shocked. . . . I just can’t believe this.”

If drugs or alcohol had somehow changed and propelled Steele on his final night, it will not be known for some time.

“It’s way too early to find out,” said Lt. William Hall, head of LAPD’s officer-involved shooting team. “The coroner does those exams but it takes quite a while . . . six to eight weeks.”

Hall also said that despite claims by family members that Steele’s killing had been a “police execution,” his investigators had uncovered “nothing to suspect any difficulty” with the shooting.

“We haven’t seen anything that appears out of line,” he added. “The investigation is still continuing, trying to gather more information as far as the initial burglary (of car stereo equipment) . . . and that kind of stuff.”

One thing, however, appears almost certain.

Whatever the final facts, when the lives of Bobby Steele and Jim Beyea collided that night, Steele was a terrified teen-ager.

Colson, in his apartment, just yards from where the officer fell, remembers hearing someone running and trying doors in his five-unit apartment building.

Repeated Cries for Help

“I could hear him saying over and over again, ‘Please help me, just help me please,’ ” Colson said.

Later, from police photographs, Colson identified the person who burst through his unlocked front door as Bobby Steele.

“He looked at me and said, ‘Help me, help me please.’ My eyes were locked on his eyes. It lasted 15 or 20 seconds and then he was back out the door.

“But I saw scared. I saw a scared little kid who wished whatever had just happened, hadn’t happened.”

But it did happen, and now there are just echoes of two lives.

At a North Hollywood home, Bobby Steele’s pants and his Le Tigre shirts have been laundered and piled and a grandmother says she doesn’t want anything moved. Not just yet.

Not too far away, at an apartment in Northridge, there isn’t too much room for Cathy Beyea to sit. That’s because everything from her son’s apartment--his Clark Gable posters, his volleyball, his furniture--have been brought over.

“What am I going to do?” she asks. “Go back to work and go on with my everyday life, I guess. It will never be the same. I’d prefer to crawl into a cave and pull the rocks in after me.

“But I can’t. He wouldn’t want me to live like that.”