A slow burn suddenly turns deadly in Minkler, Calif.

Reporting from Minkler — Trouble had been brewing in tiny Minkler, a Sierra foothills community about 20 miles east of Fresno, for months. But residents never envisioned that it would end with two people -- one a sheriff’s deputy -- dead and two other law enforcement officers wounded.

Joel Wahlenmaier, 49, a veteran with the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department who investigated homicides and other violent crimes, was killed in Thursday’s gunfire. Deputy Mark Harris, 48, was injured.

Javier Bejar, a Reedley police officer who responded to the call for backup in the minutes after Wahlenmaier was shot, is on life support at Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno and is not expected to survive.

The suspect, Ricky Ray Liles, 51, died during the gun battle that erupted when authorities attempted to serve him with a search warrant.

Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer said Friday that Liles had been taking medication for depression and probably took his own life with a gunshot to the head.

Liles had told his wife “that he would not go to prison,” Dyer said at a news conference. “He would take the lives of several officers before taking his own life.”

On Friday, what there is of Minkler was cordoned off as a crime scene, helicopters buzzing overhead.

But Minkler’s worries began about five months ago with small fires. A bunch of leaves here, a patch of grass there.

“You’d come out and say, ‘How did that tractor seat catch on fire?’ ” said rancher Jeff Rodenbeck, 51.

Eventually, a shed and a trailer burned. Then the shootings started. Someone shot up the Minkler Cash Store six times since January. On Monday, someone fired four bullets into Sally Minkler’s mobile home.

“Sally said she bent over to get her cellphone and the bullet went right where her torso had been,” said Mary Novack, who runs the Minkler Cash Store, the nerve-center and commercial entirety of Minkler, a town so small it once was listed for sale on EBay.

Residents were convinced the culprit was Liles, a former security guard renting a mobile home on Minkler family property across from the store.

“He was just your average pasty white guy with a bad back,” said Jeff Butts, who grows grapes and plums along the Kings River.

“But when you know all your neighbors, you look around and say, ‘Well, I know it’s not Mary, and it’s not Charlie and it’s not Sally’ . . . and pretty soon everyone came up with Liles,” Butts said. “He wasn’t friends with anyone. But no one ever actually saw anything they could prove. Things were getting tense out here.”

On Thursday morning, Novack was relieved when she saw law enforcement vehicles pull up to Liles’ place. She called Butts and told him cops were about to knock on Liles’ door.

“Hey, this guy is finally going down, let’s go to the store and watch,” Butts said he told one of his workers.

A small crowd gathered on the front porch of the general store, which has held court in Minkler since 1920. They watched as a deputy kicked in the door, shots were fired, an officer slumped, more law enforcement came and a prolonged gun battle raged.

“I was stunned. I didn’t even get down,” Butts said. “I kept thinking, ‘What are they doing? Those can’t be real bullets.’ The cops are saying hundreds of rounds were fired, but it had to be thousands.”

He was incredulous when a woman, later identified as Liles’ wife, Diane, and a dog emerged from the trailer. “I don’t see how anyone came out of that alive,” Butts said.

Half a mile down the road, Rodenbeck heard the first volley of shots. He loaded a pistol and rifle, and got his wife and teenage daughter away from the house in case gunmen emerged from the woods behind their home. Then he went to see what was going on.

When the bigger gun battle began, he crouched inside his truck’s tire well.

“Look, this is the country, gunfire is not a big deal, you hear it all the time. Someone’s shooting at coyotes. Or skeet,” he said. “But this was a war zone. It sounded like the cops had automatic rifles and they kept shooting. If you’d been here, you would have hit the ground. It rocked this place. He killed a cop right in front of them, and they don’t take lightly to that and I can’t say I blame them.”

Rodenbeck moved to Minkler from Huntington Beach to raise his family away from the city. He likes the beauty -- “this is river bottom, green all the time” -- the quiet, and the fact that men such as Charles Minkler, the great-grandson of Orzo Minkler, who founded the town in 1892, can still load 1,000 bales of hay. Minkler is in his 70s.

“Out here, men don’t get old. They get beat up and wrinkled, but they don’t use canes,” Rodenbeck said. “They have chores to do.”

But he was never under any illusion that violence couldn’t touch this place.

“They say they used to hang people from that tree over there,” he said. “Charlie can tell you about the bandits that used to hide out in these hills. Different people have different reasons for wanting to be out somewhere quiet.”

Novack, 54, recalls drug-dealing motorcycle gangs in the 1970s. As a teenager, she glimpsed white-robed Ku Klux Klan members burning crosses at the river’s edge.

“That’s a sight you never forget,” Novack said. “It’s chilling.”

She looked around at the orchards in bloom, snow-dusted peaks and sheepdogs trying to make friends with the police.

“People are saying, ‘In Minkler? It’s so beautiful and quiet there.’ But good and evil are everywhere,” she said. “Right in front of you. Right next to each other all the time.”

metrodesk@latimes.com

Marcum is a special correspondent for The Times.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.