Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (26 page)

Rosen had juggled his loyalties for a long time and had seemingly come to a place where he didn’t feel guilty about his extramarital activities as long as he was always there for his wife and his family. “Angel,” however, recalls him with bitterness, still hurt and resentful that he was cheating not only on his wife but on her while he grew increasingly attracted to Teresa Perez.

“There should be a whole book written about him,” Angel wrote in an email. “The way he treated me—and others. I was with him for a long time before he started up with Teresa.”

In the beginning, Rosen and Teresa Perez confined their friendship to an occasional coffee break and then to having lunch together. There was such a discrepancy in their ages that no one took their relationship seriously. But Teresa apparently fell in love with J.R. and demanded more and more of his time. She told her foster mother that he had taken her to Arizona with him for a convention and to one of his vacation homes for her birthday. His grown daughters disputed that later, saying that their father hadn’t left the state without taking his wife along for at least seventeen years. They said he was home for dinner every night.

Perhaps. More likely, no one can keep track of adults without hiring a private detective to trail them, and Rosen’s family had no reason to do that. He had always been discreet, and he gave the women in his life cash so there would be no paper trail to follow.

Teresa’s emotions and maturity seemed to be frozen as she experienced them in her teenage years, like insects trapped in amber. She had no education and no life experience beyond scrambling for money to live. She had never really grown up and was both histrionic and full of impossible dreams. She ignored the reality of Justyn’s marriage, refusing to even ponder the warning sign when he stayed with his wife for their golden wedding anniversary and well beyond.

“She was sure he was
the
one for her,” her foster mother said sadly. “They were going to walk the beaches and into the sunset.”

Teresa was more convinced of that when Rosen offered to get her a really nice apartment, pay her rent, and give her money for groceries and other necessities. Although he wouldn’t be able to move in with her, he would visit her. He did have one proviso. Her daughter, Lori, who was 14, would have to move out. He told Teresa he wouldn’t feel comfortable having the teenager around when he called on her mother.

Most mothers would have balked at this request, but keeping Justyn Rosen in her life was of the ultimate importance to Teresa. She had continued to stay in touch with Bob Costello. He knew about Teresa’s life since they’d parted and was devoted to his daughter. Now Teresa called him to tell him that Lori would have to live with him and his wife. He agreed.

And so Teresa had moved into a lovely apartment on Louisiana Street. Her stay there may have been the longest she had ever lived in a home of her own. Despite her hardscrabble life, she had good taste, and she wanted expensive furniture and paintings.

It was ironic that for the moment having a home meant more than having her daughter. Teresa herself had been abandoned; now, as much as she loved Lori, she abandoned her, choosing to be with Justyn no matter what the cost. She may have reasoned that once she married her wealthy benefactor she would be in a financial position to take better care of Lori.

Or maybe Teresa didn’t reason at all. Her mind flitted from one thing to another. She was no longer working as a car saleswoman. In some IQ tests she took over the years of child custody suits, she hadn’t scored very high, but there was too much cleverness in her to downplay her native intelligence.

Now she no longer had to work if she agreed to Justyn Rosen’s terms for his support. She told herself that this was just an interim thing. Teresa wanted to live in a big house the way he and his wife did. She wanted to be taken care of for the rest of her life.

At 14, Lori detested J.R. If it weren’t for him, she would still be living with her mother, and it was natural that she resented him.

Being his mistress worked for a while, and Teresa was placated by the easy life she was living. It wasn’t as if she were with Justyn just for the money, either. She really believed that she loved him with all her heart. As long as she had hope for their future, she could be sweet and accommodating. She still wanted to marry him. But as the century turned and nothing changed, and she saw Justyn grow older and older, she began to doubt him.

It was as if her daddy was leaving her again, abandoning her no matter how much she loved and needed him. The tighter Teresa clung to Justyn, the more uncomfortable he became. He had seen her temper now and how venomous she could be in an argument. Her beauty wasn’t enough to make up for the ugliness she exhibited when she was angry.

As the seasons changed and coolness crept into Colorado in September 2003, there was a sense of finality in Teresa Perez and Justyn Rosen’s relationship. He was 79 and quite probably suffering from cancer. No longer the virile, vigorous man he was seven years before when he was entranced with Teresa’s beauty and facade of charm, he wanted only to be free of her. She would not let him go. She threatened to commit suicide or expose their relationship to his wife and family.

Teresa was just as frightened as Justyn was. What would she do without him? She was forty. She had a lot of
things;
her apartment was lavish and furnished impeccably. She had always kept it clean; she’d seen enough clutter and dirty houses when she was a foster child. And she wanted it to be perfect when her lover dropped by. But he didn’t come over anymore, and she realized that she really had nothing. On her own she couldn’t pay the $800 a month rent, and she had no particular skills.

She had already played one of her top cards: she sent a letter to Justyn’s wife, thinking that would end his marriage. But it didn’t. After sixty years, his wife was not going to let him go.

In the summer of 2003, Teresa warned him that she was prepared to do more. She had pictures and places and dates that she intended to send to his daughters and to other members of his family and his friends. If he tried to leave her, she would send them and reveal his secrets to the community where he was used to being revered and respected.

Her threats were those of a woman who lived in her own world, who was delusional and desperate. At his wits’end, Rosen contacted a lawyer to see if he could obtain a restraining order that would shut Teresa out of his life. He said that she was stalking him. She left terrible messages on his answering machine, and wherever he drove, he felt that she was following him.

Craig Silverman, the lawyer retained by Justyn Rosen, sent Teresa a registered letter on September 15. It contained a stern warning. He told her that she had to stop calling or writing Justyn or his family. Having checked her background, he included a reference to her arrest ten years before for having used a credit card not her own and piling up charges before the owner realized what she was doing. Silverman submitted that her stalking Rosen was a case of Abuse of the Elderly. The letter had a chastising tone that angered Teresa, and it carried a warning: “Mr. Rosen is nearly eighty years old and your days of bothering him are now over.”

He was wrong.

The letter from Justyn’s attorney was a slap in the face to a woman who was unable to understand that her own actions had caused it. Teresa was in so much pain and anxiety that she lost what little ability she had to empathize with anyone else. When she was cornered, she had always been able to ferret out her opponent’s weakness and would play on it. She knew that the man who had forsaken her was extremely committed to his religion. Being Jewish was important to Rosen. She now made fun of his religion, denigrating it, telling him that he was supposed to suffer as all Jewish people were because they were “bad.”

When she told Bob Costello that she didn’t understand why that upset Justyn so much, he tried to explain to her that she had gone too far; that having been born after World War II, she obviously didn’t understand what Hitler’s regime had done to the Jews.

“She asked me if I would have left her over that,” Costello recalled, “and I told her yes.”

Teresa’s world revolved around herself; it always had. She was narcissistic and antisocial, so stunted emotionally from her childhood of abandonment that she constantly saw herself as a victim.

As always, Teresa called the people who had been there for her, even when she was exasperating. She talked to her foster mother in Ohio, sobbing over the phone that Justyn didn’t want her anymore. Patricia agreed to call him and ask him why he was leaving Teresa. When she did, he explained that Teresa had become too controlling. He told the Ohio woman not to call him again. It was over.

Still, Teresa followed Justyn. She was even more beautiful than when he first met her, and most men would have been pleased to have such a statuesque woman walking just behind them,
if
they were unaware of her obsessive tenacity. But she was unhinged. Costello had suggested that if she felt she must confront Rosen, she should hire an attorney and confront him that way. She said she might consider that; she could sue him for palimony.

On October 2, Justyn Rosen, through his lawyer, Craig Silverman, filed a sworn affidavit asking for a restraining order that would stipulate that Teresa Perez must keep at least a hundred yards away from Rosen at all times. It was not unlike the requests that thousands of females who are victims of domestic violence ask for. Even if they obtain these orders, they are basically only pieces of paper that have proven to have little impact on jealous or deranged stalkers. But it would at least provide a reason for the police to arrest Teresa if she violated the restraining order.

It was probably humiliating for the old man who had a good reputation in Denver to admit that he was being emotionally blackmailed, and he must have worried that it would cause gossip, but he had few options.

“While I initially welcomed Ms. Perez’s company,” the statement read, “I have many times recently sought to end my relationship with her. In response, Ms. Perez has consistently demanded money from me to support herself and she is unwilling to let me terminate our relationship.”

Although he did not describe the details of his relationship with Teresa, he noted that she had sent a letter to his wife. “She has recently made clear to me her willingness to deliver similar packages of information to my children and other people I care about.

“I made the mistake of giving her money in the past, and now she feels she is entitled to more money. She is not.”

He was an old man who was receiving treatment for cancer, still wealthy but not the powerhouse he had once been. His hands were gnarled, and he wore a classic Burberry cap to cover his bald pate. It was easy to feel sorry for him and for his wife, who was also 78 or 79. Even so, his chickens had come home to roost, and he had chosen the wrong woman for his last hurrah as a man with a beautiful young mistress.

His statement revealed that he was afraid. He had come to dread Teresa’s messages on his voice mail and the constant glimpses of her in his rearview mirror or in the city so close to him. How did she always know where he was?

“Teresa Perez represents a threat to my mental and physical health,” Justyn Rosen stressed, citing his age and his illness. “I feel as if Teresa Perez has long been manipulating and taking advantage of me. I need it to end now.”

Judge Kathleen Bowers granted a temporary order prohibiting Teresa from getting within a hundred yards of the Rosen home in the Hilltop neighborhood or of his car dealerships. Another hearing was set for October 16.

Process servers attempted to reach Teresa at her apartment, but she hid behind her locked doors, crying. In hysterical tears, she called her former foster mother.

She was panicked and heartbroken. She was also angry and desperate.

Shortly before
six
PM
on Friday, October 3, Captain Joseph Padilla was on duty as the head of the Denver Police Department’s Gang Bureau at 2205 Colorado Boulevard in the center of Denver. The Gang Bureau was housed in an old firehouse located on the western edge of the city’s sprawling City Park, just northeast of the Denver Museum of Natural History. The park was lush and green and boasted two lakes: Duck Lake and the much larger City Park Lake. The onetime firehouse was also close to Saint Joseph’s Hospital, the Presbyterian Saint Luke’s Medical Center and the National Jewish Medical and Research Center.

Padilla, a big man with a thick mustache, had twenty-five years of experience as a cop, nineteen of them with the Denver Police Department. He’d been in some tough scrapes before, two where he had to fire his gun. He hoped never to have to do that again. This Friday evening was quiet. It was shift change at six, and red-haired Officer Randy Yoder left the gang unit to walk to his black Ford F-250 pickup truck, where he’d parked it hours earlier in one of the lots near the police building.

It was still light out, although the sun would set at about twenty minutes to seven. The forerunners of winter hadn’t hit Denver yet, and it was dry and mild with temperatures in the low sixties. The weekend lay ahead, time off for most of the cops stationed at the Gang Unit substation.

Yoder stood at the passenger side of his rig as he took off his police equipment: his police radio from where it was clipped to his shoulder, his gun belt, the bulletproof vest that was a somewhat bulky—but necessary—part of his uniform, and his blue uniform shirt. Wearing just a black T-shirt and his uniform pants, he put the other items into his bright blue gym bag. He was the only cop in the lot at the moment as he scanned it idly.

He watched as a new white Ford Expedition SUV turned at relatively high speed into the driveway southwest of the Gang Unit building. The driver appeared to be a man, and there was a woman in the passenger seat. The driver didn’t park in one of the slots set aside for the public but instead drifted into the spaces reserved for patrol units and cops’ personal vehicles. It pulled up close to Randy Yoder, whose truck was headed south.

“I was in my driver’s seat at that point, and I got out and walked up to the SUV,” Yoder recalled. “It kind of struck me as odd. The window was cracked just a little bit, like a half-inch. I guess I was kind of expecting him to roll down the window and say, ‘Where can I go?’ But he says, ‘Are you the police?’ ”

Yoder saw an elderly man at the wheel. “I told him, ‘Yeah, I’m the police. What can I help you with?’ And before I could finish [saying that], he flings open the door, kind of bumps into me, and takes off running. And he runs around, and as he’s running, he says, ‘She’s got a gun! She’s got a gun!’ ”

Startled, Yoder looked into the SUV and saw that the woman in the passenger seat did indeed have a gun. She was pointing it at him. He wasn’t going to stick around and ask her why.

Yoder backed up to his pickup truck and frantically started to search for his police-issue weapon and radio. As he did that, he kept his eyes on the woman.

She got out of the Ford Expedition, and Yoder could now see that she was still holding a silver handgun. She began to walk toward him, asking, “Where is he? Where is he?”

Yoder could see the old man trying to hide behind Officer Joey Perez’s vehicle. At the time, Joey Perez (no relation to Teresa Perez) was inside the Gang Unit’s offices.

Yoder found his radio first, but he couldn’t turn it on by just feeling the buttons while his attention was distracted by the woman. Finally he felt a thrill of relief as his hand closed around his service weapon, a .45 caliber Sig Sauer, Model P220. The woman had walked to a point between the white SUV she was riding in and Yoder’s pickup truck.

“I am a police officer,” Yoder shouted at her. “Drop your weapon.
Now!”

He yelled it three times, but the woman only stared at him. Then she placed the gun, which appeared to be a 9mm Smith and Wesson, to her head, as their eyes locked.

“Shoot me,” she said. “Shoot me. Well, just go ahead and kill me.”

Never taking the gun from her head, the woman began to move toward Yoder, and he edged away, trying to keep his truck between them. His eyes still fixed on the woman with the gun to her head, Randy Yoder managed to get his police radio turned on. He tried to break into radio traffic. When the air was finally clear, he spoke into it, calling out an emergency warning: “TAC thirty-six. I’ve got a party holding a gun to her head.”

“While I’m talking,” Yoder remembered, “she’s still moving about.”

He was warning his fellow officers inside the building and asking for help at the same time.

“And then,” he said later, “she goes and gets back into her car, into the passenger side, and she’s sitting in there, and she’s yelling and ranting and raving, but I don’t know what she’s saying. Because now I’m focused on this guy. I’m trying to get him; I’m hollering at him. I’m watching her, and I’m hollering at him to come over to me, because I was going to throw him in my truck.”

Randy Yoder figured that if he could get the old man into the open door of the passenger side of his pickup truck, he’d be safe from the woman, who seemed intent on shooting him.

“He doesn’t respond, and I tell him several times…. Well, finally, he does. He comes running as fast as…Well, as fast as an old man can run. There, my door is open.”

The old man was almost safe, but as he ran, the woman spotted him, and jumped out of the white Ford. Yoder shouted to the man to get into his truck, but he couldn’t move fast enough. “She made a beeline toward him,” Yoder said. “I saw her coming around the truck, and I began to back away from her.”

Yoder was at the tailgate of his pickup truck when he heard the woman’s pistol go off. “And I hear two pops! I see him go down, and I see her pointing the gun at me. I didn’t know that I had been hit or what had happened. At that point, adrenaline’s kind of running. She doesn’t even skip a beat, though. She’s not lollygagging through here; she’s on the move. She goes right to him, I hear the pops, and she’s standing over him, and she’s just continually [firing]. One. Two. Three.”

Randy Yoder retreated toward a nearby tree to get some cover. As he ran, he felt two shots hit him in the side. At that point, he turned and shot at the woman. He didn’t want her to hurt anyone more than she already had.

Inside the station, Captain Joe Padilla heard the radio call for help and realized that, unbelievably, Randy Yoder was right outside in the parking lot.

Padilla headed for the door. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of another officer’s gun belt lying on a table in the roll-call room and knew that Officer Daniel Perez (Joey’s brother) was still in the office, someplace. Padilla called out a warning to Perez, “Danny! She’s got a gun!” hoping he would hear it, and then Padilla plunged out into the parking lot.

“I saw a woman first, tall, slender, good-looking, in a shooting stance,” Padilla recalled. “And my first thought was that she was a police officer and that she was holding a suspect at gunpoint.”

Padilla was armed with a .45 caliber Glock Model 21 semiautomatic pistol. Its magazine had a capacity of thirteen rounds, and it could have one additional round in the chamber.

It was important later on to know the type of weapon everyone involved in this strange tableau was carrying.

Danny Perez, alerted by his captain, rushed out of the bathroom, where he was changing out of his uniform. He grabbed his fanny pack, which held his handgun, a 9mm Glock Model 17 semiautomatic pistol. This model held seventeen rounds in its magazine and one in the chamber. As Perez exited the police station, he saw Padilla running west toward the parking lot. He also saw a white SUV and caught a glimpse of Randy Yoder standing near the back of his own pickup.

Police officers are trained to size up a situation in as short a time as possible. Before they ever hit the streets for the first time, they are placed in staged situations where they have to decide whether to fire their weapons, bearing in mind that things are not always what they seem to be and that they must avoid hurting innocent bystanders or hostages.

One of the best police training films is titled “Shoot—
Don’t
Shoot!” Trainees must decide in an instant or so whether to push a button in response to figures popping up in front of them. Often, they shoot, only to realize that they have just fired at an innocent victim or someone with a child in his arms. What might seem so easy to a layman is in reality a maze full of deadly pitfalls.

Pierce Brooks’s book,
Officer Down: Code Three,
is another invaluable training reSource. But in the end each cop must make his own decision of what to do. And in real life, there may be even less time to decide. In Denver, on this soft October evening, the Gang Unit team walked or rather
ran
into a shooting gallery in their own parking lot. They had no idea what motivated the beautiful hysterical woman with the gun. They were afraid that Randy Yoder might be fatally shot. From Padilla’s viewpoint, it appeared that the woman—who he now realized was not a police officer—was about to shoot Yoder.

He didn’t know that Yoder was already wounded. Having taken off his body armor just before he encountered the couple in the white SUV, he wore only a thin black cotton T-shirt over his chest and abdomen, the most vulnerable areas of his body. Shock kept Yoder from realizing that he was bleeding heavily, and he felt little pain…yet.

The woman was still pointing the gun at Yoder. She switched her aim between him and the old man on the ground, whom she continued to shoot. Yoder fired at her in a vain attempt to stop her from shooting the wounded man.

As he tried to dodge the woman’s bullets, Yoder caught a glimpse of a blue uniform and saw it was his captain, Joe Padilla. He was also aware of another officer in the lot, whom he couldn’t see well. It was Danny Perez, who had gotten down on one knee near Randy Yoder’s truck so he could see the figure lying beneath it.

“I saw movement first,” Padilla says, “and I started running that way, and I see a woman come out behind the SUV, and she raises the gun up.”

Padilla ran to the southwest of the Gang Bureau office until he was “roughly parallel” with the woman with the gun. He saw her raise her gun again and begin shooting. At the same time, he saw Randy Yoder ducking and bobbing near his truck. Then the red-haired officer disappeared.

With a sinking heart, Padilla feared that Yoder had been fatally shot. He sighed as he recalled his split-second decision to fire at the woman.

“And because her hands went like this [he gestured at a diagram showing where all the personnel and vehicles were]…I fired at her. I thought Randy was hit because I never saw him [pop up] again. And she ran around by this black truck, which was Randy’s truck. And I ran up to the front of the car. I think it was a little further back, but I had a view of his door—open—on the black truck. I’m hearing gunshots, and I’m crouched down like that. I don’t know where Randy’s at. I’m thinking she’s shooting at Randy over here [pointing to chart], so I fired again at her underneath the door as she’s down. And I believe I hit her because after I fired [that shot] her body just slumped.”

Any cop will tell you that the officer who has to shoot a human being is injured just as badly as the target, injured in the heart and soul and conscience, even though he had no choice. Joe Padilla was no different. He was heartsick at having to shoot the woman and dreaded moving around the black truck and probably finding that one of his men was dead, too.

As Padilla moved around Yoder’s truck, he saw the woman, who seemed to be unconscious or dead, and for the first time realized that there was another person lying on the ground. It was an elderly man, who lay on his back and appeared to be mortally wounded. Padilla had had no idea that a second civilian was involved in the parking lot shoot-out.

The gun was no longer in the woman’s hand, and Captain Padilla called out, “Cease fire!”

Brothers Joey and Daniel Perez were both there during the barrage of gunfire.

Daniel watched the action from his viewpoint of the underside of Yoder’s truck, a large diesel jacked up high off the road. He described seeing the woman’s legs “from the midthigh down” and assumed she was shooting straight down into the elderly man’s body. He then fired three or four shots at the part of the woman he could see from his kneeling position.

Joey Perez, who was working plainclothes inside the Gang Unit, had rushed to the parking lot to provide Randy Yoder with backup. He heard Yoder shouting at someone but in his line of sight, he couldn’t see who it was. He then heard a number of gunshots. He crouched and moved around to the back of Yoder’s truck.

It was dead quiet now. The acrid smell of gunpowder still drifted in the air. The Perez brothers and Captain Joe Padilla stood near Randy Yoder’s truck. Padilla leaned over the still figure of the woman and now saw a handgun underneath the old man’s leg. If the bleeding woman should suddenly regain consciousness, she could reach it, so he kicked it away, then carefully picked it up and put it on the floorboard of Yoder’s truck.

Randy Yoder had been hit twice in the abdomen a few inches beneath his heart and lungs, but he wasn’t dead. Padilla already had fire department paramedics on the way.

The most dreaded call police can hear went out over the radios of patrol units in the area. “Officer down…officer down.”