Death trap The killer who ambushed a north state p

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Death trap
The killer who ambushed a north state police officer not only destroyed a young couple's dreams but left their friends aching to know why
By Sam Stanton and Marjie Lundstrom -- Bee Staff Writers
Published 2:15 am PDT Sunday, July 31, 2005
Story appeared on Page A1 of The Bee
TO OUR READERS

The murder of Red Bluff Police Officer Dave Mobilio happened more than two years ago and the trial is over, the killer on death row awaiting execution. But the pain lives on in Red Bluff, perhaps more so because it's a friendly town that local residents had long considered more Mayberry than mayhem. Bee staff writers Sam Stanton and Marjie Lundstrom set out to answer questions lingering in the community halfway between Sacramento and the Oregon border: "Why Red Bluff?" "Why Dave?" In a five-part series starting today, they show how a senseless, random murder affects not just the lives of family and friends of the victim, but also those of the killer and of the communities where both lived. It's a story that's tough to tell but needs to be told.

- Rick Rodriguez
Executive Editor


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RED BLUFF - He crouched in the shadows behind a metal bin, waiting to kill. He had passed on earlier targets - two uniformed sheriff's deputies who had stopped by the dimly lit gas station on the edge of Red Bluff to refuel their patrol car.

But the man in the shadows had a plan.

Sometime around 1:30 a.m. on Nov. 19, 2002, Officer Dave Mobilio of the Red Bluff Police Department became part of that plan.

To this day, residents remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. Thanksgiving was nine days away, Gray Davis had been re-elected governor of California, and the town of Red Bluff, population 13,147, had just lost a fourth officer to better pay in nearby Redding.

Dave Mobilio was working hard. The 31-year-old officer with a wife and 19-month-old son - and a dream house under way - was well into his graveyard shift when he pulled into Warner's Petroleum fueling station on Main Street, nearly a mile north of the central business district. Earlier in the day, a family medical emergency had left another officer without child care, and Mobilio had been asked to fill in.

At 1:27 a.m., he radioed dispatch from the gas station and climbed alone from his patrol car.

This was the man's cue. He sprang from his hiding place and began to run, one foot scraping gravel. The noise seemed to startle the uniformed officer, but the man charged forward, firing three armor-piercing bullets. One missed. Two others penetrated the back of Mobilio's body-armor vest, and he fell facedown onto the pavement beside Pump 4, his automatic pistol skittering a few feet away.

The killer stood over the fallen officer, then fired one more shot into Mobilio's head, to make sure he was dead.

In that brutal instant, a beloved police officer was dead, a town descended into mourning, and a bizarre case of politically motivated murder began its long journey through the justice system - a journey that ended in April in a Colusa County courtroom.

But the case is far from over. The mur-der of Officer Dave Mobilio - the first killing of a law enforcement officer in Tehama County in 100 years - crept into the lives of many and resides there still.

There is Mobilio's little boy, left fatherless. There is his widow, who moved back to her hometown to escape the pain, and his Bay Area parents, who still anguish over the loss of their only son. There is the prosecutor with nightmares, the police chaplain with guilt, the jury forewoman who doesn't trust strangers anymore. There is the 7-year-old child of a Red Bluff police detective, who still panics when she hears a siren and needs to be sure her daddy is OK.

And across the country in Ohio, there is another family grieving the loss of their own son, now on death row at San Quentin.

One flash of violence, hundreds of lives transformed.

The year Dave Mobilio died, nine law enforcement officers were killed in California and 156 nationwide, each with their own tragic stories. But Mobilio's murder stands out - a sorrowful chapter in the nation's history of domestic terrorism and the violent eruption of anti-government zealotry.

In Red Bluff, it's more personal. Among those who knew him, and those who did not, the same two questions have been asked, again and again:

Why Red Bluff? Why Dave?

"For us, it's like the day Kennedy was shot," said Deputy District Attorney Lynn Strom, who would prosecute the case. "It's like we were all there, we all knew him and everybody has a story to tell about what it was like for them. It helps us heal."

The town of Red Bluff, named for the rust-colored cliffs nearby, has retained its small-town charms, though locals complain it's being "discovered."

Nestled along Interstate 5, about 30 miles south of Redding, it is a quick side trip over the Sacramento River, where visitors are greeted on the edge of town by the fading Cinderella Motel and the landmark State Theater, its paint peeling. Historic two-story buildings with brick facades line the two-block central business district, though Wal-Mart has found a perch on the town's southern edge.

Like many of California's rural communities, Red Bluff is feeling the press of new settlers looking inland for a break in lifestyle and housing prices. Between 1990 and 2000, the population of Tehama County grew from 49,265 to 56,039. In Red Bluff, the county seat, the median price of homes has more than doubled since 1993, spiraling from $81,500 to $195,500 this year.

Dave Mobilio was among those who migrated from the Bay Area to Red Bluff, where his path to law enforcement was hardly direct. But his decision to settle here, where the hunting, fishing and outdoor lifestyle meshed with his personality, seems preordained.

As a boy growing up in Saratoga, an affluent suburban pocket near San Jose, Dave was what his father would come to call a "tentative adventurer."

"David wasn't the first one to embrace risk," said Richard Mobilio, 66, whose white hair frames a sun-burnished face. "He was more cautious. But he also felt as if he had to prove himself in ways that were different than what his sister did, or what I did, or his mother."

Dave liked action from the time he was a small boy, screaming down the grassy hill behind the Mobilio home on his Big Wheel tricycle or learning to navigate the family's backyard pool at age 2.

In a neighborhood chock-full of kids looking for adventure, Dave often found it, wandering about decked out in a hat of some sort - a cowboy hat, a fireman's helmet, anything to adorn his small head.

When he was 6, he and his close friend Scott wandered up the hill on what they decided was a bear hunt, then came tearing down after managing to set a fire that scorched the hillside.

"It was very naughty, and the firemen came and had a very serious talk with him," said his 60-year-old mother, Laurie, a striking woman with high cheekbones and chin-length auburn hair. "It was the only time I ever spanked him, because we were so scared for him."

But Dave rarely gave his parents reason to worry.

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As a student, he never excelled the way his older sister, Lynne, had done. While Dave struggled with learning disabilities, she was valedictorian of Saratoga High School, where she was two years ahead of her brother. She eventually earned her doctoral degree in social psychology.

If school was more difficult for Dave, he compensated with candor. In a Nov. 23, 1983, report on Holland that he wrote in the sixth grade at Foothill School, Dave explained how he had come to choose that particular subject: "I chose the country of Holland because I knew it was small, and I thought it was going to be a cinch," he wrote in a boyish hand.

He earned a B-minus.

Dave had what his parents remember as a "Huck Finn quality" and got more enjoyment from being outside, leading packs of children on beachside jaunts during family vacations in Maine, camping in Alaska's grizzly bear country or going on safari in Africa.

Travel lust ran in the family. His father, a former Marine, engineer and consultant with a series of business successes, opened a travel company in 1987 that leads clients on adventure tours worldwide.

But Dave didn't settle on a career path until he was in his late 20s, after a series of jobs. He bagged groceries, mowed lawns and worked as a bouncer, a job that was a natural for a man with a passion for weight lifting and bodybuilding.

He worked at Radio Shack in the San Jose area, once rushing from the store when he saw a passer-by collapse in a parking lot. He calmly administered CPR until paramedics arrived.

Dave moved to Chico in 1991 to attend Butte Community College, and while there found work at Sears in a job aimed at preventing shoplifting. From that job, he slowly warmed to the idea of becoming a police officer.

By then, he had met his future wife, Linda Marie Dias, a schoolteacher whose close friend lived next door to Dave at a Chico apartment complex.

"There's a really cute guy in the apartment next door. I think you guys would be great together. I think you should go meet him," the friend told Linda one day.

"So I marched over to the door and knocked on the glass," Linda recalled later.

Dave answered - "a very attractive man, very strong, healthy build, beautiful green eyes," Linda said.

The torch was lit.

It was 1991. Dave was 21. Linda, 19.

Their romance continued on and off for several years until Dave proposed in 1995 at a Chico restaurant, where he was so nervous Linda thought he was sick. Sweating and coughing, he dropped to one knee and told her, "You're the one I want to spend my life with."

Linda said yes, and the couple left the restaurant with their entire meal in boxes. They were too excited to eat.

By that November, Dave had graduated from the police academy, and he and Linda agreed they would move

wherever one of them got a job first. Linda was hired to teach school in Cottonwood in 1996, the same year they were married, and the couple moved to nearby Red Bluff, where Dave set his sights on landing a job with the Police Department.

It didn't take long. He was spotted one day by a police sergeant, who saw him working out in a local gym and recruited him to be a reserve officer. Dave had an offer from another department, but he wanted to stay in Red Bluff so Linda would not have far to commute. In 1998, his perseverance won him a full-time job on the force.

Dave fit in quickly in the department, where officers still handle the duties of small-town America: checking the doors on Main Street businesses to make sure they are locked, herding groups of young people toward home at night and answering disturbance calls.

"We're Mayberry," explained police Chaplain Ron Fortenberry, who had worked in San Bernardino County before moving to Red Bluff. "I came from Southern California where a ride-along is 'man with gun' calls and five 911s pending. And here they actually answer barking-dog calls. I'd say, 'You mean we're going to go answer a barking-dog call?' 'Yeah, that's what we do.' "

For Dave Mobilio, it was the perfect fit.

On his off days, he would ride in the backcountry on his souped-up quad off-road vehicle, or hunt wild pigs or fish. At 5-foot-11 and 240 pounds, he had such massive arms that some thought he looked uncomfortable in short-sleeved shirts. At Linda's school, when he would pop in for surprise visits, children would hang off his arms, treating them like monkey bars.

He was punctual, always showing up 30 minutes early for any engagement. But he also was impulsive, never able to wait to open a gift, even as a grown man. Once he showed up at Linda's school with a Great Dane puppy that he had decided the couple just had to have, bringing it into the classroom for the kids to name.

At work, he quickly became known as the department prankster, a characteristic that occasionally backfired. Once, while trying to get back at a colleague, he grabbed a jar of Vaseline and squished the whole gooey mess under the car door handle of his intended target - or so he thought.

"Unfortunately, it was the supervisor's door," Red Bluff Police Chief Al Shamblin would say later in court, while spectators chuckled. "He got the wrong one.

"But he was always full of things to do. Just tons of fun to be around."

Beyond the practical jokes, Mobilio was best known around town as an officer in the DARE program - Drug Abuse Resistance Education. Affectionately known as "DAREman Dave," he was assigned to schools two days a week to help prevent children from drifting into drug use. The other two days he patrolled Red Bluff.

He worked regularly at Jackson Heights Elementary School, where more than 70 percent of the school's 500-plus students live at or below the poverty level.

"Dave was always seen with the children on the playground or eating in the cafeteria," said Steve Meagher, vice president of the Jackson Heights PTA. "Kids were not embarrassed to say that he was a cool guy to be with."

When his parents visited, Mobilio would take them along on patrol so they could see him in the job he loved. His mother, Laurie, marveled at the way he could spot things she had overlooked.

"He waded into threatening situations," she said. "He had guts. I wasn't really (worried), I had a lot of confidence in him. I could see, having been in a ride-along, how they supported one another.

"And it was Red Bluff, after all."

It was Red Bluff, a place where danger didn't seem to lurk. Until the murder, the only two instances of law enforcement officers being killed in Tehama County dated back more than 100 years. In 1895, Sheriff John Jasper Bogard was shot while trying to stop a train robbery. In 1902, James Henan DeLaney, the 41-year-old constable of tiny Vina, 25 miles southeast of Red Bluff, was shot while questioning a man about firecrackers.

Red Bluff, midway between Sacramento and the Oregon border, remains farming and ranching country - part of the attraction for Dave and Linda as they began to plan the rest of their lives together. When they moved to this small town, with two stoplights in the main business district, they bought a house. But they eventually sold it to buy a 5-acre parcel with a creek running through it, where they would build their dream home.

Dave was an incurable romantic, writing love letters and sending flowers - "all the things that a woman dreams of," Linda said. He would go through an entire pad of Post-It notes, scribbling love messages and sticking them throughout the house. One day, she came home and found one that said: "Let's have a baby."

Their son, Luke, was born on April 16, 2001, and Dave wept openly. He had accompanied Linda to every doctor's appointment and, in his impulsive way, surprised her one day by wallpapering the nursery with a Noah's ark theme.

Their dreams were coming together. Life was good.

And it was all about to implode.

On Nov. 18, 2002, the week before Thanksgiving, Dave was home with his 19-month-old son, who was still in diapers. By then, the family was living in a cramped rental, waiting for the builders to start their house in the country. The foundation had been poured, and the lumber would be delivered the next morning. Linda had run out to buy shoes for a friend's wedding the following weekend.

"I got home," she said later, "and I remembered the phone ringing. Luke had put my shoes on and was clicking around the house in them, and I remember I took pictures."

Dave, who was cooking dinner, came back from the phone call. There was a problem. The 26-member Red Bluff Police Department was already short-handed, having recently lost four officers to higher pay in nearby Redding. Earlier that day, fellow Officer Brett McAllister had found his former mother-in-law unconscious on the floor of her house. She was taken away by ambulance, leaving McAllister to care for his 11-month-old son while his ex-wife went to the hospital.

Dave would have to pick up the 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift.

"I'm sorry, I have to go to work," he told Linda. "They need me."

"And so he got ready, and he told me he loved me, like he always did before he left," Linda said. "And I told him I loved him. And that was the last time I saw him."

Ron Fortenberry got the call about 2:10 a.m. He shook himself awake, listened to the dispatcher and hung up.

"What's wrong?" his wife asked.

"One of our officers has been killed, and they need me at the scene," he replied.

Fortenberry, the 50-year-old police chaplain, sat on the bed, so numb with shock he couldn't remember where his uniform was. His wife, Renee, had to help him on with his clothes.

Across Red Bluff, similar scenes played out as police dispatcher Sue Meyers called people in.

Gregg Cohen, the Tehama County district attorney, groggily took his call, then quickly dressed and made the 25-second drive to the gas station.

Dan Flowerdew, a Red Bluff police detective, soon arrived at the murder scene, too, where his friend and colleague lay dead. The body had been discovered minutes earlier by another Red Bluff officer, sent to check up on Dave Mobilio when he failed to respond to a radio call.

Flowerdew's duty lasted until midnight the next day - a 22-hour shift that would haunt him for months to come. While others would have lasting memories of Mobilio in life, the body covered in tarps would be the stark image that lingered with him.

"Our guys were fortunate because they remember Dave in uniform or as a kid," said the detective, a tall, lean man who speaks in steady, measured tones. "Well, I remember Dave there ... ."

While Flowerdew began his vigil, Fortenberry and others headed toward Dave and Linda's rental home in Anderson, 20 miles north on Interstate 5.

"The hardest thing for me to do was go to Linda's house," Al Shamblin would recall later.

Shamblin, now the Red Bluff police chief and a 32-year veteran of the department, was commander in charge of patrol operations the night of the murder. It fell to him to lead the others to Dave and Linda's home. Linda needed a face she would recognize.

"There was a pound at the door. It was the middle of the night ... And it was getting louder and louder," Linda, then 29, said in court testimony.

Frightened, she first thought she should call her husband for help. She peeked through the glass panels in the door and saw shapes of people on the step. Then she heard Shamblin's voice, one she recognized, and she opened the door.

"I saw Al," she would recall. "He looked so sad."

She knew at once something was wrong. "Where's David? Where is he?" she asked.

When they broke the news, Linda became physically ill, running to the bathroom over and over. One of the officers retreated to Luke's bedroom to hold the child.

Finally, Linda asked Shamblin to get her parents on the phone in Chico. But after he dialed and reached her father, Shamblin found "the words just wouldn't come out.

"And I had to hand her the telephone."

Linda told the officers there were two things she wanted before she and Luke left for Chico: Dave's badge and his wedding ring.

"And they took it off of his finger on the pavement and brought it to me," she said.

Word of the murder was spreading quickly now, and investigators were worried. Some things needed to be kept secret.

The killer appeared to have left a clue, though it was as mysterious as the murder itself. Placed beside Dave Mobilio's lifeless body was a homemade canvas flag with a picture of a snake and, painted in black, the enigmatic words: "This was a political action."

Printed below in smaller black letters was the warning: "Don't tread on Us."

District Attorney Cohen studied the scene. The officer had been shot three times - twice in the back and once in the head - but there were no shell casings. No witnesses. No surveillance pictures. Nothing.

Only the flag.

"Basically, we've got a dead officer and we have no shell casings, which we think is very, very odd," said Cohen, 43, a shrewd, hardworking prosecutor with a trace of his New Jersey roots in his accent.

"And we have this flag. So we're very unnerved. Very, very unnerved."

Flowerdew was anxious to keep inquisitive journalists and onlookers from seeing the flag. With a news media helicopter on its way, investigators hurried to shield the crime scene with a curtain of red Fire Department tarps.

"The flag to me was just critical - just crucial - because there were only a few people who knew it had been placed there: the responding officers, the crime scene people and the person who put it there," said Flowerdew, 41, a 16-year veteran of the small Police Department.

"We didn't know what it meant. But we knew the person who put it here knew exactly what was on the flag."

Mobilio's body was shielded by the red tarps, too, and a cordon of yellow police tape. The body would remain at the gas station well into the afternoon.

This soon became a matter of contention.

"The other officers were (saying), 'Why is Dave still out there? What's going on?' " Flowerdew recalled.

Virtually everyone at the scene knew the victim, and they wanted him lifted gently from the concrete and driven away. But Flowerdew and others knew that couldn't happen, that Mobilio would have to stay there while detectives combed the scene.

Fortenberry would say later how glad he was it hadn't rained that day. Maybe it was stupid, he thought, but "I didn't want Dave to get wet.

"He was my friend," Fortenberry said sadly, "and I didn't want him to get wet."

Even with the flag, investigators were stymied. What did it mean?

Still more perplexing: Why Red Bluff? Why Dave?

Cohen knew that murders were rare in Red Bluff, and they usually happened for obvious reasons. The prosecutor wondered if this murder might be linked to the Nov. 8 death of a 31-year-old Red Bluff man, who had collapsed and died in police custody after a foot chase by officers.

"That was our first thought, that maybe there was some type of retribution," the prosecutor said. "I think that's what everybody kind of thought."

They were looking in the wrong direction. The man they wanted was halfway to Oregon, and everything was going exactly to plan.

Coming Monday - The Killer

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