False Alarm Leads to Man’s Fatal Shooting

Ted Franks was 77 and had set up housekeeping at the offices of a small manufacturing firm that helped him turn his dream engineering project into a reality.

He worked late nights, listening to waltzes and cooking up his special chili in a makeshift kitchenette in the quiet industrial park just south of the Huntington Beach Mall.

But at 4:25 a.m. Wednesday, Franks stepped into a dim hallway and was shot by a Huntington Beach police officer, whose identity was not disclosed.

The officer had come upon Franks, police said, while investigating a burglary alarm that turned out to be false.

Franks stumbled back into his bedroom, bleeding from a wound to his left leg, and died nearly two hours later at UCI Medical Center in Orange. The cause of death was possibly blood loss or a heart attack, said Huntington Beach Police Lt. Dan Johnson.

“Ted’s so harmless,” said Steve Ramelot, owner of Tolemar Manufacturing, where the shooting occurred. “He was just an old man in his underwear.”

Police had responded to a silent alarm at a neighboring business, one of the more than 90% of commercial burglary alarms that turn out to be false, Johnson said.

But an open door at the manufacturing company--where Franks had lived Mondays through Fridays for the last nine months--led officers to believe there was a burglary in progress, according to Johnson.

“One officer went to a door to the office at the front of the warehouse,” he said. “The door swung open, the officer was confronted by an elderly male, and an officer-involved shooting occurred.”

The 31-year-old officer who shot Franks has been with the Police Department for seven years and spent three previous years with another law enforcement agency, Johnson said. The officer was counseled Wednesday by a department psychologist and was placed on administrative leave for several days--routine in all officer-involved shootings, Johnson said.

“The officer hasn’t been interviewed, so right now it would be inappropriate to speculate on what happened,” Johnson said. “He’s very upset.”

Johnson said the two officers who entered the warehouse in the 7400 block of Lorge Circle shouted warnings for anyone inside to immediately surrender. The second officer was providing cover for the first officer when the first officer fired at Franks, who was living in a front office, Johnson said.

The death marks the department’s fourth officer-involved shooting since September 1995 and is being investigated by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. Huntington Beach police officials also are conducting their own inquiry.

Franks, a World War II veteran, had been an aerospace engineer for decades and had been staying at the industrial park to avoid the long commute to his mobile home near Temecula, said Ramelot, the 21-year-old owner who devised his company name by spelling his last name backward.

Ramelot said Franks was scheduled to leave Wednesday night for a utility trade show in Denver to show off his prized project: spheres to mark electrical high wires, designed to keep aircraft from colliding with the wires. “One more day and he wouldn’t have even been here,” Ramelot said.

Franks began designing the marking spheres, and a system of bolting them to high wires by helicopter, about three years ago. He brought the design to Tolemar--which also manufactures motorcycle parts--about 18 months ago.

Described as energetic and warm, Franks often regaled his young employer and other co-workers with stories of the war and the time he spent as a master sergeant in the South Pacific.

“He never got shot,” Ramelot said of the war years. “He was 77 years old and he never even got sick. He was healthier than us.”

Franks grew up in Mojave, married his high school sweetheart and raised three children. He had 14 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. His wife, Mary, died three years ago, and Ramelot said the fit and genial engineer worked at a frenetic pace to keep his mind off his loss.

Members of Franks’ distraught family were making plans late Wednesday to come to Orange County from Arizona, Texas and Hawaii.

“I can’t fathom how this can happen,” said Franks’ son, 48-year-old Dennis Franks. “Being almost 80 years old at your own place of business, unarmed, I don’t think there’s any excuse. They show these things on TV where there are guys with guns all around them, and [the police] aren’t shooting them. It’s hard for me to believe.”

Dennis Franks and his wife, Hattie, 48, of Lake Havasu City in Arizona, said Ted Franks had just helped them buy a new family car. The man they lovingly called “Papa” was thrilled that his invention was taking off and looking forward to making some money, Dennis said.

“This was retiring for him,” his son laughed. “Even after my mom died, he kept right on working. We thought it was good for him because they’d been together for 50-some years. We encouraged him to keep doing something.”

Just three months ago, Franks moved his mobile home to a new senior development in the tiny Riverside County community of Aguanga. He had purchased a slice of land there on a pond at the Jojoba Hills SKP Resort--billed as a haven for urban “escapees”--when his wife was alive, and waited patiently during the resort’s development, Ramelot said.

He had spent the last few weekends landscaping around the pond with a succulent “red apple” plant and was looking forward to fishing after resort managers stocked the pond in the coming month, said Tolemar employee Henry Huismans, 22.

“All the old people at Jojoba Hills were envious because he had a patio that hung over the pond,” Huismans said. “We were supposed to build an awning for it next week because he didn’t want to sit in the sun.”

Bob Harvey, the park manager, described Franks as “one fine man” who donated two $3,000 pool tables to the resort billiard room because he couldn’t pitch in with physical labor. The resort was built almost entirely by volunteers.

“Every night when he’s here he’s up playing pool at 6 p.m.,” said Harvey, 72, pausing to hold back sobs.

Franks was proud of his 45-foot trailer and had recently hired some men to help with landscaping and tending the pond.

“He said, ‘I don’t want to see the weeds,’ ” Harvey said. “I’m doing it for myself, but it benefits everyone in the park.”

Since he worked such late hours on his “pride and joy” project, Franks arranged to live at the office during the week and travel home on weekends, Ramelot said.

Forever the engineer, Franks installed a sink and garbage disposal, two microwave ovens, a convection oven, a hot plate, a full-size refrigerator and a shower at the business to make his weeknights more pleasurable.

Wednesday, his room showed signs of the day-to-day routine that had become so comfortable: a full spice rack, a giant-screen television where, Ramelot said, Franks loved to watch the Discovery Channel, and a drawer full of his favorite CDs. Still on his disc player: “The World’s Best-Loved Waltzes.”

Ramelot said Franks loved to waltz and told stories of his job as a light engineer at a dance ballroom in his younger years.

His bed remained unmade, his work clothes slung over a nearby chair.

Frank Fleck, 53, an owner of Coast Aerospace in Garden Grove, said he had known Franks for about two decades. Franks was “very well known” in the aerospace community, said a stunned Fleck, choking back tears.

“We had worked together for a lot of years,” Fleck said Wednesday. “He was probably one of the most energetic people I ever met in my life. He was just always enthused in everything that he did.”

The Huntington Beach Police Department’s three previous officer-involved shootings over the last year involved suspects who police considered armed.

In January, an officer shot and killed 17-year-old Ulises Zambrano in a multi-agency drug raid. The officer said it appeared the teen was reaching for a weapon.

In October 1995, an officer shot and critically wounded a Huntington Beach man who police said had charged officers with a pair of scissors.

On Sept. 29 of last year, two uniformed officers in an unmarked car shot and killed 22-year-old Jose Manual Rios after he allegedly aimed a sawed-off shotgun at them. His family contested the police account and said Rios had aimed the shotgun at the ground.

Johnson said he did not want to speculate about the reasons for Wednesday’s shooting. But he said officers are trained to handle a range of encounters--from armed criminals to innocent bystanders--when answering a burglary call.

“Our officers are going in and doing a search expecting burglars and should be expecting a wide variety of things,” he said. “It’s not uncommon to come across innocent people in the midst of a crime.”

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Tragic Shooting

Huntington Beach police mistakenly shot a man who was living at the offices of a small manufacturing firm. Officers were responding to a false burglar alarm in the building next door and found the back door of Tolemar Manufacturing open. Ted Franks died later at UCI Medical Center in Orange. How the shooting occurred:

1. Police find back door of warehouse ajar, enter building and begin search.

2. Ted Franks emerges from his room.

3. Officer, five feet away, shoots Franks in leg.

4. Franks stumbles back into his room, where he is treated by paramedics called by police.