‘We’re Just Lucky,’ Father Says : Wounded Baby Goes Home, Gingerly

Ten-month-old Michelle Olmos went home from the hospital Thursday, one day after an Anaheim police officer accidentally shot her while trying to fell a gunman who had commandeered her family’s car.

Her diapers puffy with bandages covering the wounds where the officer’s bullet entered and exited her tiny body, the infant otherwise seemed unmarred by the frightening ordeal that led to the arrest of a convicted bank robber armed with a machine gun and semiautomatic handgun. The man had climbed into the car’s back seat, held a gun to her mother’s head and reportedly said, “Drive, or I will shoot you.”

“We’re just lucky; she’s lucky, and we’re just glad to be home and together,” said Peter Olmos, his daughter jangling keys in his lap. “If (the bullet) had hit her spine she would have been paralyzed for life, and it was just an inch or two away.”

But doctors told her parents that Michelle will suffer nothing more than a small scar that she “will eventually grow out of” because the bullet struck her in a dimply part of her thigh and buttock further padded by a diaper.

Steven Paul Harston, 24, who surrendered at gunpoint, is expected to be arraigned today in Municipal Court in Fullerton on charges of kidnaping and assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer. He remained in Orange County Jail on Thursday with bail set at $250,000. Jail officials refused him visitors, saying he was under lock-down and was “medically unfit.”

Harston, in whose car police found two wigs and an automatic assault shotgun, is a convicted bank robber who authorities said is a possible suspect in other Orange County crimes.

According to court documents, Harston was convicted of the armed robbery of a Wells Fargo Bank in Westminster. In August, 1986, he was sentenced to five years in prison, followed by probation, but police and FBI agents would not say when Harston was released from prison.

“Based on our knowledge, we are currently examining recent unsolved Orange County bank robberies to determine if he could be a suspect in any of them,” said Buckey Cox, special agent in charge of the FBI office in Santa Ana.

But Cox said police do not believe the suspect was coming from or going to a bank robbery when a traffic officer attempted to flag him down for running a stop sign Wednesday.

Detectives were investigating reports by witnesses that the gunman threw a bag from his car as police chased him for about seven minutes before the shooting. No bag has been found, Anaheim Police Lt. Marc Hedgpeth said.

Although Harston was alone when he allegedly barged into Jody Olmos’ car and took mother and daughter hostage, Hedgpeth said investigators are looking for possible accomplices because “the robberies we believe he was involved in, involved another person.”

Wednesday’s bizarre drama unfolded about 10 a.m. Wednesday on State College Boulevard as Jody Olmos maneuvered her car in traffic toward a post office. She had heard sirens ahead of her along La Palma Avenue but assumed they were bound for a nearby hospital.

Then her car was rear-ended, and it stalled.

Moments later, Olmos said, a man opened her car door, climbed into the back seat and pointed a gun at her head. When she tried to flee with the baby, he told her to leave the child alone and drive.

Sitting beside her, a seat belt securing her to the passenger seat, was Michelle. The gunman did not threaten the baby, Olmos said. Seconds or minutes later--Olmos has no idea--she heard two shots and her rear windshield shattered. An officer was standing near her window, ordering her to get out of her car with the baby.

The gunman remained in the back seat, but police told her he had dropped his semiautomatic gun onto her purse in the front seat. She ran to a flower shop with the screaming baby, and only then did someone notice a blackened hole on her daughter’s diaper.

The 31-year-old mother would only learn later that Anaheim officers were chasing the man for several miles because he failed to pull over for a traffic violation. When traffic backed up on State College south of La Palma Avenue, the man abandoned his car, which then rolled forward into another vehicle, pushing it into Olmos’. The gunman climbed inside her maroon Mercury.

Seeing the man pointing a gun at the woman, then at the officer, the officer stood at the back of the car and fired two shots, Hedgpeth said. The officer, who has only been identified as an “experienced motorcycle officer,” fired in self-defense and to prevent either a murder or a kidnaping, Hedgpeth said.

The shots, fired from about 10 feet away, may have been slowed by the rear windshield and the passenger seat in which Michelle sat.

Although the district attorney’s office is investigating the shooting for any criminal wrongdoing, and police internal affairs officers are checking for any violations of department rules or policy, a preliminary examination of the case vindicates the officer, Hedgpeth said.

It “will be a couple of weeks” before the investigation of the officer’s judgment and actions is completed, Hedgpeth said.

As is required by the Police Department, the officer has been given two days off with pay and must see the staff psychiatrist. The officer will not return to duty until he is certified as being ready, Hedgpeth said.

The Olmoses have criticized the officer who wounded their daughter, saying he should have seen the child’s safety seat, which they believe was visible from behind the car.

“If he was 10 feet away,” Jody Olmos said, “he should have been able to hit the guy. He missed twice. . . . He could have hit Michelle or me.”

Despite the preliminary vindication by his department’s investigators, “any conscientious officer would feel bad” about shooting an infant, Hedgpeth said. “He is very concerned about the baby’s welfare.”

Michelle, who was released Thursday afternoon from UCI Medical Center in Orange, had only a few reminders of her hospital visit: the dressings on her right buttocks and a bandage on her arm where she had been fed intravenously for nearly 30 hours.

Michelle and other members of her family--her parents, her 27-year-old aunt, her infant cousin, two brothers, 4 and 11, and a 13-year-old sister--celebrated her homecoming quietly Thursday night.

In the Olmoses’ Anaheim living room, the dark-haired girl pulled her big sister’s hair, sucked on keys, played with a Slinky toy, crawled around the couch and nursed a bottle, careful only when she sat down on her bandaged behind. The bullet left a dime-sized wound. It exited near the center of her back, leaving a larger wound.

Michelle watched herself on several television news shows with the uninterest only a child could display.

“You don’t even know what’s happened to you,” her father laughingly told her. “That’s probably good.”