A police officer and a pair of soon-to-be newlyweds were dead.
Another officer, riddled with bullets, was in intensive care.
Two more police were shot at but got away, one of them grazed by gunfire. Two innocent and uninvolved women were shot by police who feared a dangerous suspect.
And despite a massive manhunt that touched three states and Mexico, the heavily armed ex-Los Angeles police officer believed behind the rampage, who promised in his rambling writings to bring “warfare” to police and their families, remained free.
“We don’t know what he’s going to do,” said Cindy Bachman, spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, one of many law enforcement agencies whose primary purpose Thursday became finding 33-year-old Christopher Dorner. “We know what he’s capable of doing. And we need to find him.”
As darkness fell, the search that had extended across California from the U.S.-Mexico border through Nevada, from suburban street to military bases, had narrowed in on a cold, snowy mountain 80 miles east of Los Angeles where Dorner’s burned truck was found.
But tracks that surrounded the truck and hours of door-to-door searching around Bear Mountain Ski Resort had turned up nothing, and authorities conceded that the whereabouts of Dorner, also a former Naval reservist and onetime college running back, remained a mystery.
“He could be anywhere at this point,” said San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon, who had 125 deputies and police officers and two helicopters searching the community of Big Bear Lake, where a snowstorm and plunging temperatures were expected overnight.
The saga began Sunday night, when Monica Quan and her fiancé, Keith Lawrence, were found shot in their car at a parking structure at their condominium in Irvine. Quan, 28, was an assistant women’s basketball coach at Cal State Fullerton. The couple had no known enemies and there was no evidence of robbery.
The following morning in National City, Calif. near San Diego, some of Dorner’s belongings, including police equipment and paperwork with names related to the LAPD, were found in a trash bin.
The LAPD was notified of the find, and two days later informed Irvine police of an angry manifesto written by a former officer and posted on Facebook.