Guns trigger a loving clash

Julie Alban still grimaces when she passes her old bedroom.

“This is where I crawled down the hallway to call 911,” she explains, pushing her wheelchair along the polished wooden floor. “I had to pull my whole body with my arms. My elbows were all bloody.”

What happened that morning 20 years ago altered the course of her life and set the stage for most of what would come.

Though paralyzed from the waist down when shot by a boyfriend she had known since childhood, Alban went on to become a Long Beach prosecutor specializing in domestic abuse cases, a Republican candidate for Assembly, champion for the rights of disabled people and, most recently, mother of a 5-month-old boy. A frequent inspirational speaker, she also has become an ardent proponent of gun control.

Recently, in fact, she raised the issue in a confrontation with her father, owner of the gun that cut her down, at a gala fundraising dinner attended by celebrities and friends.

“You are a loving and devoted father,” the disabled lawyer told Seymour Alban, 83, an orthopedic surgeon, former reserve police officer, prominent Republican and lifelong lover of guns. “It’s ironic that the person who loves me the most could somehow be a participant in my injury.”

That misfortune occurred June 8, 1988, when Julie Alban’s then-boyfriend, Bradley D. Ackerman, strolled into her bedroom in her parents’ Long Beach home and shot her in the back. He then turned the gun on himself, inflicting a minor wound.

The incident garnered immediate headlines because Ackerman, then 23, was the stepson of Long Beach Press-Telegram Chairman Daniel H. Ridder, who lived across the street from the Albans in one of the city’s toniest neighborhoods. The two families were close friends who often shared holidays and had traveled abroad together.

During the well-publicized trial, Ackerman’s lawyers maintained that, disappointed by not achieving his potential as a tennis player and depressed after losing a $30,000 bet on a baseball game, the young man had taken Valium, blacked out and mistakenly shot Alban in a botched suicide attempt.

Alban and her father painted an entirely different picture. Ackerman, they testified, was infuriated by her refusal to marry him. The defendant, a guest at the Alban house while his parents were out of town, had retrieved the gun from the trunk of Seymour Alban’s car, where it had been left after the two attended a gathering of reserve sheriff’s deputies that evening.

“We picked up a stray puppy,” Reva Alban, Julie’s mother, remarked in an interview during the trial, “and he turned out to be a rabid dog.”

After deliberating 11 1/2 hours, the jury convicted Ackerman of attempted first-degree murder, later reduced to attempted second-degree murder.

He was sentenced to life in prison and was released after serving about 7 1/2 years.

Julie Alban, meanwhile, got on with her life. She graduated from Fullerton’s Western State University College of Law, where her family established a scholarship for students in wheelchairs. After a few years in the Long Beach city attorney’s office, she narrowly missed being elected to the Assembly in 1998.

After the election, Alban opened a law practice in Placentia and, last year, began thinking about having a child.

“There were only two things I always wanted,” she says, “a career and to have a family. At 41 I felt that I had achieved what I wanted professionally. There wasn’t much left for me there. I just felt an inordinate desire to have the connection” of being a parent.

She was put in touch with a married mother of four willing to give birth to the child. Alban’s egg was mixed with donor sperm and implanted into the surrogate.

The result was Joseph Abraham Alban, born Oct. 6.

“He is a true miracle,” Julie Alban says. “I can’t believe that my life’s journey -- so disrupted at age 22 -- has taken this turn.”

As Alban settled into the routine of motherhood, however, a dark specter began to haunt her. To help make ends meet, she had moved back to her parents’ home, the site of her maiming. There she was astonished to discover her father still clinging to his guns.

“He had them everywhere,” she says. “I didn’t want them in the house with my baby. We are not a family that can afford to have another tragedy. I pleaded with him for months, but he just wouldn’t budge.”

Eventually she called a family friend, a police officer, who agreed to store the weapons in a gun locker at his home. For a while, Alban says, it seemed like the problem was solved. Then the family learned that Seymour Alban had taken back the guns and moved them to his medical office in Los Alamitos.

“I don’t get it,” Julie Alban said. “There’s nothing in my life that I love the way he loves those guns.”

Several months ago, Los Alamitos police, informed of the situation by Julie’s brother, Dr. Joseph Alban, who shares his father’s practice, removed two shotguns, a 9-mm handgun and a .32-caliber pistol from the offices on Katella Avenue.

Though no laws had been broken, police spokesman Sgt. Jeff Travis said, the weapons “were being kept in an unsecured manner. They were probably unsafe in that people could have access to them. We took them and booked them for safekeeping.”

Julie Alban, incredulous at her father’s tenacity, decided to confront him publicly. What better place, she thought, than the annual Sports Legends Awards Dinner for the Paralysis Project of America, where she was scheduled to speak before 450 people. Among them would be such sports celebrities as retired Phoenix Suns player Kevin Johnson, jockey Jose Santos and boxer Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini.

As the date of the event at the downtown Los Angeles Omni Hotel drew near, the usually confident lawyer grew nervous. Her mother sat on the group’s board of directors and Seymour Alban was on its Scientific Committee. Although she had argued about guns with him before, she’d never done it in such a public forum.

“Your unshakable optimism propelled me to succeed,” Julie Alban told her father, who was standing next to her on the podium. But her injury never would have happened, she said, “if it hadn’t been for one mistake. There are 200 million privately owned weapons in the United States, 24% of them handguns. Yet they are responsible for 70% to 90% of all fatal shootings. A gun is used for self-protection less than 5% of the time.”

Seymour Alban smiled. “I am very proud of my beautiful daughter,” he said, describing what had happened to her as a “terrible tragedy.”

In the privacy of an upstairs room, however, the doctor spoke more freely.

“I don’t feel that I did anything irresponsible,” he said. “My gun was stolen from me. There was nothing I could do.”

An ardent hunter, marksman, ROTC graduate and outdoorsman, Alban had long been devoted to his weapons. There was another reason for his fervor: He had watched helplessly decades ago as, a continent away, his fellow Jews were marched to their deaths.

“The first thing Hitler did,” Alban said, “was confiscate the guns. Guns were my culture. If anyone threatened my family, I’d rather die protecting them than walk to the gas chamber.”

In light of his own family’s tragedy, however, all that had worn thin. “The idea of defending ourselves was very important to me,” Alban said, “but our lives have been changed.”

Then he made a confession: Unbeknown to his family, he had retrieved his guns from the police station’s evidence room, where they had been stored.

Rather than take them home, however, he had returned them to the secured locker at his friend’s house, where he says they will remain.

“I think Julie’s right,” the doctor admitted, “the weapons should be stored.”

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david.haldane@latimes.com