Anaheim Police Shoot to Death Man in Mother’s Apartment

It was the blood covering the stairs leading to her Hampshire Square apartment that started Doy Mulford’s heart pounding.

Then the neighbor’s unthinking comment: “Oh, they blew him away good.”

Then the half-dozen police officers barring the entrance to her one-bedroom home.

Mulford knew before the officers said a word. The man they’d shot in her cramped apartment Friday afternoon was her 24-year-old son, Charlie.

“I saw the blood and I said, ‘Oh my son, why did they blow him away until he died?’ ” said Mulford, 45, her voice cracking. “He’s an innocent boy. He’s a mental patient. He was in his own mother’s apartment.”

Anaheim Sgt. Steve Rodig said the officers could have done nothing else.

Rodig said that shortly after noon, two patrol officers responded to a neighbor’s call that a man was breaking into Mulford’s apartment in the 2500 block of East Ward Terrace. When the police arrived they saw Charlie Mulford inside Apartment 88 and ordered him out.

Instead, he said, Charlie Mulford came toward the officers carrying a “deadly weapon,” which Rodig would not identify.

The officers, still standing outside the apartment, ordered Charlie Mulford to drop the weapon and sprayed him with a chemical repellent. When he continued toward the officers, one officer fired a fatal shot into his chest, Rodig said.

“I don’t know what else the officers could have done,” Rodig said. “If the officer had been struck with (what Mulford was carrying) he would have sustained great bodily harm.”

“We don’t go around shooting people for no reason,” he said. “When the police get a call of a burglary in progress, they don’t have time, unfortunately, to do a background check, to find out if someone is mentally ill.”

But Friday night, Doy Mulford and her son’s friends couldn’t believe the officers could have shot the 5-foot-8, 150-pound Charlie.

“Charlie was a docile human being,” said his friend Gary Turner, of Anaheim. “He wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

Doy Mulford said her son began to have mental problems in 1988 and was diagnosed as a schizophrenic. She said he was taking lithium and living in a Westminster board and care home. The mother had moved from Fullerton to the Anaheim apartment complex three months ago. She said her son often visited and stayed the night.

On Friday, Charlie Mulford had taken two buses to her house to wait for her to return from the post office, where she was picking up a support check from her former husband in New York, the mother said. They had planned to go to the doctor when she returned.

“He’s the only family I have here,” she said. “He’s not a dummy. He’s a good boy. He’s a good person.”

She said her son was afraid of strangers and had sometimes irritated her neighbors by singing Christian songs at full volume.

Turner said Charlie would sometimes throw tantrums to get attention. “He would scream and yell,” Turner said. “He would do that all the time. The police should have known” that he was mentally ill.

Ethel Marmo, who lives across the street from the apartment complex, said she was parking her car when two police cars arrived and followed the officers into the complex courtyard, standing under the apartment while the officers approached it.

“I got nosy and wanted to see what was going on,” she said.

Marmo said she didn’t hear the officers yell anything to Mulford, but heard him loudly cursing at the police.

“That guy was swearing bad,” she said. “You know four-letter words.”

After the yelling, Marmo said, one police officer went inside while the other remained outside.

“Then I heard a gunshot--that’s all I heard,” she said.

Mulford was airlifted to UCI Medical Center in Orange, where he was pronounced dead on arrival, said Nancy Rhomberg, a hospital spokesperson.

Anaheim police officials declined to identify the officer involved in the shooting while the case is under investigation by the department and the Orange County district attorney’s office.

Times staff writer Jaime Abdo contributed to this report.