ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, April 5, 1997 TAG: 9704070080
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: HILLSVILLE
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER THE ROANOKE TIMES
Police believe the man deliberately murdered his wife, but his daughter's shooting was probably an accident.
A judge had ordered Donnie Ray Dalton to stay away from his mobile home Thursday afternoon until his wife had picked up her clothes and personal belongings.
Dalton, 37, had also been expressly forbidden to buy or transport a firearm while the judge's protective order remained in effect.
But the court orders apparently meant little to him as he prepared to commit murder and suicide.
"The man had it planned," said Hillsville Police Officer Leonard Howell, who accompanied Audrey Dalton to the mobile home along with town Police Chief K.H. Sharpe Jr. "He was laying there in wait."
"It was an ambush," Sharpe said.
The single shotgun blast through the trailer's bedroom window not only killed the woman, but her 16-year-old daughter, Andrea, who was walking toward the trailer just behind her mother. Andrea died a few hours later in a hospital.
"Two of the pellets passed the mother and hit the daughter. We believe that was what happened," said Sharpe, who was approaching the trailer with them but escaped injury.
"We just heard a boom, and the window busted. He shot right through the window and the blinds," Sharpe said.
"I just saw the blood fly from her head," he said of the mother. "She hollered, 'Oh, God!' That's the last thing she ever said.
"I heard another shot and I figured, well, he's gonna kill us all," Sharpe recalled. He yelled to others at the scene to get down behind one of the cars, and fired one shot into the window where the first blast had erupted.
By that time, Donnie Dalton was already dead. He had killed himself with his second shot.
"It was about the time you would break the shotgun down and reload it," Sharpe said of the time between the two shots. "When we found him, the whole top of his head was just decapitated."
Sharpe said that Audrey Dalton, who was 36, had been staying at a shelter for abused women and children in Wytheville. He said some of Donnie Dalton's family had told him that Dalton "had pulled a gun on her before and put it to her head."
She had obtained a protective order earlier Thursday in Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court in Wythe County. The order directed Dalton to have no contact with his wife except through her attorney, to stay away from her residence or place of work or anywhere else he knew her to be, and to stay away from their trailer until 6 p.m. Thursday when she would pick up her belongings.
Audrey Dalton had worked for about three years on the housekeeping staff at Doe Run Lodge, a resort in southern Carroll County on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
"I can easily tell you what kind of an employee she was: exemplary," said Julia Gillespie, general manager. "Always a good attitude, always a laugh and smile, and her fellow employees loved her."
Gillespie thought of her as "a little mountain girl" because of the twang in her accent. Whatever her domestic concerns, she was always upbeat on the job.
The other employees had gathered at the resort early Friday, to support one another in their mutual grief and shock. "We've just rallied around one another," Gillespie said.
"You read about these things happening. We need to be more sensitive to the possibility of domestic tragedy, and to do everything that we can to prevent it," she said.
A similar incident had made headlines on the same day that Dalton and her daughter were killed. Sharon Casey, a housekeeping employee at another motel, had been shot and killed along with her mother, Deborah Casey, Tuesday night in Roanoke, allegedly by her former boyfriend.
Sharon Casey had taken out numerous warrants against against Miguel "Mike" Ortiz since May 1996, when she first accused him of hitting her. But they did not save her life.
Sharpe said it is somehow less of a shock when such incidents happen in cities like Roanoke or Richmond. "It's filtered down to us, and I hate that," he said.
"We got a population in this town of about 2,600 people. Most everybody knows everybody, you know. You don't expect people to do that here," he said. "We write a few speeding tickets, arrest a drunk now and then. We're just not used to this."
Even in hindsight, Sharpe and Howell are unsure what they could have done differently.
It was not unusual for Hillsville police to be called by authorities at the Carroll County jail, asking that officers accompany a woman to pick up her things at a home where there had been domestic abuse.
"We do this very often," Sharpe said. "Most times, they're right back with their husbands within a week."
They had seen the court order prohibiting Donnie Dalton from being on the premises, but still Sharpe and Howell checked the doors, one of which was padlocked, and called out Dalton's name. "No answer, no footsteps, no nothing," Sharpe said.
Sharpe had asked Audrey Dalton "if she thought there was going to be any trouble, and she said she didn't think so." Howell asked her if her husband had a gun. She said he used to have one, but he broke it.
Sharpe was escorting her to the trailer, and Howell had just gone three steps past its bedroom window when the first shot came and he saw her fall. "Just all of a sudden, boom!" he said.
After the second shot, Sharpe called for backup from the state police Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the Carroll County Sheriff's Office. "It was a shaky situation, because we didn't know whether he was already dead or ready to shoot again."
A state SWAT team fired tear gas grenades into the trailer. After getting no reaction, they opened its padlocked door with a crowbar. "They hollered back and said 'He's dead,''' Sharpe said. "He was lying there inside of the door with his head blown off."
All three bodies had been taken to the medical examiner's office in Roanoke for autopsies Friday.
"He could have shot us - me and Officer Howell - at any time. He didn't want us. He wanted her," Sharpe said. "Right at that minute, we didn't know the daughter was shot.
"She was a little farther back," he said. "It was just a tragic thing, especially for the little girl. She was not at fault, no way."
Sharpe has worked in law enforcement for 23 years. "And that's my first time for something like that," he said. "It's like a nightmare. It's like a dream or something, I don't know. It's not real. In [law enforcement] school, we're trained for it, but it's not real."
The last time Sharpe walked into such a dangerous situation was nearly 23 years ago, a month after he joined the department. He entered a home where a man had been charged with abusing his wife, and the man fired three shots. All three lodged in the door frame.
Sharpe retreated, called for backup, and the man was arrested. He got off with five years' probation and a $5,000 fine.
"That night, I quit," Sharpe said of his reaction to the incident. But then-Chief Gene Pack said, "Don't do that. This might happen one time in 30 years. It might never happen again."
"So I thought about it and I came on back," Sharpe said, and worked his way up to department chief in 23 years.
Now, it has happened again.
LENGTH: Long : 135 lines KEYWORDS: FATALITYby CNB