Concord Monitor du lieu suivant : Concord, New Hampshire • 3

CONCORD MONITOR Saturday, August 23, 1997 A3 DREGA Continued from Page A-1 Whatever its source, on Tuesday afternoon, Drega's anger came to a town head, of inflicting Colebrook wounds that on the tiny. feel as they will never heal. In a four-hour rampage, Drega killed state troopers Scott Phillips and Leslie Lord, part-time judge Vickie Bunnell, and newspaper editor Dennis Joos. He burned his house down before fleeing to Vermont, where he shot and injured four more officers before being killed during a gun battle with between 60 and 80 lawmen. Origins Drega was born Jan.

19, 1935, in New Haven, Conn. His brother, Frank, still lives in the modest, beige house at 318 Quinnipiac where Drega and his five siblings were raised. His father, Joseph, worked as a painter. His mother, Anna, was homemaker. Both were Polish immigrants.

Drega quit high school after two years, according to acquaintances. He may have joined He told people he served in the Korean Conflict and made a career out of the military. The Veterans Administration said yesterday that it has no record of Drega, but that just means he never applied benefits. Around 1960, Drega married a waitress at a restaurant in Groveton, whom he met while working on a construction job nearby. From 1965 to 1970, Rita and Carl Drega lived in Manchester, where he worked in construction.

Drega spent 1969 and 1970 building a home for them in Bow. Once they moved there, neighbors saw a loving couple who often rode their motorcycles together. "They were always together," said neighbor Bernice Prusia. Drega told Prusia about his plans to build Rita an A-frame house on their Bow property and of his dreams of growing old with her at their home in Columbia, along the Connecticut River. But by 1971, Rita was dying of cancer.

On June 9, 1972, she died. Drega was alone. "He truly loved his wife. He truly, deeply loved his wife," said George Tetreault of Portsmouth, a polygraph specialist. "He was devastated when she passed away." As Rita lay dying in 1971, something else happened.

The town of Columbia fined Drega $600 for a zoning violation because he didn't have durable siding on his new house. That zoning violation became Drega's obsession. And in the last few years, his obsession with the fine grew, leading to numerous confrontations with local officials and a lawsuit against the town in 1995. In court document after court document, Drega repeatedly brought up the 1971 violation, whether it was relevant or not. "I was not able to fight this case as my wife was dying of cancer at the time," Drega wrote.

"There was a trial. Plaintiff was found guilt. (Note plaintiff was not guilt)." Drega wrote that his brother paid the $600, but town records only showed $250 paid. What happened to the rest, he demanded to know. He also wanted to know why he was fined in the first place and he haunted town offices and the Colebrook District Court in his quest.

Ruth a court assistant in Colebrook, said he appeared constantly asking for the 1971 file. "He demanded things we didn't have. They had all been destroyed," Lewis said. "He didn't believe we didn't have it. He just thought we weren't giving it to him." While Drega didn't directly threaten her, Lewis was still frightened of him.

"He just had a very menacing way of talking, that's all'I can describe it as," she said. He was physically intimidating, too. Drega topped 6 feet and 200 pounds, and it was pure muscle, Ouimette said. "He was a very big rugged man," he said. In 1988, he wrote The News and Sentinel a Colebrook weekly and one site in his shooting rampage complaining of his treatment at the hands of Columbia officials, his zoning violation and his neighbor's tarpaper siding.

"I have raised this situation to the attention of the Planning Board and the Board of Selectmen on numerous occasions. They have failed to take any action," Drega wrote. "To me this raised a question concerning the fair and equal administration of the law DIAMONDS! Let SPEER'S be your prime source for diamond jewelry and loose diamonds. Diamonds in all sizes, shapes and quality Broad selection of engagement and anniversary rings Custom made jewelry Competitive prices SPEER'S FINE JEWELRY 24 No. Main St.

Concord 224-1582 apparently in the eyes of the selectmen, personal friendships or personal animosities dictate how the law shall be applied." On the bottom of his typed letter, Drega scrawled, "The same gos for the N.H. State Police." About the same time as the letter, Drega began spending more time in Columbia, his neighbors said. And his list of grievances against the town began to grow about building permits and his taxes. "Since the case they brought against me in 1971, they have given me a great deal of trouble," Drega wrote. "I think his strongest conviction was that he had a right to protect his property.

He let it be known he wanted to be left alone on his land," said Tetreault, the polygraph specialist. In the spring of 1990, Drega appeared before the selectmen, demanding minutes from an earlier meeting. According to a statement to the police by Vickie Bunnell then a member of the board and, this week, one of this Drega's victims the board was in the middle of other business. She promised to mail the minutes. During the course of the meeting, she found the minutes and put them in an envelope.

As the meeting finished, Drega returned and she gave him the envelope. "He then asked for the minutes of 'the meeting from two years "Bunnell wrote. When Bunnell told Drega she couldn't find the minutes right then, he began pulling open file cabinet drawers and refused to leave. Bunnell called state troopers, who gave Drega a choice between leaving and being arrested. He chose to be arrested.

In Drega's version of events, town hall was open and therefore he had a right to examine the town's records. The trespass case was continued without a finding for a year and then dismissed. Showdown The next major blowup came in 1993, when tax assessor Louis Jolin attempted to appraise a new addition to Drega's garage. According to statements Jolin and Bunnell gave the police, Jolin walked down Drega's driveway, said hello and told him why he was there. Drega did not respond.

When rough terrain prevented Jolin from getting good measurements outside the building, he walked inside. "(Drega) then spoke for the first time asking me who gave me permission to go inside his building," Jolin wrote. As Jolin attempted to leave, Drega stood in front of his jeep. Drega told him "that I could leave, but the vehicle stayed." Jolin then told Drega he was going to call Bunnell. "That seemed to anger him because he told me to tell Vickie Bunnell to bring those records he had requested some time ago." When Bunnell arrived, she and Jolin found that Drega had placed timbers across the driveway, blocking Jolin's jeep.

When they attempted to move the timbers, Drega appeared, carrying a rifle, with a pistol on his hip. He demanded to know what they were doing and fired a shot into the air. "Drega, who was no more than two feet from me, shouted that I was to touch nothing, and raised his rifle," Bunnell wrote. He then demanded copies of records that he had requested by letter. The selectmen had received the letter only the night before.

Later, "Drega demanded to know, 'Who stole my Bunnell wrote. "I told him if he was talking about a fine back in '72 or so, I had no idea what became of it." Eventually, the state police had to get Jolin's car off the property and arrested Drega for reckless conduct. He was not prosecuted in exchange for agreeing not to come to town hall unescorted or unannounced. But the incident enraged him. "I was arrested for criminal trespass at the Columbia town office, when I was arrested for reckless conduct the selectmen and the assessor were criminal trespass on my property and the assessor was unauthorized entrie in my building, do they get arrested, NO F--K WAY," Drega wrote in court documents.

In 1995, Drega filed a lawsuit against the town, accusing Bunnell and Jolin of trespassing and Bunnell of violating the right-to-know law, among other things. He went as far to submit himself to a polygraph test to prove that he didn't act recklessly. Tetreault, who administered the test, said Drega admitted firing the gun in the air, but "he wanted to prove that he did not point his gun at them. "He didn't think it was reckless. I could not make him change his mind," Tetreault said.

The case against the town was dismissed and Drega saw further proof that he couldn't get a fair deal. "I knew he was after Vickie Bunnell," said Larry Gray, who spent about a month working on Drega's property. "He told us that. She was the one person he hated the most." In Columbia and Colebrook, Drega's anger was well known but little else about him was. "If you saw him in the store, you wouldn't say 'Hi Carl, how are because he wouldn't speak to you," Higgins said.

"He might glare at you." He would disappear for months at a time, neighbors said. He apparently worked construction, loading his camper on the back of his old rusted pickup and going off to job sites. He listed his occupation as a millwright and in some of his few personal conversations with Gray and Ouimette, told them he worked as an independent construction foreman. For a total of about three months during different periods, Drega worked during shutdowns as a millwright at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant in Vernon, Vt. "He was a laborer type on the turbine," said Rob Williams, a Vermont Yankee spokesman.

"It was not sensitive work." When in Bow, he apparently talked and waved to neighbors. In Columbia, he avoided his neighbors and his neighbors avoided him. He was, after all, a man who toted a rifle to the mailbox. Bernard Routhier, a farmer who lives across the Connecticut River from Drega's property, remembers only a few conversations with him, and those just after Drega began spending more of his time in Columbia. "He came to the farm a couple of THE BLACK FOREST NURSERY "YOU'LL OUR PRICES QUALITY" OFF SELECTED SHRUBS TREES BUY 3 LOVELY PERENNIALS GET 1 FREE $3.99 SALE SUPER HOSTAS OUR FIELD DUG $25.00 FRUIT $18.00 BOX FILLERS HYDRANGEA TREES SHRUBS VISA DISCOVER 4 FIELDS AND GROWING OPEN 7 DAYS 9-6 PM EXIT 17 OFF 1-93 082397 RT.

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"I think he had never seen that before until he became my neighbor." After that, Routhier said, Drega would perhaps wave back if he waved first. Both Gray and Ouimette said working with Drega was the most difficult job they ever had. Both had the opportunity to talk to him, occasionally at length, and both felt his anger and saw his strange behavior. "At one point, he wanted me to work 15 minutes and then he would say go, and he would call me an hour later and want me to go back and do some more work," Gray said. When their crews were working for Drega, he watched like a hawk and ran the show with military precision.

"He wrote down every hour and every minute we worked," Gray said. "If one guy got off the machine to get a sandwich out of his lunchbox, he deducted the time." In the end, Drega deducted 50 cents from Gray's final bill because of time he felt the crew didn't work. "Carl was a very strange man. He was very demanding, very commanding," Ouimette said. "He was the type of guy you did what he said and you didn't ask questions." Drega kept a tight watch on the crews on his property, and no one no one at all was allowed anywhere near the house or the other three buildings on the property.

All of the house's windows, except for those facing the river, were boarded up. The grounds were wired with motion detectors, Gray said. One day, Gray's wife entered the driveway, which isn't visible from the house. "He just stopped everything and start running to the hill," Gray said. "He had the whole place wired to protect himself." Neither Ouimette nor Gray, nor anyone else, suspected Drega was stockpiling the makings of bombs or weapons in those buildings.

But, like almost everyone else who met Carl Drega, they didn't want to be around him, and knew there was an eruption waiting to happen. "It was an uneasy feeling going to work there every morning. We knew he was mad at law enforcement. We knew he was mad at Vickie Bunnell and we knew he was mad at the selectmen," Gray said. "We knew this sort of thing was going to happen sooner or later from him." (Staff writers Carrie Sturrock, Steve Varnum, Tresa Baldas and Annmarie Timmins contributed to' this story.) WA WALLPAPER PER $295 $395 Per Single Roll In Stock 100s To Choose From OloR 60 West Concord, NH 224-7131 CENTER 251280 INDIVIDUAL HEALTH INSURANCE AFFORDABLE RATES Time Insurance American Republic Connecticut National Johnson Porter Insurance Services 881 Main Street, Contoocook, NH 03229 746-4955 or 800-974-5199 CONCORD MONITOR Service Directory New Subscriptions 224-4287 Call today to start your personal subscription to the Concord Monitor for just $3.50 per week, over off the newsstand price.

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