LOS GATOS
Dirt-biker mystified by trap set on trail
No known conflict with 3 neighbors charged in assault
John Coté, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Robert Barnes sat in his Los Gatos hills home Wednesday, his face grooved with gashes, his mouth reconstructed with titanium plates, and wondered: Why would anyone set a booby trap across a road used by motorcyclists?
Santa Clara County sheriff's deputies say that Barnes, 46, could have been decapitated May 6 while riding his motorcycle along Loma Chiquita Road in unincorporated Santa Clara County when he rode into a rope or some other object that had been tightly stretched across the road.
On Tuesday, sheriff's deputies arrested Barnes' neighbors, Edward Anderson, 48, Donald Bryant, 62, and Donna Olsen, 46, on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon and battery with serious bodily injury in connection with the booby trap. Police say the three watched from nearby bushes as Barnes rode into the rope.
"I know Ed, I know Don, I know Donna," Barnes said, slightly lisping from the wounds and 500 stitches to his face. "It's hard to really explain. I wish I knew just what the heck they were thinking."
Barnes was the lead rider in a group of motorcyclists, going 20-25 mph, when something struck him across his upper lip. He was wearing a full-face helmet, but the impact ripped through parts of his face, knocked out teeth and damaged the sides of his helmet around the face guard, he said.
A second dirt-bike rider saw Barnes thrown from his motorcycle and slowed, Santa Clara County Deputy Serg Palanov said. As the second biker was coming to a stop, he saw the suspects pull taut what appeared to be a rope, Palanov said. The second biker was able to stop in time and sustained only minor injuries from hitting the object.
A friend drove Barnes to the emergency room at Good Samaritan Hospital in San Jose, where, after surgery, he was in a coma for five days.
Sitting in the living room of a home perched on a hillside, Barnes tried to make sense of what happened that day. With teeth missing, and stitches protruding from a gash tracking upward from the right corner of his mouth, he spoke slowly, sometimes angrily.
"That was not just a rope," Barnes said. "When the trauma nurse looked at what happened, she said 'There's no way that a rope did this. "
Barnes suspects he hit a length of rebar or something similar that his neighbors had secured at both ends across the roadway, and only after he had struck that did they pull up a rope for the second rider.
Barnes' wife, Wendy Barnes, 41, credited the helmet with saving her husband's life.
"Without that, they said he would have been dead," she said.
The bizarre incident stunned some law enforcement officers.
"I've ridden for years, and I've heard of stories like this, but I just thought it was another urban myth," Palanov said. "I can't believe someone would do this. ... If it was a few inches lower, I don't know. It could have decapitated him, or it could have broken his neck."
Authorities said they are investigating whether the incident was triggered by a dispute about Loma Chiquita Road, a private road about 5 miles east of Highway 17 at Summit Road. Barnes lives just houses away from his alleged attackers.
But Barnes, a construction worker by trade who now cares for his children, said there was no conflict with his neighbors.
He described the neighborhood, where a neighbor's welcome mat read simply, "Leave," and where a power pole is adorned with a blue alien doll, as one that "used to be like the Wild West."
Some neighbors along Loma Chiquita Road, a ribbon of asphalt that periodically turns to dirt, said they were shocked by what happened.
"I don't know anything about a dispute," said Kylee Johnson, 26.
Johnson said she had known the suspects for more than 10 years, described them as nice people, and said she had never heard them complain about motorcycles in the area.
"I've never heard them complain once; I've never really heard anyone complain at all," said Johnson, whose mother commutes to work on a motorcycle. "People who come up here usually come to get away from it all. You expect stuff like this to happen in the city, but you never expect that it can happen here.