A Troubled Time : Newport Police Grapple With Mistake Shooting, Car Death

Like the citizens they protect, the officers of the Newport Beach Police Department are known as an elite and often very private group.

The department, which patrols the wealthy homes of the so-called jewel of the Gold Coast as well as the busy resort scene on the Balboa Peninsula, has a reputation of keeping to itself.

“Newport is a very . . . closed group of officers,” said Barry Charles Spatz, a psychologist who counsels Santa Ana police officers. “They are an affluent city’s police officers. . . . “You just don’t read about Newport Beach (officers) very often.”

But two shocking events--one involving a police shooting and the other a horrifying auto accident that stunned the community--have led to a week of intense scrutiny for the department, a lot of it unfavorable.

The results, officers say, have been hate mail, hostile phone calls and sagging morale.

“People are calling and saying, ‘What is going on down there, you bunch of barbarians!’ ” said Officer Bob Oakley, spokesman for the 150-officer department.

“It’s been a long week here for everybody,” added Lt. Tim Newman, a top aide to Police Chief Arb Campbell, who was vacationing this week in Hawaii. “We’ve had a lot of significant events and everybody is affected by it. . . . It’s one of the negative aspects that are part of the job and you have to call upon your maturity and training and friends to help out.

“Things don’t always go the way you like,” he said, “but you have to make sense of it and go on.”

The torrent of publicity began and has persisted since the Labor Day weekend unfolded, with television crews, newspaper and radio reporters covering every new crumb of information about the two cases.

Newport Beach Police Officer Glen Fisher turned out to be a hero, he realizes, but the price has been high. What happened the night of Sept. 1 “will never leave me,” he said during an emotional interview Thursday night.

His shift that day had begun at 3:30 p.m. About 5 p.m., at the Balboa Pier, he was sent to an “injury traffic” accident.

Screeching to a halt at the wreckage, he found a car on its side, water spewing from a broken main and, lying nearby in the alley, was what appeared to be a contorted mannequin.

A crowd of neighbors, perhaps 50 of them, gathered fearfully as the 27-year-old officer walked up to the figure and was amazed to find that “it was an actual person.” And she was alive.

It was Debbie Killelea, he would learn later, a woman who had been active in a community effort to slow speeding traffic. Now she had been struck by a speeding car, knocked into a wall and thrown 50 feet. Her two young sons survived because she pushed them out of the way.

Held Her in His Arms

Her left leg lay severed by her side, Fisher said, and her face was so disfigured he could not perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. So he held her in his arms, and comforted her in her last moments of consciousness.

Though no words were exchanged, Fisher remembered, there was a powerful bond, and those 10 or 15 minutes will “never leave me.”

“We did have eye contact. I kept telling her to ‘keep breathing. Look at me if you know I’m here. Help me out.’ And she rolled her eyes over,” Fisher said sadly. “I was trying to let her know that someone was there, someone was going to help her.”

The woman’s husband, Brian Killelea, had heard the car crash and ran from the family’s home to investigate. Though Killelea’s sons witnessed the crash, Fisher believes they were taken from the area almost immediately afterwards. It would be much later in the evening before Fisher met Killelea’s three young children: Michael, 10, Hilary, 7, and Joe, 6.

After paramedics transported Killelea to Hoag Memorial Hospital, Fisher joined the search for the driver, who had bolted from the wreckage on foot. Thirty minutes later, he found his suspect.

Near the end of the peninsula he spotted Danny David Ornelas in his rear view mirror, and the young man stared back, Fisher said. A witness to the crash had indicated that a “male Latin, 5-feet-7,” was the hit-run driver, Fisher said. He chased the man onto the beach.

Arrested Suspect

“I overcame his resistance and took him into custody without injuring him or me,” Fisher said.

“We got several calls from people in that neighborhood complaining that (Fisher) didn’t beat him up,” Oakley said.

Fisher handcuffed Ornelas, gave him a field sobriety test and put him in his patrol car for a trip to the same hospital where Killelea died three hours after the crash.

“He had a cut on his chin that we were concerned about, and we wanted to give him a blood test,” Fisher said.

That test showed Ornelas, who is 19 and from Huntington Park, to have a .18 blood alcohol level, nearly twice the level of presumed intoxication.

“Do you realize what you’ve done here?” Fisher said he asked the college freshman. He said Ornelas replied, chuckling and showing no remorse, “That this woman died?”

Ornelas, who has been charged with murder, told a reporter Wednesday that he had been drunk when he hit Killelea but that did not hit her on purpose.

“The thing that really got to me,” Fisher said wistfully, “was he saw her there. He left her there! That’s pretty non-caring to me. When you take all the consequences . . . her condition, nobody was helping her, he leaves the area after obviously seeing her . . . the disregard for human life!”

Two and a half days later, on the same peninsula, half a dozen Newport Beach officers were summoned to the base of the Balboa Pier in response to calls that a man was carrying a sawed-off shotgun. It was about 2:50 a.m. and the officers began searching the area with flashlights.

One of the officers, Derek Duncan, 25, mistook a portable stereo for a gun and fired a single shotgun blast at Sundaga Bryant, gravely wounding him. At about the same time, police arrested a 14-year-old boy with a paint-pellet gun resembling a shotgun.

Duncan, a three-year veteran of the force who previously served for a year as an Orange County sheriff’s deputy, has been temporarily reassigned to administrative duties while an investigation into the shooting continues. He has declined to be interviewed.

Fisher, who also had worked as a sheriff’s deputy, said all of the officers sympathize with Duncan.

“He’s a highly respected officer and a fine officer. He’s a decorated officer. He’s taking it hard. . . . Everyone feels for him.” Spatz, the psychologist, said this circling of the wagons is a trademark of police officers.

“It’s cops and non-cops,” he said. “Anything traumatic tends to push them even further into their own culture. And they do have their own culture. Immediately, the brotherhood enters in. When one is under attack, you do have the siege mentality. It’s rally round the fallen guy. It’s pull up the moat.

“There may be different opinions of what is a good shoot or a bad shoot, is the shooting review board out to get me? But that’s internal laundry,” Spatz said, noting that these thoughts usually aren’t shared outside of the police fraternity.

Though one officer is perceived as trying to help a victim while the other is grappling with the burden of injuring someone, both men have seen psychiatrists. It is a department policy that officers who have been through a tramautic experience talk it out with specialists to cope with the grief and go on with their lives.

“To get a policeman to accept this has taken many, many years,” Oakley said. “And I think it’s only becoming . . . acceptable for police officers to talk to counselors.”

The week of attention has left its mark on the officers, Fisher said.

“It affects every policeman who works here. Of course, it’s a lot different for myself than Officer Duncan. (The people who witnessed the crash) think I’m a hero. But they don’t understand that you are a hero when you take that oath. They don’t realize that only certain kind of people get up and go out there and do it everyday. Because we want to help people. And Derek Duncan is one of them,” Fisher said fervently.

What he and other officers at the scene of the tragic hit-and-run crash did that night is “what any other officer would do,” Fisher said. “Please don’t believe I’m the first guy who has been through this.”

“But how many people do you know who could interview those kids, and tell those kids when they ask you, ‘Is my mommy OK?’ And be able to say, ‘Yes,’ when mommy is not OK.”

These every-day deeds that police officers do, said Fisher and other officers interviewed, are what seem to have been forgotten this week.

“We’re not all bad guys,” Oakley said. “Really.”