Police Kill Bus Hijacker After 320-Mile Chase

Frantic that Armageddon was near and distraught over losing track of his family, a charter bus driver hijacked a Greyhound bus and its eight passengers in Phoenix early Thursday and led police on a 320-mile chase that ended with him being shot to death just after reaching home.

A Colton police officer killed Reynaldo Andrade Gonzalez in the driveway of the house where he lived with his pregnant wife and three children. Gonzalez, 33, was unarmed but struggling with police in an attempt to get a weapon, said San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Sgt. Dennis Casey.

Gonzalez’s relatives called the shooting unjustified. “Our point of view is that he was executed,” said a brother-in-law who refused to give his name. Referring to the black motorist beaten last year by Los Angeles police, he added: “If Rodney King had lived in Colton, he’d be dead right now.”

Gonzalez “was stressed out,” acknowledged the brother-in-law. “He thought the world was coming to an end. It did for him.”

During the five-hour pursuit across the Arizona and California desert, the commandeered bus struck a pickup truck, a car carrier and a California Highway Patrol squad car.

None of the bus passengers--including a toddler and a French postal worker who speaks little English--were injured. Casey said that at one point Gonzalez told them “that they were all going to die”--not a threat, his family says, but a reference to the biblical “end of days.”

The hostages were questioned at the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s headquarters then rushed away by Greyhound officials. Only one passenger, a weary middle-aged woman wearing a winter parka, had anything to say. “It was very scary,” she said. “I just thank God I made it out safe.”

Greyhound announced it would accommodate the travel plans of the passengers, whose bus had originally been bound for St. Louis.

Two Colton police officers at the scene of the shooting were hospitalized in fair condition.

Gonzalez had not worked for months, and with a fourth child on the way he was worried about money. Neighbors said he also had resumed a drug habit. He was so troubled that he briefly considered murdering his family, an urge that shocked him so much he sought solace in religion, said his sister, Cynthia Gonzalez.

As he pored over the Bible, especially the Book of Revelation, Gonzalez grew convinced that Armageddon was at hand, relatives said.

According to Cynthia Gonzalez, who spoke Thursday with her brother’s wife, Theresa, he took the family Monday for what was supposed to be a short drive. Reynaldo Gonzalez became agitated and declared that everyone in California was going to die, and that if he returned home he would die too.

For reasons unclear to his sister, Gonzalez drove the family to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, across the border from El Paso. The next day, Gonzalez took the family car keys and began running down the street. His 10-year-old daughter, Danielle, tried to follow but could not keep up. The family never saw him again.

“To me it sounds like he had a nervous breakdown,” Cynthia Gonzalez said Thursday in her Colton apartment.

Stranded in Juarez, Theresa Gonzalez panicked and called her family in Colton for a ride home.

Meantime, the brothers said, Gonzalez called another relative from Phoenix, asking for his own ride home. Relatives do not know how Gonzalez got to Arizona, and suspect he may not even have known himself. They later found a message Gonzalez had left on his answering machine at home saying he did not know what had happened or how he had gotten separated from his family.

Relatives had already left Colton to pick up the wife and children, so they never learned that Gonzalez wanted them to stop in Phoenix and get him too, the family members said.

It was not until after the shooting that they found another message from Gonzalez: He intended to catch a cab to Colton.

Shortly after midnight Thursday, Phoenix police said, a man approached several cab drivers at the downtown bus terminal and inquired about transportation to Los Angeles. The cabbies told police the man was acting strangely. One told local television reporters that the would-be passenger said “Jesus wanted him (in California) right away and that the devil was chasing him.”

He was refused a ride.

About 12:20 a.m., Gonzalez boarded Greyhound bus 1647, scheduled to leave 15 minutes later for St. Louis. The keys were in the ignition, the engine was running and the driver was away.

He took the wheel and pulled away, headed west on Interstate 10. On board were two women and a 2-year-old from Arizona, passengers from Missouri, Rhode Island and Minnesota, and the French man.

About 10 miles from the depot, an undercover narcotics officer for the Arizona Department of Public Safety noticed that the bus was traveling with its headlights off. The officer, in an unmarked car, radioed for patrol cars to stop the vehicle.

According to department Sgt. Rick Knight, two squad cars gave chase with flashing lights and sirens. The bus headlights stayed off and its speed increased, reaching 70 and, briefly, 85 m.p.h.

Inside, the French passenger, Jean Maurice Henry, had been wondering why the driver was not wearing a uniform.

A University of Redlands professor who later acted as Henry’s interpreter said he told her that the driver was singing, and that at one point, a young man went to the front to talk briefly with him.

Henry did not understand the exchange, but no one seemed frightened, the interpreter said.

Then the French passenger noticed he was heading away from his Midwest destination. He spotted a sign that said: Los Angeles, 220 miles.

Arizona authorities and the California Highway Patrol, which took up the chase at the state line, tried placing metal spikes on the road moments before the bus arrived, in an attempt to slowly deflate its tires. But the maneuver failed.

The bus rolled across the desert, past Blythe and Indio and Banning, chased by patrol cars, police helicopters and television camera crews. Near Palm Springs the bus swerved across two lanes to knock a CHP squad car off the highway shoulder.

After reaching the urban area around San Bernardino, the bus took the Sperry Avenue exit in Colton, said CHP Officer Larry Olveda. It headed into a residential area and onto Stevenson Street.

Gonzalez stopped the bus in front of his house and got out.

Unknown to him, his wife and children were sleeping at a relative’s home nearby. They had arrived only 2 1/2 hours before.

KNBC cameraman Greg Bennett captured the scene on film: The driver, bearded and clad in blue jeans and a dark sweater, walked straight up the driveway while police handcuffed a blond young man, a passenger, who had also disembarked.

According to Casey, the San Bernardino County sheriff’s sergeant, Gonzalez was met near the house by an FBI agent armed with a shotgun. Gonzalez refused to stop on command, made “irrational comments” and finally grabbed the agent’s weapon, Casey said.

According to Casey, Colton Police Sgt. Joseph McCann was wounded in the wrist. Officer Charles Becerra came to McCann’s aid. Then a scuffle began over Becerra’s handgun. The police officer’s right eye was injured during the struggle.

Colton Officer Mike Brisino, a four-year veteran, shot Gonzalez twice with a .22-caliber rifle, Casey said.

Much of the police account was confirmed by Mike Delgado, who witnessed the scuffle from his second-floor bedroom window across the street. A spotlight from an overhead helicopter illuminated the scene.

He said he heard a shotgun go off before Gonzalez reached several officers standing in front of a pickup truck parked in the driveway. When Gonzalez got to the authorities, “he was resisting, no doubt about that,” Delgado said. Within seconds, Delgado heard two more shots. When police walked away he saw a body, but he did not know it was his neighbor.

Watching the police reaction, Delgado said, he assumed the man had been armed: “But now that I heard he didn’t have a gun, I am saying, man, with all of those officers, you mean they couldn’t have gotten one man down?”

All three Colton officers have been placed on administrative leave, a routine procedure, Colton Lt. Randy Heusterberg said. The Sheriff’s Department is investigating the shooting. Neither Casey nor Heusterberg would comment on whether the shooting was justified.

Times staff writer Judy Pasternak in Los Angeles and correspondent Laura Laughlin in Phoenix contributed to this story.