Call Paints Portrait of Desperate Woman : Transcript: But 911 recording leaves unanswered questions in her shooting death by a sheriff's deputy in Mission Viejo hotel.

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

July 23, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MISSION VIEJO — Drunk, armed, on the verge of suicide, DeLoura Harrison dialed 911 one Monday night last month with a calm yet desperate plea for help.

“Yes. Sorry to bother you,” said the 43-year-old Florida salesclerk, in town for a court appearance to end her marriage of 20 years. “I just need a crisis hot-line number.”

Along with the hot-line numbers, Harrison got the sympathetic ear of a Sheriff’s Department dispatcher as, for 22 minutes, she spoke of the torment that was driving her toward suicide and the competing hopes that were keeping her alive, a transcript released Monday reveals.

“I just have to get through tonight,” Harrison said near the close of the conversation, taking on a note of optimism. But the night nonetheless ended tragically as the one-time beauty queen was fatally shot by a sheriff’s deputy responding to her crisis call.

Calling the shooting self-defense, Sheriff’s Department officials said Harrison pointed a .25-caliber semiautomatic handgun at the unidentified deputy as he entered her Hampton Inn hotel room in Mission Viejo with a passkey provided by a night manager.

But Harrison’s father in Florida has attacked the Sheriff’s Department’s handling of his daughter’s call. And as is standard in an officer-involved shooting, the district attorney’s office is now investigating the case.

The district attorney’s office had initially refused to provide access to the recording of the two June 10 calls from Harrison, one at 9:41 p.m. and the next at 9:49.

But after a lawsuit brought by The Times and two court hearings last week, Superior Court Commissioner Eleanor M. Palk last Friday ordered the release of a partial transcript of the recording, with portions said to be key in the continuing investigation deleted.

Palk refused, however, to order public identification of the deputies involved.

Assistant Dist. Atty. Bryan F. Brown said Monday of his office’s objections: “What we are concerned about is completing this investigation without having anything published that might impede subsequent interviews that we have to do. . . . That might jeopardize the investigation.”

The partial transcript, while leaving unanswered questions about the actual shooting, does paint a vivid portrait of Harrison’s emotional state in what would be the final minutes of her life.

The first phone call, lasting just two minutes, was a request from Harrison for a suicide hot-line number. Two times during the call, dispatcher Tracy Sturms asked Harrison if the number was for her, but Harrison denied it each time.

“Is there some way that we can help you?” Sturms asked. “No, it’s just, you know, general information,” Harrison responded.

But, in fact, Harrison was in trouble.

And she would acknowledge this to Sturms when she called back just six minutes after the first call ended, saying that no one answered at either of the two crisis lines she had been given.

Committed to a hospital for depression earlier this year, Harrison was in Orange County to finalize her divorce from her husband living in Laguna Niguel and was upset about this, she told Sturms.

Earlier in the night, she had held to her head for two hours a gun she brought with her from Florida, she told the dispatcher. She said she had been drinking heavily. She had pills. And she had tried to jump out the hotel window but found that “I can’t get the window open enough,” she told the dispatcher.

“I guess I’m a weak person. . . . I’m an evil person,” she said. “I must be something because my husband’s divorced me after 20 years.”

Harrison told Sturms: “So see, um, I have a big choice tonight, and I know that, but I just keep thinking if I get drunk enough I can do this.”

Harrison said repeatedly that she was scared by the idea of having to go home the next day to Gainesville, Fla., where she had been living with her parents. But for all the times that she mentioned suicide to Sturms as an escape, she talked more of the drawbacks of death.

First, there was her 17-year-old son. “I mean, I gave birth to him,” she said. And if she killed herself, Harrison said she was “confused” over whether her son could get the money from her divorce settlement.

There were other things she lived for, like her former job as an elementary school teacher.

“I love teaching children,” she said. “I do, I love it.”

Harrison said she also viewed suicide “as a crime.”

And she feared what might happen if she were to fail in killing herself. “God, I don’t want to be a vegetable, I do not want to lay there on a respirator. If I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it all the way,” she said.

Near the close of the conversation, Harrison talks about how she “drank to survive and now I’m surviving, but now I’m starting to get ideas so I, I don’t know, I, I don’t know, see I start getting confused, but what time is it?”

Moments later, she said: “There’s somebody at my door.”

Authorities will not say whether the deputies were then at the door and have declined to discuss other details of what happened in the minutes before she was shot.

What is known is that at 10:09, the telephone line from the hotel room to the dispatcher went dead. And by 10:37, following paramedics’ arrival on the scene, DeLoura Harrison was, too.