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Shattered lives

A former football star battling paranoid delusions. A Fresno police unit specially designed to suppress violence. The volatile combination would leave ... Shattered lives

Cindy McGlynn stands in a flower bed and stares through the jagged glass of a broken window, speaking into the darkness: "Tommy, I found some guys who believe your story, and they're going to help us." McGlynn pauses. "Tommy, is that you? Tommy, answer me. You need to answer me."

Tommy is Tom Neville, McGlynn's brother-in-law and a former Fresno State and professional football player. He has fled into the night from a nearby psychiatric hospital after injuring another patient he thinks is a hit man out to kill him. Neville is bloody, but not from the hit man of his delusions. Neville is bleeding from breaking glass to get into the rental office of an apartment complex in northeast Fresno. He is hiding in the office's utility room.

Two Fresno police officers, each with a drawn pistol, stand on either side of McGlynn at the broken window. Keep talking, they tell her. "Tell him to follow the sound of your voice," one says.

Neville never replies.

By the time the sun rises on May 9, 1998, Tom Neville -- 36 years old, 6-foot-5 and 356 pounds -- lies dead inside the rental office of the Oxford Park Apartments with 13 gunshot wounds. He has been shot by members of the Violent Crime Suppression Unit, Fresno's response to violent street crime in the 1990s.

Andrea Neville of Fairbanks, Alaska, is suing the city of Fresno over the death of her husband, saying his civil rights were violated by the use of excessive force. Her family has filed claims seeking $120 million. Questions multiply.

Is a grieving family conveniently targeting the VCSU for a series of events that Tom Neville tragically set in motion when he fled the psychiatric hospital?

Or did the VCSU become -- as Andrea Neville's lawyer charges -- a band of rogue cops who were out of control when they shot Tom Neville?

Or maybe it was all a mistake? Neville's wife asked a family friend to find her delusional husband after he escaped from the psychiatric hospital. That friend was an on-duty VCSU veteran who, with other VCSU officers, joined the search for Tom Neville. The friend tried to talk Neville into surrendering, but he didn't succeed, and Neville died.

The Fresno County District Attorney's Office cleared the officers involved in the shooting.

A trial scheduled for June in Fresno will decide Andrea Neville's lawsuit. She declined to comment for this story, as did VCSU officers.

Yet it's possible to delve deeply into the Neville case -- and the inner workings of the VCSU -- through public records filed in federal court and expert witness reports exchanged between lawyers in the case. The documents tell the story of a delusional man who had been using marijuana, a controversial police unit that worked to quell the violence of a roiling city, and the night in May, almost three years ago, when their paths crossed.

First, the man.

Neville knew the roar of the crowds in Fresno. From 1982 to 1984, he played offensive lineman on Fresno State's football team. His job: protect the quarterback from blitzing linebackers. Neville then moved on to the National Football League, where he became a journeyman, signing during the course of his career with five teams, including the San Francisco 49ers and Green Bay Packers.

Neville made his money in the spotlight of sports, but he died in darkness. The darkness of a disturbed mind. The darkness of the rental office where VCSU officers in black uniforms shined flashlights on him when he emerged from hiding.

In the minutes before the shooting, Neville kept saying "just make it clean." Some officers thought he was suicidal. He said he was going to force them to use their guns, but he also asked officers not to hurt him with their weapons.

He was disturbed, and big, and then he was dead.

Neville played professional football from 1985 to 1992, according to NFL records. After retiring, he returned to Fairbanks, where he had attended high school. He met and married Andrea Stepovich, from a longtime Alaska family; her father had served as the last territorial governor before statehood in 1959.

Tom Neville worked in Fairbanks as an apartment investor and manager and also helped coach high school football players. Andrea Neville taught fifth grade at a Catholic school before their son, Michael, was born in June 1996. She returned to work in the school library after her husband died.

In late March or early April 1998 -- approximately a month before his death -- Neville began acting "increasingly bizarre," according to a medical-psychiatric report paid for by Andrea Neville's lawyer as part of her lawsuit. Dr. Mark I. Levy of Mill Valley, a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and assistant professor at the University of California at San Francisco, based his report on medical records and deposition transcripts.

Levy says Neville developed a "persecutory delusion" that he would be killed by a relative or a "hit man" after accusing the relative in a family conflict. Nightly, he barricaded himself in his basement, possibly with a weapon, and smoked marijuana heavily -- although he allegedly gave it up in late April or early May of 1998, Levy says.

Neville also worried that his son had been molested. He told his wife he had been molested in third grade by a school bus driver in Alaska.

Andrea Neville persuaded her husband to see a Fairbanks psychiatrist, Dr. Leo Ingles, who prescribed an antidepressant and a tranquilizer. Neville never kept a second appointment. Instead, he fled to Fresno, alone. He took a room at the Traveler's Inn on East Shaw Avenue near Fresno State.

Neville believed the "hit man" was in the room above his and was "tracking" him with a laser device. He called 911, and police responded.

May 6, 1998 -- three days before he died -- patrol officers took Neville into custody at the motel, according to court documents. He had a rifle, but this encounter with police was peaceful, although Neville did say he would use the gun and told officers in a challenging way, "You gonna take me down."

Police called the incident a "5150." The number refers to a section of the Health and Welfare Code that allows a 72-hour hold on an individual deemed a "danger to others or to himself."

Officers took Neville to University Medical Center, where he remained for 28 hours. He was transferred to Cedar Vista psychiatric hospital on Friday, May 8.

Late that evening, a face from the past triggered a violent response from Neville. He attacked another Cedar Vista patient who was an acquaintance from his earlier years in Fresno. Neville hit the man in the face and continued to pummel him after the man crumpled to the ground. Neville then called the Fresno Police Department to report that a "hit man" had assaulted him.

Cedar Vista staff wanted to give him a tranquilizer, but Neville didn't give them the chance. In a fit of strength, he pulled off the handle of a steel door, with lock and deadbolt in place, and ran off into the Fresno night.

Brad Alcorn, a friend of Neville's and a VCSU officer, was working the night Neville escaped from Cedar Vista. Earlier in the day, he had gone to a firing range near Auberry to practice SWAT sniper skills.

Alcorn and other VCSU officers would join the search for Neville late in the evening, and he would talk Neville out of the utility room. But he couldn't get him into the waiting ambulance alive.

That fact haunts Alcorn and spurs argument by lawyers in the case.

The lawyer guiding Andrea Neville's lawsuit now attacks Alcorn's role as the negotiator that night. What were Alcorn's qualifications to negotiate? He says he received general training to deal with delusional people, and he also had real-life experience from working the streets of Fresno. He had no advanced training in crisis negotiation, however, and he isn't sure whether he ever took a class in abnormal psychology.

The VCSU should have called for one of the department's trained crisis negotiators, says Andrea Neville's lawyer.

A lawyer defending the city says the Fresno Police Department had "no duty" to send a crisis negotiator to the scene.

And Alcorn? He doesn't like to think of the night that Neville died.

"This is probably one of the most tragic things that's happened in my life," he says in a pretrial deposition. "Tom was a friend. I've spent the better part of two years trying to forget this."

But Alcorn could show another side of himself on the job, according to Myrna Loran, an ex-VCSU officer who sued the city over alleged sexual harassment in the unit. Loran says Alcorn and other officers joked about whispering to injured suspects on the street: "Go to the light." The implication: Go ahead and die.

Loran says the officers did this in front of VCSU commander Lt. Greg Coleman, but he says he never heard that comment, according to court documents.

Loran settled her lawsuit for $450,000. Another ex-VCSU officer, Simon Palacios, collected $165,000 after settling a lawsuit he filed over alleged racial discrimination in the unit. Capt. Marty West watched these cases unfold and, in a memo filed in federal court, warned Police Chief Ed Winchester that the VCSU was a ticking bomb eight months before Tom Neville died.

West got no response from Winchester, who disagreed with West's assessment, according to court documents.

In any event, the unit that tried to rescue Tom Neville from the demons in his mind -- and ended up killing him -- arrived at the Oxford Park Apartments with controversy in its past, and tragedy in its future.

The VCSU started out to meet a huge need in Fresno: peaceful streets in a frightened community.

Chief Winchester organized the unit in 1994. In the five months before VCSU's "deployment," Fresno saw 13 homicides and 61 citizens injured by gunfire, Winchester says. Gang members and drug dealers were shooting at one another with rapid-fire assault weapons and "cutting down" innocent people, he adds. Three weeks before the VCSU began its work, three children were hit by stray gunfire, including an 11-year-old girl taking out the garbage. Fresno police officers were being fired at, too.

VCSU officers patrolled in pairs and swarmed "hot" calls involving guns, gangs and violence. The unit eventually numbered 30 officers; they adopted a paramilitary look, wearing black vests and black cargo pants bloused in black boots. Regular officers wear dark blue uniforms.

Even some critics of Chief Winchester credit him for starting the VCSU. "The city was in absolute turmoil," says retired Fresno police Lt. Larry McIntyre, no fan of Winchester's. "Assaults. Rapes. Homicides. They were spiraling out of control. Something had to be done. The crooks had more firepower than the cops.åI think the department as a whole was damn glad that VCSU was there."

Johnny Nelum, president of the NAACP in Fresno, disagrees. He says the Fresno Police Department overreacted with the VCSU. "They messed with everybody," Nelum says. "They were running wild, I do believe. There weren't a lot of checks and balances."

Nelum says citizens complained to him about the VCSU, and he told them to file complaints with the city. City Ombudsman David Bearheart, working as a liaison between the community and the Police Department, says he received no complaints about the VCSU. People might have complained directly to the Police Department, he adds.

At times, the VCSU has generated headlines.

Last year, four of the unit's officers went on trial in federal court in a wrongful-death lawsuit filed over the 1997 shooting of William Lee Fowler Jr. Fowler had spent time in prison for rape and other crimes. A jury exonerated the officers, providing an important victory for a unit that had internal problems early in its history.

Lt. Stuart Riba, the first VCSU commander, was accused of using his police phone to make personal calls, taking his children on SWAT calls and abusing his estranged wife. Chief Winchester fired Riba in 1996, but a civil-service board reinstated him, and he now works as a patrol officer.

A sense of bravado permeated the unit. Loran says VCSU officers wore T-shirts in training that showed a wild boar with bloody tusks and carried the words: "The Ultimate Pig -- Fresno Police Violent Crime Suppression Unit."

VCSU officers also engaged in politically incorrect humor. Lt. Coleman, who commanded the unit at the time of the Neville shooting, testified in the Loran case that he tried to help officers who wanted to stop chewing tobacco. He devised a challenge: The first officer to start chewing again had to wear a dress and go into a gay bar for a drink.

Coleman wanted to videotape the officer going in and coming out and show it at the VCSU's Christmas party.

Russell Cook, Andrea Neville's lawyer, says VCSU officers also joked about being skinheads and would click their heels, do a stiff-arm salute and say "Heil, Hitler" in a Police Department briefing room. Lawyers for the city say Coleman disciplined the one officer he observed giving the Hitler salute.

But Cook keeps pounding. He says in court documents that VCSU officers used derogatory terms for African-Americans and Asian women in the presence of Coleman and that Coleman encouraged such conduct.

The strategy seems clear. In court documents, Cook describes VCSU officers as "immature," "reckless" and "unprofessional," and he wants to tie their general behavior to the specific actions they took against Neville. He says the officers were "out of control," opted for an aggressive approach in dealing with the mentally ill Neville and needlessly shot him.

Rosemary McGuire, a lawyer defending the city, says in court papers that allegations about the VCSU are irrelevant to a case that centers on police efforts to communicate with Neville and take him into custody. McGuire says Cook wants to "cloud the issues" and "confuse the jury."

Lawyers looking for dirt on the VCSU, however, only have to probe the lawsuits filed by two of its own: Loran and Palacios.

In 1996, Loran reported Brian Twedt, a fellow officer in the VCSU, for stealing two pornographic photos and a pair of sunglasses from two suspects. Then, Loran alleged, Twedt and other VCSU officers retaliated against her, and when she sought help from superiors, they were slow to respond. In the trial of Loran's lawsuit, which resulted in a hung jury, Twedt admitted taking the photos and sunglasses. On the eve of a second trial, Loran and the city agreed to settle the lawsuit. Loran no longer works as a police officer; she says she took a stress leave and then the department medically retired her. Twedt still works as a Fresno police officer; he's assigned to a patrol unit in southeast Fresno.

Andrea Neville's lawyer says he will call Loran as a witness, and Loran has indicated in a court document what she would say about the VCSU. She says VCSU officer Jason Serrano said in front of Coleman that he was going to run out of room on his belt for notches, indicating his number of kills. Coleman never heard Serrano make that statement, according to the city's lawyers. Serrano was one of the shooters in the Neville case and says that he feared for his life as Neville grunted and growled and charged him on his hands and feet in the rental office.

It was his third shooting as a Fresno police officer. He shot at two other people between December 1993 and March 1996, his first 21/2 years on the police force. The first two shootings occurred before Serrano joined the VCSU. He says internal-affairs investigations ruled both shootings "justified."

Capt. West, who warned the chief about a brewing VCSU problem, says violence-prone Fresno made an officer's shooting history a nonissue in staffing the unit. At times, officers had to use their guns, West says, adding: "I don't know of an officer who went out looking to shoot someone."

Yet some VCSU officers took aim with their words, and fired away, according to Palacios, the other member of the unit to sue. He alleged a number of discriminatory incidents, including:

At a briefing, VCSU officers discussed how an African-American officer had made the training list for the unit. One officer said: "That is all we need -- a brother who lives and has relatives who live on the U to be working with us. We don't need no f------- home boy." (The "U" is a commonly used name for a block on Eugenia Avenue in west Fresno, which in the 1990s was a scene of gang, drug and other criminal activity.) The same officer continued: "Well, it's kind of like Simon. Everyone knows that the only reason why he's here is because he is a politically correct officer." Palacios is Hispanic. He says he retired from the Fresno Police Department in 1999 because of stress.

As the Loran and Palacios cases played out, some Fresno police officers grew worried. Capt. West wrote his memo in September 1997 to Chief Winchester. West was blunt. He labeled VCSU commander Coleman "a weak disciplinarian," recommended he be reassigned and said the unit needed "a no-nonsense" leader who wouldn't be "afraid to deal with the strong personalities that make up VCSU."

He concluded his memo with a warning: West reminded Winchester about the chief's own words that experience taught that "problems in a unit like VCSU" would likely "lead to bad things."

"I agree," West wrote, "but I need help in fixing it before it's too late (if it's not already)."

Was it too late for Tom Neville when he broke out of Cedar Vista hospital? Could anything have changed the outcome?

What if Cindy McGlynn, Neville's sister-in-law, hadn't noticed the window Neville broke out to get into the rental office?

What if Andrea Neville hadn't called VCSU officer Brad Alcorn and asked him to look for her husband after he escaped from Cedar Vista?

What if VCSU Sgt. Randy Dobbins had insisted that a trained crisis negotiator be sent to talk to the delusional Neville?

When Neville arrived in Fresno from Alaska, he checked into Room 105 at the Traveler's Inn. Although his mind might have been clouded, he was clear on one thing: He wanted to see his friend, Brad Alcorn.

If size gives a man authority and a police officer needs that kind of presence, Alcorn was born to do police work. He stands 6-foot-5 and at the time of the shooting weighed 250 pounds. He joined the Fresno force in 1984, worked patrol, handled police canines and became a SWAT team sniper. Alcorn was an original member of the VCSU.

He and Neville met in the early 1990s at Gold's Gym on Blackstone Avenue. They worked out together. They did martial arts training together. Sometimes they'd go to a bagel shop afterward, and sometimes Alcorn's wife, Jenifer, would make them lunch.

After Neville married in 1995, he invited the Alcorns north for sledding in the great Alaskan outback. Alcorn wanted to go, but he never made it. His job kept him too busy.

In the first week of May 1998, as Neville's life moved toward its violent end, Alcorn learned that Neville was in town and wanting to talk. Alcorn reached Neville by phone May 6, 1998, at the Traveler's Inn. Neville ran water during their conversation so the "hit man" wouldn't overhear.

After hanging up, Alcorn made one of several fateful decisions about how deeply to get involved. He didn't go to the motel. Instead, he called Fairbanks. Something in Neville's rambling words made Alcorn wonder. Had Neville harmed his wife? Alcorn eventually connected with Andrea Neville, who was unhurt and willing to talk. She related her husband's bizarre behavior: He had withdrawn $5,000 from their bank account and fled Alaska with a duffel bag and a one-way ticket.

She didn't know where he had gone.

By Friday, May 8, Andrea Neville was in Fresno. She took a room at the Comfort Suites and visited her husband at both UMC and Cedar Vista. At UMC, she got a surprise. Tom Neville had taken off his wedding ring and wanted to give it back.

"He felt this would all end, would all go awayåif he wasn't with my family," Andrea Neville says in deposition testimony.

Did it seem to her that he was ending their relationship?

"Yes," Andrea Neville says.

Lance and Cindy McGlynn also visited Tom Neville at Cedar Vista. Lance and Tom were stepbrothers. Lance is in management for the U.S. Postal Service; Cindy works in real estate foreclosures. She was in bed when Cedar Vista called after 10:30 p.m. May 8 with the news of Neville's escape. She got in her gray Honda Civic and went to join the search. She didn't think she'd be gone too long.

McGlynn drove down side streets near Cedar Vista and called into the darkness. "Tommy, it's Cindy. It's OK. You can come out."

She found Neville hiding in bushes at a nearby medical complex. But before she could coax him into her car, he bolted across Cedar Avenue. Brakes screeched. A motorist stopped just short of hitting Neville, who in a surreal scene stood with his hands on the car's hood, leaning toward the windshield. After a few seconds, Neville ran again and disappeared into the darkness.

McGlynn then heard a shattering noise. Today, she's certain it was Neville breaking the window at the Oxford Park rental office. He would find his final hiding place down its darkened hallway.

A telephone call also alerted Andrea Neville to her husband's escape. But she didn't go searching for him. Instead, she called Brad Alcorn. He and three other on-duty VCSU officers soon arrived at the Comfort Suites to talk with her.

She appealed to Alcorn: Find my husband.

Alcorn says Andrea Neville also told him to be careful. He remembers her saying she was concerned for the public with Tom Neville roaming about. She remembers saying Neville was scared, wouldn't hurt anyone but might be seen as a threat because of his size.

Alcorn told Sgt. Dobbins, commander of the scene at Oxford Park, that Neville was 6-foot-5, weighed almost 400 pounds, played pro football for 11 years, was an extremely strong and powerful man, had martial arts experience, was a paranoid schizophrenic with extensive cocaine and marijuana use in his past and was considered a danger to the public by his family.

Alcorn and other VCSU officers first searched the grounds of Peoples Church, found nothing, then moved next door to Oxford Park, a tidy apartment complex on Cedar north of Herndon. Concrete lion statues stand on brick planters at the complex. Palm trees tower over the swimming pool. The units resemble Swiss chalets with steep roofs and small balconies. A rental office with big windows and a decorative door stands close to the street. Neville broke one of the windows to get inside.

Officers almost didn't see the telltale window. They searched the complex, found nothing and only surrounded the office after Cindy McGlynn pointed out the broken window. She saw a bit of a curtain fluttering in the late-night breeze and, on closer inspection, realized the window had been broken out.

Today, she's sorry she ever told the VCSU officers. She feels guilty about all that happened to Neville once the police knew he was inside.

She was optimistic at first. "They found Tommy," she told her husband on a cell phone. Everything was going to be fine, she remembers thinking.

The police had to get into the rental office, so VCSU officers went to the apartment manager's unit. It was attached to the rental office, connected by a hallway and an unlocked door. A utility room opened onto that hallway. Neville hid in the room, pushing a refrigerator to barricade the door from inside.

It was 2:15 a.m. when the officers knocked at the manager's door. Caryl Skelton, the manager, was dozing in a living room chair with the television set on, according to her deposition. VCSU officer Richard Hill told Skelton somebody might be hiding in the office. Skelton took Hill and another officer to the door leading to the office, and Hill heard something on the other side of the door. Hill asked Skelton to go get Alcorn, and he says she started complaining about mud on her carpet.

Hill raised his voice: "Ladyågo to the door and flag down the officer!" Then it was quiet again, and Hill could hear something. "It was enough to really kind of give you a chill," Hill would tell police investigators after the shooting. "You just knew he was back there."

Richard Hill, a former Marine, became a Fresno police officer in the late 1980s, joining the VCSU when it was formed in 1994. He also runs an Internet business, selling police and tactical gear at a Web site, ultimatepig.com. Editorials posted at the site offered commentary on police-related topics.

One editorial dated Sept. 9, 1999 -- more than a year after the Neville shooting -- appeared under the notation, "The Owner Speaks," and the headline, "Officer Involved Shootings." The editorial referred to an incident in which Fresno police shot a man who brandished a cigarette lighter that authorities said was a realistic replica of a gun.

The editorial read: "A Hispanic guy razed sic a handgun at a Patrol Sgt. who told him to drop it. He didn't according to the newspaper and got shot. And that's the way it is supposed to work. I say good dam sic job and keep up the good work. This Sgt. saw a gun and reacted the way he should have."

The same editorial asked and answered the question of what an officer should do in that situation: "YOU SHOOT THE IDIOT!!!!"

Hill says he wrote editorials to "stir up a little controversy" and attract Web-site visitors. He says he stopped because he didn't like writing them and they didn't produce sales.

On the night of the Neville shooting, Hill faced a bigger challenge than finding customers for his e-business. As he and other VCSU officers focused on the rental office's utility room, three things happened at roughly the same time:

Hill stood in the apartment manager's kitchen and watched the door leading to the rental office hallway creep open and closed. After 15 minutes or so, Hill and other officers realized it was the wind moving the door. He says they felt embarrassed and "giggled" a little. It was a momentary break in the tension.

Back in the manager's apartment, Caryl Skelton's husband, Robert, was asleep in his bedroom. He was roused by the commotion. He dressed and walked into the kitchen and found it filled with police officers. Robert Skelton volunteered to talk with the man hiding down the hallway. "This is police business," he remembers the officers saying. "You get out of here."

Skelton's mobility would become an issue in the Neville case. Police say they had to move in close to Neville because Skelton was an invalid who couldn't be moved and needed to be protected. Skelton said he wasn't an invalid, testifying in a deposition in November that he exercised every morning and had just climbed a 40-foot ladder to put up outdoor Christmas decorations. Skelton's wife says she never told police he was an invalid.

Outside, Alcorn briefed Sgt. Dobbins, who had just arrived at the apartments. Did Dobbins and Alcorn talk about whether Alcorn should keep dealing with the incident, given his friendship with Neville?

"I don't remember any conversations about that," Alcorn says.

Did Alcorn and Dobbins talk about just waiting Neville out?

They didn't, Alcorn says. They thought Neville needed medical help after the flight from Cedar Vista.

What about using pepper spray or a police dog on Neville? They talked about both options, Alcorn says. Dobbins says that in the tight quarters, pepper spray would have incapacitated the officers as well.

Did they talk about getting a psychiatrist from Cedar Vista to come over and help? They did not, Alcorn says.

After briefing Dobbins, Alcorn went back to the manager's apartment and called out to Neville, hoping to establish verbal contact. "Tom, this is Brad," Alcorn shouted. "Are you there? Are you OK?"

Finally, a single word came back: "Brad."

Neville started talking, and the standoff was about to enter a new phase.

VCSU officers opened the apartment manager's small garage, which had a door leading to the hallway and utility room beyond. Officers entered the hallway. Some positioned themselves at the hallway door to the garage. Others stood at the hallway door to the manager's apartment. All were within 10 feet of the utility room where Neville was hiding.

Just before Neville started talking to Alcorn, Dobbins -- who commanded the scene -- placed a cell phone call to then-Sgt. Lydia Carrasco, supervisor of the department's crisis negotiation team. She was at home. It was 2:45 a.m.

In their own ways, Carrasco and Dobbins represent modern law enforcement. Carrasco -- a female and Hispanic -- was on her way up the chain of command. She's now a lieutenant. Dobbins was the poster boy for the modern cop. He has a bachelor's degree in criminology, plus some graduate work, to go with the badge. He's a former Officer of the Year in the Fresno Police Department.

Dobbins faced several key decisions that night. One of them: Should he ask Carrasco to send a special crisis negotiator to talk to Neville?

Dobbins didn't ask. Instead, he laid out the facts. He wanted her to decide.

Carrasco had several things to weigh. Alcorn, who was trying to get Neville to talk and soon would be negotiating with him, was both a friend of the suspect (not a good thing) and a police officer with no advanced training (not necessarily a bad thing). Carrasco says regular officers negotiate in the field all the time and do it well.

Dobbins and Carrasco contradict each other on what was said during their phone call. Dobbins says that Carrasco told him to let Alcorn continue to negotiate and that she asked Dobbins to call her back "with a disposition either way."

Carrasco says that she never told Dobbins to let Alcorn continue with negotiations. Carrasco also disputes that she said anything about calling her back "either way."

A trained crisis negotiator, Carrasco says police engaged in standoffs have one big asset: time. "It is to your benefit," she says. "With the passage of time, it increases the likelihood that person will surrender for a variety of reasons."

On the night of the shooting, however, time seemed to be on no one's side as events began to unfold quickly. It started with an abrupt end to the Carrasco-Dobbins phone conversation.

"Hold on a minute," Dobbins told Carrasco. "Something is happening." Officers were telling him that Neville was talking. He said he had to go. Carrasco told him to call her back. He said OK, but he never did.

At 2:47 a.m., Neville and Alcorn started what would become a 35-minute conversation.

"Are you OK?" Alcorn asked.

"How are you doing?" Neville asked back. He sounded calm. He didn't yell or scream. At one point, Neville tossed a beer out of the utility room and said, "Have a beer with me."

Alcorn replied, "Why don't you open the door and let's talk?"

Neville also asked for a cigarette. None of the officers smoked, but Alcorn found a can of Copenhagen chewing tobacco and put it in front of the utility room's door. Neville cracked open the door and slid out a fireplace poker to retrieve the tobacco.

The two men talked about their families. They both had sons born in the summer of 1996. Neville said he was worried about his son being molested. At one point, Neville talked of professional basketball player John Stockton and other in-laws having "a hit" on him. Stockton and Neville married sisters.

Neville spoke some more: "Just make this clean." He kept repeating it. The words carried different meanings to different people.

Alcorn says he expected Neville to do something aggressive: "I didn't know if it was fighting. It was clear that something was going to happen."

Hill, who would fire the first bullet into Neville, heard the words and got a clear message: Neville wanted the police to get off a clean shot so it ended quickly for him. "I don't know what else he could be talking about," Hill says.

For a few golden moments, however, Alcorn thought it was going to end peacefully.

Neville finally opened the door and stepped out of the utility room. He carried a fireplace poker. Officers yelled for him to drop it, which he did, according to officers' depositions.

After the shooting, police investigators found no latent fingerprints on the poker. McGuire, the city's attorney, minimizes their absence: "Not everything people touch will produce a usable print."

As Neville came out of the utility room, he looked around and seemed surprised. "Is this all for me?" Neville asked. He faced six VCSU officers. Two were armed with Remington 870 shotguns that fired 2-inch square bags filled with lead pellets. The bags are intended to stun, not kill. Police call the bags "less lethals."

The other four VCSU officers carried .40-caliber Beretta handguns with bullets.

Alcorn tried to assure Neville everything would be OK: "We're here for you. We're here to get you some help. All we want to do is help you."

Alcorn mentioned Neville's size: "Tom, you're so much bigger." He also told Neville: "You're scaring everybody here, so let's just stay calm."

Alcorn tried to get Neville to go to a waiting ambulance. But it would have to be in handcuffs. Neville said no.

"Don't you trust me?" Alcorn asked.

"No," Neville replied. "It's not personal. I just don't trust you."

Again, Neville said to "make it clean." Sgt. Dobbins heard him say he was going to force the officers to use their guns, but also that he was afraid of the weapons. Officer Serrano remembers Neville saying he could "blow" right past officers and take their guns.

Then a crucial sequence of events. Even more crucial: How officer Hill interpreted them. "I think he Nevilleåmentioned he was going to pick up the pokerå" Hill would later tell police investigators.

Did he actually say he was going to pick it up? one investigator asked.

"You knowåI thought he did," Hill replied. And then?

"As he was bending over for the poker, there was a couple of less lethal shots fired into himå" Hill said. "He wasn't going down. My perceptionåhe was reaching for that poker again.åI was pretty much scared to death he was going to pick that poker up and whack one of us. So I shot him with my .40, hoping I could drive him to the ground."

Hill thought he hit Neville in the back. "I was actually hoping I'd get him in the pelvic girdle," Hill would later tell police investigators. "I was hoping to just drop his ass."

Neville fell. "He looked angry that we didn't kill him," Hill recalled. "You know, he wanted us to make it clean."

It was silent then in the hallway, and Hill heard his name whispered by two of the other officers. He knew what that meant: They were questioning his shot. "I started having a little bit of anxiety," he said in deposition testimony. "Butåit went away because I know I was right."

Hill then stepped from the hallway into the garage and told a surprised Sgt. Dobbins that he had shot Neville.

"You're kidding," Dobbins said.

"No, I'm not kidding," Hill replied. "You see how big this guy iså."

Back in the hallway, Alcorn moved to handcuff Neville but found him slippery from bleeding. Before Alcorn could complete the job, Neville spun around and tackled him. Neville growled and yelled. Alcorn pushed, punched and kicked.

Neville also reached for Alcorn's holstered gun, according to court documents.

Officers fired more less lethal rounds at Neville.

Hill looked back down the hallway and saw a chaotic scene: "I can see Neville crawling up and down the damn hallway.åThey emptied all the less lethals, and people were drawing and shooting him with their handguns. And it wasn't stopping him." An officer yelled "Cross fire" to warn the others. "I thought, Godåthis is just going to s---," Hill said.

After tackling Alcorn, Neville charged Serrano, who kicked him in the head and chest. Neville knocked a less lethal shotgun from the hands of VCSU officer Ramiro Cruz, according to court documents. Cruz then fired a bullet.

Neville lay on the floor, his hands covering his face. Blood was starting to pool at his head.

Serrano says he approached to handcuff Neville, who began to breathe "bigger and faster." Then Neville grunted and growled, rose on his hands and feet and charged Serrano again.

Neville tried to tackle the 152-pound Serrano. Afraid he was about to be hurt or killed, Serrano pulled his gun from his holster and fired three times.

All three bullets hit Neville.

When the shooting stopped, Hill felt Neville for a pulse and saw him inhale and exhale. He helped an ambulance crew roll Neville face up.

"I don't think I'm imagining this, but I swear it looked like his eyes were openå" Hill told police investigators. "He almost had this s---eating grin on his face."

The standoff ended at 3:29 a.m. A police log identified Neville's final position: "Down on the ground."

When the last shot had echoed through the night, the VCSU officers quickly gathered outside the rental office. Serrano apologized to Alcorn and wept. Alcorn nursed a sore foot. He apparently had been hit by one of the less lethals. After 30 minutes outside, the officers moved to an upstairs meeting room at the apartment complex. More emotion spilled out. Serrano apologized again. Alcorn hugged him. Alcorn cried, too. Caryl Skelton, the apartment manager, brought coffee to the officers.

Sgt. Dobbins didn't try to separate the officers involved in the shooting before they gave statements to investigators. He says the officers weren't discussing the details of the shooting.

Lt. Coleman, VCSU commander, who arrived after the shooting, stayed with the officers in the upstairs room. "At no time" did the VCSU officers "discuss or exchange information," Coleman says.

Lawyers for the city say too many officers were involved in the incident -- four shooters and other police personnel at the scene -- to "segregate each one separately." The officers were told not to talk about the incident until after being interviewed, the lawyers say.

Police, however, didn't follow their own rules, according to ex-VCSU officer Myrna Loran: "If we detained or arrested other individuals related to shootings, we would never allow them to congregate together in the same area where they were free to talk and get their stories straight."

Was it even police policy for the VCSU to have rolled on the Neville case? Chief Winchester says the VCSU responds to any situation requiring a large number of officers, including searches for children and unarmed suspects loose in neighborhoods. But Loran disputes that, too. And Winchester's own testimony in available court documents makes no reference to children or unarmed suspects in describing the VCSU's mission.

In the end, the Fresno County District Attorney's Office cleared the officers involved in the Neville shooting. "Given the suspect's mental instability, his threatened use of deadly force and his actual assault on the officers, including grabbing for a handgun, the officers' response was legally justified," says Deputy District Attorney Burton Francis.

Kris Mohandie, a police psychologist from Pasadena who city lawyers hired as an expert witness, says Neville "committed suicide by cop." Neville believed he could not escape death at the hands of a "hit man," so instead "he decided to precipitate his death at the hands of the police," Mohandie says.

Peter Reedy, retired from the Sacramento Police Department after 25 years and hired as an expert witness by Andrea Neville's lawyer, counters that police had wrong information about Tom Neville, which contributed to the shooting. Reedy says, for example, that police exaggerated or fabricated Neville's use of steroids, cocaine and marijuana.

An autopsy found a trace of marijuana and an inconsequential amount of alcohol, but no cocaine, according to Dr. David Hadden, Fresno County coroner. Tests weren't done for steroids. Hadden adds: "We cannot rule out that the cannabis may have played some role in Neville's behavior."

Reedy takes other verbal shots. He says Alcorn clearly had "no idea what he was doing" in negotiating with Neville. And Hill? Reedy describes him as a "renegade, unprofessional, out-of-control officer" who "should not be tolerated by any police department."

In the hours and days following Tom Neville's death, words were spoken and scenes played out that might never be forgotten.

Cindy McGlynn, Neville's sister-in-law, had to wait in the predawn hours to give her statement to police investigators. It was cold. She wore only shorts and a sweat shirt. A police officer offered to let her sit inside a patrol car to warm up, but McGlynn declined. It would have been too strange, she says.

Lance McGlynn, Cindy's husband, went to the Comfort Suites to tell Andrea Neville. He was accompanied by a chaplain. "Once he came inåhe had already told me somehow," she remembers.

Robert Skelton, the apartment manager's husband, who went back to bed, stayed there. He got up the next morning at his usual time, 5:30 a.m., dressed and started to clean up the damage done to the rental office. He had to step over Neville's body, which was still in the hallway.

Tom Neville was buried after 500 people attended a standing-room-only Mass at Sacred Heart Catholic Cathedral in Fairbanks. His grave lies in Birch Hill Cemetery overlooking Fairbanks on a wooded hill. Early day Alaskan pioneers are buried there, too.

Brad Alcorn went home after the shooting and took off boots that had been bloodied at the scene. The boots were by Danner and nicknamed by some people the Go Devils. Alcorn has a new pair now.

He and the other officers no longer work on the VCSU. They rotated off the unit. Alcorn works night detectives. Hill is with a Problem Oriented Policing team, the kind of unit his Web site took a dig at in a 1999 editorial. Serrano works on patrol in northeast Fresno, where Lt. Coleman is the operations commander. Sgt. Dobbins is with Internal Affairs, which investigates alleged wrongdoing by officers.

Several weeks after the shooting, Brad Alcorn called Andrea Neville. He could barely speak.

"He said that he wanted to tell meåwhat Tom had said before he died," Andrea Neville says. "Tom told Bradåthat he loved me, and this didn't have anything to do with me."

Alcorn also said Tom Neville wanted him to stay in contact with Neville's son, Michael, because "he was there and he was the only one that could talk to Michael."

But whatever Alcorn might tell the boy and his widowed mother will have to wait.

"Brad told me he couldn't tell me what happened," Andrea Neville says. "That he wasn't allowed to and, someday, he would be able to."

The reporter can be reached at dhoagland@fresnobee.com or 441-6354.