0 and he has been on the run. there has been a major manhunt in the southern california from the mountains of san bernardino county to the border of mexico now for six days without much progress. it seemed like the trail had gone cold until about 12:22 this afternoon pacific time. the san bernardino sheriff's office got a call about a car theft. it's not clear yet about whether it was a home -- a burglary or a car theft. anyway, they were told to be on the lookout, that a guy who looked like christopher dorner would be driving. they thought to be driving a white pickup truck. he was spotted by some california fish and wildlife warden. there was a brief exchange of gunfire. he fled into the forest. and then holed up in this cabin that we're now looking at that is being reduced to ashes right now. there was a gunfight with looking for this person. the vastness of los angeles territory, the media involvement, the media savvy of this person we're pursuing here, the police are, talking to charlie sheen, or communicating with him, rather, talking about the various media personalities that he has been watching over the years. trying to get his manifesto out to the public, his grievance against lapd for what he alleges, and i don't know if anyone in the world supports his alleged allegations of racism in the department. of course, it had that reputation decades ago. and of course his grievance says oftentimes you find people who have had problems with the bureaucracy and feel they have never gotten out of it. two police officers have been killed now. two other people have been killed, the daughter and fiance of a police captain. in fact, it was the police captain who was defending him in his case against the department. they're all dead now. a police officer killed just today from the san bernardino deputy sheriff's department. all that going on as we speak. he may be on the loose, john. this story doesn't look like it's coming to the close we thought it would just a half hour ago. >> no. keep going back to what you said at the top of when i first joined you on your show. you compared it to a movie, "high sierra" or "white heat." it has all the elements. that's i think one reason why it has captivated people across the country. here in los angeles, of course, it has been a fact of life, a daily fact of life for six days now, this manhunt, police checks, checkpoints. people getting reports of someone looking like dorner. and so they empty out a store, a hardware store, and they check everybody in the store one by one, asking for their id. and this has been a daily fact of life here. and just captivated everybody. and then sort of dominated the news, dominated the headlines. local stations now have been on the air with this here in los angeles all afternoon. >> watching this. >> it's an l.a. story, certainly. we're going to go to joel rubin, a reporter for "the l.a. time." he has been talking to sources at the scene. thank you for joining us tonight. this is a story that is happening right as we speak. it's very difficult to get the whole picture. your thoughts or what you've been able to report. >> it's very hard to get the whole picture. you're right there. is a lot of contradictory information, or at least a lot of hesitant, unverified information coming in. we're trying to make heads or tails of it all. now it seems to be mostly a waiting game as authorities on the scene, you know, as i'm sure you've seen on tv, the cabin where he is thought to be holed up is largely engulfed in flames. as a matter of safety, authorities aren't going to approach it until they can safely do so. there were some conflicting reports from our sources about whether authorities had actually made entry into the cabin before the flames broke out. i don't think they had. so it's still a waiting game to see what they find inside. >> again, the question of sequence. we've been watching the arrival of armored personnel carriers, at least one. we've been hearing about giant lights being brought up to the scene in an attempt, it looked like to hold an all-night barricade situation and do it safely, where you have men who are being carried in an apc where they can't be shot, but they can stand right there at the scene. and of course putting lights on the scene, you can avoid the suspect from escaping. but all that seems to be gone now. that's all moot now because the cabin is burning. and it's hard to believe that he stayed in there on purpose. you have to wonder whether there wasn't some sort of brilliant distraction play here by the man being pursued here. >> yeah. all along it's been a question of who is christopher dorner. is he a masterful, well-trained disciplined navy sailor and cop who could pull off something like you're proposing, or is he somebody who got in way over his head and had delusions of grandeur about what he was capable of. certainly there are the people out there who think that he is always one step ahead of the authorities. but we're hearing and the story we're following, we're assuming is true is that he is in that cabin, although time will tell to see if that's true. >> and the question is why did he remain. >> yeah, well, again, there were some indications that he may have been injured in the initial gunfire. >> i see. >> there was a rifle seen on the television images, there was a rifle seen on the road outside of the cabin with what looked like to be some blood outside. and there was some speculation amongst police officers that i spoke to that were monitoring the situation that was his and his blood. so they thought he might have been injured before he went into the cabin. >> the story is developing. and this kind of story is such a los angeles story, as i've been saying. tell me about the mood out there in the city. your readership, and why this has been such a grabber, even as it developed in the beginning with this fellow with a grievance against the lapd. he claimed it was a racist situation. that hasn't been backed up by anyone that involved him going on this murder rampage of killing four people now allegedly. and perhaps going to kill more. tell me about the readership you've got whom. you talking to out there? people seem to be rapt in their attention. >> very much so. the lapd holds a pretty -- people are fascinated with the lapd to begin with. there is a sort of base level of interest that runs in the city for the lapd. it is a storied institution. it has a very infamous and famous past. so you start out from that, and you add on to a story like you outlined that really hollywood couldn't make up if they tried. it has all the elements of a movie that we probably will see some day in the theaters when screenwriters get ahold of it. but it has been a story that the city has gripped on to. our readership quite literally can't get enough of it. and traffic to our website is through the roof. it's really a story that has gained interest unlike anything we've seen in a long time. >> well, you know, california has always been seen of the land of the second start, the fresh start. second chapter in their lives, people go out there and start all over again. and then you the mountains, again, a great redoubt, a great place to hide. that's why fiction movies like "high sierra", a place to go to if you're desperate. here is a story, a man attend of his rope. knowing he faces capital punishment, having shot a police officer and killed him. so much of this is coming together now in what we're watching here of this burning cabin. this is the stuff of which great police stories are told. and of course it's all part of our population out of 350 people, we're focusing on two people tonight, this guy, christopher dorner, and the president of the united states. one is giving a state of the union address. and the other is perhaps in that burning cabin. >> very much so. it is a local story. ultimately all news is ultimately local. as you said it has all the makings of a story that people are naturally obsessed with. he wrote this alleged manifesto that police attribute to him and made it clear that he wasn't afraid to die. and that sets up a really dangerous undesirable situation for the cops who are hunting him, because he has shown his willingness to kill. and has now to keep doing so until he is killed. and that he wouldn't be taken alive. it really is a dramatic, dangerous situation. >> i tell you, commissioner bit bratton was on here a few minutes ago. and he was steadfastly defending the honor of the lapd saying all the stories from the past, as bad as they were about racism in the department in the '80s, have been corrected. that the perception of most of your -- well, you can't say in general. generally is that the perception that they have cleaned up their act? >> very much. so and i think we have to -- yes, we have to acknowledge that the lapd of the past is not the lapd of today. they have under bratton while he was here, he pushed through and oversaw a very dramatic reform of the department as the federal government came in and forced changes down the department's throat after several scandals. bratton latched on to the changes and made sure that the department actually bought into them. and in doing so really changed the story line of the lapd. and that said, this whole episode, while you would think nobody would want to touch dorn were a ten-foot pole we have been inundated with e-mails and calls from lapd cops and from the public that say the old lapd is still alive and well. even if that's not the case, and i don't think it is, the memories and the pain and the scars from that time are still very much on the surface. >> it often goes down to personal experiences with the police that are anecdotal, but of course they drive how you think about any life experience. they dominate your thinking. and of course the past is always with. thank you, joel rubin of "the l.a. time." clint van zandt is now with us. clint, thank you. i've been watching you on knbc as we monitor the situation. do we have clint? we don't have clint. >> yeah, i'm up. >> thank you for joining u. clint, here we are once again in a live situation where it's hard to read the future. and a burning cabin, we're watching on the knbc helicopter. it's burning away. we don't know if christopher dorner was in that cabin and presumed dead at this point, or there, and either died at his own hands or died at the hands of law enforcement, it may still be a while before we're able to identify, number one, if somebody is in there. and them two, who that person is. >> what would be the sequence of events? if he were wounded and couldn't move, he would start a fire around him that woo be the only possibility, right? he would have to start the fire and know he couldn't get out. >> two ways. if law enforcement made a decision to put gas, smoke, or anything else in, some of those rounds, for example, that you can either fire from a shotgun or fire from an m-79 have a pyrotechnic capability or aspect to them. even though law enforcement wouldn't fire them in there to intentionally start a fire, in a wooden cabin like that, something could have happened. so just by the introduction of certain types of gas, it could have ignited something inside. or the shooting that took place could have knocked over, you know, a gas lantern or something. >> sure. >> or dorner could have lit it off. >> going back to the experience in philadelphia with the move situation there, what form of weapon is it? is it meant to create smoke and force the person out? is it meant to gas them out? or is it meant to burn a building down? >> well, i think in this particular case, law enforcement had no reason, chris, to try to go inside. as you've reported, we lost another law enforcement officer today, and one critically wounded. the last thing if i would have been an on-scene commander, i would not have wanted to commit a s.w.a.t. team to go inside when this guy very well was firing semiautomatic weapons at law enforcement. >> right. >> so i would have put gas, smoke, or anything at my disposal in to force him out before i would have taken a chance on another law enforcement officer getting shot. >> what will be the plan of action now as the night continues. if there are no developments, and the fire simply goes out some time tonight, the next hour or two, will there be a perimeter setup? will there be a manhunt that continues? >> well, i think law enforcement is probably satisfied itself that it has a good perimeter. as you and i talked on your show earlier. >> right. >> this afternoon, there is going to be an inner and an outer perimeter. and i think law enforcement would be fairly comfortable that nobody was able to run from that cabin, even under the cover of smoke from that fire and get away. if they have satisfied themselves that whoever was inside shooting could not have gotten away, i would say they'll keep a perimeter set around that cabin tonight. they'll probably bring auxiliary lights in. but they'll wait until tomorrow before they go in and see what is actually inside that cabin. again, for safety of law enforcement officers. >> but we will be able to determine through forensic examination of what ever is left in there, whether mr. dorner was there or not. there won't be a mystery left here for conspiracy theorists? >> no. i would guarantee you probably -- as you know, the fbi has got a disaster team. and men and women of that teenagers that's their job to go in to recover the -- even in a fire or an aircraft crash or something like that. they find whatever human skull, bones, anything like that. and they would already have probably dorner's dental records in their hand. and they may well have already gotten dna swabs from at least his mother. so if they find bones and they're able to get a dna from inside the bones or the dental record as the fastest way, if they can go in and worst case scenario they find a skull and it has certain fillings inside the dentistry of that skull, they'll be able to identify it for all practical purposes if it's dorner as his remains. >> clint, here is the challenge. if this is how the story ends, gives us an explanation as to what happened here. what is the story of christopher dorner? >> i think it's a very sad story. i think it's someone who has painted themselves as a victim all of his life, who has not necessarily taken responsibility for his challenges. hey, chris, as you said earlier, we all have problems. everybody gets screwed by their boss or have problems with their agencies or their wife or their girlfriend. those things happen. that's why we call it life. instead of a fairy tale. and in this particular case, losing his job with the lapd, him feeling that it was done, it wasn't the way it was supposed to have been done, that he was discriminated against. losing his job in the navy. but then this just shows someone who's got an ego as big as all outdoors. probably some significant emotional challenges. all of this pent-up energy that could have been used for good to go out and take other human lives. chris, we're going to be waking up tomorrow morning and the next day and saying how sad. number one, so sad for the people that christopher dorner is believed to have killed and injured. and number two, that he wasn't able to resolve his own problems. and if there is anything to be gained from this, anything, it's black, white, whatever color, whatever race, wherever we come from cultural wise, we have to work these situations out. but once you get a legal opinion that said my friend, we listen to the case, and that's the way it goes. we have to learn how to take the bad news with the good news in life. christopher dorner could not handle bad news. when it got too heavy for him, he chose to act out against everyone. and the epicenter of his anger and rage was the 10,000 men and women of the los angeles police department. and everybody else in society who would have stood with him. >> yeah, i think he engaged, if he did, in group guilt, killing not just police officers, but killing the daughter of his former police captain who was defending him in his case, killing her fiance, then again shooting two other officers, killing one today. this is all alleged, but it's all pretty much compacted now in this story we're watching as these flames rise up from the tree there's in the san bernardino mountains in the big bear territory there. what a story. clint, my last thoughts to you as an expert, is this going to be a classic case? is this going to be the kind of thing we study in human resources cases where you have to identify people, a judgment against them they don't like? you have to keep an eye on them or what? >> it's just like gun violence we see across this country, chris. a lot of people have mental health conditions. others just act out. the biggest challenge for profilers when we look at people who commit terrible crimes is why today? why not yesterday? why not next week? why did they choose this particular time? that will probably be the lesson learned in this. but unfortunately, whether we call this an emotionally challenged man or terrible situation of domestic terrorism, we will see other terrible situations in this country. we just have got to be big enough to try to help people try to deal with it. and, you know we have to pray for the dead and the families that are going to be burying their loved ones this week. >> well, i guess the good story, if there is one here that this is still a news story that in this country of 350 million people, we mostly go to work. we put up with things that are done to us we don't think are fair. we have race still as a problem this country in certain parts. we have life that is difficult. as you say, it's not a fairy tale. people get up in the morning. they go to work. they get it done. they don't do things like this. unfortunately, this is still a news story when somebody behaves as this man certainly has here. it's quite a story. hopefully it's a simple case of a strange case of a very strange situation with someone who had great media savvy, who had the brains to keep track of hollywood, to keep up with charlie sheen, to establish relationships with people through the media, to in some strange way enjoy his situation. at the same time wreak havoc in anyone he came in contact with. it is quite a story. it's great to have you on. we're going to continue. we're going to go right now back to john yang for the very latest on this case before we go to cover the state of the union under the leadership of rachel maddow. let's go right now quickly to john yang. the latest capsule of what has happened tonight. >> chris, you see the picture there. that tells the story. the fire burning down. there is very little left oft that cabin to burn. it looks like it's down to the foundation now. this is the cabin where according to san bernardino county sheriff's department a man believed to be christopher dorner had been holed up, had been trading gunfire with law enforcement officials. they said that there was no contact with dorner once he got inside that cabin. the only thing they got coming out of that cabin was gunfire. a fire again somehow. it's still not clear how. and now the cabin has burned to the ground. they believe that dorner did not escape that cabin. and it is going to be a while until they can get in there and see what remains in there, chris. >> so there was no inflammatory materials shot at that cabin? there was nothing launched in there like a smoke bomb or anything like that? there is some reports from the scene that tear gas canisters were fired. there is some reports that there was a smoke bomb. they didn't know which direction it came in, whether it came out of the cabin, whether it was going into the cabin. but the san bernardino county sheriffs official said that there is no -- she has no idea how the fi