Terror of Skirmishes Still Alive for Head of Police Border Unit

SAN DIEGO —  He never dreams about them any more, but he does remember each instance vividly. And the thing that stands out the most is the silence that enveloped him every time. There was no sound as he shot at and was shot at by shadowy figures in the rugged canyons east of the San Ysidro border crossing.

In that situation, Manny Lopez said, “The mind is trying to save the body. And all it’s concerned about is the danger. You focus intensely on this person shooting at you--nothing else.”

Lopez was involved in six gun battles as the San Diego police sergeant in charge of the Border Alien Robbery Force, a unique 10-person unit that, between 1976 and 1978, was charged with arresting criminals who preyed on illegal aliens as they crossed surreptitiously into the United States from Mexico. The unit was the forerunner of the current Border Crimes Task Force (composed of officers from the San Diego Police Department and the U.S. Border Patrol), and was made famous in Joseph Wambaugh’s book “Lines and Shadows.”

Recently, Lopez discovered a practical use for his grisly experience. In two separate trials, he has given expert testimony about the state of mind of people who are involved in shootings. He recently testified in a murder trial in Pasadena; in August he testified in the murder trial of Herman (Rock) Kreutzer, who was subsequently convicted of second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of his son-in-law, James Ray Spencer.

Lopez was paid about $500 by defense attorneys in each trial, and said he hopes to provide expert testimony more often--and for a higher fee, if possible. That may sound a little commercial, but Manny Lopez is not the kind of person to let slip an opportunity to capitalize on his experiences.

A Knack for Getting Publicity

Critics say he has a knack for getting maximum publicity for whatever he does--publicity that is generally favorable to him. But Lopez never really cashed in on the publicity he gained from the Border Alien Robbery Force and Wambaugh’s book, and the knowledge of that chafes at him. The dapper, cigar-smoking, 39-year-old former police sergeant is as restless and ambitious as ever.

“I have to exploit what (fame) I’ve got, because if I don’t, it’s going to fade away. I’m realizing that more and more,” he said.

Being an expert witness is only one of many lines of work Lopez has pursued since quitting the Police Department in 1979. But for the last 4 1/2 years he has spent most of his time working as a private investigator for police officers.

When Officer Kevin Barnard was accused of firing his revolver unnecessarily at an attacking pit bull terrier in Pacific Beach in December, Lopez collected evidence that helped persuade a police review board that the shooting was justified. Lopez also did investigative work for Officer Arturo Velasquez, who was prosecuted by the district attorney’s office after being accused of kicking a handcuffed suspect while arresting him in July. Velasquez’s trial ended recently with a hung jury, and the district attorney’s office subsequently dropped the charges.

“Nothing will ever be as exciting as the (border alien robbery) force. But I enjoy what I’m doing now,” said Lopez. “It feels good to defend police officers.”

It doesn’t hurt that someone is writing a series of novels based on his detective work, either. And this time Lopez will split the profits with the author.

Jesus Manuel Lopez was born in Calexico, but lived with his family in Mexicali and Tijuana before moving to San Diego when he was 6 years old. He grew up in Logan Heights and National City, and

graduated from Sweetwater High School. In 1968, at the age of 21, he joined the San Diego Police Department.

He made sergeant and was on the board of the Police Officer’s Assn. when he was asked to head the new Border Alien Robbery Force in 1976. The new assignment didn’t exactly fit into Lopez’s ambitious career plans--”I would have liked to be chief, but realistically, I could have been a captain or maybe a commander,” he said. But he took the job because he was bored, because he’d be in charge, and because of the unchecked brutality of the crimes being committed on the border.

Under Lopez’s direction the heavily armed, Spanish-speaking members of the Border Alien Robbery Force wore scruffy clothes and posed as illegal aliens in order to attract and arrest border bandits. Four months after they started patrolling the rugged canyons east of the San Ysidro Border Crossing and north of the Tijuana airport, Lopez was involved in his first shooting.

Caught by Surprise

“This guy caught us totally by surprise,” he recalled, “and pointed a .45 right at my head. I thought, ‘Oh (bleep),’ squatted down, and told myself I was going to die. I was kind of outside myself talking to myself, saying, ‘It’s too bad you’re going to die.’ ”

After a few moments the man with the gun turned slightly and trained his revolver on Lopez’s partner, Joe Castillo. “When he did that, I shot him five times,” said Lopez.

Over the next 14 months he was involved in five more shootings. None of the people he shot died, and he only got hit once himself, in the shoulder. But Lopez remembers all of those gun battles well.

“Before the shooting started, I was very scared, but during the shooting I felt no fear. You focus only on the person (shooting at you)--he is the danger. And in all the shootings I was in, I perceived the danger to be over when I saw the person fall to the ground.”

The latter point was an important one in the Pasadena murder trial in which Lopez recently testified. The suspect was accused of fatally shooting a man who attacked him with a soup ladle, even after the attacker turned and ran. The suspect claimed he couldn’t remember how many times he had fired, nor that he shot the man in the back. All he could remember was the danger the man posed to him.

Key Question

Among other things, the prosecuting attorney asked Lopez if he would ever shoot someone in the back. “I said yes, if I thought there was danger,” Lopez said. The Pasadena man was found innocent.

In Kreutzer’s trial, Lopez testified on the key question of why Kreutzer kept shooting his son-in-law after already hitting him with two shots. Lopez testified that when you perceive danger in a gun battle, you tend to keep shooting until the person who is threatening you goes down.

Lopez quit the San Diego Police Department in 1979, a year after the Border Alien Robbery Force was disbanded because police officials considered it too dangerous. Reporters from several local newspapers and TV stations interviewed him at the time, and he told them it was simply time to move on.

But Lopez says now that one reason he quit was because of low pay. In 1979 he was a sergeant with 11 years’ experience and was still making only $22,500 a year. He also pointed out that his police assignments all seemed boring after his work on the border.

‘Hell of a Job’

“Being scared was exciting,” he said. “We had done a hell of a job out there. And (the unit) was all mine.

“Part of my problem, too, was that I was outspoken. If something was wrong, I’d say it’s (bleeped) up. I made some enemies in high places (in the department), some of whom are still there.”

After leaving the Police Department, Lopez tried his hand at grease recycling, and established a plant in Mexico with some partners. The cleaned and recycled cooking grease could be used as an additive for cattle feed, among other things, but the venture went sour due to competition from recyclers in Los Angeles, and Lopez claims he lost about $75,000.

For cooperating with Wambaugh on “Lines and Shadows,” he and the other members of the Border Alien Robbery Task Force each received $5,000. But when the book appeared in 1984, Lopez was incensed at the portrait of him as a smooth-talking, macho tyrant who kept his own counsel and courted the media at the expense of his men.

Other members of the force insist that the book depicted Lopez accurately, however.

In Demand as Speaker

“Everyone (on the force) had a hard time getting along with Manny after awhile,” said Eddie Cervantes, a former member of the Border Alien Robbery Force who is now a sex crimes detective with the San Diego Police Department. “The publicity got to him, and made him change. Everything had to be done his way. . . . and he never gave the guys credit for things they did.” Lopez said he constantly gave credit to the other members of the task force, and that jealousies developed because he was a better public speaker and thus more in demand at luncheons and press conferences. He aggressively defended the tactics and actions of his men to Police Department administrators on numerous occasions, he pointed out. But he also conceded, “To a degree, we were all seduced by the attention we got.”

Lopez’s sister, Maria Severance, who is a patrol officer at the SDPD’s southern substation in San Ysidro, said that whenever her brother talked to her about the force’s activities, “He always referred to ‘us,’ ‘we.’ ”

“He was the oldest (child) in the family, the outspoken one, the boss,” Severance said. “He’s always been a leader, not a follower. But I never heard him praise himself.”

Lopez said he is no longer bitter about his characterization in “Lines and Shadows.”

“We didn’t get a lot of money, but why should I be bitter, with all the publicity I got from this guy Wambaugh?” he asked. The book led directly to his being contacted to give testimony as an expert witness, he noted, and to his current agreement with Mark Winkler, a La Jolla author who is fictionalizing Lopez’s work as a private detective in a series of novels.

‘All-American Hero’

“I first saw Manny Lopez on the ‘Today Show,’ and he struck me as the All-American hero. He’s excellent on television,” said Winkler, adding that he thinks Lopez’s glib manner on camera will be invaluable on promotional tours for the books.

The first novel of the series, which Winkler said is being looked at by two publishers, involves a private detective more or less like Lopez who goes to Baja California to kidnap a Russian agent who is spying on U.S. naval facilities in San Diego. The second novel is half finished and is set in the Florida Keys.

In reality, Lopez’s daily routine as a private detective would not exactly make riveting reading. He conducts interviews with witnesses, visits the scenes of accidents, tracks down information on urine samples and compiles reports. Although he is technically in business for himself, nearly all his work is done for the law firm Thistle and Krinsky, which specializes in defending peace officers throughout the county in civil and criminal cases.

Often he challenges the findings of the San Diego Police Department’s Internal Affairs Unit, which investigates complaints against officers. Lopez smiled at the suggestion that as a private detective he still manages to criticize and annoy some of the Police Department’s top administrators, but quickly grew serious again.

Some of the internal affairs investigators are fair, but some are blatantly biased against officers suspected of violating departmental guidelines on such things as the use of force or proper courtesy, he said. Velasquez, for instance, was fired and then prosecuted by the department’s internal affairs unit for assault under the color of authority. “Now the charges have been dropped by the D.A., but (Velasquez) will have to fight like hell to get his job back,” Lopez said.

Case of Attacking Dog

In the case involving the attacking pit bull, the officer, Kevin Barnard, was accused of shooting the dog twice after it was already mortally wounded.

“I did some research, and found out a pit bull can bite with a pressure of 2,000 to 2,200 pounds per square inch,” Lopez said. “That’s greater than most sharks. Now, the dog had been hit six times (with bullets), but it was still coming after the guy. How does he know it’s mortally wounded?

“If there’s a similarity between what I’m doing now and what I did on the border force, it’s that cops are getting screwed around, and I’m helping out. You have to discipline people sometimes. If it’s fair, it’s fair. But too many times it’s not fair.

“And that’s the way it was out in those canyons for the illegal aliens, too.”