tuesday lecture

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:rWwt9SQ4U4cJ:www.hhs.csus.edu/CJ/Red%2520Bluff-2.doc+andrew+mickel&hl=en


http://www.jsonline.com/onwisconsin/movies/jul03/156641.asp



Wrong turn
A middle-class college student, onetime peace activist and Army veteran, Andy Mickel didn't fit the profile of a cop killer
By Marjie Lundstrom and Sam Stanton -- Bee Staff Writers
Published 2:15 am PDT Monday, August 1, 2005
Story appeared on Page A1 of The Bee
Andy Mickel drove away from the murder scene in silence in his maroon 1992 Ford Mustang hatchback, sticking to the back roads as he left Red Bluff.
His radio was broken. That was not part of the plan.
But everything else went just the way the 23-year-old man had wanted: the murder, the cop, the small town in California.
Behind him, 31-year-old Red Bluff Police Officer Dave Mobilio - a bear of a man with a wife and toddler son - lay facedown on the pavement of a filling station, shot twice in the back and once in the head.
An execution, pure and simple.
A homemade flag depicting a snake lay beside Mobilio's body with the words: "This was a political action. Don't tread on Us."
Mickel, who had fashioned the flag along with a homemade brass catcher to collect his spent shell casings, always figured he'd have time to get away and complete his plan.
A 5-foot-10, 160-pound man with dark hair and sharp, angular features, Mickel did not fit the profile of a cop killer. He wasn't a criminal or drug dealer. He was a college student. He'd been a peace activist. He'd served in the Army. His middle-class parents were college teachers, his brothers were successes, his childhood friends were solid citizens with promising careers.
And he was a long way from home.
The man who had ambushed and executed a small-town cop in Northern California in November 2002 was best known in Springfield, Ohio, a town of about 65,000 between Columbus and Dayton. A former railroad hub where freight trains still thunder through the city, Springfield is a key stop for presidential candidates scouting votes in bellwether Clark County and all of Ohio.
It would soon be on the map for something else.
* * *
Even from childhood, friends would say, Andrew Hampton Mickel seemed destined for something big. A boy who would make his mark one day.
"I always knew that Andy was going to do something great," said Ben Poston, a friend since grade school. "I just didn't know if it was going to be great in a good way or great in a bad way."
No one foresaw the mark Mickel would leave before his 24th birthday - an act so violent and unexpected that his friends and family, like those of the victim, would be left to ask: Why?
It is the enduring mystery in the murder of Dave Mobilio, whose life collided with Mickel's in a dimly lit gas station on Nov. 19, 2002. Now Mobilio, a cop, was dead, ambushed by Mickel when he stopped to fill up. Two and a half years later, Mickel would be sentenced to death for the crime.
Yet here were two young men with seemingly similar backgrounds - educated parents, successful siblings, loyal friends and solid middle-class upbringings with world travel and rich opportunities.
So what went wrong with Andy Mickel?
"This is a situation we never ever dreamed we'd have to face," his mother, Karen, recently said, softly weeping.
"Not ever."
Andy Mickel, the second of Stan and Karen Mickel's sons, was raised in Springfield, Ohio. Surrounded by farm country, the Clark County city - with its historic clock tower overlooking a neglected downtown core - has the usual urban problems: poverty, drugs, some violence. One of its largest employers, International Harvester (now Navistar International), continues to shed jobs. Civic leaders are pinning their hopes on the revitalizing possibilities of a hospital consolidation.
With four exits off Interstate 70, Springfield also is home to Wittenberg University, a small liberal arts college affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Stan Mickel, a professor and scholar specializing in Chinese language and literature, came to Wittenberg in 1971. In 1978, he was awarded a Senior Fulbright Fellowship to do research in Taiwan, where Andy was born.
Years later, sitting in a jail cell in Red Bluff, Andy Mickel would display a string of four Chinese symbols he had later tattooed in dark green on the inside of his left arm. Translated, he said in an interview with The Bee, they read "Central Clinic," the place of his birth.
A fifth Chinese symbol, he said, was one he and his father came up with together when he decided to get tattooed: "Compassionate Warrior."
* * *

Despite their world travels, the Mickels returned to Springfield to raise their boys in a quiet neighborhood of 1940s-and 1950s-era homes.
The established neighborhood, with expansive front lawns and a leafy canopy of maple, elm and locust trees, is made up mostly of two-story houses with crisply painted shutters and colorful awnings.
The Mickels were among the first on the block to have a computer, an appealing draw for the neighborhood kids. Karen Mickel, a math instructor at the University of Dayton, served on the local school board. Her husband, who had earned his bachelor's degree at the University of California, Berkeley, and his doctorate from Indiana University, was widely published.
The Mickels initially agreed, then declined, to talk in depth with The Bee about their son, worrying they would say something to hurt or alienate him.
Friends describe the couple as gentle, sincere people whose lives have been turned inside out by the crime. Shortly after they returned from California for their middle son's murder trial, they attended their youngest son's graduation from Notre Dame. Patrick Mickel is going on to get his doctoral degree in physics; their oldest son, Jeremy, is a graphic artist in New York.
Andy is on death row in San Quentin.
"I'm scared to death we're going to do something that's going to be worse for our son. I know it's hard to imagine anything worse," said Karen Mickel, her voice trembling.
But others who knew Andy Mickel did share recollections, scouring their memories for markers - for anything - that might explain the eruption of violence. They are hurt, they are sickened, they feel horrible for Dave Mobilio's family - and, without exception, they are baffled.
Poston, Mickel's childhood friend, remembers his buddy as an adventurous, somewhat dramatic playmate. "Every day of the week was a chance to get into a kind of adventure," said Poston, 25, a newspaper reporter who recently left Ohio for the Missouri School of Journalism.
Andy was the fantasy-loving kid who liked Indiana Jones and comic books featuring Batman, the Joker and the Green Lantern.
"He was really into fantasy and kind of creating his own reality, even as a little kid," Poston said. "You always got that sense that he looked at his life like he was living in a movie, and he was the star."
Judi Smith, whose backyard is catty-corner from the Mickels', found the neighbor boy to be a "sensitive child." Andy was close friends with Smith's twin daughters, Rachel and Lindsay, from the first grade. He was especially close to Rachel, digging with her for worms as a kid, then escorting her to Prom Court as a teen. Being neighbors and in the same class, the kids were part of the same circle all the way through high school.
Judi Smith and Karen Mickel would talk over the back hedge and picket fence, occasionally having cookouts or taking the kids on "little field trips" in the summer.
It deeply touched Smith that Andy once spent his summer afternoons visiting her mother, who had Alzheimer's disease and was living temporarily at the house.
"I remember one time Andy came over and I said, 'The girls aren't home, Andy.' And he goes, 'That's all right, I came to see your mom,' " said Smith, a 54-year-old mother of four. "And he would sit with her and she'd go on and on about stuff, and he'd just hold her hand and he'd just laugh with her, and kiss her on the cheek when he left."
* * *

As he grew up, Mickel ran with a crowd of about 16 boys and girls of similar age - a tightly knit group of kids, including Poston and the Smith twins, who didn't romance each other but simply hung out. The Mickels loved this crowd for their son. The kids gathered often in the Smiths' spacious family room, where they watched movies or played games like Scattergories.
"We weren't these prudish, perfect little kids," said Rachel Smith Wilson, who is now married and living in Tennessee, pursuing a doctoral degree in economics. "But we also didn't have to drink every weekend like a lot of high school students do."
In high school, the friends began having elaborate progressive dinner parties that continued into their college days, though Mickel often had to be prodded to participate.
In other ways, he showed himself to be a nonconformist, occasionally doing odd, attention-grabbing things. Rachel Wilson recalled how her friend once showed up at a school dance in a blue sweat suit, his entire body colored with blue marker, calling himself a "Smurf." In one of his senior class pictures, he posed standing in a metal garbage can. When his older brother graduated from high school, and friends gathered in the Mickels' backyard, Andy suddenly appeared on the roof, dressed like Indiana Jones and carrying a whip. With a flourish, he jumped down amid the guests.
"It was like a five-minute little episode. I remember thinking, 'That's Andy,' " said Wilson, now 25.
Andy's antics were well known. While his friends had their own claims to fame - Ben Poston was named in the senior yearbook as the "Teacher's Pet" and, along with Lindsay Smith, as having the "Best Hair" - Andy was chosen as both the "Most Witty" and the "Most Daring" in the class of '98.
"He had an amazingly witty sense of humor. He was really funny," said Griffin House, a close childhood friend singled out in the yearbook for the "Best Eyes."
House, now a musician living in Nashville, credits Andy with opening up his creative side. As kids, the two would grab House's mother's old Camcorder and make comedy sketches they thought were hilarious.
"He's so smart," House said. "His mind just works a lot differently than others'."
Scott Dixon, who tutored Andy in creative writing, couldn't help but notice the cynicism that crept into his pupil as he entered adolescence. But Dixon, a 42-year-old school consultant who deals with severely emotionally disturbed kids, never saw any violent tendencies in him, or any other red flags.
It was, Dixon thought, just "typical teen angst."
"He always seemed to be shackled by cynicism, and I always hoped that someday he'd break free of those chains," said Dixon, who enjoyed Andy's writing, which he described as "biting, dark humor," though enigmatic at times.
Andy Mickel did not excel in school; everyone agrees he didn't much care for classroom work. But they considered him exceptionally bright.
Linda Bodey, his drama teacher at North High School, still thinks of him as one of her "special" students, a kid so absorbed with detail he "could write a whole paper about one paragraph in a novel." When playing Tiresias, the blind seer, in "Oedipus Rex," Andy painstakingly practiced how to position his fingers on a cane to best resemble an old man. Bodey thought such attention to detail sometimes left Andy with tunnel vision, as he burrowed down a track without seeing the wider view.
He always had a cause; he was not caught up in the typical high school milieu," said Bodey, 52, an energetic teacher known to work 12-and 14-hour days.
Andy seemed drawn to her, often quizzing her at length about her long hours, her private life and whether she was happy. In 24 years of teaching, only two other students had ever broached such personal and penetrating topics.
"He was very bright, inquisitive, always processing in his head," said Bodey. "He was always the guy somehow not quite on the same rhythm as everybody else - enough so you might have picked him out in the crowd."
He could also use his mind like a weapon. Poston recalls how his friend sometimes tried to intimidate and bully people with his intellect - a characteristic that would be observed years later in a California courtroom.
"He was always kind of playing this intellectual mind game with people," Poston said. "He would say things then wait for somebody to say something that was maybe not the most thoughtful statement. Then he would push you and say, 'What do you mean? Justify what you just said.' "
* * *
If there was a chink in Andy Mickel's intellectual armor, it was his moodiness and occasional erratic behavior as he moved through North High School.
Everyone seemed to know that he suffered from depression and was prescribed antidepressants that he hated to take.
Depression appears to have played a key role in what would be his earliest, and virtually only, brush with the law before his move to the West Coast in 2001.
In October 1997, his family reported him missing after a night out with friends. Poston says he was with Andy that night in Springfield, going to see the film "A Life Less Ordinary" with Ewan McGregor and Cameron Diaz. Driving home in his Geo Metro, Andy - who Poston said was not drinking or using illegal drugs - began driving recklessly, racing the wrong way down a boulevard and crashing into a tree. The car, which his parents had given him, slammed into the tree on the passenger side where Poston was sitting. Neither was hurt.
Andy drove the car home, then ran away that night. Poston said his friend walked or hitchhiked some 15 miles to Yellow Springs, Ohio, home of Antioch College, where he fashioned a lean-to from sticks and spent the night in John Bryan State Park. Poston and his friends went looking for Andy the following day, but he returned on his own, stopping by Poston's nearby home.
There, he talked with Poston's father, a psychologist, about his depression.
The episode disturbed his friends. "It kind of spooked everybody," Poston recalled.
Judi Smith also began to notice that the "sensitive" boy next door seemed "kind of troubled sometimes." She wasn't sure what medication he was taking - his family won't say - but she suspected it wasn't working.
One afternoon, as Smith stood on her front porch, Andy paid her a visit when the girls weren't home. Smith had been on antidepressants herself following some surgery, and she decided to broach the subject.
"I said, 'You know, I'm on something and it's helping me, and it's not the worst thing in the world.' And he hugged me real tight," she recalled. "He seemed so sad."
Apart from the depression, though, Poston, House and others saw little amiss. If there were large cracks in the Mickel family, they didn't see them. If there was anything wrong, Andy didn't say.
And despite their friend's occasional antics, he also did the typical things. He was a Cub Scout and a paperboy. He attended Lutheran Sunday school. He wrestled awhile. He went on canoeing and camping trips. He helped build a house for Habitat for Humanity.
Then, upon graduating in 1998, Andy Mickel threw his teachers and friends a curve. While the gang headed off to college, he decided to join the Army.
"I would've more expected him to join the Peace Corps than enlist in the armed forces," Bodey said.
Poston was equally perplexed.
"I don't know why," said Poston, who, along with House, attended Miami University, 75 miles away in Oxford, Ohio. "He wanted to kind of experience it all. I think he just wanted to be an Everyman - be everywhere, do everything he could."
Mickel spent most of three years at Fort Campbell, Ky., home of the Army's 101st Airborne Division. He graduated from Army Ranger School, Airborne School and Jungle Operations Training School.
Rachel Wilson saw her old friend during his Army days and was disturbed by how much he'd changed. Home for a visit from college, she was jogging in the neighborhood when she spied two strangers who looked like skinheads. She thought about turning around until she recognized Andy.
She ran up to give him a hug. Instead, he stepped back and stuck out his hand.
"He was just so different, so different," she said. "He was just kind of cold. His eyes were cold. It just didn't seem like the same person to me - just distant and removed."
It was, she thinks, the last time she saw him.
But Andy Mickel would not stay long in Ohio or his old neighborhood. After being honorably discharged from the Army in 2001, he decided to head west for Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.
The distance between Andy Mickel and Dave Mobilio had shortened considerably.
Evergreen State College, a secluded campus set in a forest, was a long way from Springfield - not just geographically, but philosophically.
A left-leaning liberal arts school with about 4,400 students, it grabbed national headlines in 1999 by selecting convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal as a commencement speaker.
While students listened to a 13-minute taped speech from the former Black Panther on death row in Pennsylvania, angry protesters - including the victim's widow - stormed out of the event. Then-Gov. Gary Locke refused to attend and deliver his scheduled keynote address.
Mickel chose this school, with its main gathering area called "Red Square." He ostensibly came to study creative writing. The college was not as academically rigorous as his parents would have liked and, in his freshman year - when many new college students are confined to large lecture halls and tackling basic requirements - he was allowed to do independent study.
It was during this time that Mickel's personal politics got increasingly intense.
In December 2001, he went to Israel with a pro-Palestinian activist group pushing for an end to Israeli "occupation." The following summer, he went to Colombia, South America, to study nonviolent resistance, and to Northern Ireland, another global hot spot. In the Pacific Northwest, he joined protests against the World Trade Organization and was arrested in Seattle in April 2002 for interfering with a police officer.
Tehama County District Attorney Gregg Cohen would later say in court that Mickel had reached for an officer's gun during the Seattle arrest, though Mickel would staunchly deny that in his jailhouse interview with The Bee three days before his sentencing.
But there is no denying that Andy Mickel became more political at college. He began railing about social injustice and corporate irresponsibility and capitalism run amok.
Scott Dixon, his old tutor back in Springfield, saw Mickel on a Thanksgiving visit home and heard him talk about politics - about corporations, environmentalism and the like. To him, Mickel seemed no more strident than many politically minded college students.
Poston didn't talk much to Mickel during this period, but both he and Dixon wonder now whether the back-to-back cultures of the rigid Army followed by a freewheeling liberal arts college made for a volatile mix.
"He went from the Army, where they tell you exactly what to do, and you learn things and it's regimented. And he got out and he went to this radical liberal college, where they don't have grades and all that," said Poston. "He was kind of like a blank slate ...
"Put those together, and I guess it was a really bad combination."
Dixon suspects his former pupil "wasn't fully emotionally centered" when he left high school and zigged to the Army, then zagged to Evergreen State College.
"There were so many diametrically opposed influences coming at him, and he tried to make it all coalesce into a single idea," Dixon said. "And it's that single idea that's kind of led to his downfall."
* * *
Whatever the catalyst, by 2002, Mickel's audacious plan had begun to take shape: He was going to murder a cop to draw attention to his politics, and to incite citizens to rise up against their government.
It had to be a small town, he reasoned, one without too many security cameras - the kind of place he'd have a chance to get away, at least for a little while.
And it had to be in California, which Mickel had decided was a prime example of a state where gun laws were too strict.
Reflecting back on that time during his interview with The Bee, Mickel said: "It's a difficult thing to go through with. It's a very significant action to take ... Taking another person's life isn't something to take lightly."
Wearing an orange jailhouse jumpsuit and dingy white T-shirt, Mickel looked gawky and almost boyish - until his gaze settled on his visitors and fixed there, for long, uncomfortable moments. Jurors later would remark about "the stare," which so unnerved one female juror she began to fear for her safety.
"I know everyone thinks I'm the cold-blooded evil murderer," Mickel said, "but I didn't take this action lightly."
Indeed, he planned the killing meticulously. At one point, he told The Bee, he visited a prison near Seattle, taking a tour with a college class so he could get some sense of what prison life would be like.
He left little to chance.
In the summer of 2002, he drove his maroon Mustang from the Pacific Northwest to Yuma, Ariz., and back - a 23-day odyssey that would later be documented with colored pushpins on a map in the Tehama County District Attorney's Office.
This was the hunt, as he tried to find just the right spot in just the right town.
That spot, he ultimately determined, was Red Bluff.
Warner's Petroleum fueling station on Main Street had piqued his interest, with its steady stream of law enforcement officers filling their cars on the outskirts of town. The location was remote enough that he could drive up nearby Breckenridge Street, then slip undetected for 2,060 feet down a desolate dirt road alongside the railroad tracks. The unattended station lay up a short hill, where large metal bins would provide cover.
Mickel returned to Red Bluff on Nov. 17, a Sunday, his plan readied. Sometime after his arrival, a Tehama County sheriff's deputy spotted him, thought he looked out of place and ran his Washington license plate: 595NAB. When nothing came up, the deputy continued on his way.
By now, Andrew Mickel had legally changed his name to Andrew McCrae - a reference, he says, to a character he liked, Augustus "Gus" McCrae, in the Larry McMurtry novel "Lonesome Dove." The name change, he thought, might spare his family any harmful association with what he was about to do.
On the night of Nov. 17, he crept into the site and waited with his .40-caliber Sig Sauer automatic pistol, but he eventually "sort of lost heart," he would later tell investigators. Several officers came and went that night, but "I couldn't get myself to do it," he said.
He drove back to a rest area north of Red Bluff to sleep and regroup, then returned the following night, gassing up first in Redding. The bumpy dirt road he had planned to take into the area behind the gas station was now wet and soggy - it had been dry in September, when he'd first scoped out the site. He eased down the dirt road off Breckenridge Street as far as he could and waited for darkness.
Sometime between 10 and 11 p.m., he left his car and walked along the railroad tracks, then climbed the hill to Warner's. The station lighting was dim; the night was foggy.
This time there would be no turning back, no second thoughts. Only one piece of the plan - not that he really cared - remained uncertain: Who would die?
In the blackness, he slipped behind a metal bin and waited.