This document is part of a series about Randall "Duke" Cunningham's attempted murder / suicide on November 25th, 2005

Home page for "Cunningham's Last Battle" web site / Contact the author / victim / witness Russell 'Ace' Hoffman

Re: Duke's last battle...

September 8th, 2007

Dear Mr. Hettena,

I just listened to your presentation on CSPAN which you gave in July here in San Diego.  Very interesting indeed!  Especially the part about the Datsun.  I've owned three Datsuns in my life.  They handle great -- especially the 510s (the 280Z actually didn't handle nearly as well).

I'll bet Cunningham knew about the infamous handling (that is roll-over) capabilities of the Suzuki Samurai.  What he didn't know is the Chevy Tracker (the direct descendent of the Suzuki Samurai (through the Geo Tracker inbetween)) wasn't so easy to flip.  I saw the last of several attempts Cunningham made to try to flip one, in a lone suicide attempt.

When that didn't work, he tried to smash his car head-on at high speed into the one I was driving (a Honda Passport).  But I had just recently learned how to avoid such a maneuver.  It's not easy, but it CAN be done.  Even against an ace.

Below is a portion of a letter to a professor at Penn State who made some interesting comments on CSPAN last spring, regarding Mr. Cunningham, and following that is a letter I wrote to Sheriff Kolender regarding his office's findings in an IA investigation we finally got them to perform, after County Supervisor Bill Horn's fatal head-on collision (Horn survived, but the other driver died).  (Before that we couldn't get anything to happen, but a letter to Horn coincidentally at about the same time got things moving.)  I never received a response to my letter to Kolender.

Feel free to contact me if I can answer any questions or if you'd like to see other documents.

And yes, my nickname was given to me by a friend, upon hearing about the incident.  Duh.

Warmest regards,

Ace