Hostage Describes Gunman as Polite but Silent

Don Evans’ first week on the job as a security guard for the Granite Construction Co. was not an easy one.

Evans was assigned to the graveyard shift, watching over a construction site at a Harbor Island hotel’s restaurant, when a teen-ager armed with a shotgun approached him about 1 a.m. Wednesday.

Evans spent the next 33 hours holed up in a ninth-floor suite at the Travelodge Hotel with the youth, a convicted burglar from Colorado, before San Diego police rescued Evans and arrested his captor, ending the longest hostage standoff in the city’s history.

At a press conference Friday, Evans described his kidnaper, 18-year-old Randy Dolph, as “a nice kid” who never threatened or abused him during the ordeal.

“He was very polite,” said Evans, a 56-year-old El Cajon resident. “And, at one time, he was very apologetic about the whole thing. . . . Under different circumstances, I’d have liked the kid.”

Dolph never explained why he had taken Evans hostage--or what he hoped to accomplish by doing so, Evans said. In fact, Dolph rarely spoke to Evans during their day and two nights together.

“I tried to talk to him,” Evans said. “He said he had a brother in a halfway house in Colorado, so I told him that I had a brother, too. . . . He didn’t want to talk to me at all, really.”

Although Dolph brandished the gun to persuade a clerk to hand over the keys to the hotel room, Evans said the teen-ager never threatened to shoot him.

Still, at one point, when police had persuaded Dolph to surrender all but two of his shotgun shells, Evans feared for his life.

“I thought that one was for me and one was for him,” Evans said. “I thought that was the end of the day right there.”

Evans said Dolph rarely allowed him to move from a bed in the suite, except to use the bathroom or get water. Although Evans managed to take a few brief naps, Dolph apparently never slept.

Evans said he lost track of time during his captivity, but at one point Dolph became irritated by the constant blare of police bullhorns.

“I was hoping that they’d shut up myself,” Evans said.

In a room a few floors below, relatives of the kidnaped man waited anxiously for news, said Starla Bennett, one of Evans’ nieces.

“They were trying to starve this kid out, and I thought, ‘Hey, they’re starving my uncle, too,’ ” Bennett said, adding that she was pleased with the way police handled the situation.

Police left soda and cigarettes outside the hotel room door, and Dolph shared both with Evans.

Police rescued Evans by snatching him out of the room when he reached to get a breakfast tray outside the door Thursday morning. About an hour and a half later, police lobbed tear gas into the room and arrested Dolph without a struggle.

A Sheriff’s Department spokesman said Friday that Dolph was being held in lieu of $30,000 bail on charges of kidnaping, false imprisonment and auto theft. His arraignment is scheduled for Monday, the spokesman said.

Evans was still recovering from the ordeal Friday, and said he had asked his employers to switch him to a daytime security shift for a while.