Gunfights, Politics, and the Soboba Reservation
Ray Dietrich
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It was never one night
A pursuit comes onto the reservation with rounds coming out of the suspect car. Four CHP officers shot at. One fires back in a dirt field.
A traffic stop in East Hemet on a car belonging to a Soboba family. One man had a gun. Deputies shot him dead in a front yard. Another ran, and he was gone for the next three months.
New Year’s Eve. Deputies shot at again on the reservation. Two units hit.
A gun battle on the reservation, multiple deputies firing. I killed a man.
Four days later it happened again on the same ground. A helicopter taking fire. A gunfight at the reservation gate. Two more dead by the end of the night.
I listened to that one on a scanner. After you kill somebody the department gives you three days off and a psych eval before you get back to work.
01:46:41 — Units are surrounded
On May 8 I asked for four units. It’s in the dispatch log. Nobody came.
Forty-three minutes later I drove myself off that corner in a borrowed car with two detainees in the back, because I stopped waiting. The tactical team came up that road about twelve minutes after I left.
The answer never changed
Why there’s a book
Most of what’s in it I didn’t know until this year. After a shooting you give a safety statement and then you’re ordered not to speak about the case. Homicide interview, ordered again. Internal Affairs, ordered again. You can be fired for talking. So everybody carries one piece of it and nobody ever lays them on the table.
Two and a half years to write. It took the case files, the autopsy, the District Attorney’s review, both dispatch channels, and the statement of every deputy, officer and civilian who was there.
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