Suspect in custody after being shot by park ranger, car crashes
By David Richie -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 8:07 pm PDT Monday, August 21, 2006
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A man was shot by a Sacramento County park ranger Monday morning but escaped into Fair Oaks above Sailor Bar, where he allegedly carjacked a vehicle only to wreck it a few moments later, investigators said.
The incident started about 9:45 a.m. when a park ranger identified by a dispatcher as Kathleen Utley tried to investigate a white Ford Focus parked near the Illinois Avenue entrance to Sailor Bar on the American River.
Sacramento County Sheriff's Sgt. Tim Curran said the vehicle matched the description of a car used in a recent burglary.
Curran said the car was occupied by a man and woman and it looked like they had just finished changing a tire.
"The man tried to walk away but the ranger stopped him," Curran said.
The man, later identified by sheriff's investigators as Karlawan Seunarine II, started fighting with Utley when she tried to do a pat-down search.
"He produced a weapon, either a knife or a screwdriver, and the ranger shot him," Curran said.
He gave this sequence of following events:
Although hit in the upper body, Seunarine got back into the Ford Focus and drove away. He collided with another car a few blocks north at Illinois Avenue and Winding Way.
When another driver stopped to make sure everybody was OK, Seunarine stole that car. He barreled west down a steep hill on Winding Way, where he lost control and rolled the car into a ditch.
The suspect was still inside when emergency personnel arrived to extricate him and transport him to Mercy San Juan Medical Center in Carmichael, Curran said.
By mid-afternoon Seunarine was out of surgery and expected to survive. He was under arrest and being interviewed, but it was not yet clear what offenses he would be charged with, Curran said.
The suspect had a domestic violence-related warrant for his arrest out of Yolo County but not much else was known about him, Curran said.
His female companion did not participate in the fight with Utley or the escape up Illinois Avenue, Curran said. She was taken into custody at Sailor Bar.
Utley suffered bruises and contusions. There was no information available about the condition of the people in the Winding Way-Illinois Avenue crash, but Curran did not think they suffered serious injuries.
A sheriff's spokesman would not confirm that Utley was the officer involved or other information about the officer.
The Bee's archives indicate Utley has been a ranger with peace officer status since about 1988 and was involved in a 1991 shooting.
While on duty in 1991, Utley shot a man who threatened her and her partner with a hunting knife, according to a story in The Bee. The man survived the shooting in Discovery Park, near downtown Sacramento. The county honored Utley and her partner for their actions, a later story said.
Monday's incident disrupted the upscale Fair Oaks neighborhood for much of the day. One of the difficult aspects of the case was that there are three crime scenes - the area where the shooting took place, the intersection of Illinois Avenue and Winding Way where the alleged carjacking occurred and the scene a little farther west where the man rolled the stolen car.
By 1:45 p.m., Utley was walking through the first crime scene with sheriff's investigators.
