Sheriff’s Department Faces Scrutiny in Fatal Standoff

He had eluded authorities for a week, shielded by Joshua trees and scrub brush in the summer heat of the High Desert east of Palmdale.

Then, late on the morning of Aug. 8, an informant led authorities to a home and cluster of outbuildings. Within hours, 50 heavily armed officers had converged on Donald Kueck’s hideout.

Kueck was the chief suspect in the murder of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Stephen Douglas Sorensen, 46, who had been shot 14 times. Deputies surrounded Kueck not far from the site of Sorensen’s killing.

Sheriff Lee Baca arrived at the standoff and told his deputies it was a “dead or alive” situation.

When reached by telephone, Kueck admitted shooting Sorenson, according to Kueck’s stepdaughter, Becky Welch, who sat beside the police negotiator during the calls that day. During the 8 1/2-hour standoff, Kueck, a 52-year-old unemployed man with a criminal record and a methamphetamine habit, vacillated between giving up and vowing never to surrender. Over the last hour or so of the standoff, he began shooting at deputies.

At 7 p.m., deputies tried to flush him out with an LAPD battering ram and, when that failed, they shot tear gas canisters, which are believed to have sparked a fire. Kueck’s body was found inside the burned compound. The coroner has not yet released the results of Kueck’s autopsy. His two sisters said they were told Kueck died of bullet wounds.

The tactics used by Baca and his deputies are the subject of four independent reviews. The investigations are being conducted by the sheriff’s homicide and internal affairs bureaus, as well as the department’s Office of Independent Review and the Los Angeles County district attorney.

They are focusing on three areas, according to sources:

* Whether officers at the scene gave their negotiator enough time to bring the standoff to a peaceful end.

* Whether the decision to use so-called hot tear gas needlessly risked the fire that burned Kueck.

* And whether Baca’s “dead or alive” ultimatum pushed deputies toward the deadly conclusion.

“There’s no such thing as a perfect tactical response to a person who murdered a cop, a person who is firing at cops with the intent of murdering [more] cops,” Baca said last month.

From the beginning, sheriff’s officials made it clear that Kueck had to give up by sundown. Authorities were worried that he would slip away in the darkness, either to escape or to harm deputies, according to Welch. She said she heard most of the communications involving her stepfather, the negotiator and commanders at the scene.

The standoff began about 11 a.m. near Llano in the Antelope Valley. The buildings were isolated on a desolate plain north of the Angeles National Forest.

A review of Kueck’s cellular phone bill provided by his family show that he placed 17 calls that day to Welch’s Riverside home. Welch said her stepfather contradicted himself repeatedly about what he did, and what he would do.

For instance, Kueck, who had a history of confrontations with police, said deputies were trying to set him up for the Sorenson killing. Later, Welch said, he told her that “I killed a cop. “

A week earlier, on Aug. 2, Sorenson had been checking out a report of a trespasser, according to Baca’s office. At 10:17 a.m., Sorenson ran a motor vehicle records check. Ten minutes later, a neighbor called the Palmdale sheriff’s station, reporting gunshots in the area of 21001 E. Avenue T-8.

Welch said Kueck told her over the phone that when Sorensen approached, Kueck jumped in his car and tried to leave. Kueck said the officer pointed a gun at him, and ordered Kueck to show his hands. Kueck told Welch that he asked Sorensen to put his gun down but the deputy kept his weapon trained on him, Welch said.

Growing angry, Kueck reached for the deputy’s gun and shot him under his bulletproof vest. The two continued to struggle before Kueck went into his trailer and returned with a gun that he used to shoot the deputy again. According to the coroner’s report, Sorensen was shot 14 times. The body was tied to a car with a rope and dragged at least a quarter-mile.

The two men had crossed paths before. Kueck filed a lengthy complaint against the deputy after Sorensen tried to pull him over in 1994.

In a handwritten account, Kueck said he was driving in Lancaster when he noticed he was being followed by a man in a red pickup.

After a brief pursuit, Kueck wrote, “I stopped my car and heard him ordering me to get out ... he was very angry and was screaming at me.... He was pointing a gun at me.”

Kueck was charged with assaulting a police officer, but the allegations were dropped.

Welch said her stepfather talked about giving up in conversations with her and police negotiator Det. Mark Lillienfeld, who declined to comment.

“He didn’t want to go back to jail, but he would surrender if they would do certain things,” Welch said. “Mark kept saying, ‘We don’t want to hurt you, what can we do to get you to give up?’ ”

Messages Relayed

Kueck never spoke directly with the officers at the scene. His messages were relayed to the deputies through Lillienfeld, Welch said.

Between 5:30 p.m. and 6 p.m., Kueck made five calls on a cellular phone to Welch’s house. But Kueck’s phone battery was dying, and Lillienfeld at one point cursed the technology, recalled Welch, saying, “He is trying to give up and I can’t get anyone on the scene to talk to him directly.”

The last call came at 6:01 p.m., according to phone records. Welch said Kueck told her, “They are moving in. Tell the sheriff to call his men off. I need to charge my phone.”

The conversation was followed 40 minutes later by an exchange of gunfire. Then the battering ram, a tank-like armored vehicle borrowed from the Los Angeles Police Department, crashed through a wall.

Officers fired tear gas at about 7:30 p.m., and within 10 minutes, fire was consuming the compound.

“They were confused about how it started,” Welch recalled. “Mark asked, ‘Does your dad smoke? Does he carry a lighter?’ They mused as to whether Don started it as a diversion.”

Sheriff’s deputies had used the same variety of tear gas, known as hot gas, which is spread by a flame, to end a 2001 standoff in Santa Clarita involving James Allen Beck. Beck had also killed a sheriff’s deputy and barricaded himself in his home. Like Kueck, he died in a fire after hot tear gas was shot into the house.

Sgt. Lou Aviles, on the staff of the California Highway Patrol’s training academy, said his agency doesn’t use hot or burning tear gas inside structures because of the risk of fire.

“If it’s necessary to use it indoors, we use the non-burning variety so we don’t have a secondary fire hazard from curtains, furniture or carpeting,” Aviles said.

The advantage of so-called hot tear gas is that it burns at a much higher temperature, making it “much more difficult to pick up and throw it back,” Aviles said. Even so, he added, “we only use burning gas outdoors.”

Citing the ongoing investigations, Sheriff’s Department officials denied requests to discuss details of the incident, provide a timeline, review internal communications or identify the officers involved.

Bob Louden, a professor and director of the Criminal Justice Center at John Jay College and a former hostage negotiator for the New York Police Department, said investigators should review Kueck’s telephone conversations.

“One of the things I’m most curious about was, what was being communicated between the negotiator in Riverside and the officers at the scene?” Louden said. “Did he get his message to them? Was it being considered out there?”

Authorities should also examine the words of Baca and top commanders, said Bill Cade, a director with the Assn. of Public Safety Communications Officials in Daytona Beach, Fla. “There are plenty of examples during these events when people make comments that have undesirable results that were not intended.”

Limited Options

Frank A. Bolz Jr., a retired New York Police Department captain who helped create that department’s standards for handling barricaded suspects and hostage situations, said Kueck’s actions left deputies with few choices, especially at twilight.

“He already demonstrated he can kill, and he’s shooting at them again,” Bolz said. “If you tried to take him peacefully, he can shoot some more.”

Kueck was described by relatives as a loner who turned increasingly erratic after bouts of bad health, and the death of his son from a drug overdose in 2001. He lived in a tent on land in Llano that his sister Lynne Kueck had bought him. Continuing worries over his well-being led Lynne and another sister, Peggi Gilmore, to buy him a used trailer.

Kueck did not work, his sisters said, and they bought him groceries and gave him money.

In 1997, Kueck was convicted of resisting arrest and fined after he refused to produce a driver’s license and drove away after being stopped by police in the Antelope Valley.

Court records also show Kueck pleaded no contest in Riverside County in September 2001 to assault, unlawful use of force on a police officer and resisting arrest after he pulled out a knife on a street.

Kueck was sentenced to a year in jail and placed on probation for three years.

The time in jail made an impression, Lynne Kueck said. Her brother told his family he never wanted to go back behind bars again.

In his final phone conversations, Kueck’s mood moved from defiance to desperation, Welch recalled.

“ ‘If they come near me, I’ll start shooting,’ ” Welch quoted Kueck as saying. “ ‘I’ll kill myself. I can’t do that. I’ll just let the cops do it.’ ”