After prison, he became a homeless advocate. Now questions surround his death in a police shooting

The two lives of Alan Paul Bartley can perhaps best be seen in photos: the cold, vacant stare of Bartley the felon on the day he was released after 19 years in prison, and the warm, confident smile of Bartley the homeless advocate, describing a ministry he built at a Garden Grove church.

The San Fernando police officers who killed Bartley on Jan. 11 didn't know about his prison time or his ministry, said Chief Anthony Vairo. When the officers pulled behind him in traffic, Bartley rammed their vehicle, struck another car as he tried to flee and then reached around behind his seat, making the officers think he was groping for a weapon, authorities said.

Both officers fired, and Bartley died in the San Fernando Valley city where he was born, inside a used sedan he had only recently bought to help him find a job. Investigators did not find a weapon in his car, but they later discovered he had  multiple convictions for robbery, burglary and assault with a firearm. 

In the meantime, the ministry he created at First Presbyterian Church about 55 miles away in Garden Grove continues to flourish -- providing showers, meals, books and comfort for more than 70 homeless people a day. And the people he knew there are struggling with how to best remember the man who gave new purpose to their aging congregation and for some, like Pastor Cheryl Raine and church elder Jane Colbert, changed their lives.

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Bartley, 56, spent more than 24 years in prison between 1982 and 2011. The longest stint was his final stay, nearly 19 years, for first-degree robbery and assault with a firearm in Anaheim in July 1993.

Toward the end of his sentence, Bartley had a faith experience, Raine said. When he was released in October 2011, a homeless ex-con with nothing to his name, he sat on a bus bench and thought, “‘OK, God, I’m not going to make it out of prison without a community,’” Raine said, “and that was his prayer.”

He found his community the next day at First Presbyterian, where he’d heard they offered free showers. He wanted to look good for his first meeting with his parole officer, Raine said.

“After he got cleaned up, he said, ‘I’ll be at church on Sunday,’ and we thought, ‘Sure, we hear that a lot,’” she said. “But he was at church on Sunday, and pretty much every Sunday after that.”

Bartley was sleeping in an alley behind some hotels near Disneyland. The area is crowded with tourists, she said, so nobody paid attention to a tall, clean-cut man carrying a backpack. On the streets, among other homeless people, he spread the word about the church’s largesse.

“Before he came, we only had two or three shower requests a week,” Raine said, “but when Alan started getting the word out, people started coming five days a week.”

The demand began disrupting church business, so the pastor asked Bartley if he could oversee showers twice a week, scrub out the stalls and wash the towels.  Bartley immediately agreed, but he had a much bigger vision.

It started small. Bartley would buy and make coffee for visitors on shower mornings.

“Then he began bugging us,” the pastor said. “‘How can I get food?’ So we ended up getting involved in the food bank, and became a distribution point.”

Soon members of the congregation began washing towels at home and collecting food that would otherwise be thrown away. A barber and hair stylist offered haircuts once a week. A parishioner set up a table with donated books and magazines, and another set out used clothing and shoes. The church began storing people’s toiletries between visits.

As the program grew, it energized First Presbyterian’s small congregation, Raine said. Parishioners helped many visitors get services, including housing and training for jobs. “We call it a ministry of hospitality,” she said, “and Alan made it; Alan created it.”

By the end of 2012, Bartley was hired on as the church’s janitor. The 30-hour-a-week job came with a small room on the church’s large grounds.

He was a tireless worker, she said, but he had difficulty taking direction and curbing his temper. It was disruptive enough at the church that Raine fired him in April 2015.  

But Bartley never stopped attending church, and the congregation continued to welcome him, Raine said, even offering to pay for counseling. “We still cared about him,” she said, “but his anger wasn’t conducive to being a church janitor.”

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Jane Colbert, a bank auditor from a family of cops, didn’t intend to fall in love with Alan Bartley. Her husband of 27 years had been the love of her life, and when he died of cancer in 2010, she had no interest in another romance.

But, she said, “He does funny things, that God of ours.”

Colbert became curious about the tidy homeless man who always sat in the same pew in church, where he could easily stash his backpack without getting in anyone’s way. Around Easter in 2012, she struck up a conversation and asked why he had been in prison.

“He said, ‘Don’t ask if you don’t want to know the answer, because I’m pretty honest,’” she recalled. “And he proceeded to tell me what he had done.”

Over time, she learned that his childhood had been bleak, Colbert said. His father wasn’t around. “He never felt loved at all.”

Bartley started skipping school and stealing from stores when he was 14 and did his first prison stint when he was 23, according to prison records. He told Colbert that his mother and sister never visited him in prison.

Colbert and Bartley were just friends at first, she said. Bartley went to her house every other Sunday to do laundry and watch a little TV. Then he started tinkering in the kitchen. “He loved to cook, and I don’t cook at all, so it worked out great,” she said. After some time, they “flipped the switch to something more romantic.”

They spent a lot of time together, but Bartley never moved in or took advantage of her income, Colbert said. “When we went to the movies or dinner,” she said, “if he couldn’t pay at least every other time, he wouldn’t go.”

As for his temper, Colbert said Bartley could be “pretty bossy,” but he never showed his anger to her. Instead, she said, he changed her priorities by always giving things away to others in need.  

“He taught me to acknowledge the people on the street,” she said. “He was always saving coins and changing them into dollars to give to people standing on the corner. I’d say, ‘How do you know what they’re using it for?’ and he’d say, ‘You’re not the one who is supposed to judge. You’re the one who’s supposed to give. They’ll answer to God when the time is right.’”

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Bartley’s life started a slow spiral after he lost his job at the church. He got another job but left it for reasons he never explained. He had a disagreement with a landlord and started living in his car.

Then, the week before Thanksgiving of 2015, Bartley burst into Raine’s office looking like a wild man. He’d lost his car, he said. He was being followed by police. He knew he’d done something wrong, even though he couldn’t say what it was.

“I’d never experienced that level of paranoia in a person,” Raine said.

Within a few days he was himself again, but the incident left Raine and Colbert shaken. At Raine’s urging, Bartley checked himself into a mental health facility, but he was released after six hours, she said. He promised to start the counseling sessions the church had offered months earlier, but he never did.

Through it all, Bartley continued to attend church, right up to Jan. 3, the Sunday before he left for San Fernando.

He’d heard warehouses there were looking for workers, Colbert said, so the Saturday before he died, he went to her house to shower and dress. She helped him trim his goatee, and they looked up the address for the Presbyterian Church in Hollywood so he’d have a place to worship the next day.

When he said goodbye, he was wearing a silver and pewter cross on a chain that Colbert had bought him early in their relationship. “He put it on,” she said, “and told me, ‘This won’t ever come off.’”

He promised to call when he got to San Fernando, Colbert said. “The last thing he said was, 'Don't give up on me. I'll be back, and I'll have a job.’”

He didn’t call that night or Sunday. By Monday morning, “I began thinking something was definitely wrong,” Colbert said.

At 12:07 that afternoon, Bartley was dead.

The coroner’s office told Colbert they didn’t find a cross and chain.

Investigators later told Colbert they found prescription pain medicine in Bartley’s car, something she can’t understand. The coroner’s office has not yet received the results of toxicology tests.

Bartley took thyroid medication, she said, and had started trials for a new statin medication after a heart attack in 2014. Neither she nor Raine had seen evidence that he used drugs, and Bartley said he never used them.

He had told Colbert he was diagnosed with depression and anxiety in prison, she said, and she’d seen the scars on his arms from past suicide attempts. Maybe, she speculated, he had another burst of paranoia, rammed into the police car, and then realized what he had done.

“He didn’t want to go back to prison, I know that,” she said, “Something took over his mind, or maybe he had a whole different plan when he left here and met up with people from his past. There are so many ifs and unknowns. I don’t think we’ll ever know.”

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First Presbyterian had a memorial service for Bartley in February that drew nearly 100 people, many of them the homeless who benefited from the church’s ministry.

In April, after no one claimed Bartley’s body, Colbert and Raine quietly petitioned for possession in court, “so he wasn’t cremated as an unknown person.”  

Someone in the congregation donated a burial plot. But when they learned it would cost nearly $4,000 to bury his remains and put up a marker, Bartley’s friends decided to scatter his ashes.

“We could just hear Alan saying, 'Why are you spending money on me, when you should be spending it on the ministry?'" Raine said.

His friends still puzzle over his last days, but Raine said the way Bartley died shouldn’t be the end of his story.

“The ending should be about the four and a half years he was out of prison, and literally transformed our church,” she said.

“Our congregation never would have gotten involved in this ministry without him. Yes, his death is a mystery, and yes, it’s tragic, but in those four and a half years, he really did something with his life. ... He did not take. He gave.”

Contact the Homicide Report and follow @latimeshomicide on Twitter.

Photos: (First) Alan Bartley in a prison mugshot, left, and after his release. Credits: California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and Paul Bays. (Second) Cheryl Raine, left, and Jane Colbert. Credit: Jeanette Marantos / For The Times. (Third) Jane Colbert. Credit: Jeanette Marantos / For The Times. (Fourth) Paul Bartley napping with Colbert's usually shy cats. Credit: Jane Colbert. (Fifth) Alan Bartley with the first baby he ever held. Credit: Jane Colbert