Killer ‘Lost Everything’ When Fired, Friend Says

COVINA — The last time James H. Torres saw his friend and co-worker Arturo Reyes Torres, they were in the office of a lawyer who told them he wouldn’t be taking their case against Caltrans, which had fired the two men for allegedly stealing and selling government-owned materials.

“We went out and looked at each other and we were pretty bummed,” James Torres recalled. “Then Art said, ‘Looks like we’re f---ed.’ ”

Three days after that Monday visit to the lawyer, Arturo Torres, 41, marched into the Caltrans maintenance yard where he had worked and methodically killed four employees, including the supervisor who, James Torres believes, had set them up for firing.

A short time later and a scant 200 yards away, Torres himself died under a barrage of police bullets.

“All he wanted was what I wanted,” James Torres, who is not related to Arturo Torres, said in a tearful interview on Friday. “We lost everything, because Caltrans saw fit to say that we did something wrong. We were set up.

“You take a man’s livelihood away and don’t give him anything to stand on, and what is he supposed to do?”

For Arturo Torres, apparently, the answer lay in the unthinkable.

He never seemed prone to violence, James Torres, 43, recalled. For three years, the two men worked side by side on Caltrans maintenance crews, spent time together on weekends and visited each other’s homes. Their relationship was so close, fellow workers said, that they were often referred to as the Torres Brothers.

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Then, earlier this year, things began going bad.

As long as either man could remember, James Torres said, the two friends had routinely disposed of excess construction and maintenance scraps by hauling them to a salvage yard, which paid them for the material.

Then, following a long tradition, they would give the money to their supervisor, Hal Bierlein, who would put it in an employee “kitty” to help pay for such social activities as barbecues and birthday parties.

One day in February, though, supervisors read employees a memo announcing that the practice would no longer be tolerated. But it was a Friday afternoon, Torres said, and “we all wanted to go home. We would get anywhere from 20 to 50 memos a day. We weren’t paying attention.”

The following Monday, the two friends were pulled off an important job and sent to replace the aluminum railing on a freeway bridge. When the job was completed, James Torres said, they loaded the old rails on a truck and, as usual, drove them to the salvage yard where they were paid $106 for their trouble.

It was only then, Torres said, that they noticed the transaction had been videotaped by two supervisors following in a state vehicle.

“Caltrans was looking for scapegoats,” he said Friday. After discussing the matter, he and Arturo Torres returned to the yard where they gave the money to Bierlein, as was their custom. “He said he would make a note that we had voluntarily turned in the money,” Torres said.

But on June 12, Bierlein and another supervisor relieved the two men of their Caltrans vehicles and fired them for misusing state property.

“We both blamed Hal for setting us up,” Torres said, referring to Bierlein, who was the first one killed Thursday.

The two men’s firings were later upheld by the California State Personnel Board, despite the intervention of the International Union of Operating Engineers Unit 12. “Our union reps felt that [Arturo Torres] was being railroaded,” Ron Glick, a union spokesman, said.

Meanwhile, life was becoming increasingly difficult for the two friends.

James Torres drifted awhile, finding it almost impossible to land a job with the cloud of the Caltrans termination hanging over his head. Eventually he settled for a $7-an-hour job in a warehouse. “I had a hell of a time finding a job,” he said. “The job I have now is because these people were desperate enough to hire me.”

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Arturo Torres, on the other hand, got a fairly good job working for the sanitation department of Huntington Beach. “Art called me one day and said he got himself a good job. ‘Finally,’ he said, ‘I’m seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.’ Two weeks later they fired him because he had a degenerative spinal disease.”

With his money running out, Arturo Torres struggled with personal problems; his wife suffers from cancer, requiring medication costing $215 a week, James Torres said. And recently, a motorist sideswiped Arturo Torres’ aging Mercedes-Benz. “He finally told me, ‘Hey, we have to get a lawyer. We’ve got to get some compensation,’ ” James Torres recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, let’s go for it.’ ”

James Torres was at the supermarket with his wife Thursday when he got a call on his cellular phone. “It was my son,” he said. “He told me he had some bad news. When he told me what it was, I couldn’t believe it--I was mad at him because I thought he was just joking around.”

Back home in front of the television, however, the worst was confirmed. Torres saw his friend’s Mercedes on the screen, with a covered body next to it. “I recognized the car,” he said. “ . . . It was like I was looking, but it didn’t really register. It hit me like a ton of bricks [Friday]--I keep thinking of him and all the times that we had.”

Torres says he doesn’t understand what finally pushed his friend over the edge.

“I honestly don’t know what he was thinking,” he said. “I wish I knew.” He says he’s grieving for the people who were killed. “Caltrans is like a big family,” he said. “It shouldn’t have happened--no one deserves to die.”

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Mostly, though, he’s puzzled about how someone he thought of as a good man, someone who played with his children, could have fallen so far by inflicting such harm.

“He was solid as a rock,” James Torres said of his “brother” Arturo Torres. “His garage would tell you a lot. It was incredibly neat. . . . --If you needed a certain-size screw, he could go directly to it.”

Arturo Torres’ life seemed equally organized, James Torres said.

“He had everything in order,” he said. “He had his whole life set, straight and in compartments. Everything was perfect. I firmly believe, in my heart, that everything happens for a reason but, with God as my witness, I don’t understand why this happened.”

Also contributing to this report was Times librarian Shiela Kern.