Suspect Held in Shooting of Park Ranger

A man suspected of carjacking and shooting a state ranger at a park in the Santa Cruz Mountains was arrested Wednesday in San Jose.

The ranger, a 16-year veteran who is the first California parks officer on record to be shot while on duty, was recovering from a bullet wound to the knee, according to the state Department of Parks and Recreation.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the parks department said the shooting could change the way rangers go about their jobs.

Authorities said the shooting occurred Tuesday morning, when Supervising Ranger Sharon Galligan tried to cite a man for illegal camping in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, which is closed for the season.

The man shot Galligan once before fleeing in a pickup truck that had been reported stolen in Redding. Parks spokesman Steve Capps said that the ranger returned fire but that the gunman escaped. A short time later, Capps said, the man abandoned the truck and stole an older-model Mercedes at gunpoint, forcing the two women inside to accompany him. He released the women unharmed in San Jose.

David Melberg was arrested Wednesday by San Jose police, acting on a tip. Police said they staked out a house where relatives of Melberg lived and arrested him when he went out to get the morning paper.

“This is a startling reminder of the dangers faced by our rangers on a daily basis in patrolling the largest state park system in America,” Capps said.

Bill Berry, chief of operations for state parks, said, “This really points out that as society changes, we are getting the spillage of the bad in society [at state parks], and we have to deal with it.”

California park rangers began carrying weapons in the 1960s and started getting the same training as police in the ‘70s. Capps said rangers have been involved in a number of shooting incidents, and have been shot at. But this is the first time in memory that a ranger has been hit by a gunshot, he said.

Roy Stearns, a parks department spokesman, said Galligan’s shooting could force the department to change the way it patrols parks. Because some parks are in such remote areas that help from backup officers can be as much as an hour away, supervisors have long warned field rangers to be cautious when approaching illegal campers. But that may not be enough.

“Typically, they ride alone,” he said of rangers. Now, he expects that the agency will at least “look at” the possibility of putting two rangers in each unit.