NEVADA — CALIFORNIA
Death Valley Desperadoes
What triggered a gun battle in a national park?
Dawn had not yet broken as 25-year-old John Cunag patrolled US-95 north of Las Vegas. “I was probably doing about 75,” Cunag recalled, “and I saw a car coming up from behind me. All I saw were headlights.” The driver was gaining on him. “They just kept accelerating. My thoughts were, this guy is crazy. I need to stop him.” Once the car passed, Cunag activated his light and siren and pulled it over.
The slender man driving the 1984 BMW was younger than Cunag. A heavier older man, balding with a bushy beard, sat in the passenger seat. In the back was an older blond-haired woman. Cunag requested the driver’s license and registration. Looking inside the car, he spotted a shotgun next to the passenger’s knee.
“How many more weapons do you have in the vehicle?” Cunag inquired calmly. The driver’s penetrating gray eyes stared right through him. “As many as I want,” he responded. Cunag told the trio to wait and returned to his vehicle.
Radio coverage was spotty in this remote corner of Nevada, but Cunag was able to reach his dispatcher. The nearest backup, however, was 18 miles away.
As Cunag finished the conversation, the BMW driver called out, asking him to come back. Cunag felt a chill and told the driver to wait. After a few minutes, the woman in the back seat exited and said she needed to talk to him. Cunag suspected they were luring him into a trap. He remained in his car and kept his spotlight pointed at the vehicle.
Fifteen minutes later, the backup arrived. When both officers had their weapons drawn, Cunag ordered the driver to exit the car. The BMW’s engine roared and the car took off with all three inside.
The next town to the north was Beatty. Cunag and his colleague raced to catch up. Near Beatty, a deputy sheriff joined the chase. As he did, the male passenger popped his head out of the BMW’s sunroof and fired four shots from an M-1 carbine, a semiautomatic rifle. All the cops dropped back.
In Beatty, the drivers came to a T-intersection. Northbound US-95 continued to the right. To the left, a state highway led to the California state line and Death Valley National Park. The BMW turned left.
Though it would later factor into a larger story, the chase received little press attention at the time. The curious drama inspired me to revisit Death Valley.
US Highway 95 begins at the Mexican border and runs north to Idaho. Between Las Vegas and Reno, its two lanes of asphalt are lined by champagne-tinted sagebrush and olive-colored creosote bushes. As I stepped from my car on my visit to Amargosa Valley, where the car chase began, the wind sliced through me. In the distance, I could see the Nevada Test Site, where mushroom clouds once rose from atomic bomb experiments.
When I drove to Beatty, something weird unfolded. Wild burros ambled the streets like pedestrians on Easter Sunday. Dozens of them. I later learned they descended from donkeys brought to the area by prospectors almost two centuries ago. One strode right up to my car window as if asking for directions.
I first visited Death Valley with my family in 1972 when I was eight. We came mid-summer, as the temperature peaked at 128 degrees. I’m now accustomed to summertime desert heat, but my older brother remembers the extreme temperatures just flattening our East Coast family. It was the first time we’d seen tea brewed in the sun.
In August 2023, Hurricane Hilary visited Death Valley, though by then it had degraded beyond a tropical storm. Still carrying a great deal of moisture, it delivered over two inches of rain to Death Valley in one day, a record for a place that averages that amount annually. When I arrived six months later, the park was still recovering. Many roads were closed. On my previous trips, Badwater Basin — the lowest point in North America at 282 feet below sea level — was just a mud pool. Now it was a lake, six miles long, three miles wide, and a foot deep.
Despite its name, Death Valley has always felt to me like one of the most peaceful places on earth. Its otherworldly landscape is mostly silent except for the wind. Vistas reach dozens of miles to the tallest peaks in the continental U.S. The park’s normal tranquility must have made the shots that rang out on March 17, 2000 all the more bewildering.
As the car chase neared the state border, Nevada authorities contacted the California Highway Patrol. When a CHP officer approached from the opposite direction, the fugitives fired a handgun five times at his windshield. The cop saw the muzzle flash but escaped injury. None of the police officers shot back at the car.
When the BMW entered Death Valley National Park, it headed for Furnace Creek, where 3000 visitors milled about. Rangers mobilized and a National Park Service airplane began tracking the BMW from above. The springtime temperature approached 90 degrees, and the skies were cloudless as usual.
With law enforcement vehicles all around, the fleeing car turned east onto a gravel drive. Mustard Canyon Road was designated for four-wheel-drive vehicles, but even I drove it without a second thought, and I wasn’t fleeing the police. Just a mile long, the route wound through a small box canyon and looped back to the main park roadway. Rangers immediately blocked both ends.
Trapped, the driver maneuvered off the graded roadway into the open desert, crossing a moonscape of small sharp rocks. After a few hundred feet, the car reached the salt flats beyond, but a rainy day earlier that spring had moistened the salt, and the car’s tires got stuck.
Shouldering rifles and carrying a large backpack, the trio abandoned the car. They hiked west, away from park roads toward Tucki Mountain, a 6700-foot peak in the Panamint Range. Park visitors rarely visited that wilderness area. Rangers decided it was safest to let the fugitives head that direction and observe them from a distance. “Nobody wanted to see anybody killed,” a park spokesman said. “Where were they going to go? It was a long day, it was hot, and the next day wasn’t going to be any different.”
While the fugitives tromped across the salt pan, law enforcement agencies coordinated their dragnet. One team searched the abandoned BMW. Inside, they found handguns, rifles, and shotguns, along with 700 rounds of ammunition, some of which could pierce armor. There were books espousing anti-government political philosophies and manuals for making bombs and conducting military operations.
Officers figured out that the car’s driver was Jeffrey Barrus, 20, of Emeryville, CA. Firing weapons from the passenger seat was his father, Lloyd, 44, a member of an anti-government militia. The woman in the back, Cheryl Maarteuse, 50, lived with Lloyd inside a southeastern Idaho car repair shop. A few months earlier, Lloyd crashed a Chevy Suburban while fleeing an Idaho sheriff’s deputy. He’d been expected to appear in court that very day on felony DUI charges.
Over 100 law enforcement officers were now inside Death Valley National Park. A CHP chopper circled above, along with an Army Black Hawk helicopter on an anti-drug mission nearby with the Inyo County SWAT team aboard. The park service plane was still flying overhead, and a helicopter gunship from the San Bernardino sheriff’s office was arriving.
The fugitives stopped hiking when they got to the base of Tucki Mountain. They positioned themselves in a gully surrounded by scrub and stacked rocks to make a bunker. A park ranger observed them through a spotting scope and radioed their location to the CHP chopper. Around 11:30 a.m., its pilots flew to the bunker and hovered 250 feet above. The Barruses pointed their rifles at the helicopter and fired. One shot ruptured the helicopter’s fuel line and another punctured its transmission oil cooler. Viscous liquid spewed from the aircraft onto the desert floor.
The pilot maneuvered the chopper a mile away from the bunker before landing on the salt pan. The SWAT team on the Army helicopter rescued the crew, who were shaken but uninjured. The chopper wreckage was removed a few days later by a heavy-lift helicopter. The incident marked the first time civilians in the U.S. had downed a police helicopter.
All afternoon, the trio shot at aircraft that came within range. Occasionally, they fired toward officers on the ground in the distance, as if warning them not to come closer. The law enforcement agencies gathered at the park’s nearby airfield and prepared for darkness.
The SWAT team positioned itself on the ground in a protected mountain area east of the bunker. Five Death Valley rangers, trained for nighttime operations, arranged themselves on the desert floor where they could observe the fugitives. Another group guarded the downed helicopter. The trio shot at them as they moved into place. Two more aircraft arrived: a Kern County helicopter and a U.S. Customs jet. Both had infrared night vision capabilities. All park roads were closed, and other units protected the Furnace Creek visitor area in case the suspects breached the containment zone.
Around 10:30 p.m., rangers heard the three fugitives arguing, debating whether to hunker down or move. They had 500 rounds of ammunition but no water or food. Lloyd wanted to stay put and keep shooting. Cheryl and Jeffrey disagreed. The shouting turned into shoving.
Authorities took advantage of the dissension to make their move. Over a loudspeaker, the SWAT team announced, “We can see you, but you can’t see us. You’re surrounded. Give it up.” The Kern County helicopter then lit the bunker with a multi-million candlepower searchlight. All three surrendered. No law enforcement officer ever fired a shot.
To me, the most striking element of the Death Valley standoff was the coolheadedness of the police. For eighteen hours, the Barruses shot at officers from various agencies who never returned fire. Continuous gunfire elicits fear, anger, and adrenaline. Yet, eight law enforcement agencies and over a hundred cops collaborated without confusion or discord.
The Barruses were intriguing, too. What motivated their crazy behavior? At first, that was hard to ascertain. The remoteness of the location meant no journalists were on the scene. Only the Associated Press reported the story, and it misspelled the name of the two male suspects as Burrus. Brief wire-service articles appeared in a few papers. But Lloyd’s later life ignited much deeper press attention.
Lloyd was born in Idaho and raised in the Mormon Church. After his mission, he married a fellow Mormon. When Jeffrey and his brother Marshall were children, Lloyd violently abused their mother. She left the marriage despite her religious conviction that they’d been sealed for eternity. Lloyd kidnapped the boys and settled hundreds of miles away. He had three more children with another Mormon woman and moved everyone to Alaska. She too fled, taking her kids with her. The older boys remained under their father’s spell. He trained them to shoot and prepared them for war against the U.S. government.
After his arrest, Lloyd Barrus said he’d wanted the police to kill him. “I just thought you’d shoot us, you know. For me, I want to be left alone. I just want to be dead. That’s it.” Psychiatrists diagnosed Lloyd with paranoid personality disorder. He pleaded no contest and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He said Jeffrey had fired all the shots. Jeffrey received a 25-year sentence, though he claimed his father had forced him to shoot by holding a gun on him. I figure they were both lying.
After serving his sentence, Lloyd began posting racist and anti-government rants on social media. He came back into the news three years after his release.
In 2017, Lloyd and Marshall raced past a Montana sheriff’s deputy going over 100 mph in another Chevy Suburban. When the deputy tried to pull them over, gunfire peppered his windshield and killed him. Other officers were sprayed with bullets when they caught up with the Suburban fifty miles down the road. They shot back.
A spike strip finally halted the Suburban. The father and son jumped out and kept shooting. Marshall was killed by a police bullet. Another cop shot Lloyd’s gun from his hand. He was taken into custody alive. The court ordered that Barrus be medicated with antipsychotic drugs to ensure he’d be competent to stand trial.
After his conviction, Lloyd asked to be hanged but was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He expressed no remorse for the death of his son, explaining to his mother, “This is what Marshall and I have lived for. It’s what he died for, Mother. I was born to do this, Mother, what I’m doing.”
Some people are called to religion, others to public service, the arts, or commerce. A few are drawn to evil.
Copyright © 2024 Lou Schachter • All rights reserved
