Fugitive ex-LA cop believed dead: CNN reports
Posted February 12, 2013 5:28 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Fugitive former LAPD policeman Christopher Dorner is believed to be dead; according to a report from CNN.
Dorner exchanged gunfire on Tuesday with San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies in the mountains northeast of Los Angeles after he broke into a home, tied up a couple and stole their pickup truck, authorities said.
Two officers involved in the shootout were struck by gunfire, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s department said.
One wounded officer, a deputy, was flown by helicopter to an area hospital, a spokesman for the county fire department said. He later succumb to his injuries.
Police later stormed the cabin Dorner had barricaded himself in. The cabin then caught fire and was quickly engulfed in flames.
Law enforcement sources said the cabin is too hot to search therefore they cannot confirm that Dorner has died. Protection detail will remain in place and LAPD remain in tactical alert.
Dorner, accused of targeting police officers and their families in three revenge-driven killings, was apparently fired upon by a state fish and game ranger as he fled in the stolen vehicle, the Riverside County Sheriff’s department said.
Local television news outlets aired the sounds of gunfire and shouting in a live broadcast from the Big Bear Lake ski resort area.
The confrontation came on the sixth day of a search for Dorner that Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck has called the most extensive manhunt in the region’s history.
Dorner’s last confirmed encounter with authorities came early last Thursday, when police said he ambushed two policemen at a traffic light in Riverside, about 100 kms east of Los Angeles. One of those officers was killed, the other wounded.
That shooting came shortly after Dorner, a former Navy officer, is suspected of exchanging gunfire with police in nearby Corona, wounding one officer there.
Last Wednesday, he was named as a suspect in the slayings of a campus security officer and his fiancee, the daughter of a retired Los Angeles Police Department captain who Dorner blamed for his 2008 dismissal from the department in a manifesto posted on his Facebook page last week.
In the rambling online declaration, Dorner claimed he was wrongly terminated and vowed to seek revenge by unleashing “unconventional and asymmetrical warfare” on police officers and their families.
