Deputy County Probation Aide Found Guilty in Bribe Case

A deputy Los Angeles County probation officer was convicted by a Superior Court jury Friday of accepting a bribe for allowing a 17-year-old boy to escape from a juvenile detention facility in 1982.

Reynaud Hatter, 37, a Pomona resident who began working as a probation officer in 1974, was charged with accepting an initial $8,000 payment from Helen Chen, the mother of Anthony Chen, 17, to engineer her son’s escape from Eastlake Juvenile Hall.

Chen flew to Taiwan after he fled from the facility near County-USC Medical Center, but was recaptured when he returned to Burbank about four weeks later.

The teen-ager made his escape shortly before he was to be sentenced on four counts of assault with a deadly weapon--a nunchaku, a martial-arts device consisting of two wooden batons joined with a chain.

Call Tape-Recorded

Helen Chen, granted immunity for her testimony, told the jury during the three-week trial that Hatter, who helped operate the Eastlake facility, accepted the $8,000 on Oct. 21, 1982. Her son escaped the next day.

After her son’s rearrest, Helen Chen, a self-employed immigration counselor, agreed to place a telephone call to Hatter from the Burbank police station in order to prove her allegations of his involvement. The call, during which she said she would make a second payment of $12,000, was tape-recorded by authorities.

Hatter was arrested as he accepted the payment in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant in Burbank.

The defense had argued that Helen Chen, a drug user and a convicted smuggler of illegal aliens and heroin, was an unreliable witness who fabricated the bribery story in order to protect herself and her son from criminal charges stemming from the escape.

Bill Number Matched

Deputy Dist. Atty. James E. Koller said the key pieces of evidence were the tape recording, which was played to the jury, and a $50 bill found in Hatter’s possession. The bill had the same serial number as one on a list kept by Helen Chen.

Anthony Chen--who also was granted immunity but refused to testify--is now at Folsom Prison for a stabbing incident that occurred while he was serving time on the original assault charges.

Hatter faces a maximum prison term of four years when he is sentenced July 8 by Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner Judith Abrams. His first trial last year ended in a hung jury--split 10 to 2 in favor of conviction.