Officer’s Killing Is Like a Death in the Family for Glendora

The people in Glendora know how to plan fetes for Citizen of the Year. They know how to shoe horses and dangle banners along ficus-studded Glendora Avenue, one of the closest things to “Our Town” that Southern California has to offer. But now they must prepare for something they have never had to do before: hold a memorial for a Glendora police officer, the first ever killed in the line of duty.

Residents of this bedroom community known as “Pride of the Foothills” lowered their flags to half-staff Saturday and showered the steps of their Police Department with flowers and sympathy cards over the death Friday night of Louis Anthony Pompei. City officials and the remaining 51 police officers pondered the slaying of their 30-year-old colleague, a fitness buff who in 1989 saved the life of a Los Angeles police officer who was having a heart attack.

A Pennsylvania native and seven-year veteran of the Glendora force, Pompei dropped his fiancee off Friday night and then went to a Vons supermarket in neighboring San Dimas. As the off-duty officer stood in line, sheriff’s officials said, at least one of two robbers drew a gun and attempted a holdup.

When Pompei, in street clothes, brandished his gun, shots rang out. Pompei was hit several times in the upper body. But, mortally wounded, he managed to shoot both suspects, who were arrested a short time later when they sought treatment at Queen of the Valley Hospital in West Covina. A third suspect was also arrested. Pompei was taken to San Dimas Community Hospital.

About two hours after the 8:30 p.m. shootout, Glendora City Manager Arthur Cook received a telephone call: For the first time since the Police Department was founded 84 years ago, one of its officers had been slain.

“A memorial for a police officer? No, we’ve never had to do this before,” said Cook, who has worked for the city since 1956. Woozy and weary, he had spent almost all of Friday night and most of Saturday morning helping to console those at the Police Department, where he said he knows every officer by their first name.

“Yes, I knew Louis,” Cook said. “He was very dedicated, very personable, the kind of guy who’d go out of his way to help someone else.

“No, we haven’t made any plans yet. We’re still in a state of numbness.”

Pompei’s fiancee, Tracey Taylor-Careaga, 27, recalled how he had helped her and her family deal with her brother’s death from cancer last July. How he came, dressed in a tuxedo, into an algebra class she was taking in April and asked her to marry him. How the last thing he said to her Friday--a day they had spent together in Mexico--was: “I’ll pick you up when I get back from the grocery store.”

The next thing she knew, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy and a friend of her sister’s were tossing pebbles at her window to wake her. “As soon as I saw them I knew what happened,” she said. “When I got to the hospital, he [the surgeon] came out and said, ‘I’m sorry. There was nothing I could do.’

“Louie was special,” she said. “He had a rapport with everyone. Even prisoners he arrested sent him letters from prison, thanking him for straightening out their lives. The neighborhood kids from this neighborhood came over all day today, crying.”

Saturday at the police station, Glendora officers pasted black stripes on their badges--their initiation into a tradition that has become all too common in other law enforcement agencies--and they held each other, tight.

Pompei’s former partner and roommate, Agent John Bur, had to be consoled inside the station house lobby. “There’s nothing you can do about it,” a uniformed officer assured a sobbing Bur.

Agent Rob Castro, one of Pompei’s closest friends on the force, gave an impromptu tribute to the officer affectionately known as “Robocop.” Just a month ago, Pompei, a regular churchgoer, attended a baptism for Castro’s son and fondly spoke of the day when he and his fiancee would have their first child.

“He was really looking forward to starting a family,” Castro said. “And just recently he was saying how everything was going so right in his life right now.”

Tucked snugly into the base of Angeles National Forest, Glendora seems to thrive on the fringes of Los Angeles’ urban sprawl and, for the most part, its residents have managed to keep the negative influences of metropolis life at bay. Glendorans like to think of their community as family-oriented, friendly, a slice of the Midwest here in the West. Zoning disputes still grab headlines. Bighorn sheep dwell in the nearby foothills. The Police Department helps usher Santa Claus around every Christmas Eve.

In recent years, the beauty that prompted songwriter Henry Scott Rubel to pen an anthem to “Glorious Glendora” has become blemished: A La Verne minister was killed in January, 1994, when he tried to stop a robbery at a restaurant where he went almost every day. And lately, Glendora police have had to contend with laboratories that manufacture methamphetamine, or speed.

Still, the death of Pompei--whose latest assignment, narcotics work for a multi-agency task force, was the department’s most dangerous--comes as a rude awakening for a town not yet accustomed to big-city tragedies.

Lined with antique shops, candy stores and carefully pruned trees, tranquil Glendora Avenue, the equivalent of Main Street for Glendorans, slowly became a boulevard of bad news Saturday as word of Pompei’s death spread.

“In this community, where we’re basically a bedroom community, there’s going to be an outpouring of support for the Police Department,” said Don Mendoes, 41, who knew Pompei from a City Council campaign they worked on together.

“I’m sure it’s going to affect everyone,” said Sue Knudson, 37, a hairstylist. “If it can happen in this city. . . ,” she said, not needing to finish the thought.

At She’s Florist, where Pompei often bought his fiancee flowers, workers remembered the officer as an affable, one-in-a-million guy. “He got me to stop hanging out with a bad crowd a few years ago,” one young woman said.

At the Orient Express, a restaurant where Pompei often stopped to eat teriyaki chicken and rice, a cook talked of how kind Pompei was.

At a Ralphs supermarket in San Dimas, antique dealer Debbie McGarry solicited donations for Pompei’s family. “I can’t believe anything like that would happen here,” she said.

Although some details of her account were not corroborated by the Sheriff’s Department, Taylor-Careaga said deputies told her that Pompei pulled his gun when he saw one suspect pistol-whipping a bag boy. Unbeknown to the officer, another suspect was behind him in line. That suspect, Taylor-Careaga said she was told, shot Pompei twice in the back. Once the robbers fled, Pompei, wounded in the thigh, back and chest, hobbled to a pay phone out front and called 911, she said. When paramedics arrived, they found him slumped underneath the phone bank. Saturday, shoppers placed flowers near the phone.

“When I met the bag boy . . . at the hospital, he told me to thank the guy,” Taylor-Careaga said. “He didn’t realize he was already dead.”

A former Sheriff’s Department employee, whose wife was in line next to one of the robbers, corroborated Taylor-Careaga’s version.

Initial reports indicated that each suspect had a gun, Sheriff’s Sgt. Richard Dinsmoor said, but investigators recovered only one gun and an undisclosed amount of cash at the Vons.

Police took little solace in the fact that Pompei wounded both suspects and that they were caught.

Sheriff’s Department officials identified Daniel Hernandez, 19, of Rosemead as a suspect in the killing, alleging that he drove the two robbers away in a gray car. Authorities declined to name the other two suspects because they are juveniles, 16 and 17. All are being held without bail; Hernandez was booked into County Jail, and the two others are incarcerated in the jail wing of County-USC Medical Center.

The arrests are “not the consolation that you’d think,” said Glendora Police Chief Paul W. Butler. “If it turns out these guys were involved, I suspect they’d get what’s coming to them.”

Butler said off-duty officers may intervene if they believe a citizen’s life is in danger. “Seems to me he was doing what a good cop should do.”