He coaxed investigative reports and documents out of the various police agencies, though some of those took years to obtain. The California Attorney General’s office gave him access to 36 boxes and 50,000 pages of documents from the trials of George Smith and brothers Chris and Russ Harven. The amount of reporting that went into “Norco ’80” is staggering. “And as I sort of dipped my toe in to see what might be out there, very quickly it became obvious that there was a much bigger story here,” Houlahan says. He started to reach out to some of the deputies, lawyers, witnesses and survivors who were part of what happened in Norco and on the streets and highways and mountain roads of the two counties in which the gun battle and pursuit took place. I wouldn’t have much of an interest in just a bang-bang-shoot-’em-up pulp true crime thing.” “And as a writer, what draws me to stories most is the human element. “I think I sensed at a really early age - it doesn’t take a genius - that there was probably a much larger story there,” Houlahan says. “I’d tell people the story and they’d always say two things: ‘Did that really happen?’ And the other thing was: ‘How come I don’t know about this?’” “I thought it was the craziest thing I’d ever heard of, and over the years I would sometimes bring it up. “And I was absolutely intrigued with the event,” Houlahan says. “That was a big photo in the middle and I think it said, ‘Ambush on Mount Baldy’ as the headline. “On the front page was that photo that has highway patrolmen Bill Crowe and Doug Earnest - Crowe has been shot and Earnest is bandaging him,” says Houlahan, an 18-year-old Whittier native at the time of the bank job. A bold headline told of a band of five bank robbers hitting a Security Pacific branch in Norco and raining hundreds of bullets down on the first deputies on the scene before leading dozens more law enforcement officers on a violent chase and rolling gunfight through two counties and up the backside of Mount Baldy. Peter Houlahan remembers picking up the newspaper one morning in May 1980.
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