James Norman, his daughter said, “truly was like a cat.”

“He had so many lives: fell off a roof, fell off a ladder, crashed his car,” Nicole Lauritsen said. “He was training somebody (to fly) and the engine went out and they landed upside down in Lake Mathews.”

But Norman, a strong and stubborn 79-year-old Army veteran and former construction worker and truck driver, had grown frail in the past year and was using a cane to walk, Lauritsen said. And so he could offer no resistance on Monday, May 12, when, as he was vacuuming the back seat of his SUV at a Norco gas station, a carjacker entered his vehicle and drove off, the door slamming almost shut and trapping Norman halfway in and halfway out.

Norman died when he fell out less than a half-mile later onto Hidden Valley Parkway.

The ma

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