Deputy Cleared in Shooting of Suicidal Woman

SANTA ANA —  A three-month investigation into the fatal shooting of a suicidal woman who had called 911 from a Mission Viejo motel room has ended with authorities declining to file charges against the sheriff’s deputy who killed her, the district attorney announced Friday.

The deputy, John Meyers, had been under investigation since June 10, when he shot DeLaura Harrison, 43, of Gainesville, Fla.

New details of the case emerged Friday following release of a lengthy report that included information that had been kept confidential during the investigation.

Harrison, who had a long history of mental and alcohol problems, had called 911 from her motel room saying she intended to kill herself and her family. The 911 operator alerted deputies, who could not get in the locked room. After getting a pass key, they entered, only to be confronted by Harrison, who pointed a .25-caliber handgun almost point-blank at Meyers’ head, according to the report.

Meyers then shot Harrison once in the chest.

“There will be no criminal charges filed against the deputy,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Chuck Middleton said Friday. “To me, it’s a very cut-and-dry case. There was no gray area at all.”

The names of the two officers and many other details surrounding the shooting had been withheld by the district attorney’s office. Some information was made public in July after The Times brought action in Orange County Superior Court seeking details about the shooting, which had brought protests from Harrison’s father.

Officials of the district attorney’s office said during the summer that release of information prior to conclusion of their investigation, conducted under an agreement with the Sheriff’s Department, might impede the probe.

The thick report released Friday, which also was reviewed by the Orange County coroner’s office and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, contains a gripping account of Harrison’s final hours. It includes a transcript of a 10-minute conversation with 911 operator Tracy Sturms, interviews with several sheriff’s deputies and a sergeant, Harrison’s husband and four witnesses. Each account verifies the Sheriff Department’s claim that Meyers had no choice but to shoot, Middleton said.

“There’s no doubt, he acted in self-defense,” Middleton said.

Harrison, a homemaker and former beauty pageant winner, had been living with her parents in Florida since she and her husband separated. She had returned to Orange County on June 8 for a hearing at which her long-contested divorce was declared final.

Her 17-year-old son, Brad, had been allowed to stay at the hotel with his mother until after the divorce hearing.

At about 7 p.m. on June 10, the day of the hearing, Harrison drove her rental car to her ex-husband’s Laguna Niguel home, dropped a load of Brad’s clothes on the sidewalk and disappeared. That was the last time her ex-husband, who watched her through a window, saw her alive, he told investigators the next day.

By 9:40 p.m., drunk and suicidal, Harrison was in her room at the Hampton Inn on Oso Parkway, drinking vodka. Apparently with no one else to turn to, she dialed 911 operator Sturms.

Harrison, who initially asked for a suicide hot line, eventually revealed to Sturms that she planned to kill herself, her former husband and Brad, according to the report.

She then told Sturms that she decided to spare her husband and son, but would take her own life. Her chief dilemma was whether to use the chrome-plated gun she had brought from Florida and chance becoming “a vegetable,” or to take 30 prescription pills.

“I’ve got pills and a gun here, you know,” she told Sturms. “I have been drinking . . . and I don’t know” which to use.

Harrison also had wanted to jump from her third-story window, she told Sturms, but she could not open it.

“What is the loss of one when it could have been three,” Harrison lectured the 911 operator. “But it’s not going to be three because I can’t hurt them. I can’t, you know. I thought I could, but I can’t.”

While Sturms tried to calm Harrison by counseling her and reminding her that her son would be devastated by her death, Meyers and Deputy Dan Noval were sent to the hotel.

The two deputies and hotel desk clerk Cathy Dougan walked to the hotel room, knocked and announced that they wanted to talk to her, Noval and Meyers said in separate accounts. They got no response.

Dougan tried to use a pass key, but it would not open the door, she told investigators. She left to retrieve another key, while the two deputies continued to try to get Harrison to open the door.

Noval told Harrison: “This is the Sheriff’s Department. We’re going to come in. We need to talk . . . we just want to talk to you and work things out.”

But Harrison responded brusquely: “I’m not gonna come to the door. Get away from the door.”

Soon, Dougan returned with a different key.

Noval told investigators that they began to fear Harrison would shoot herself any moment. They devised a plan to tackle her when the door opened.

“I said, ‘When we open the door, you cover me and I will get to her,’ ” Noval told investigators. “I’m gonna jump her and will cuff her and we’re gonna defuse the situation.”

The two deputies then drew their guns and Dougan turned the key. But when Meyers tried to open the door, he felt Harrison push it back. He then shoved the door wide open, almost losing his balance. Noval was crouched directly in front of him.

Meyers looked at the barrel of a gun pointed at his head. For a moment, he said, “I couldn’t tell exactly what it was.”

It quickly dawned on him, however, and he yelled, “She’s got a gun!”

Dougan, who stood outside in the hall, said that as the men rushed in, she heard Harrison “start to cry or mumble.” Then a gun went off.

“I heard my gun pop like a cap. It sounded like a cap gun,” Meyers recalled. Harrison stumbled backward, spun around and fell face down between two beds.

The district attorney’s report includes a statement by Harrison’s former husband, Gene, that he had been warned the day before his ex-wife’s death that she was capable of violence.

“Gene Harrison received a phone call from the deceased’s doctor in Florida,” Wallace J. Lucett, district attorney’s investigator, wrote. “The doctor told him his life could be in danger, because his ex-wife was not in a very good frame of mind.”

Gene Harrison declined to comment Friday on the report. But he told investigators after the shooting that he did not think Harrison was acting suicidal or violent after the daylong divorce hearing. He only recalled that she brushed him off when he tried to talk to her.

Undersheriff Raul Ramos on Friday said applauded the district attorney’s decision, but expressed sympathy for Harrison’s family.

“It was a tragic situation, and our hearts go out to the family,” Ramos said. “But the officers were in a situation also, and they had to take immediate, decisive action. We’re just very glad the D.A. found they were justified in what they doing.”

Ramos added that the deputies were distraught at the death and received counseling to help them through “the traumatic times.”