"We had a perfect life. Everything was just perfect. But, he was always talking about how he was hurt when he was younger and I always wondered when it would come out."

  -- Jennifer Smith, Cole Smith's widow

  A tough life,  a happy guy,  a tragic end

  Man killed by police in Central Point had fought demons since childhood

  By DANI DODGE
of the Mail Tribune

  GRASS VALLEY, CALIF. -- Harvey Sidney Smith Jr. was walking to his first day at a new school when he pulled on his mother's hand.

  "No one knows me here, right?" the first-grader asked his mother.

  "That's right."

  "I want to change my name," the boy said. "I want to change my name to Cole Younger."

  Thomas Coleman "Cole" Younger was an outlaw in the post-Civil War era who rode at times with Jesse James. Harvey had a buddy named Jesse James. He'd heard a song about Cole Younger. Harvey's mother, taken by the boy's seriousness, assented. When they got to the school, she registered her bright first-grader as Cole Younger Smith.

  The name stuck. The boy thrived. His reading and math were so advanced he skipped second grade and went onto third, taking letters of commendation with him.

  But the life that began with such promise and determination lasted only 25 years. It was blessed by two daughters he adored, but dogged by memories of his own difficult childhood and eventually shattered by mental illness.

  It ended Dec. 28 after Cole Younger Smith appeared at Oregon State Police headquarters in Central Point asking for help and saying he was going to kill someone. Smith told police repeatedly he had a 9mm pistol in his pickup. He pointed out individual officers and said he would kill them. He moved his truck slowly back and forth inside a tight circle of officers and patrol cars.

  Negotiations that started out promising deteriorated during the evening. Smith rammed two police vehicles; police tossed a "flash-bang," a small grenade-like device intended to stun and disorient subjects, into the bed of the truck.

  When Smith got out of the truck and charged police with something in his hand, police opened fire with bullets and nonlethal bean bags. Officers thought the item in Smith's hand was a gun. It later was discovered to be a safety razor in its case. Smith was hit by nearly two dozen bullets.

  Police are reviewing the case to see what could have been done better. Smith's family plans to file a civil suit. They believe mistakes were made by police, who treated Smith as a criminal rather than a man suffering from bipolar and post-traumatic stress disorders.

A mental health advocate from a federally funded civil rights agency, the Oregon Advocacy Center, is looking into Smith's death to determine if it will investigate the case.

  `He saw things a kid shouldn't'

Cole as a baby with his cousin, Rachel.  Cole often stayed at his cousins' house.

  Cole lived most of his life in the small town of Grass Valley, tucked into the gold rush country of California's Nevada County. Once trodden by miners, the historic downtown's covered sidewalks are now populated with fancy boutiques. People in the town still can't believe there's now a Kmart on the outskirts.

  Cole grew up in a family where truth seems to shift in schisms of alliance and discord. A family where people don't ask too many questions of their kin but try to take care of their own.

  His grandmother, Geraldine Schrick, 80, had seven children. Among them are a college professor, a top manufacturing executive and a founder of care homes. The youngest was Cole's mother, also named Geraldine. People in the family call her "J.R.," as in Junior, or Gerry. When she was just 16, Gerry married Harvey Sidney Smith, a Vietnam veteran.

  On July 26, 1974, Gerry, 17, had been having contractions for two days but didn't know what they were until her sister, Mary Schrick, felt her stomach. Then she and Mary Schrick went to the county fair.

  "It was horribly hot," Mary remembered. "But she wanted to go to the fair with the contractions to try to get the contractions to work well."

  Soon the family was at the Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital in Grass Valley. But it was a long and difficult labor. There were problems with the baby's heart. A specialist was brought in.

Cole was remembered as a gentle child who liked to make others laugh.

  "The doctor went in and I thought he didn't look old enough to tie his own shoelaces, let alone deliver a baby," Mary said.

  But then came a cry from the delivery room and the announcement, "It's a boy!" He was 6 pounds, 14 ounces and 19 inches long. His normal birth size belied the giant of the man he would someday become. He grew to be 6-foot-8, the tallest of any of Geraldine's 30 grandchildren.

  Gerry's marriage lasted only a few years before she moved back to her mother's home, a big yellow farmstyle house on Vintage Lane in Grass Valley. Little Cole would run his Hot Wheels over the white porch railing that spanned the width of the house. He built forts in the trees. And he tracked the red mud of the three-quarter-acre lot into the house.

  Although he and his mother moved on, Cole went back to the house when his mother got uterine cancer at age 22. Gerry recovered and began a volatile 20-year romance with Chuck Rooney, five years her elder. He was the man Cole came to call "Dad."

  Cole never got to know his biological father, Harvey. Harvey is now dead, according to family members. Cole referred to him only as "the biological dude."

  Rooney had worked as a "meat slinger" at Safeway but spent much of his life on disability. An accident at age 2 in which he nearly drowned had left him unable to learn to read or write, Gerry said. He later was severely affected by diabetes, she said.

  Gerry worked in restaurants, and for a short time as Head Start teacher, until she, too, went on disability after a breakdown. She now takes anti-depressants.

  Although Gerry said Cole's life at home was idyllic, other family members said they saw nasty bruises on the boy. Gerry and Rooney had terrible fights, family members say.

  Nevada County records show they were arrested by police a number of times, but except for the most minor of traffic violations, the cases were dismissed.

  "He saw things a kid shouldn't," said Cole's cousin, Amy Fielding, 30. "I remember seeing (drug) paraphernalia on the table."

  Cole often chose to stay with his aunt Mary's family rather than at home. He even had his own room at her house.

  Despite Cole's difficulties growing up, there was always a strong loving bond between mother and son, family members say.

  "My sister did the very best she could," Mary said. "It was not an easy time. And it wasn't my place to say anything. When it got too bad, he would just visit us for awhile."

  Over the years, Mary would have nine children: One, Rachel, was born within six months of Cole. According to different family members, Cole stayed anywhere from one night to months at a time.

  "He was so gentle," Mary said. "He used to carefully pick up a caterpillar to see how its legs moved, and then my dainty little daughter would say, `That's disgusting,' and smash it with her foot.

  "Each time he was devastated."

  One day when Cole was about 11 it snowed in Grass Valley. He built a snow fort.

  "He got his picture on the front page of the paper," Mary said. "He was so proud that day."

  He also loved to fish, his mother said. He and Jesse James Jarret would ride their bikes about a mile to Lion's Lake at the county fairgrounds to fish. They would sit on the same bench each time.

  "He and his buddy Jesse would bring bluegills home and put them in a bucket," Gerry said.

  Eventually, she'd tell them the fish weren't doing so well, and the boys would carry the sloshing bucket back to the man-made lake and dump them in.

  But at school, kids made fun of his poverty.

   "They picked on him because he didn't have good clothes," Mary said. "He was so big, none of my kids' hand-me-downs would fit him. We had to special order his shoes because they didn't sell them that big."

  Cole was about 12 when he met Jenny Bosch, who lived around the block from him. The two developed childhood crushes on each other.

  "He used to help me with my homework," she said. "He was very smart in math."

  In seventh grade, Smith went to the state championships with his choir and won a gold medal. But then he stopped singing. He started working. At first, it was summers with his mother in the kitchen of a camp for children with cancer. Later he got a full-time job as a cook at the Holbrooke Hotel, the oldest continually operating saloon in California.

  He tried out for sports but didn't stick with it, said his uncle, Tony Schrick.

  "He tried to play football, but ... didn't like people getting pounded on," Tony said.

  More than anything in the world, though, he wanted to be a cop with the California Highway Patrol. But when he talked to officers about the idea, they discouraged him because of his family's run-ins with the law.

  "They wouldn't even give him a second look," his cousin Rachel Barrios said. "That really hurt him. Since I can remember, he wanted to be a cop."

  Eventually working became more important than school, and despite earning all A's one semester of his sophomore year, he dropped out in his junior year. A heart ailment and pneumonia that landed him in the hospital for more than a week that year added to his desire to give up on school: He never felt he could catch up.

  Depression began in teenage years

  About this time, some family members saw the first signs of depression in Cole. His gentle, blithe attitude would crash into a moroseness they'd never seen before, his uncle said.

  But he continued to work. He was popular with women. He bought a yellow muscle car. He moved out of the house into an exclusive gated community called Lake Wildwood when he was 17.

  He grew into a young man who was protective of his cousin Rachel as if he was her big brother. When he didn't like someone she was going out with, he'd let the guy know.

  "The thing that really made me mad, was he was always right about them," Rachel said.

  Kids in the huge extended family loved Cole and would climb on him like a jungle gym. He had an infectious giggle and an easy-going manner that attracted kids, dogs and strangers.

  Yet, before he even turned 18, he was suffering from bleeding ulcers.

  And although he was known for his gentle spirit, he did let his fists fly on occasion. He was convicted of assault in 1993 for beating up a cousin he thought had gotten too mouthy with him and was sentenced to a year of probation.

  When his girlfriend at the time cheated on him with a school wrestler, he "cleaned the guy's clock," Gerry said.

  Then, childhood sweetheart Jenny Bosch appeared at Gerry's door one day, when she heard Cole was back in town from working construction in Oregon. She made a declaration. Standing on the porch, her finger waving in the air, she said: "I'm gonna make him my man."

  When the couple first got together, they were sweet to each other, remembers friend Steve Pedersen, 28.

  "He was a great guy to hang out with," Pedersen said. "He'd go anywhere in town and he'd know someone."

  When Cole was about 21, he and Jenny moved in together.

  "We had a perfect life," Jenny said. "Everything was just perfect. But, he was always talking about how he was hurt when he was younger and I always wondered when it would come out."

  During the day, Cole did maintenance at a mobile home park called Tall Pines. In the evenings he cooked at Frank's Pizza. He wanted his wife to have the opportunity to be a housewife.

  "He was a big gentle giant," said Pat Wright, co-owner of the popular pizza parlor in the heart of Grass Valley's quaint downtown. "He got along with everyone."

  By the time he was 22, Cole made a down payment on a small white house with green trim just outside the downtown center.

  "I think that's the happiest I ever saw him," his mother said. "When he got that house."

  His first daughter, Andrea, was born and he showed off the little girl at Rachel's wedding on June 8, 1996. Then, Jenny caught the bride's bouquet and Cole reached up his long arm and plucked the garter out of the air.

  "He seemed happy, the happiest I ever saw him," said cousin Amy. "He said `Jenny and I are getting married."'

  Mental illness diagnosed

  But the stress of the jobs, the fixer-upper, the new baby and his past were catching up, Jenny said. He was having nightmares. His depression began to overwhelm him. He went into the hospital with heart problems again.

  On June 2, 1998, he told Jenny he was feeling suicidal. She called the county mental health department, and Cole was put into treatment for five days at Charter Hospital in Roseville, part of a Northern California mental health system. His diagnosis: bipolar disorder, a mental disorder affecting at least 2 million Americans that involves episodes of serious mania and depression. Family history and genetics often play important roles in developing bipolar disorder.

  On June 26, 1998, Cole and Jenny married.

  But Cole was back in the hospital the next month. This time, doctors added another ailment to his diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder. Although post-traumatic stress was once thought to be mostly a disorder of war veterans who have seen heavy combat, researchers now know that it affects hundreds of thousands of people who have survived earthquakes, inner-city violence, domestic abuse, rape and other trauma. The disorder often leads to, or appears with, depression.

  Cole switched to a regular 9-to-5 job at Sierra Swiss Machines but couldn't hold it together. As he worked over the machines, he would be caught off-guard by an uncontrollable shaking that can come with post-traumatic stress disorder. The owners would send him home during the episodes, a co-worker said.

  "We knew he had problems and was working through them," said Carrie Adams, an office manager at the metal shop. "But still, we never saw him be aggressive. He was always happy-go-lucky."

  Another daughter, Alison, was born. Cole at this time was on three medications. Unable to work, he went on disability. Jenny got a job. They defaulted on their home.

  Cole was further depressed that he had lost the coveted role of breadwinner. The medications made him gain weight and shortened his temper.

  Police were called to the house because of loud arguments. Twice more Cole got to the point of considering suicide. Sometimes he just drove off and called police to help him.

  "One time, he drove halfway to Reno," Jenny said. "He stopped to get gas, and that's when he called for help. He would start to get scared of his thoughts."

  He withdrew from the family.

  "After Alison was born, everything went bad," said cousin Rachel. "It wasn't a bed of roses before, but after Alison was born it got worse. I'm not trying to defend him, but when you are raised that way, I don't think you know anything different."

  Then in May 1999, he beat his wife. She ended up in the hospital emergency room with bruised ribs.

  "Even though we were still married, I pressed charges," Jenny said. "And he paid."

  He was convicted of assault and began a program of daily counseling and anger management.

  "He was a working fool and he liked it that way," said his best friend, Nathan Taylor, 26. "When he couldn't work anymore, he felt like a bum."

  But still, with his friends, he was the same affable Cole he'd always been. He could be counted on for a hand in moving when no one else could. Smith and Taylor took trips to Reno, where they nursed $20 on nickel machines all night, ate a big breakfast at dawn and drove home. When his best friend's wife went through a difficult pregnancy, Smith looked in on her during the day.

  Neighbors recalled seeing Cole playing with his girls outside his apartment with affection and love. He took the girls to fish at Lion's Lake, although he always had someone else put the worm on the hook.

  `He decided that the best thing for him to do was to leave'

  Jenny and Cole moved to Philomath four months ago in hopes they could start a new life in Oregon.

  "Grass Valley used to be small like Philomath," Jenny said. "We wanted to raise our girls in a small place like we grew up in.''

  She got a job at a deli. They lived in a nice place. But the holidays were always hard for Cole. And this past Christmas was no different.

  At 2:30 p.m. Dec. 28, Jenny called the Philomath Police Department. In their reports, officers said she wanted them to stop Cole from leaving because she needed him to baby-sit while she went to work. Cole told officers he wanted to leave because they had been fighting for two days.

  "About one year ago, while they still lived in California, he had gotten upset and had hit Jennifer," officer Mark Koeppe wrote in his report. "He did not want that to happen again. He decided that the best thing for him to do was to leave."

  Officers agreed. Police said Cole was calm and cried only a few tears as he carried his things out. Cole told police he was headed for his family's home in California. Officers watched as he drove his Ford Ranger down the street.

  Unlike his namesake, Cole found no pardon

  Cole's namesake, Thomas Coleman "Cole" Younger, was a bank robber in the 1860s and '70s. In 1872, a bank robbery went sour in Northfield, Minn., and he was captured by outraged citizens, convicted of robbery and murder, and sentenced to life in prison.

(A movie about the raid was filmed in Jacksonville in the early 1970s.) Younger was later pardoned, led a full life, and died in his hometown of natural causes.

  But unlike his namesake, Cole Younger Smith would get no second chance.

  At 7:23 p.m., Dec. 28, Cole pulled into the Central Point Oregon State Police office. A dispatcher called Jenny at home at 8:05 p.m. Jenny said she told the dispatcher about Cole's mental illness. She told them given the chance, she could talk him out of the truck.

She said, "Don't surround him; it will trigger the post-traumatic stress."

  But the dispatcher put her on hold for a half hour, then hung up.

  Cole Younger Smith was pronounced dead at 8:55 p.m.

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