Widow Tells of Fairy Tale Turned Into Fatal Tragedy

The way Jeanette Reynolds tells it, hers was a chance fairy-tale second meeting with the shy, intelligent boy she had this crazy crush on, way back in 10th-grade biology class.

It was at a 20th high school reunion party in Whittier that a friend set her up with still-shy Paul Reynolds. Jeanette didn’t waste any time.

“I had this really big crush on you in high school,” she told him right off the bat. They were married two years later.

On Wednesday, which was to have been their fourth wedding anniversary, Jeanette Reynolds sobbed gently as she talked about her husband--shot dead early Tuesday in a confrontation with authorities at 24-hour gas station near their Cardiff home.

Reynolds, an avid surfer, sailor and swimmer who for more than a decade had been active in the small-town world of Encinitas politics, was killed after he reportedly threatened a San Diego County sheriff’s deputy with a small rigging knife commonly used by sailors.

On Wednesday, in the hours following the shooting, scores of friends dropped by the couple’s house to remember the 44-year-old unemployed electronics engineer, whose philosophy was always to turn the other cheek, not lash out in anger or confusion, they said.

Recently elected vice president of the local Cardiff Town Council, Reynolds was a cautious local citizen who often told friends, “Buckle up, it’s the law.” Always involved in community issues, he once painted on his Volkswagen van in man-sized letters a message against a proposed bullet train to run through town.

He had a sensitive side, too--showing up at the hospital to visit a friend’s 4-year-old daughter who had been injured in an automobile crash, consoling the crying child by encouraging her to throw beanbags at a clown’s face he had found.

Speaking at length about the shooting incident for the first time, Jeanette Reynolds on Wednesday tearfully detailed the events of late Monday that led up to her husband’s death and questioned the deadly force used against him.

And she described her life with the often-eccentric man who took regular medication for his diagnosed manic-depressive condition. And while his illness caused sometimes wild mood swings, his wife stressed, the result was never violent impulses.

“For four years, our life together was a like a fairy tale that came true,” said Reynolds, a 44-year-old psychology student at work on her master’s degree at Cal State Fullerton.

“But as everyone knows, fairy tales don’t always end happily.”

For Paul Reynolds, the beginning of the end could have come last July when he was laid off from his laboratory job of 15 years with Unisys Corp., working on the tiny circuits that go into microchips.

But this is not, Jeanette Reynolds says, a story about another disgruntled ex-worker who sat around at home stewing until his anger and frazzled emotions finally caused him to explode.

“Paul was actually pretty glad when the layoff came,” she said. “The way he saw it, they did him a favor. There were a number of new things he wanted to get into--making a new softer surfboard for beginning surfers was one of them. He was going in a lot of different directions.”

The layoff allowed Reynolds to surf more often, pursue yoga, take long ocean swims almost daily, and to set off for a jaunt on “Rissa,” his 27-foot sailboat.

“I used to get seasick out on the boat, but for Paul, it was paradise,” Jeanette said. “He liked being out there, far away from everything. He found his peace out on the water.”

Back onshore, Paul Reynolds also suffered from what his wife described as “bipolar manic-depression,” a chemical imbalance of the brain that caused sometime wild mood swings, often set off by stress in his life.

Reynolds, who lost his first wife to cancer, had been suffering some more heartache of late. His father was in failing health, his brother’s marriage was troubled and Jeanette had her own burdens at school.

“It just put him under a lot of stress,” she said. “Paul often picked up on other people’s pain. He felt their stress.”

At times, when the symptoms of his disease surfaced, Paul would become depressed for days at a time, doing little more than sleeping and reading. At other times, his behavior was so manic, he could barely keep his thoughts straight, much less find time to sleep.

Recently, his wife said, Paul Reynolds was in his manic stage.

“Sometimes, his thoughts and ideas were coming so fast, he couldn’t even get them out before the next one came,” she said. “Sometimes it was just so hard to follow him. He had so many things he wanted to say--all at once.”

Most often, these bursts of manic energy were harmless. Like the night Paul and Jeanette learned that the Shepherd, their favorite vegetarian restaurant in Encinitas, was closing.

He told the owner everything would be all right. Then he solicited stories from several local newspapers until the restaurant management told him they were going to give it another three months.

On Saturday night, Paul was even standing on top of the restaurant laying a tarpaulin so that the expected rains didn’t flood the place. “I think it was Paul,” Jeanette said, “who kept the Shepherd open.”

On Monday night, hours before he was to die, Reynolds was acting manic again.

“He was talking and talking and talking and I wanted to settle him down so I got him started on describing to me the surfing trip he was about to take to Costa Rica,” Jeanette recalled.

Next, shortly after 11 p.m., the couple embarked on a late-night walk, their habit when Paul was feeling up. At a nearby video store, they dropped off several rented movies, including “The Deer Hunter”--a favorite of Paul’s that features a character, played by Robert De Niro, who reminded him of a friend who died in Vietnam, Jeanette said.

Then as they strolled past Yogi’s, a local sports bar near Highway 101, Paul asked his wife--who skated and danced as a child--to come inside and watch the Olympic skating events on the wide-screen television.

At this point in her story, Jeanette cried again. “He wanted me to come in with him but I had on some old clothes and my hair was up--I just didn’t like the atmosphere of bars, so I stood outside.

“He wanted me to come in and talk with him but I had worked all day and I needed sleep. So I walked on home. The last time I saw him he was sitting there drinking a beer. I could have been there with him.”

An hour later, while lying in bed, Jeanette heard her husband downstairs in the garage where he kept his computers. Then she heard his car engine start and heard him drive off.

“I thought it was so strange,” she said. “He never, ever goes anywhere without saying goodby to me.”

A short time later, Deputy Jeffrey Jackson arrived at the Birmingham Drive Chevron gas station after receiving reports that a man was acting irrationally, blocking cars and bothering a driver who was delivering gas to the station.

Authorities now say Reynolds was armed with a marlin spike, a combined spike and jackknife used by fishermen and sailors to part the strands of heavy coiled ropes.

Warned that the intruder carried a knife, the deputy ordered him to drop the weapon and lie face up on the pavement, sheriff’s deputies said. The man complied but when Jackson went to apply a set of handcuffs, the man grabbed the weapon again and swung it back toward the approaching deputy, officials reported.

Jackson fired once, hitting Reynolds in the neck. The deputy has been placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation into the incident, officials said Wednesday.

Shortly before 5 a.m., when the medical examiner arrived to inform her of her husband’s death, Jeanette Reynolds knew right away it was something about Paul. “I screamed, ‘No, no, no,’ ” she said. “I just couldn’t stop screaming.”

Sheriff’s Lt. John Tenwolde, a veteran homicide investigator who is handling the case, said there are many investigations where the facts don’t seem to add up.

“I didn’t know this man or the sheriff’s deputy involved,” he said. “And I don’t know anything about manic-depressive illnesses. All I can rely upon is my experience as a law enforcement officer, which tells me that life is full of contradictions.”

The day after the shooting, friends of Paul Reynolds continued to ask how such a solid community citizen could end up in a life-and-death standoff with an armed officer.

“This is just so inconsistent with the Paul that we know,” said Albert Gross, Reynolds’ friend and neighbor. “There’s allegations that he gestured violently, which makes me immediately suspicious.

“The sense we have, the people who knew Paul, is that this officer really blew it and killed somebody that we valued. This just wasn’t some nobody they killed.

“You’ve heard of the expression that the guy was no rocket scientist. Well, Paul was a rocket scientist, a man who was valued not just by his friends, but by the whole community.”

Added family friend Yvonne Hanzen: “No matter what they’re saying about Paul, his friends, family and people who really knew him realize that you have to have confidence that what you know about someone is the truth, and be content in knowing that the truth is what matters.”

As she copes with her shock and grief, Jeanette Reynolds will try to take a page from her husband’s philosophy on life. After all, Paul had always said they were made from “the same cookie-cutter.”

“Paul was the kind of guy who forgave everyone for everything,” she said. “I think he would have even forgiven the person who killed him. And so, when I can, I want to talk with the officer who killed Paul.

“I want to see him and talk to him, but not in any angry way. I want to do it in the manner that Paul would have done it and just tell him that it’s going to be OK.”