Foundation Will Honor 6 for Unusual Law Enforcement Efforts

A local Highway Patrol officer who is the CHP’s first female truck-safety specialist will be among six people honored for unusual law enforcement efforts Friday by Valley lawyers and judges.

Others who will be cited by the Valley Community Legal Foundation are three officers involved in life-saving rescues, a policeman in charge of neighborhood crime prevention and a plastic surgeon active in anti-gang work.

The awards will be given during a Law Day luncheon at the Odyssey Restaurant in Granada Hills. The 6-year-old nonprofit foundation is made up of business and civic leaders in addition to court officers and attorneys. This is the third year the group has honored police officers.

Superior Court Judge Fred Rimerman, who is heading the luncheon program, said the awards are unusual because two sheriff’s deputies are being honored for their independent actions in the same incident and one of the winners is not affiliated with a police agency.

The police winners were nominated by law-enforcement agencies.

They winners are:

Highway Patrol Officer Martha Kay Davidson, 28, who has headed commercial vehicle enforcement in the Valley for a year. She specializes in hazardous cargoes and is the CHP’s only woman commercial-truck enforcement officer.

CHP officials said her West Valley patrol zone is the only one in the Los Angeles region to register a decrease in truck accidents this year.

Capt. Richard Kerri, commander of the Woodland Hills CHP office, said that record is impressive because local truck traffic is up 6.5% this year and there has been an increase in the number of hazardous waste loads being transported through the Valley to a Santa Barbara dump.

He said Davidson trains other officers on hazardous waste and materials safety.

Davidson, a Van Nuys resident, is a single parent of two. She has been a Highway Patrol officer for two years.

Deputies Eric Bodnar and Thomas A. Gibson, who are credited by sheriff’s officials with saving 40 lives during a fire at a Van Nuys retirement home July 22. They were off duty when they spotted flames from a condominium construction project next door to the 12-story Fickett Towers.

Bodnar, 28, who was traveling to his Agoura home, and Gibson, 23, who saw the flames from his Panorama City residence, volunteered to help evacuate the retirement home after the fire spread.

Officials said the men worked more than two hours leading elderly residents to safety through smoky halls. Each carried several people from the building.

The deputies later received the Sheriff’s Department Gold Meritorious Conduct Medal “for their willingness to offer help under circumstances so threatening to their own safety,” a sheriff’s spokesman said.

The men have been with the Sheriff’s Department for two years each, the spokesman said.

San Fernando officer Bruce Martin, 29, who jumped into a storm channel water-spreading basin Feb. 12 to help rescue an 8-year-old boy who had been swept in from a storm drain. Martin and Jake Guiterrez, a flood control district worker who also leaped in to help, pulled an unconscious German Gonzales from the basin. The boy had been swept more than a mile down a storm channel and was close to being pulled into an underground culvert.

Martin, a Canyon Country resident, has been a San Fernando police officer for four years, Police Chief Chuck Sherwood said.

“He jumped 15 feet into muddy, debris-filled water to reach the victim. He disregarded his own safety to rescue the boy,” Sherwood said.

The boy has not regained consciousness and is still hospitalized.

Los Angeles police officer Carmen (Butch) Cantalupo, 36, who is credited with helping cut the residential crime rate in Granada Hills, where he heads a nine-officer detail. He directs patrols and the Granada Hills Neighborhood Watch program. The area experienced a 26% reduction in crime last year.

Devonshire Division commanding officer Capt. W. W. Mitchell said Cantalupo was picked as station house officer of the year in 1982. In 1983, he was named Granada Hills officer of the year by local homeowner groups and the Granada Hills Chamber of Commerce.

Cantalupo is a 15-year Los Angeles police veteran who lives in Thousand Oaks.

Dr. Karl N. Stein, a plastic surgeon who practices in Sherman Oaks, has removed more than 400 street gang tattoos from teen-agers and young adults in a voluntary program he initiated in 1981. Removal of the tattoos allows former gang members to escape the stigma of past gang affiliation.

The free program was started at the suggestion of a juvenile court judge who found that former gang members could not move to new areas or find jobs when marked with the telltale tattoos.

Stein, a 44-year-old Encino resident, has assisted former gang members from as far away as Santa Cruz and San Bernardino. His work has led to creation of a free tattoo-removal service that handles about 10 people a week at Northridge Hospital Medical Center.

Rimerman said Stein was selected to share in the police honors because his efforts had assisted law enforcement.

The Law Day awards seek to point out that police officers face daily risks, he said.

“They go unrecognized for doing their daily tasks,” Rimerman said. “No one thinks about them until there is trouble. If they don’t do what people feel is right, they get criticized.”

Besides plaques for the police winners, cash scholarships will be presented to Valley law students and several special awards will be made, Rimerman said.