Fired Employee Kills 4 Former Co-Workers Highway Worker Killed By Police In Fierce Gun Battle

A dismissed state highway employee armed with an AK-47 assault rifle killed four of his former co-workers at a maintenance yard Thursday before being shot to death by the police in a fierce gun battle.

Two workers who had been hospitalized with injuries were released Friday, while a wounded police officer was listed in stable condition, a spokesman for the police and Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation, said Friday. About 60 people were at the Caltrans yard when the former employee, Arturo Reyes Torres, 43, walked through an open gate in the pelting rain and began firing, apparently randomly, into a trailer, said the spokesman, Albert Miranda.

“Employees heard a popping sound,” he said. “Everyone was running for safety.”

When police arrived, Torres tried to flee but was blocked in an intersection by a motorist. Witnesses said the gunfight lasted as long as a minute.

Caltrans identified the dead employees as Hal B. Bierlein, 51, Torres’s former supervisor; Michael J. Kelley, 49; Paul White, 40; and Wayne Bowers, 43.

Torres, of Huntington Beach, was a 12-year state employee. He had been dismissed in June after he and a co-worker were videotaped selling a salvaged bridge rail to a metal recycler, according to transcripts from the State Personnel Board, which upheld his dismissal.

Ronald A. Glick, the state director for the International Union of Operating Engineers, which represents 12,000 state maintenance and trade workers, said the union was appealing Torres’s dismissal a second time. He said Torres was being made a scapegoat for a practice long tolerated by Caltrans.

“Stuff being picked up is supposed to be brought to the yard and dumped,” Glick said. “In some cases, they were converting it at a dealer.”

But employees didn’t profit personally from the scrap diversion, Glick said. The money was deposited with a supervisor to pay for employee social functions, he said.