Tumult and Fury of 1985 Had a Flip Side : A Toxic Fire, a Bomb, but Also the Septuplets

It was a year of sobering ill will in Orange County in 1985. There was the county’s worst environmental emergency, the introduction of a cold-blooded killer and a terrorist bombing that left one man dead.

But there was a brighter side, too: If you commute on the Costa Mesa Freeway, if you think you might be arrested, if you’re a goat, 1985 was probably a good year for you.

When you think back on 1985 in Orange County, you will think of these happenings.

The news broke in March: A 30-year-old Riverside woman who had been given fertility drugs was at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange preparing to deliver seven babies.

Patricia Frustaci, a high school English teacher, and her husband, Samuel, a salesman, previously had conceived a child with the help of fertility drugs. But seven?

“We never expected this,” she said as she sat in her hospital bed. “We thought, possibly, of there being twins, or maybe even triplets, but one baby would have been just fine. We weren’t trying for a record.” Still, a record was in prospect. Septuplets had never before been born in the United States. “We’re praying and hoping they all make it,” she said, “but we’re going in with our eyes open. We’re not expecting the world.”

She said she would be happy to take home just one healthy baby, but because of the uncertainty, they were not buying baby clothes yet. “Do you buy for seven or for two?” she said.

For three, as it turned out. On the morning of May 21 four boys and three girls were born 12 weeks premature. One of the girls was stillborn. The others were listed in critical but stable condition and doing well for their sizes--from 1 pound, 1 ounce to 1 pound, 13 ounces.

But by the time the last went home on Oct. 4, three more had died. The survivors were Steven Earl, Patricia Ann and Richard Charles.

“I feel lucky that we have three because the odds were against (the septuplets) surviving,” Patricia Frustaci said as she was taking her last child home. “But I lost four children in 19 days and I still cry for them every day.”

Four days later, the Frustacis filed a lawsuit against the West Los Angeles clinic and doctor who had administered the fertility drugs, alleging medical malpractice and wrongful death. The Frustacis’ lawyer said the couple had been made “virtual prisoners by the need to care for and support these children.”

The news of the Night Stalker, the man who sneaked into homes at night, then raped and killed, was a story from distant Los Angeles until Aug. 25.

On that night, a man entered William Carns’ home in Mission Viejo, shot Carns three times in the head, then raped Carns’ fiancee. Suddenly, Orange County, too, began bolting its doors, buying guns and leaving the lights on all night.

Carns and his fiancee survived the attack, but it may have been the undoing of the Night Stalker. It provided police with the clue that allowed them to identify Richard Ramirez, a 25-year-old drifter from Texas, as their No. 1 suspect, and his capture came seven days later.

The hero turned out to be 13-year-old James Romero of Mission Viejo, who had stayed up late that Sunday night to work on his motorbike. He saw what he considered a suspicious car drive by, and he called the Sheriff’s Department to report it. It was an orange Toyota, he said, and he gave them a partial license plate number. After Carns was attacked only a few hours afterwards and less than a mile away, police believed they had their first clue to the Night Stalker.

Los Angeles police quickly found what they thought was the car, and inside it criminalists discovered a partial fingerprint that they said allowed them to identify Ramirez as their suspect. Ramirez’s photograph, published in newspapers and televised, became the most familiar face in Southern California that week, and on the following Saturday, he was spotted in an East Los Angeles neighborhood and captured by neighbors.

A week later, doctors reported that Carns was awake, alert, sitting up, eating and beginning to feel sensation in his paralyzed left arm and leg. (By mid-December, he had been released from the hospital to spend Christmas with his family in North Dakota.)

That same week, Romero was presented by Sheriff Brad Gates with an off-road motorcycle and $4,500 in cash from private donations. “When somebody’s done something this good, we like to do something about it,” Gates said.

Romero received a plaque, too, that praised his “bravery and courage.”

Do you feel like a hero, he was asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

In the meantime, the wheels of justice began to move a bit. On Dec. 2, Ramirez was arraigned in Santa Ana on attempted murder and rape charges as the first step in what promises to be a long road toward trial. He also faces charges stemming from 14 murders in Los Angeles County and one murder in San Francisco.

The fire began smoldering in an Anaheim warehouse on June 22, and a day later a county fire official was calling it “Orange County’s worst environmental emergency.”

By that time, an estimated 7,500 people had been evacuated under the threat of toxic fumes coming from the Larry Fricker Co. warehouse, which stored various agricultural chemicals and pesticides. They were forced to stay away from their homes and workplaces for four days until fire and health officials declared that the team of 25 firefighters had brought the fire under control.

But that was far from the end of it.

Arson investigators, hampered by toxic residues that took an estimated $250,000 worth of work and 18 days to remove, declared that the fire had been deliberately set, but no suspects were arrested.

Then in September, Melvin M. Belli, a prominent lawyer from San Francisco, filed a round of lawsuits on behalf of four plaintiffs who claim to have suffered lung damage from the fire’s fumes. The suits guaranteed that the fire would continue to smolder in the courts, perhaps for years.

But the fire’s true legacy was a wave of municipal ordinances in Orange County that require businessmen to disclose to fire departments the dangerous chemicals they are storing. Before the Fricker fire, business groups had opposed such ordinances as an invasion into business privacy, but after the fire the ordinances easily passed the Board of Supervisors and several city councils.

If you lob a well-aimed shell off-shore from San Clemente, it will hit San Clemente Island. The Navy, which owns the island, lobs shells there all the time; it’s a target for naval gunnery practice.

Not a very hospitable environment, yet wild goats over the years have flourished, procreating into herds of up to 20,000 to 30,000, eating everything in sight and thereby threatening the survival of several species of plants, birds and animals already on the federal endangered species list.

The goats have survived Navy assault in past years, but the Navy resumed the attack in 1985, announcing once again that it would shoot the stragglers that animal rights groups were not able to round up and remove.

The assault was scheduled for dawn on March 7, but, bowing to pressure from animal lovers’ groups, the Navy called off the attack two days beforehand. The New York-based Fund for Animals was given more time to round up the goats and find them new homes.

Using nets dropped from helicopters, the group had by year’s end reduced the goat population to about 200 and was still working at it. The Navy said it had no plans “in the foreseeable future” to shoot any more goats.

Against the advice of relatives and in spite of past death threats, Alex M. Odeh, a Palestinian-born American, accepted an invitation to appear on a Los Angeles TV program Oct. 10 to discuss the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro.

Odeh was a published poet and part-time instructor of Arabic at Coastline Community College in Fountain Valley, but he had been invited because he headed the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee on the West Coast.

During the interview he condemned terrorism. “We are witnessing that violence breeds violence,” he said.

But he added that he thought the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had been mistakenly linked to the hijacking. “As far as I know, (PLO leader Yasser) Arafat did an excellent job, and we commend Arafat for his positive role in solving this issue. The media ought to give the PLO and Arafat recognition, inform the public about the PLO as a political organization and Arafat in particular as the chairman of the PLO, who is a man of peace.”

The next morning Odeh was the first to arrive at his organization’s office in Santa Ana. He unlocked the door, started to open it and was blown across the hall by a bomb that had been planted in the office overnight. Emergency surgery did not save him, and he died about two hours later.

Security was tight at his funeral--there had been bomb threats--and a memorial dinner scheduled at the University of San Francisco was moved off campus because of the university’s fears about security.

“I pray to God they catch these people who did this to Alex,” said Odeh’s widow, Norma. “I never thought this could happen in America.”

A few weeks later, a senior FBI agent in Washington said the FBI believed the Jewish Defense League (JDL) was responsible for the bombing. He said it was similar to two other bombings on the East Coast.

The accusation brought an angry denial--”absolutely absurd, obscene and outrageous”--from JDL leader Irv Rubin. He challenged the FBI to arrest any JDL member “within the next 24 hours.” FBI sources conceded, however, that “we aren’t close” to arresting any suspects.

During rush hours, it took an average of 35 minutes to travel the worst 11.7 miles of the Costa Mesa Freeway. That’s about 19 m.p.h.

Then in November, a car-pool lane opened along both sides of the center divider, and for the first time in years, there really was a fast lane on that notoriously molasses-in-January freeway. “Once again, we’ll be able to drive 55 on the 55 (freeway),” quipped Ralph B. Clark, one of the Orange County transit commissioners who approved the experimental lane in October.

But according to California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) figures, commuters were doing considerably more than 55 during the first three weeks.

In the new lane reserved for car pools (two or more people per car), the average time over the 11.7 miles was 10 to 12 minutes or between 58 1/2 and 70 m.p.h. Even in the regular lanes, traffic was swifter--about 33 1/2 m.p.h. or 21 minutes over the 11.7 miles.

A “diamond lane” exclusively for car pools had been tried on the Santa Monica Freeway in 1976, but it had been swept away by a wave of public hostility. That experiment had depended on converting an existing freeway lane for car-pool use exclusively, thus making the remaining lanes even more congested.

But the Costa Mesa Freeway “commuter lane” was added along both sides of the center divider, leaving the existing three lanes untouched. Interviews of motorists during the lane’s first week indicated most were satisfied with the result.

Whether the difference in speed between the commuter lane and the regular lanes would result in increased traffic accidents is one of the main questions of the 90-day experiment, and by year’s end, it had not been answered conclusively.

Caltrans detected first an increase, then a decrease, then another increase in accidents, mostly caused by commuter-lane drivers encountering unexpected congestion. Caltrans analysts said that, in general, it did not appear that accident rates had been significantly affected, but they were reserving judgment.

If the study shows the lanes to be safe and effective, some might be added to the San Diego Freeway by 1988, officials said.

It was nearly eight years ago that the American Civil Liberties Union first went to federal court complaining about conditions in the Orange County Jail. In 1985 they were back before U.S. District Judge William P. Gray saying the jail still was grossly overcrowded.

Overcrowding was so bad, in fact, that in the men’s main jail, which the state said should house no more than 1,191, as many as 2,000 were being held overnight. Up to 500 were sleeping on mattresses strewn along floors.

Thus began the biggest crackdown on jail conditions in Orange County history.

On March 18, Judge Gray ordered the county Board of Supervisors to pay $10 a night for each prisoner forced to sleep on the floor after his first 24 hours in jail. He also appointed a “special master” to report to the court on jail conditions, and he ordered county supervisors to set aside $50,000 for the fines that seemed inevitable. He gave county officials 60 days before the fines were to begin.

Jail officials began transferring inmates to branch jails and to the county’s honor farm and releasing more inmates without bail. They even instituted a new parole program for jail inmates. Still the fines piled up, so much so that Gray agreed in June to cut in half the accumulated total of $51,660. But he kept the pressure on. In August he decreed that the maximum men’s jail population would be 1,500 and gave county officials a Dec. 1 deadline to comply.

Modular dormitories providing beds for 450 additional inmates were ordered for the sheriff’s honor farm. Construction began on an intake/release center beside the jail for handling and housing prisoners on their way in and out of jail. The Theo Lacy branch jail in Orange also was ordered expanded. As the year’s end approached, however, the men’s main jail population hovered between 1,500 and 1,600, and county officials pleaded for more time to meet their deadline. Judge Gray gave only a 45-day delay.

It meant that beginning Jan. 15, the sheriff will no longer be able to exceed the court-mandated limit. If left standing, the court order will take effect and no more than 1,500 prisoners will be permitted in the men’s main jail under any circumstances.

It will be the first time in Orange County Jail history that there has been an enforceable ceiling on jail population, a hard-fight victory for jail reform advocates.

The two main combatants over the future of John Wayne Airport--the county Board of Supervisors and a confederation of anti-noise groups from Newport Beach--laid down their gloves this year after reaching a historic truce. But whether they laid their gloves out of reach remains to be seen. It certainly did not end the controversy.

On Dec. 16, U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr. signed an agreement between the county and Newport that allowed limited new jet service over the next 20 years. It ended two decades of litigation between the two governments and removed the last legal obstacle to airport expansion.

In the agreement, the county won a promise from Newport not to oppose additional jet airline departures necessary to handle a total of 8.4 million passengers per year (77% more passengers than this year). In exchange, Newport won a promise that the additional flights would not be by airliners as noisy as the McDonnell Douglas MD-80 (formerly the DC-9 Super 80), which once was the quietest jet available.

Both sides were jubilant. “The citizens of Newport Beach are fully protected for 20 years, and the county can get on with the business of improving the airport and providing adequate air transportation for the people of Orange County.” Newport’s lawyer, Pierce O’Donnell, said enthusiastically. “We are now acting in a new-found spirit of cooperation.”

Newport’s enthusiasm lasted two days. On Dec. 18, the Board of Supervisors temporarily authorized daily departures increased from 55 to as high as 95, and, using its complicated allocation formulas, figured that nine of the additional flights could be by the noisier jets.

“I can’t talk. I really can’t,” said Newport Mayor Evelyn Hart as she left the Board of Supervisors meeting. “I’m devastated by their action.”

Board Chairman Thomas F. Riley, who represents the Newport area, said the action, while legal, was “a slap in the face and the realization of (Newport’s) worst fears.”

And, as has been the history of the airport controversy, the solution may breed more problems. The owners and manufacturers of airliners like McDonnell Douglas’ MD-80 have complained that the agreement illegally discriminates against them and have threatened to sue.

There were other happenings, both serious and light:

- Wally, the 5 1/2-foot alligator who had apparently slipped away from whatever human owned him, had been living in the Back Bay for at least three years when he was finally caught, much to the relief of the water birds in the area. Zoos rejected him--he was just meal size for the typical zoo alligator--so he was sent to live in a herpetologist’s pond with other alligators of his modest size.

- The judge called him “cruel, vicious and callous,” and few would disagree. Jack Oscar King, a 65-year-old apartment maintenance man, was convicted in San Bernardino of trying to rape 15-year-old Cheryl Bess, then pouring acid over her head and leaving her for dead. Cheryl spent much of the year at the UCI Medical Center where doctors tried to restore her horribly disfigured face and some of her sight.

- And despite a monumental publicity campaign headed by her parents, there was no hopeful news on the whereabouts of Laura Bradbury of Huntington Beach, who was 3 when she was apparently abducted from Joshua Tree National Monument in 1984. Her parents said they would not give up.

- The California Lottery gave Orange County its share of winners, but the most notable was Sharon Nunez, a 29-year-old Newport Beach housewife who spun the wheel and applauded enthusiastically when it stopped at $100,000. Nunez received a check for $80,000 ($20,000 was withheld for taxes), but then had to turn almost all of it over to a county marshal. Alas, her husband was being sued, and a court ordered the money seized pending a hearing. A court commissioner let the lucky winner keep and spend $4,000.

- The strike of 10,000 meat cutters and 12,000 Teamsters against Southern California supermarkets, which began Nov. 5, quickly became focused on Orange County, where violence broke out at some of the market warehouses. In Irvine, at a Lucky Food Centers’ supermarket warehouse, violence erupted almost immediately, leading to a string of arrests by a force of nearly 50 police officers stationed there for days. There were scattered reports of sniping, and in one, a truck driver’s arm was broken by a bullet fired as he was driving on the Santa Ana Freeway near Tustin. At year’s end, Teamsters approved but meat cutters rejected a “final offer” by supermarkets, extending the strike for both unions into the new year.

- A pair of bank robbers took $8,415 from a Costa Mesa savings and loan branch but were so hotly pursued by police that they hurriedly ditched the loot. They threw handfuls of it out the window as they sped along the Costa Mesa Freeway, setting off a chaotic scramble among motorists trying to scoop it up. The fleeing suspects were caught, but police were unable to account for about $1,200 of the cash.

- An estimated 500,000 people gathered at Anaheim Stadium during a 10-day crusade to welcome evangelist Billy Graham back to Southern California, which he calls his “second home.” It was the first time he had preached in Southern California since 1969, and, his aides said, probably his last crusade here. Graham is 67.

- During the summer, David P. Jacobsen, 54, of Huntington Beach, a hospital administrator, became the fourth American to be kidnaped and held by the Islamic Jihad in Beirut, and by year’s end, his family was still waiting and waiting and waiting. A British envoy’s negotiations for the American’s release had yet to bring results.

- The trial of 21-year-old Vietnamese student Minh Van Lam, who was accused of murdering Cal State Fullerton professor Edward Lee Cooperman, finally got under way after months of sensation and controversy. Cooperman, a physicist who headed a scientific committee providing aid to Vietnam and who favored normalizing relations between Vietnam and the United States, had been shot in his campus office and had bled to death. Friends said they were certain it was a political assassination, but Lam said it was an accident. A first trial ended in a hung jury, and a second trial was decided by a judge: guilty, but of involuntary manslaughter, which carries a maximum four-year prison sentence. Cooperman’s friends bitterly denounced the verdict, but by year’s end, the controversy had died away.

- At one time, Disneyland cast out every couple of the same sex who danced together on any Magic Kingdom dance floor. But two gay men filed suit against Disneyland in 1980, and while the same-sex dancing ban continued, it was finally withdrawn without fanfare last fall. “The decision is years late, but let’s applaud it,” said Morris Kight, a leading gay-rights activist. “It’s a gentle victory, one that shows Disneyland is finally paying attention to the world around them.”