BIG BEAR LAKE, Calif. — There was no question, Rick Heltebrake said. The man standing in front of him on a rural mountain road was Christopher Dorner.
Dressed in camouflage from head to toe and wearing a bullet-resistant vest packedwith ammunition, the most wanted man in America over the past week was just a few feet away, having emerged from a grove of trees holding a large, assault style rifle.
Teams of officers who had sought the fugitive ex-Los Angeles police officer since last week were closing in. Dorner pointed the gun at Heltebrake and ordered him to get out of his truck.
“I don’t want to hurt you. Start walking and take your dog,”’ Heltebrake recalled Dorner saying during the carjacking Tuesday afternoon.
Dorner, who wasn’t lugging any gear, got into the truck and drove off. Heltebrake, with his 3-year-old Dalmatian Suni in tow, called police when he heard a volley of gunfire soon after.
A short time later, the police had caught up with a man they believe was Dorner. They surrounded a cabin in which he had barricaded himselfand began a standoff that was broadcast around the world and ended with the man’s death in the burning building.
By day’s end, the man had mounted a last stand in a shootout in which he killed a sheriff’s deputy and wounded another before the building caught fire.
A charred body was found in the basement of the burned cabin along with a wallet and personal items, including a California driver’s license with the name Christopher Dorner, an official briefed on the investigation said on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.
The coroner’s office is studying the remains to positively determine their identity. It was not clear how the cabin caught fire.
Recalling his encounter, Heltebrake said Wednesday that he wasn’t panicked in his meeting with Dorner because he didn’t feel that the fugitive wanted to hurt him. “He wasn’t wild-eyed, just almost professional,” he said. “He was on a mission.”
“It was clear I wasn’t part of his agenda, and there were other people down the road that were part of his agenda,” he said.
Dorner, 33, had said in a rant that authorities believe he posted on Facebook last week that he expected to die, with the police chasing him, as he embarked on a campaign of revenge against the Los Angeles Police Department for firing him.
The apparent end came inthe same mountain range where his trail went cold six days earlier, when his pickup - with guns and camping gear inside - was abandoned and on fire near the ski resort town of Big Bear Lake.
His footprints led away from the truck and vanished on frozen soil.
Deputies searched door to door in the city of Big Bear Lake and then, in a blinding snowstorm, SWAT teams, with bloodhounds and high-tech equipment, focused on scouring hundreds of vacant cabins in the forest outside town.
With no sign of him and few leads, police offered a $1 million reward to capture him and end a “reign of terror” that had more than 50 families of Los Angeles Police Department officers, who were mentioned as targets in the rant, under round-theclock protection.
If the body proves to be Dorner, the death toll in his rampage would be four, including two police officers, one of them killed Tuesday.
Los Angeles Police Department Lt. Andrew Neiman said the agency had returned to normal patrol operations, but about a dozen of the targets would continue to be protected until the remains are positively identified. “This really is not a celebration,” he said.
Neiman would not answer any questions regarding what occurred in the mountains the previous day, saying it was the investigation of San Bernardino County authorities.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 02/14/2013