What Led Chris Dorner to Go Off the Edge: Workplace Abuse, Racism, and Unfair Firing

Continued from previous page

The money belongs to Enid Korean Church of Grace, 724 W. Randolph, and the bag contained $7,792 in cash and checks.

“The military stresses integrity,” Dorner said. “There was a couple of thousand dollars, and if people are willing to give that to a church, it must be pretty important to them.”



He said it was “a little scary” having that much money in front of him.



Dorner said his mother taught him honesty and integrity. “I didn’t work for it, so it’s not mine. And it was for the church,” he said. “It’s not so much the integrity, but it was someone else’s money. I would hope someone would do that for me.”

Local Oklahoma City tv news recently ran  stories on Dorner's  good samaritan "heroism" in Enid, but this was largely ignored by the national media — it confused and upset their facile narrative, apparently.

Most of Dorner’s naval career was spent on naval bases in San Diego and near Las Vegas. He also served in Bahrain, and earned scores of medals and commendations.

In 2005, Dorner joined the LAPD and was in training when the Navy called him up for a year of active duty overseas in the Persian Gulf. A former Navy friend of Dorner’s, Long Beach police Sgt. Clint Grimes, described a very different Dorner from the crazed mass-murderer who terrorized Southern California earlier this month:

"I never knew him not to be smiling," [Sgt. Grimes] said.

Grimes said Dorner is very bright. Dorner's unit used high-tech sonar equipment to find small boats that could be a threat to naval vessels in port.

"They're not looking for a stupid guy, here," Grimes said.

In the same article, Dorner’s closest college friend, an Oregon attorney named James Usura,  describes Dorner as “well-spoken, educated, rational. I didn't think he was moody or showed anything that would indicate he had mental health issues." Then, echoing a common theme to nearly all “going postal” workplace massacres — that it’s impossible to profile potential rampage murderers — Usura told reporters,

"People are looking for predictors, but I just never recognized anything that would indicate he was unstable in any fashion. He seemed normal, and I know that's not a great descriptor, but that was who he was to me."

Indeed Dorner’s ordinariness is what stands out. He was an ordinary middle-class African-American California jock, facing “ordinary” racism and racial discrimination, in a country that officially claims to be post-racial:

"Mr. Dorner was from Southern California and I was from Alaska, so being at SUU, which is set in a rural, predominantly white Mormon town, one of the things that connected us was our shock to the social demographics of the place," Usera said. "It was different to what we were used to and so we could relate to each other."

Usera recalled Dorner complaining about instances of discrimination, but nothing that alarmed Usera during their college years.

"He is a person who believed that racism is alive and well in the United States, not just in Utah," Usera said, "but while it is something he mentioned on some occasions, I never saw him get irate about it."

During his academy training, Dorner reported an incident in which he was in a van with other recruits, and one of them called another recruit “nigger.” Dorner told him not to use that word. Their argument erupted into a fight, and Dorner reported the racist recruit to his supervisor. The result, he later said, was that he was shunned by his colleagues.