Ominous Call a Portent to Brother in S.D.

The last time Robert Stroh heard from his wildly unpredictable younger brother, Darren, was a collect call Friday that came at the crazy hour of 5 a.m.

Darren Stroh was on the road again. Shivering from the cold, he stood at a pay phone somewhere off Interstate 5 in Northern California, telling Robert, his big brother, mentor and best friend, that he was heading for Robert’s home near San Diego, ready to start a new life.

Again.

Darren Stroh, a 22-year-old unemployed electrician with a history of drug problems, including a dishonorable discharge from the Navy in 1990 for the sale of crystal methamphetamine, said that, only four hours before, he had suddenly left his rented home in Grants Pass, Ore., where he had lived the past few months.

And now he was back in the fast lane, driving south through the night in his battered 1978 Toyota Corona, not sure if the car could make it to the Rancho Bernardo home of the brother who had always listened, who helped him out of so many jams in the past.

“It was just so mysterious,” Robert Stroh, a 24-year-old restaurant worker, said of the call. “All he said was that he was coming to see us and to start over again. He said he needed to get away from the immediate family, that he felt the walls were closing in.” What Darren Stroh didn’t tell his brother was that, along with a few belongings, he had also packed a double-barreled shotgun and two rifles from his grandfather’s home in tiny Foots Creek, Ore.

About 12 hours later, Robert Stroh and his young wife, Eva, sat in their tiny apartment, tears filling their eyes as they looked on in horror and disbelief at television footage of Darren being shot dead by a California Highway Patrol officer on an otherwise empty Orange County freeway off-ramp.

They listened to the ugly details of how Darren Stroh had apparently killed a good Samaritan motorist who had stopped to assist him and his disabled car. And how he later led CHP officers on a 300-mile chase through Central and Southern California before his car ran out of gas on a lonely last-stand stretch of road.

As he fielded phone calls from shocked family members back in Oregon, Robert Stroh talked about the little brother he had looked out for after their parents’ divorce. He talked of Darren Stroh’s two failed efforts to reconcile with their father in Texas. And about his brother’s struggle to beat a boyhood drug habit and failed attempts to get his often-detoured life back on the open road.

None of the family, Robert Stroh says, could explain Friday night how easygoing Darren could suddenly, inexplicably, turn so violent.

“He was very outgoing,” Robert Stroh said of his lanky, good-looking brother. “He was easy to get along with. And he was pretty smart . . . . I have no idea why he did what he did. This was off the wall. All of the family has been trying to come up with some kind of reason for what happened. He was a pretty easygoing guy.”

At times in his life, Darren Stroh was also pretty confused, his older brother said. His parents divorced shortly after Darren’s birth in Oxnard. Years later, he was expelled because of truancy from a Mira Mesa high school, where his mother had moved with her three sons, the eldest, Bill, Robert and Darren, the baby.

After dropping out of school, Darren Stroh became involved with drugs--including marijuana and crystal methamphetamine. But his older brother was there to see that Darren didn’t drop out completely.

“I tried to reach out to him,” Robert Stroh recalled. “I tried to take him everywhere I went, to parties--everywhere. He thought everyone, even the family, was against him. He was always crashing from the drugs when he came home. He was irritable. But I wouldn’t let him go.”

In 1985, after their mother remarried, Robert Stroh recalled, the three brothers went to live with their father in rural Longview, Tex., northeast of Dallas, where their father worked as a fireman. There, the boys were greeted by tough times and family arguments, Robert Stroh said.

“We were angry because we felt we had been shipped there against our will. Our father wanted to know why we weren’t going to school. We wanted to know why we should listen to him when he was never around.”

They returned home to San Diego a short time later. There, at Robert Stroh’s urging, Darren Stroh entered Garfield Independent High School, a school in El Cajon for youths who need extra help, just to be with his brother. When Robert Stroh was graduated from the school, Darren Stroh dropped out again. And he got back into drugs, Robert Stroh recalled.

He went to Oregon to visit family, including his grandfather. And in 1989, at their grandfather’s suggestion, Darren Stroh enlisted in the Navy. There he earned his high-school equivalency degree and seemed on the road to straightening out.

But by May, 1990, Darren Stroh, who spent weekends and most of his free time with his brother and sister-in-law, was in the brig at Coronado, charged with the sale of methamphetamine. For months, Robert and Eva Stroh loyally visited Darren in his military jail cell. Even now, Robert Stroh insists that his brother had kicked his drug habit.

“I still think it was a setup,” his brother said. “Darren was drunk, and he met some girl at a beach in San Diego who turned out to be an undercover cop. She asked him where she could get some crystal. So he want and bought her some--$20 worth from contacts he had made in his former life.”

Upon his release, Darren Stroh’s wild life veered back toward Texas, where he married last summer and took a job as an electrician’s assistant. Six months later, the marriage was over, and he was on the road once again, boarding a Greyhound bus headed back to Oregon--using money from his worried grandfather to buy the ticket.

Robert Stroh last saw his brother over the recent holidays during a trip to Oregon to see his mother and other family.

“Darren was in good spirits. Everywhere Eva and I went, he went with us. He was frustrated because there wasn’t any work. But we were together. We were like best friends again.”

That’s when Robert Stroh played the father role again, smiling at his brother’s plans to pursue an electrician’s job after he helped their grandfather build his house.

Then came the bizarre call in the middle of the night, the one that jarred Robert Stroh out of bed and into an uneasy reality on the day his brother eventually died.

“I was worried about him over the phone,” Robert Stroh said as Eva quieted the couple’s 20-month-old daughter, Ariel. “He sounded a little confused about where he was going. He said he had to stop and see a friend in Los Angeles.

“And he was driving that old car. I was surprised that he made it as far as he did. I just had no idea that something this horrible was waiting down the road.”