Pushed Over Edge, Mother Chose Own Brand of Justice : Courtroom: When Ellie Nesler killed the man accused of molesting her son, she became a hero to some in town.

Long before she gunned down her son’s accused molester in court and at once became a heroine of this Gold Rush country and an emblem for crime victims nationwide, Ellie Nesler learned some harsh lessons of life here from her mother and grandmother.

Rely on yourself, she was told, because a woman in the Mother Lode must often go it alone. Trust in the Lord but pack a pistol just in case. And do not seek trouble--but if trouble finds you, strike first.

“We’re like rattlesnakes,” Nesler’s 65-year-old mother, Marie Starr, said last week. “You don’t know we’re there until someone steps on us.”

Daniel Mark Driver, 35, violated the family creed when he allegedly sodomized Nesler’s 7-year-old son at a church camp in 1988. He had insinuated himself into their lives in what they considered the cruelest possible way, toting a Bible and reciting whole verses word for word. There were few transgressions worse in the eyes of Nesler, whose God-fearing mining family goes back three generations in these hills.

Still, family and friends say the 40-year-old single mother would have never walked into the Old West-style courtroom April 2 and pumped five bullets point-blank into Driver’s head had she not been pushed over the edge by several events that morning.

“Ellie couldn’t take it anymore,” said Ardala Inks, a cousin who accompanied Nesler and her son, now 11, to court that day. They were scheduled to testify against Driver, who had been charged with seven counts of child molestation involving the Nesler boy and three other young boys, then ages 6 to 8.

“After four years trying to find this guy, after four years of watching (her son) become a Jekyll and Hyde, she had reached the end,” Inks said. “Then this guy walks into the courtroom with this big smirk on his face.”

In the week since the killing, a multitude of journalists, talk show and TV movie people has swooped down on this tiny town, which served as the backdrop for “High Noon” and countless other Hollywood Westerns. They have come to document what one local calls the “phenomenon of Ellie Nesler,” a miner’s daughter who with utter calm blew away her son’s alleged tormentor.

In the process, she has found herself a local darling and a beacon for people everywhere besieged by crime and frustrated at a porous legal system.

Two area banks have set up Ellie Nesler defense funds. Shops and honky-tonks up and down Main Street here and in nearby Sonora are collecting cash in big glass jars. T-shirts and bumper stickers proclaim “Nice Shooting, Ellie.” Calls of support have poured in from across the country and Canada, Italy, Spain and Denmark.

“The press says this was vigilante justice. The kind of thing we do here in ‘frontier town,’ ” bristled Monika Gilmore, a patron at the Office bar. “Sure, we’ve got our share of rednecks, but this is about a mother protecting her cubs. You mess with my young, honey, and you’re dead meat, too.”

Nesler publicly thanked her supporters Tuesday after a Sacramento bail bondsman posted her $500,000 bail. Otherwise she has kept mum, her silence only stoking the curious. Awaiting her preliminary hearing on first-degree murder charges, Nesler hides from the gawkers, traveling back roads and hopping from one relative’s house to the other.

But over the past week, in interviews with family and friends, a picture has begun to emerge of Nesler’s difficult past and the events leading up to the shooting--crucial minutes that may help explain her state of mind at the time.

That Friday morning, Nesler’s son told The Times, he awakened sick to his stomach in anticipation of facing the man who he said had haunted his nights for four years. The boy said Driver had threatened to kill his family if he told authorities about the “nasty things Danny did to me.”

As he sat outside the one-room courtroom waiting to testify, the boy said he could not stop vomiting. Then Driver, wearing an orange jailhouse outfit, handcuffs and a belly chain, was led into the courtroom. He caught sight of the boy throwing up into a plastic garbage bag and flashed a big smirk.

“My aunt was standing in front of me so I wouldn’t see him,” he said in a telephone interview from an undisclosed location. “My face was in the plastic bag, and I looked up and he was staring at me with this funny grin on his face.”

The boy said his mother became so enraged at the idea that Driver was mocking them that she lunged at Driver; family members stopped her.

“Ellie’s eyes were crackling and her face was flushed,” said Inks, Nesler’s cousin. “(Her son) was puking his guts out, right down to the bile, and this guy has the gall to walk by with this big smart-ass grin.”

Inks does not know if Nesler was packing the .25-caliber handgun at that point. She was pacing the hallway and trying to comfort her son when one of the other mothers walked out of the courtroom shaking her head.

“She came out and said it was going badly in there,” Inks said. “She said she thought Driver was going to walk. The kids were giving weak testimony. ‘He got to the kids again,’ she said.”

The court took a short break and a sheriff’s deputy led Nesler into the room. Sitting at the near side of the table, his back to Nesler, was Danny Driver. Without a word, Nesler pulled out her semiautomatic, drew a bead and emptied the chamber, missing her mark only once.

“There was no indication of a problem, no words exchanged,” said Tuolumne County Assistant Sheriff Michael Costa. “The deputy who escorted her into the room stopped to talk to another deputy and that’s when he heard the pop, pop, pop.”

Because local prosecutors witnessed the crime, the state attorney’s general office has taken over the case. State agents refuse to discuss any aspect of the investigation.

At the trailer where Nesler was living with her two children before the shooting, family and friends struggled last week to stave off the constant crush of media. The few journalists allowed inside found the style of poverty that still defines this country despite a decade of rapid growth and an onslaught of wealthier Bay Area transplants who imported coffeehouses and bookstores.

Amid knee-high weeds and the scattered hulks of car bodies, Nesler had set up an above-ground swimming pool and jungle gym. A big-screen TV takes up half the living room, and the walls are adorned with crucifixes and a religious saying: “Life is fragile. Handle with Prayer.”

Her mother tells stories of deep hurt in Nesler’s childhood--traumas endured that will surely become part of her legal defense. When a reporter writes down the details, Nesler’s mother grabs the notebook from his hands and threatens to destroy it if he uses the information in a story.

“This is not a show, boy. My daughter’s life is on the line,” Marie Starr said. “It’s hell she’s been through and is still going through, and I’m not going to let you tell it all.”

Starr recounts her life growing up in this “hill country,” carrying her own .25-caliber pistol and once running a man out of town for harming a 7-year-old Ellie. “I told him you either leave or die,” Starr said.

Ellie, the eldest of three daughters, was always willing to help out. She drove a tractor for local cattle ranchers, dug ditches, installed irrigation pipes and worked on cars, Starr said.

Like her mother, Ellie married young and divorced. Then she met Bill Nesler, a miner and crop-duster with deep gold country roots. With few riches left in the Sierra foothills, he moved his wife and son to a new gold rush country, Liberia. Nesler gave birth to a daughter about the time civil war broke out in the West African country.

Concerned about the safety of her children, she left her husband and moved back home. Nesler got by on county welfare checks and money she earned cutting firewood.

She met Danny Driver a short time later, said her sister, Jan Martinez. Driver, whose mother lives here, carried a Bible everywhere and gravitated to single mothers with young boys.

It was Martinez’s idea to take Nesler’s son and her children to a summer religious camp in the nearby mountains. Driver worked at the camp as a dishwasher. The boys stayed three weeks and on the trip home, Martinez said, she noticed her nephew acting strange.

“I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him,” she said. “He seemed so angry and then withdrawn. I figured he was missing his daddy.”

During a sleep-over nine months later, Martinez said, the boy confided in her. “He said: ‘Auntie, would you keep it a secret if I tell you something? That man, Danny did nasty things to me.’ I said: ‘Honey, that’s not a secret Auntie can keep.’ ”

The boy said he begged his aunt not to tell anyone. “Danny said he would kill me and kill my sister and mom if I told,” he said.

Nesler took the allegations to authorities, but Driver had left the area. Over the next three years, she kept a constant lookout for Driver as her son grew increasingly morose.

“One minute he’s sunny and open, and the next minute he’s angry and closed and in your face,” Inks said. “He has a short fuse and he can’t handle the stress of school.”

Nesler sought counseling for the boy when he came home from school crying several times, saying he had seen Driver parked in his yellow Buick Rivera outside the playground.

In 1989, Driver was arrested in Palo Alto for theft, pleaded guilty, and was returned to Tuolumne County to face the molestation charges. It was not the first time he had been accused of lewd acts with young boys. Five years earlier, he had pleaded guilty to multiple counts of sex with boys in the San Jose area.

He was given probation after Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Robert Foley was bombarded by letters from Driver’s church attesting to his fine character.

“The system didn’t work,” Nesler’s mother said. “I should have trusted my own instincts ‘cause I never trusted that man. He’d come over here with that Bible and I run him off the property twice.

“We’re not violent people. Ellie is sweet, kind, gentle and brave. But when people hurt us, there’s a limit to what we can take. I just wish I was sitting in her place ‘cause I’m checking out soon. I just wish.”