`Tank' struggled to find his place.

Byline: Winston Ross The Register-Guard

They called him "Tank."

Beyond that nickname - given to him by his mother - it's hard to describe Steven Lile Garner with a single word, say friends of the 34-year-old college student shot dead Wednesday by Coos Bay Police.

He was a cross-dresser, a would-be geologist, a methamphetamine addict, a severely dyslexic creative writer obsessed with Dungeons and Dragons-type role playing games, a fisherman and a poet, friends said.

His mood depended on the day - if not the hour.

"He was kind of an endearing wacko," said Debra Thomas, who took him in for three weeks last April, after he convinced her that he had fallen on hard times and his financial aid for school hadn't come through.

"He told me once, 'Anyone who's ever been on the sea will tell you the ocean is like a woman, and you find you're in love with her, even though she has the power to kill you.' He could be so bizarre and yet so profoundly touching, in a way." How he began the downward spiral of events that led to Wednesday's shooting is a mystery, friends say.

"He was a jackass, half the time," said Sydney Wheeler, Garner's cousin. "He tried to steal stuff from his aunt. He got in trouble for drugs, drinking and driving.

"He went by 'Jennifer' when he dressed in drag."

A longtime resident of the Coos Bay area, Garner spent several years as a longshoreman, but he had an array of other interests, including geology, poetry and creative writing.

In fall of 2002, he enrolled at Southwestern Oregon Community College in pursuit of an Associate of Arts degree. He hoped to transfer to a full-time college and get a degree in geology, friends said.

But in October of last year, he ran into serious trouble with the law. He had been convicted in previous years of three counts of petty theft, all of which were handled as violations and less egregious than misdemeanors. But his arrest on drunken driving and possession of a controlled substance could have meant jail time. In early June, Garner was scheduled to go to trial on the charges, to which he pleaded not guilty.

Still, he maintained several friendships with people he'd met in school, and became an avid player of Dungeons and Dragons, among other role-playing games.

"He started our RPG (role-playing game) club," said Kristel Schliesmayer, a 19-year-old student at the college.

He also wrote most of the complicated plot lines, guiding the players through a series of adventures.

"They were weird but fun," Schliesmayer said. "We'd come out of a cave and turn around and there was a train coming for us." That may have satiated Garner's lust for creative writing, said Thomas, a fellow student who knew him from poetry and creative writing classes.

"He slept in my daughter's bedroom," she said - her daughter is currently living in Hawaii - "right across from my son's room. Worst thing I could say about him - other than that he was his own worst enemy - is that he was a bit of a slob."

Thomas said Garner hand-wrote most of his poetry, but that his dyslexia was so severe he usually required someone to proofread it before turning it in. She still has a story he wrote on her computer, a short rant about a character who's homeless and homosexual and getting beat up.

Garner was strange, Thomas said, but he didn't scare her.

He talked often about how unfairly women were treated in this country, Thomas said. She described how he also liked to wear women's clothing, paint his toenails and fingernails and wear "an awful lot of jewelry."

She added that he didn't like police officers, recalling a day when he saw a police car and called the officer a "pig" as Thomas drove her 17-year-old son to school.

Garner often carried a knife with a three-inch blade, said classmate Aaron Bales, who saw Garner minutes before he was shot by police. Bales, who summed Garner up as an "oddball," remembers bumping into him earlier that morning with a sling on his arm and a bandage on his nose from a recent fall off a wall.

"You don't want to mess with me," Garner told him. "Another guy messed with me - I'm walking and he's not."

But he also remembered a day when a bird struck a window of a campus building and dropped to the ground.

"Tank picked it up and just petted it for awhile," Bales said. "Then he let it go, and it flew away. I know that sounds crazy, but it's true."

Often, he talked about missing his ex-wife, Victoria Francess, said Schliesmayer.

The couple separated in recent years, and she took out a restraining order against him on Jan. 8, 2003. He also had become estranged from his family, Thomas said, though she wasn't sure why.

As she readied herself for Thursday night's creative writing class, Thomas thumbed through the latest edition of the campus literary magazine, the Beacon.

She came across this autobiographical description of Garner:

"Steve Garner feels writing is painting pictures with words, and he hopes is paintings are clear. The ocean is always blue, the water is always salty and my love of the ocean will never die."

Reporter Bill Bishop contributed to this report.