Grief, shock and confusion continued to plague two families on Saturday as they struggled to understand what caused a West Davis man to fatally shoot his friend and roommate, then turn the gun on himself.
“I don’t know what happened between them, but there wasn’t any animosity,” Lois Hall, the mother of 23-year-old Joseph Andrew Hein, said in an interview at her Dixon home Saturday, a day after police found the bodies of Hein and UC Davis veterinary medicine student Whitney Joypauline Engler, 27, in the Glacier Drive home they shared.
“He liked and respected Whitney,” Hall said. The pair had been friends for a couple of years, meeting at the Freewheeler Bicycle Center, the Hein family’s downtown Davis bike shop, and discovering a mutual enjoyment of cycling. They became roommates in December.
Hall said her son, a licensed helicopter pilot, showed no signs of being depressed or suicidal. Nor did Engler express any concerns about Hein to her family, her mother Virginia Bigler said in a phone interview.
Bigler said she had spoken earlier Thursday with her daughter, who had planned to drive to her family’s home in San Diego later that night to spend time studying for her licensing exams and to pursue job interviews. Engler, whose key interest was in animal behavior, was slated to graduate from the veterinary program in May.
“She had a great love for animals,” a passion she developed as a toddler “when she decided she wanted to be with animals her whole life,” Bigler said. Engler graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in brain behavior and cognitive science before attending UCD, which she described as her “dream school.”
Friends and family described Engler as driven and hard-working, but noted she also made time for her many pets, including a dog, three cats, two parrots and a collection of finches.
“She was a sweet girl. Everything was going in the right direction for her,” said Anjolie Daryani, a fellow fourth-year vet student. “We’re all just a tight-knit family, so everybody’s distraught that something like this would happen. She had her whole life ahead of her.”
Engler’s fellow students held a candlelight vigil in her memory Saturday night near the veterinary teaching hospital, and on Friday launched a search for her missing pets — a 4-year-old Australian shepherd named Rosie and Chique, a black-and-white cat — that fled during the police activity.
“We are so grateful. The students and the university have been so supportive,” Bigler said.
Investigation continues
Police discovered the murder-suicide scene at about 2 a.m. Friday, seven hours after a man called 911 to report that two people in their 20s, a male and female, were dead of gunshot wounds inside the Glacier Drive home. He hung up when dispatchers tried to question him further.
Although autopsies are planned for Monday to determine Engler and Hein’s cause and manner of death, Davis police issued a statement late Friday afternoon saying that the incident is believed to be a murder-suicide, and investigators “are not actively seeking any suspects at this time.”
“The initial indication is that he (Hein) is the gunman,” Assistant Police Chief Darren Pytel said Saturday, a suspicion he said would have to be confirmed through gunshot residue and fingerprint analysis, as well as a review of other evidence recovered from the scene. A handgun was found near Hein’s body, Pytel added.
Hall, Hein’s mother, confirmed her son owned guns but insisted he used them responsibly, usually for his hobby of target shooting with friends. She said Hein assured her he would never use them to hunt animals or harm anyone.
She wonders whether Engler’s shooting was accidental, and that Hein — after asking police to send out a squad car and ambulance — panicked and took his own life rather than face arrest and prosecution or put his family through that ordeal.
“He was not cold-hearted. He was very generous and very giving,” she said. “I want people to know that he’s not a horrible person.”
Hall said she had no knowledge about the source of a large-caliber assault rifle Hein had pictured on his Facebook page back in September, along with the comment, “Turns out shooting assault rifles is actually pretty fun.”
Police, however, say the photo was just one piece of information that contributed to the heightened police response at the scene Thursday night, including a SWAT team and Yolo County Bomb Squad technicians.
Police response detailed
Among the resources deployed to the scene were two Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicles — one owned by the West Sacramento Police Department, the other transferred from Davis to Woodland police ownership last year after local residents and City Council members raised concerns over police militarization.
Pytel, the assistant police chief, said the armored vehicles were deemed necessary for multiple reasons, the result of a decision-making process that began just moments after the 911 call came in.
“It was the tone and the manner of how the caller spoke to us,” Pytel said. He described the person as being “very matter of fact. …It led us to believe the caller may have been involved in the crime.”
As officers responded to the scene and made repeated attempts to contact the occupants of the home, it soon became clear that they were at a disadvantage.
The home, located on the south side of Glacier Drive, is a two-story duplex “where anybody on the upper floor would have had a clear, unobstructed view,” Pytel said. “In other words, the officers were in the direct line of fire.”
And while the 911 caller told dispatchers he would be on scene when police arrived, “there was nobody waiting for us,” Pytel added. A trace of the number used to place the call, however, revealed the phone was still inside the house.
Those circumstances, along with the lack of “hard cover” anywhere near the scene, prompted the deployment of the SWAT team, which is jointly operated by the Davis and West Sacramento police departments. West Sacramento police also sent its MRAP, which Pytel said satisfied two major needs — armored cover and height advantage with its rooftop turret.
Police also considered the possibility they were being lured into a “suicide by cop” situation, in which a subject provokes law enforcement into using deadly force, oftentimes by committing a deadly act of their own — a scenario seen just two days earlier in San Jose, where a veteran police officer was fatally shot while approaching a suicidal man’s apartment.
By that point, police knew Hein had weapons registered to him, including a handgun he had just received the week before, Pytel said.
After learning Hein may be in possession of an assault rifle, “our concern was that if he had that kind of weapon, our body armor wouldn’t stop it,” Pytel said. It also prompted police to move their command post away from the Glacier Drive house and onto Denali Drive as they created their tactical plan.
Earlier, police brought in a helicopter equipped with infrared cameras that confirmed there was no one hiding in the back yard or on or near the roof, but was inconclusive as to whether other parts of the house were occupied.
“We knew we would eventually have to make entry, and we had no way to protect the team going in and during a frontal entry,” Pytel said. That led to the deployment of the Woodland police MRAP, which had a two-hour response time, arriving on scene at about 11:45 p.m.
The MRAPs transported SWAT team members and robot operators to the scene, then were positioned in a V-formation to serve as a protective shield for the officers as well as the apartments across the street, Pytel said. The robot operators, who require a line of sight to use the equipment, first sent a larger robot to breach the front door, an operation that took two tries due to ineffective ammunition on the first attempt.
A smaller robot was then sent into the house, clearing the first floor of any suspects, but was unable to navigate the steep staircase up to the second floor or gain access to the garage, which is situated at the front of the house, Pytel said.
Concluding they would have to make entry into the house, officers deployed tear gas through the second-floor windows to incapacitate anyone who might be lying in wait inside, Pytel said. They also used several flash-bang devices, which causes temporary disorientation while they enter a room.
Upstairs, they found the bodies of Engler and Hein in separate bedrooms.
“It’s very unfortunate that the situation turned out like it did,” Pytel said. “We could have gone in much earlier, but that wouldn’t have been the safe or prudent thing to do, based on the information we were getting.”
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene
