The Odd Payoff of a Crime

Carona, a compact man with a vaguely military bearing, hovers at the back of the room, trying not to disrupt. Heads turn anyway. Another young woman appears and escorts him out of one side door and back in another to a table near the lectern, where the publisher of OC Metro, a local business magazine, is talking about how great it is to live and work in Orange County. Everyone in this Costa Mesa restaurant seems to agree. The event feels like a Rotary Club meeting-turned-fund-raiser, where women in fashionable black order wine by the color and tanned men in dark power suits hold bottles of light beer. The publisher finishes his spiel; two editors prepare to announce OC Metro's "Hottest 25," the biggest movers and shakers in this well-heeled corner of the world. They call each of the honorees' names and present them with plaques and handshakes as the audience claps respectfully.

Then comes Carona.

As he is introduced--"Orange County Sheriff Michael Carona"--the 48-year-old Santa Monica native bounds from his table, most of the audience rising with him. Energy charges the room as Little League suddenly becomes the Majors, and the star pitcher is on the mound. Carona accepts the plaque and handshake, and faces the cheering crowd, self-consciously bobbing his balding head as he waves, his face locked in an open-mouthed smile. Then he swims back through the electrifying din to his table, a bit sheepish, not uncomfortable but not at ease either, an aw-shucks deer in the headlights.

This is the odd payoff of murder. Last summer, Carona became the national face of intrepid police work when he took to the airwaves to denounce the killing of Samantha Runnion, a 5-year-old girl who was kidnapped as she played with a friend outside her family's condominium in Stanton, a small working-class city of an estimated 38,000 people squeezed in south of the Santa Ana Freeway between Garden Grove and Anaheim. In press conferences, Carona promised the unknown killer that he and his deputies would not rest until they had run him to ground. It was a bravura performance, Carona slipping between the sometimes conflicting roles of detached law enforcement professional and emotional Everyman, never shorting either. The police would get their man, he vowed. A little girl's death would be avenged.

The public promises were a roll of the dice. What if the crime wasn't solved? What if no arrests were made? But within days, police identified Alejandro Avila, 28, of Lake Elsinore as their man. Prosecutors say DNA evidence, credit card and cell phone records, tire tracks and footprints point to Avila, who awaits trial on murder, kidnapping and other charges.

Law and order has always played well in Orange County, where the local airport carries John Wayne's name and the guiding political ethos is that of the laissez-faire entrepreneur. Carona plays well here, too, coming across as a mix of common-sense administrator and tireless cop. It also helps that he touts his "personal relationship with Jesus," and has said his faith is the most important thing in his life, followed by his family and the Sheriff's Department--priorities that are noticed in this church-heavy county. But his role in solving the Runnion case shifted the rookie sheriff's profile several notches upward, from local figure to home-grown national hero. And everybody wants to be close to a hero.