Nightmare in Riyadh : Shoot-out: For the Kent Hinkson family, five wonderful years in Saudi Arabia ended in a deadly hail of police gunfire.

By DENNIS McLELLAN

Sept. 30, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

FOUNTAIN VALLEY — Kent Hinkson settled into the sofa in his parents’ living room and glanced over at his two younger sons playing with Masters of the Universe figures on the floor.

He clasped his hands under his chin as if in prayer. Then, calmly and evenly, he recounted the events that led to the death of his wife and daughter last month in Saudi Arabia.

“It was a Tuesday, Aug. 14,” he began.

After more than five idyllic years living in the capital city of Riyadh, where he had been working for the Saudi government, Hinkson and his wife, Kim, were planning to move back to the United States on the first of September.

Then the unimaginable happened.

Two weeks before they were scheduled to leave Saudi Arabia for Provo, Utah, the Hinksons and four of their six children were returning from a trip to the supermarket when their car was commandeered at a stoplight by a gun-wielding drug dealer who was running from the police.

At the end of a 45-minute drive at gunpoint through city streets and onto a desert highway, the gunman shot Courtney Hinkson, 10, in the neck, killing her. And in the hail of police fire before the gunman’s surrender, Kent Hinkson, 36, suffered a wound to the head, and Kim Hinkson, 32, four months pregnant with twins, died.

More than 300 family members and friends gathered in the chapel of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Westminster in late August for the memorial service for Kim and Courtney Hinkson, who were later buried in Salt Lake City. Hinkson and his five children--four boys and one girl, ages 3 to 13--returned to Orange County 10 days ago to tie up loose ends and visit relatives. They left last Monday for a new life in Provo.

When Kent Hinkson was first offered a job as a computer programmer-analyst for a U.S. company in Saudi Arabia in 1982, he and Kim said: Forget it. Like many Americans, they envisioned Saudi Arabia as being no more than a desert of camels and tents.

But as Mormons, “very used to asking for guidance,” Kent Hinkson recalls, he and his wife prayed for the answer to the question of whether to uproot their family from Garden Grove. Afterward, they both felt in their “minds and hearts” that moving was the right thing to do.

And for nearly eight years--not counting the year and a half back in the United States after his first job was completed in 1984--it was the right thing. In fact, to the Hinksons, Saudi Arabia was more their home than the United States.

They made many friends among the foreigners working there; their government home in a residential compound became a social center on weekends. Kim, an outgoing woman with a knack for making people laugh and enjoy themselves, was especially fond of their Muslim friends. “Muslims and Mormons,” Hinkson says, “share a lot of common values. Family is chief among them. So our families got along well.”

As for how safe they felt living in Saudi Arabia. (This was before it became a staging area for U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf crisis.) The couple didn’t just feel safe, Hinkson says, “We felt it was the safest place in the world--period. There’s very little crime there, and it was a safe place to raise children in comparison to the United States.”

But early this year, the Hinksons had decided to move back to the United States. After five straight years in Saudi Arabia, “it was time,” Hinkson said.

“It was a Tuesday--Aug. 14.”

As on any normal day, he had gone to work at his job with the Riyadh Development Authority, a government organization overseeing development in the Riyadh region.

And, as usual, Kim stayed home--a large house in an eight-villa compound in the heart of the city’s northern residential district--where she had served as the older children’s schoolteacher.

Kim, who had been experiencing morning sickness, spent the day packing.

Around 6:30 that night, Hinkson suggested that the family go grocery shopping, then stop at a Turkish restaurant for a take-out dinner. Because Saudi law does not allow women to drive, Kim always looked forward to a chance to get out of the house.

The Hinksons and their four younger children piled into the family car, a Nissan station wagon provided by the government. The kids sat in back; the adults in front. The two elder children stayed home.

At the market, Hinkson said, “we picked up cookies and ice cream. We were just going to relax after working all day and packing.”

But on their way to the restaurant, they stopped at a red light, about a mile from home.

It was 7:45.

The first thing Hinkson remembers noticing is the sound of his wife, then of his children, screaming.

A man in dark sunglasses, wearing the traditional ankle-length white Saudi dress and red-cloth head-covering, ran to their car’s passenger side. He held a .45 automatic pistol and yelled in English for them to open the door.

Hinkson’s immediate response was to step on the gas, but he was boxed between cars.

When Hinkson did not unlock the door, the gunman fired through the side rear passenger window. The bullet passed through the car, missed the children and shattered the opposite window.

“Open the door!” the gunman yelled through the broken window, “or I’ll kill you right now!”

Hinkson fumbled with the lock; the gunman climbed into the back seat with the children. Hinkson then felt the .45 pressed against his head. The gunman ordered him not to turn around.

“He was very nervous,” Hinkson recalled, adding that he could see a police car 30 feet in front of them. “He informed us that if he was caught by the police, they would kill him; and if we didn’t do exactly as he said, he would kill us.”

When the light turned green, the gunman ordered Hinkson to drive.

As they drove through the city, the gunman told Hinkson which way to turn.

“In the beginning, the police followed us closely,” Hinkson said. “This made him nervous. He’d tell me to stop, and he’d hold my daughter (Courtney) out the window with his gun to her neck and yell in Arabic trying to negotiate” with the police. “All his attempts to talk failed to get him what he wanted. Eventually, he steered us a course onto the freeway. I was driving out of Riyadh into the desert.”

On the freeway, they encountered police barricades. “They lined up truck trailers to try to force us to stop. I was told at those times if I slowed down he would kill me right then. So I’d go through those barricades at over 100 miles an hour. That would scare the heck out of my family. They’d be screaming.”

Hinkson said Kim, who had tried to keep the children quiet, fainted from fright several times during the chase, her head slumping on her shoulder.

As they passed each barricade, police fired at the car--shooting, Hinkson assumes, at the wheels.

After almost 45 minutes, Hinkson stopped the car; the gunman again attempted to negotiate with the police who surrounded them. “He yelled out the window for about a minute and then ordered me to drive off. There wasn’t much room on the road. We went down into the dirt to go around the cars. As we came up, that’s when all hell broke loose.”

The police, now some 50 strong--opened fire.

“It sounded like a combat movie on TV with machine guns, and I know they weren’t firing machine guns. The car started receiving many, many shots that broke the glass out. Bullets were coming into the car, and that was when I was hit.”

Hinkson was hit in the crown of the head by a police bullet shot from the rear of the car. It felt, he said, as though he had been slugged with a fiery hot hammer. The bullet passed through a layer of bone in his skull and bounced off, ripping through the roof of the car. (“The doctor said he didn’t know why it bounced out, but it did.”)

Although blood was streaming down his face, Hinkson was still able to continue driving. But within seconds, another bullet blew out a tire. The shooting stopped as soon as the car stopped, Hinkson said.

Because of the noise and confusion, Hinkson was unsure when his wife was hit by police gunfire or when the gunman shot his daughter. “Evidently, in the last moments, he held her in his arms and pulled the trigger because he had given up the chase and knew he was a dead man.”

Hinkson said police later told him that they were shooting into the car to try to hit the gunman. But, he said, “obviously someone thought I was worth shooting at, too. I have been informed some of the police weren’t aware they were dealing with hostages.”

The police officer who gave the order to shoot later apologized. But Hinkson does not hold the actions of the police against them.

“It’s not that important that I know exactly what happened,” he says. “I know which bullets did what. In the end, I signed a statement requesting that the policemen, who would have received some punishment for what they had done, not be punished.

“I’ve learned in Arabia that people do not think out of the same framework, and so for you to attempt to understand them is impossible. I care for them, and I believe they were acting out of the framework where they believe they were doing the right thing--or they had no knowledge that they were doing the wrong thing.

“Another thing about the Saudis is they believe drugs are of sufficient danger to society that even if innocent people are hurt, they must put an end to the criminal.”

Hinkson smiled grimly. “There’s the irony of the situation: One of the reasons we were in Saudi Arabia was for safety from these type of things.”

And, he observed, “if there hadn’t been such a severe penalty for drug dealers, (the gunman) wouldn’t have been as desperate as he was.”

Although Hinkson has forgiven the Saudi police for killing his wife, he refuses to describe his feelings about the gunman, who was tried and beheaded within 10 days of the incident.

After his wife and daughter were buried in Salt Lake City, an American couple Hinkson had met in Saudi Arabia invited his five children to spend time with them on their Utah farm. “They were quite happy to stay there and had a good time on the farm,” Hinkson said. “That was good for them.”

Hinkson has taken his children to a psychologist. “She says we’re handling it well,” he said, acknowledging that the children have had nightmares. “I think we all have had a little bit of seeing it all over again in our mind at night and during the day.”

Looking down at Hugh, 3, who was now sitting by his side, Hinkson said: “Just yesterday, this guy here said for the first time that his mother was dead. Before that, he always thought he could get on an airplane and go see her.”

Hinkson said he is grateful for the support of family and friends. But he and his family are finding the most comfort in their religion.

“I believe that God will take care of us,” he said. “We don’t view Kim and Courtney as really being dead. In our way of looking at life, they’re in a place where they’re happy and free from the troubles of mortality, and we’ll all eventually be reunited and live forever.”

Beyond settling into their new home, Hinkson’s plans remain vague.

Before Kim’s and Courtney’s death, he had planned to start his own software publishing business in Provo and to shuttle back and forth to Saudi Arabia as a computer consultant for the Saudi government. Now, he said, he will either get a job in Provo or in nearby Salt Lake, or he will start his own business.

He has not, however, ruled out an eventual return to Saudi Arabia.

“I hope someday to go back because it’s a nice place to live,” he said. “In many ways, it’s home.”