How I Outsmarted and Escaped Serial Killer Danny Figueroa
There was a full moon out when my friend, Steve Trottier, and I returned around 9:00 pm on horseback to the Horsin’ Around Ranch, where I had Comet, my Arabian horse boarded, on June 21, 1986.
The full moon, high in the sky, cast a glow over Norco, California, making it look more like dusk than 9:00 at night. Because of the increased visibility, Steve and I decided to drive to the Santa Ana River and smoke the joint Steve had with him, in the woods along the riverbed trail.
We parked on River Drive and walked the dirt road leading to the riverbed trail. Upon entering the wooded area, Steve lit the joint and we passed it back and forth as we walked along the trail. As we got close the the riverbed, we saw a camouflage-festooned man with his face painted dark, lying on the ground on his belly, with a high-powered rifle and scope sticking out from underneath. He stayed very still as we passed, and when we got out of earshot, I asked Steve, “Did you see that? What do you suppose that guy is doing out here with that rifle?”
Steve just looked at me blankly and said the only thing he could muster, “Maybe he’s out here hunting rabbits or something.”
I replied, “Yeah, Steve, and if he is, you are sprouting some mighty long, floppy ears there, and look! You’ve got a fluffy little cottonball tail on you that I never noticed before. That high-powered rifle would reduce a little bitty rabbit to pink mist. He’s after bigger game. Like, game way bigger than you’d find along this little river trail, Steve. That guy is looking to shoot something that weighs as much as you do. We gotta get the fuck outta here.”
We kept going, since there was an old, abandoned cinderblock powerhouse up ahead, where teenagers often hung out and smoked and drank and hid from the grownups. When we got to the powerhouse, it was empty — for the first time ever. That cinderblock structure always had at least a few kids in it. I was afraid the heavily armed guy in camouflage had shot everyone in there, so we walked right past it fast, and didn’t even stop to look.
That’s when I heard footsteps right on the other side of the vegetation. The trail switches back at the powerhouse, and is separated by a row of trees and scrub bushes that you can’t see through. The heavily armed guy in camouflage was stalking us.
The whole way out, Steve and I acted like we were unaware we had some nutcase dressed like a tree, sneaking up behind us with a rifle and scope, to hunt us down like game. Anything I had to tell Steve regarding the guy hunting us, I whispered to him.
The riverbed trail gradually gets wider and wider, and appears to lead to the road out, until it suddenly dumps out into the weedy middle of nowhere. At the point where the widening trail doglegs a bit, there is a little, easy-to-miss deer path that leads straight out to the dirt road Steve and I used when we walked in. This fact, and this fact alone, is the sole reason we weren’t killed that night. I knew about the deer path. The camouflage-festooned gunman stalking us didn’t. I rode Comet through that area all the time and knew every rock, bush, and squirrel. Our stalker had apparently just stopped for a quick kill.
Steve and I ducked down the deer path and got the fuck out of there. The guy who had been stalking us followed the ever-widening trail and ended up out in the weedy middle of nowhere.
As we were walking up the dirt road toward where my car was parked on River Drive, KC Daylighters came bouncing out of the brush. Our stalker had gone in and gotten his pickup truck, which had KC Daylighters mounted on the roof, and everything in its path was lit up like daylight as he drove out of the brush.
I yelled, “Bite the dirt!” and Steve and I dived into the grass along the side of the dirt road, and we laid there really flat and still, just like our stalker was doing when we first saw him. The pickup truck drove by very slowly, as the driver scoured the sides of the road, looking for us. Finally, the truck got to the pavement at River Drive, and at that point, the driver spun the truck around and zoomed back into the wilderness, leaving a cloud of dust and dirt in his wake.
At that point, Steve and I got up out of the brush and ran like mad to my car. We got in, and I drove past several phone booths (this was back before cell phones existed) and stopped at a 7–11 convenience store in the middle of Norco. I removed my jacket so that guy wouldn’t recognize me if he happened to drive by and see me on the phone — no, that’s not the person you just tried to hunt down and murder, that’s just some girl calling her mom or something. I called 911.
The 911 operator kept asking me the same questions over and over, and she was really interested in the camouflage and face paint, and it turned out the cops had been looking for this guy for a month. He had been on a serial sniping spree in Riverside County. I had no idea of this. It wasn’t until I called my dad the next day to tell him about my harrowing ordeal, when he said, “Hey, you know what? I heard they were looking for that guy in San Timoteo Canyon.”
After I spoke with the 911 operator, the police put up a roadblock somewhere on or near River Drive to catch the sniper. It wasn’t until a week later, on June 28, that they finally caught up to him. I kept my eyes on the news, and it turned out the guy’s name was Danny Figueroa, and he was sentenced to 66 years for the murders he committed before I escaped him. It turned out the police had shown up to Danny Figueroa’s house to question him about the murders the same day that I escaped him, but his family said he was out camping in the desert.
I can tell you from firsthand experience, he was not camping in the desert that day. He was hunting two people along the Santa Ana riverbed in Norco, California. And they both got away.
~ Afterword
I tried looking up Steve Trottier on the Internet several years ago, so we could reminisce about that one crazy night when we escaped a serial killer. What I found was a news article reporting that he had been killed in a motorcycle accident in Utah in November of 2012. Rest in peace, my good friend.
