D.A. Will Reportedly Clear Detective in Shooting : Fatality: In being cleared criminally, he is, however, expected to be criticized. The memory of the shooting plagues him still, he says.

The district attorney’s office is expected to absolve San Diego Police Detective Leslie Oberlies of criminal liability this week in the fatal August shooting of John Joseph Kelley but will criticize Oberlies’ actions that night, according to a source close to the investigation.

Oberlies shot Kelley, a 30-year-old British subject, outside a Denny’s restaurant Aug 6. It was perhaps the most controversial of 12 fatal police shootings this year because Kelley had no gun, and several witnesses said Oberlies had no reason to fire.

Oberlies, 51, who has been with the Police Department for 24 years, said Monday he had not been informed of the district attorney’s decision but expected to be cleared, adding that “it’s about time they told me something. I’ve been waiting four months.”

In his first interview since the shooting, Oberlies, who works in the criminal intelligence section, defended himself and other police officers from critics of the department’s lethal force policy.

“Nobody wants to kill nobody. It is the worst thing to ever happen to me,” he said. “But, when you pull that trigger, you are absolutely correct in doing so.”

Those unfamiliar with the dangers of law enforcement work have no right to question his actions, he said.

“After all these years, I’m used to being second-guessed,” he said. “I have problems, though, with people second-guessing me without any idea about what they’re talking about. When a cop second-guesses you, it’s one thing. You can discuss it with him. They know it’s the worst thing to happen to a police officer.”

According to police accounts, Oberlies was called to the Denny’s after Kelley’s wife called police and said her husband had taken two of their sons and had threatened to return with them to England. She said her husband had arranged to meet her at the restaurant, on Camino del Rio South in Mission Valley.

Oberlies showed up instead, shortly after 10 p.m. Police said Oberlies approached Kelley, recognized him from photos his wife had provided, and identified himself. Kelley brushed by him, yelled an obscenity, got in a borrowed car and started the engine, police said.

Oberlies drew his gun at the driver’s side door and asked Kelley to freeze and stop the engine. Kelley then reached down and made a “furtive movement” between his legs, police said. Oberlies fired five rounds. Three of the shots smashed the driver’s side window and hit Kelley, killing him instantly, police said.

The district attorney’s office will conclude this week that Oberlies should not be criminally charged, a conclusion they have reached in dozens of police shootings since 1984, the last time an officer was charged.

But a source close to the investigation said Oberlies will be criticized for the way in which he handled the situation that night, and the district attorney’s report will include other actions Oberlies might have taken.

One witness to the shooting, Jim Kluver, an engineering consultant for a defense contracting firm, said Oberlies gave no warning to Kelley until after he fired five times.

Kluver said Monday that he expected Oberlies to be cleared and is upset that nobody seems to care about Kelley’s fate any more.

“We knew from the first night that they would exonerate him,” Kluver said. “We can’t get past the district attorney’s office. There is nowhere else I can go with this. We have no other recourse. You tell me why a man who wants to be with his kids should be shot?”

Homicide investigators interviewed Kluver, his girlfriend and another friend, on the night of the shooting, Kluver said. All three were interviewed by a district attorney’s investigator on Oct. 24.

At that time, the investigator shared with Kluver the details of the police homicide report, he said, and it contained seven errors, including the time at which Oberlies shouted his warning.

Marie Palmeri, another witness, said Monday that Oberlies never identified himself as a police officer before shooting. She said Kelley had both hands on the steering wheel and never reached between his legs.

And she said the homicide division’s summary of her testimony that night was completely inaccurate, including their quoting her as saying she couldn’t see anything because of the glare at 10 p.m.

“I play that scene over and over in my head all the time, and I keep wondering what I could have done or what I could have said,” said Palmeri, a paralegal secretary from San Diego. “But then I think, I might have been shot.”

Police said Kelley’s car never moved. Kluver, Palmeri and other witnesses said it rolled backward as Oberlies fired.

Police shootings have eclipsed nearly all other law enforcement issues this year, because of their record-setting numbers and questionable circumstances.

Since Jan. 1, San Diego police have shot 27 people--12 fatally--the highest total for the past six years. Two of the fatal shootings occurred last week, and, in one of those cases, in circumstances similar to the Kelley shooting, 20-year-old Richard Cross did not have a weapon in his hand when a police officer pushed opened a door and killed him with a single shot.

After the Kelley shooting, Oberlies was placed on administrative assignment, assigned to a desk for about a month, he said.

An undercover officer in criminal intelligence for the past decade, Oberlies then returned to his normal duties, which include showing up at public protests and photographing protesters.

“I just snoop,” he said Monday. “We try to make sure the chief knows what’s going on. We photograph protests, and, if nothing happens, if a crime doesn’t occur, we (dispose of) the film. If something happens, we go to one-hour photo and we have photos of suspects.”

He has been named along with six other officers in a $2.5-million civil suit--still pending--by a San Francisco man who said he was beaten and assaulted during a Gay Pride march in Hillcrest four years ago. In the mid-’80s, Oberlies stopped an attempted bombing of a family planning clinic by a fundamentalist follower of the Rev. Dorman Owens.

In an interview, Oberlies said he thought of almost nothing else in the days and weeks after the shooting.

“You walk through it, you live through it, but it doesn’t go away,” he said. “It’s a terrible thing. I’ll never forget it. It never, ever stops bothering you. You wish you could have gone back three minutes and have done something else. After you shoot someone, a million things go through your mind. It’s not a dream. You can’t wake up from it.”

The public has no way of knowing how an officer feels after he kills someone, he said.

“I have three kids, two stepdaughters, grandchildren and a mother and a father,” he said. “But that guy had kids too. We approach a guy, and he could be a bank robber or dope dealer or a rapist. And his kids can always say, ‘The cops killed Daddy.’ ”

Sometimes, Oberlies says, he privately vents his anger at the County Board of Supervisors, who he believes has not provided enough jail beds.

“They knew we were running out of jail space in 1965 and 1970, and they still think we can get by with the jails we had in 1960,” he said. “But they can sure allow more houses to be built. Maybe if they built the proper number of jail cells, some of these people would be off the street.”

Oberlies runs through every circumstance of the shooting again and again in his mind but knows nothing can be the same.

“That guy could have pointed a gun at me, and I could have shot him, and I would have not felt any less bad about taking his life,” he said. “There’s all this crap about surrounding circumstances of what happened. But I still killed the poor (man). Nothing will ever change that.”