Mourning a Victim of Road Rage

He was, Dawn Guerriero tells you, her broad-shouldered moving man, a big good-natured lug with a blue-collar Staten Island accent who hauled furniture for a living and whose gentleness helped put her life back together again.

The Culver City woman admits that she had lost all faith in men the year she met Arnold Guerriero. She was recently divorced, with two children to care for, but the man everyone knew as Arnie took control as the family’s gentle father figure.

But while affable and easygoing, Dawn’s lumbering 250-pound husband of three years didn’t suffer fools--especially on the road.

“Arnie was a New Yorker, it was part of his nature,” she said. “He honked at people. Sometimes he flipped them off. But that wasn’t any reason for him to die, to be dragged to his death like an animal.”

In a grisly scene that moved several stunned onlookers to hysterics, the 37-year-old Guerriero died last week after he got into a shouting match with a 69-year-old motorist who refused to pull aside on a Santa Monica street.

The argument turned into a weaving car chase across Santa Monica’s Main Street area. It ended when Guerriero finally stopped his car and approached the other motorist, who suddenly drove his car at the ex-New Yorker. He slammed his 1972 Ford Maverick into Guerriero, pinning him underneath, dragging his wounded body more than a block.

Guerriero’s injuries proved so massive that family members later had difficulty identifying the body.

Bail Revoked, Hearing Set

On Tuesday, Dawn Guerriero got a chance to confront the suspect, 69-year-old Robert W. Cleaves, as he appeared in Santa Monica Municipal Court to faces charges of first-degree murder, assault with a deadly weapon and felony hit-and-run. Cleaves, a former character actor, has been in custody since turning himself in to police shortly after the incident.

In court, his gray hair disheveled, he remained shackled to three other inmates, saying little as Judge Bernard J. Kamins appointed him a public defender and then revoked his bail, which had been set at $1 million. He was ordered to reappear in court Nov. 10.

In her front-row seat, 43-year-old Dawn Guerriero wiped away tears as she watched Cleaves consult with his attorney. Repeatedly, she bowed her head to kiss her dead husband’s wedding band, which she wore on a gold necklace.

At least one stunned witness to last Wednesday’s run-in near Ashland Avenue and 3rd Street said she heard Cleaves squealing in delight as he dragged Guerriero’s body beneath his car.

“As the car sped off, I heard a whooping sound, a guttural sound--it was chilling,” said Kirsten Anderson of Santa Monica, who called the incident a brutal reminder of deadly uncontrolled road rage.

“It’s a lesson to all of us,” she said. “You never, ever lose your own self-control in these petty little street fights, because you never know who you’re dealing with.”

Police say that the confrontation started about noon as Guerriero, his 25-year-old stepson, Ryan, and another man took a lunch break from a moving job with the J. Paul Getty Museum. They reportedly pulled up behind Cleaves on a side street as he sat in his car, his motor idling, blocking their path.

Guerriero honked his horn. Cleaves thrust his arm out the window and waved them around. Words were exchanged as Guerriero passed, and then Cleaves, apparently offended, sped after him, police said.

“The suspect was honking and screaming at them to stop and get out of the car,” said Santa Monica Police Lt. William Brucker. “Apparently, they were laughing, amused that this old guy was chasing them. They thought he was crazy, or kidding. They didn’t realize how angry he was.”

After several blocks, Guerriero stopped his late-model Ford Taurus and approached Cleaves’ car, Brucker said.

“That’s when the suspect just ran him down,” the lieutenant said.

Witnesses say Cleaves intentionally drove into Guerriero, throwing the victim onto the hood of the car, and carried him for a short distance. Stopping to let the body fall off the hood, the suspect then reportedly backed up and ran over the injured man--pinning him beneath the car’s front axle--gunning the vehicle down a hill for more than a block.

“I want to know what this man was thinking when he stepped on the gas pedal, knowing my husband was beneath his wheels,” Dawn Guerriero sobbed. “Did he think he was dealing with some insect? I waited all my life for my Prince Charming, the lovable man I had planned to grow old with, and now some animal has taken him away from me.”

Maria Morrison, Cleaves’ court-appointed attorney, would not discuss the case or her client. Neighbors at Cleaves’ apartment complex for senior citizens in Venice, where he has lived for five years, called the stocky man a loose cannon whom they had reported to the Los Angeles Housing Authority.

“We knew someone was going to get killed at the hands of this man--we just thought it would be one of us,” said neighbor John Sutorius. “For him, road rage was normal. He was a bully who picked fights with everyone.”

According to the USC Cinema and Television Library, Cleaves’ credits include such films as “The Born Losers,” “The Young Savages” and “Not With My Wife, You Don’t!”

Guerriero’s funeral is scheduled for Thursday, after which his body will be flown to his native Staten Island for burial.

Meanwhile, Dawn Guerriero must cope with her husband’s sizable medical costs without insurance or savings.

“I never had to pay a bill, never had to even see a bill, with Arnie around,” she said. “Now I am just so lost.”

Friends and well-wishers held a benefit carwash last weekend, and family members opened a trust fund for the survivors. A neighbor will pay next month’s rent on the family’s house in West Los Angeles.

Outside the courtroom Tuesday, Guerriero’s friends remembered him as a back-slapping, joke-telling guy who was always there when he said he’d be, an insecure “regular schmo” who wore a baseball cap as a cover for his premature baldness.

A Former New Yorker

Guerriero, who moved to Los Angeles 17 years ago from Staten Island, liked expensive cigars, German beer, the occasional gambling trip to Las Vegas with the boys--and, most of all, New York City and the Giants football team.

Dawn Guerriero was working as a waitress when she met the large man with his nose buried in the morning paper. They never really liked one another--until one date eight years ago, shortly after Dawn’s divorce.

“The first time I laid my head on his shoulder, I had a sense of peace,” she said. “I knew I’d be safe the rest of life, as long as this man was in my life.”

Arnie helped care for Dawn’s amputee father, carrying him to doctor’s appointments. He encouraged his stepsons--who called him Pops--to play sports and took Ryan under his wing at Spina Moving and Storage, where Guerriero had worked his way up the ranks to become a moving consultant, handling such accounts as the Getty Museum.

The other night, Dawn Guerriero laid out her dead husband’s burial clothes--the Giants cap and team shirt he once wore proudly. “The shirt needed washing, but I hated to do it--his smell was still on it,” she said. “But I couldn’t bury Arnie in a dirty shirt.”

Wistfully, she tells you that her husband was mad as hell when he died. “He knew he had a hell of a lot more to live for.”