The Case History of a Controversial LAPD Traffic Fatality Investigation : Family of Victim, Driver Critical of Police Procedure

Los Angeles Police Officer John Hamilton surveyed the grisly scene: the lifeless body of 15-year-old Matthew Marshall, his mangled Peugeot bicycle and a Volkswagen Rabbit, its windshield smashed, a Coke can lodged in the headlight cavity.

Following standard LAPD procedure, the veteran traffic accident investigator diagramed what he saw that March night in 1985 on twisting Roscomare Road near Mulholland Drive in Bel-Air. He also took down the names of three witnesses who arrived after the crash.

The Volkswagen’s driver, Scott Reuman, 35, of Bel-Air, had driven away from the scene, but returned before the police arrived. Reuman flunked a field sobriety test, and more than two hours after the crash his blood alcohol registered 30% above the level at which the law presumes intoxication.

It seemed like a clear-cut case when Hamilton took his report to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, which routinely filed three charges against Reuman: vehicular manslaughter, a felony, based on Reuman crossing a double yellow line into Matthew’s traffic lane, and two misdemeanor drunk-driving counts, based on the blood-alcohol test.

Case Allegedly Ruined

But crime scenes are not always as they appear. And what Hamilton didn’t detect, according to the prosecution, ruined its vehicular manslaughter case against Reuman when he went on trial nearly a year later.

The defense produced two witnesses, not named in Hamilton’s report, who testified that his diagram did not match what they had seen when they arrived.

Reuman testified that before the police got there he tried to revive the boy and in the process moved his body. Reuman also said he picked up Matthew’s 10-speed bike and carried it to the edge of the road, right where Hamilton’s diagram showed it.

Nothing in Hamilton’s report or diagram indicates he asked whether evidence had been moved.

The jury saw police photographs of a tennis shoe, the bicycle and other items. But the pictures were all close-ups. Overall shots setting the scene, showing the relative location of each piece of evidence, were not taken.

Notes that Hamilton and Officer Phillip Jackson made before Hamilton prepared his report disappeared before the trial began. The prosecution said this often happens and that it raises doubts in jurors’ minds about the validity of the police report.

Hamilton’s diagram also did not indicate the location of glass shards from the Volkswagen headlight, which would tend to indicate the point of impact.

The public defender’s office, which represented the disabled 35-year-old Bel-Air man, got a court order to hire an accident reconstruction expert at a cost of $3,279.

Engineer’s Analysis

Engineer Jack T. Kerkhoff of Somis, Calif., produced an analysis of the physical evidence showing that Reuman was not at fault. Kerkhoff’s reconstruction theory held that Matthew’s bicycle must have crossed the double yellow line into Reuman’s lane.

Lydia Delgadillo, the junior prosecutor trying the case, said the LAPD refused her initial request for an accident reconstruction expert who could buttress the prosecution contention that Reuman crossed the double yellow line into Matthew’s lane of traffic.

Delgadillo then subpoenaed a California Highway Patrol officer. She told her superiors that this strategy prompted the LAPD to provide one of its accident reconstruction experts, Sgt. Harry Ryan.

Santa Monica Superior Court Judge Robert W. Thomas, who presided at the trial, said in an interview that Ryan “was not prepared” and his testimony was unpersuasive. (Ryan did not respond to a message requesting an interview.)

The basic question put to the jury on the vehicular manslaughter charge was simple enough:

Was Scott Reuman responsible for Matthew Marshall’s death?

Jury Deadlocked

On the basis of the blood-alcohol test results, the jurors found Reuman guilty of misdemeanor drunk driving. But the jury deadlocked on the vehicular manslaughter charge, which rested on whether Reuman had crossed the double yellow line into Matthew’s lane of traffic.

The dead boy’s mother, Harlene Marshall, said she had written a letter to Hamilton’s superiors praising how he comforted her and her husband, who has since died, on the night of the crash.

But, she said, as she sat through the trial and became convinced that Hamilton’s investigation was inadequate, she grew furious.

(Requests by The Times for an interview with Hamilton were relayed to him by LAPD officials; he did not respond.)

Once the verdict was in, Marshall said, she began demanding an explanation of what had happened to what she had been told was a simple, routine case.

Her quest, which is continuing, also led her to become involved with Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. Today, she assumes the presidency of the Los Angeles chapter, succeeding Barbara Bloomberg, who founded the chapter five years ago.

Angry About Investigation

“Like most people,” said Marshall, the owner of a small record company, “I just assumed that when something like this (accident) happens there are people whose job it is to take care of it and that they are trained and they know what they are doing and they do it.”

Marshall is not the only one angry about Hamilton’s investigation. Reuman said in an interview that if Hamilton “had done a decent job I would have been acquitted.” Reuman added that a “decent investigation” would have cleared him by proving that he never crossed the double yellow line into the oncoming lane and therefore was not at fault in Matthew Marshall’s death.

Reuman, a $480-per-month aide in the disabled students office at Los Angeles Valley College, told The Times and a probation officer that he feels no responsibility for Matthew’s death.

Reuman appeared in court with a cane, limping. He said his leg was shattered in 1983 when his motorcycle crashed on Roscomare Road not far from where Matthew died.

After the crash in which Matthew died, Reuman said that he had drunk half a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and was on his way to a Van Nuys grocery store when he thought his car struck a deer. He said he drove on, but returned a few minutes later to check on the animal he thought he had struck, arriving before the police.

Judge Thomas, too, found the case unsettling.

“I send murderers to prison, rapists and burglars to prison, no problem,” Thomas said in an interview. “But this case. . . . What do you do with this case?”

Deciding how to punish Reuman, Thomas told his staff and others in his courtroom during a break, was “my toughest job in 10 years on the bench.”

Jailed on Misdemeanor Charge

A first-time conviction for misdemeanor drunk driving usually warrants unsupervised probation and a fine, Thomas said. From the bench the judge noted that Reuman was driving on a suspended license at the time of the crash, having failed to pay 10 tickets, most of them for driving an earth-moving truck with faulty equipment. (Reuman says the state Department of Motor Vehicles erred and that he had a valid license at the time of the crash.)

Even though no verdict was reached on the manslaughter charge, Thomas gave Reuman 120 days in county jail on the misdemeanor charges, a sentence Reuman began serving last week.

Marshall, joined by others from MADD, met with prosecutor Delgadillo and her boss, James Bascue. Then she met with Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner. She said they told him that Hamilton’s investigation suffered from glaring omissions.

“I expected Bascue and then Reiner to say there was nothing that could be done, that your son really could have been on the other side of the road and it really might not have been Reuman’s fault.

“I expected them to excuse it away. But they didn’t. They said, ‘You have every reason to be furious with the way this was handled.’

“Bascue held up this report and said, ‘I’ve already sent this memo to the LAPD and we’re going to use this case to change police investigative procedure so this doesn’t happen again.’ ” Marshall recalled.

She said Reiner told her that there is an underlying problem with the “culture” of the LAPD, with what it expects of officers. Once an officer has made an arrest and gotten a criminal charge filed, Marshall said Reiner told her, his case is considered “cleared” on the department’s statistical charts and he gets no more encouragement from the department to work for a conviction.

Given an outline of Marshall’s recollection of their meeting, Reiner did not dispute her remarks. But Reiner declined to comment directly on the record.

Next, Marshall said, she met with Capt. Dave Dolson, who heads the LAPD West Traffic Division where Hamilton works.

Dolson said that after talking to Marshall he was sufficiently concerned to assign one of his best detectives, Sgt. Douglas Myers of the Specialized Collision Investigation detail, to review the case. He declined further comment until the report is completed, probably in mid-June.

Marshall said she is not satisfied with the response of these officials. “I don’t feel any of them take enough responsibility” for doing a thorough job, she said.

“Reiner never took any responsibility, frankly, except to say his staff should have been sharper because they were dealing with LAPD,” Marshall said. She had kind words only for Detective Myers, who “was by far the most open and interested of the police officers I met with and the only one willing to engage in self-criticism.”

Stanley and Harlene Marshall’s lives were consumed in building their firm, Bainbridge Records. They hadn’t been out for weeks, except on business. On March 22, 1985, a Friday, they planned to attend a recording industry party in Beverly Hills and then meet friends for dinner at 72 Market Street in Venice.

Matthew was told to watch his younger sister, Rebecca, then 10, and that he could order a pizza delivered. He was not to leave.

At the Beverly Hills party, Harlene Marshall said, she drank one white wine spritzer and her husband may have had a single straight Scotch. At dinner they each had a glass or so of wine, she said.

Coming home about half-past midnight they expected to encounter few, if any, cars on Mulholland Drive. But as they neared the turn-off to the top of Roscomare Road they found a line of cars stopped. A security patrolman said a terrible accident would delay their passage.

Stanley Marshall wanted to weave his way through whatever was ahead. But Harlene Marshall objected. “Stan, let’s go down and come up the other way. I just want to see Matthew and the car in the driveway,” she recalled saying.

No Premonitions

She had no premonitions. She just remembered that in October, 1984, a week before Matthew’s 15th birthday, he had slipped the keys into his mother’s Honda and gone for a ride. Matthew and the car came home unmarked then, but Harlene Marshall said she flew into a rage.

“If you’d been stopped by the cops, you wouldn’t be here; you’d be in Juvenile Hall,” she recalled shouting at her son. “I was freaked out. Later, when I told my friends, they said they had done the same thing when they were about Matthew’s age and they thought I was crazy to ground him for a month. Matthew took his grounding gracefully.”

Stanley Marshall turned his Cadillac around, drove down the San Diego Freeway to Sunset Boulevard and came back up twisting Roscomare Road, which many residents traverse at near freeway speeds. As the couple turned into the long private drive leading down to several homes including theirs they saw a black-and-white LAPD car ahead of them.

They also saw another odd sight: an older couple, a psychiatrist and his wife who are neighbors, standing on Roscomare Road in the dead of night.

“I wasn’t thinking about Matthew, but the neighbors, and when the police car stopped in front of us and the officers got out I opened my door,” Harlene Marshall recalled.

“We live down below. Can you let us through?”

“Are you Mrs. Marshall?,” Officer Hamilton asked, walking toward the couple.

“My son?”

“Yes.”

“Is he OK?”

“No.”

“Is he dead?”

“Yes.”

“No. No. No!” Harlene Marshall began screaming into the darkness. Stanley Marshall ran around the car and held his wife. They abandoned their car to Hamilton and his partner and walked home.

‘Thank God We Caught Them’

“All I could think was ‘Thank God we caught them.’ If we hadn’t come just then,” Harlene Marshall said, “the police would have knocked on the door. Rebecca was there--alone.”

Rebecca was watching television.

“Rebecca, Matthew’s had an accident,” her mother told her.

“Is he OK?”

“No. He’s dead.”

Rebecca put her arms around her mother’s waist and “let out scream after scream after scream.”

Stanley Marshall grew angry and depressed over the death of his son. Five months later, out for tennis with his wife and friends, he said he didn’t feel good and sat down. His heart stopped.

In her statement at Reuman’s sentencing, Harlene Marshall blamed her husband’s death on grief caused by Matthew’s death.

James H. Bascue, a career prosecutor highly regarded for his work directing prosecution of gang leaders a few years back, supervises the Santa Monica office of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.

He said he believes the jury failed to reach a verdict on the vehicular manslaughter charge because “we were not able to present the jury with sufficient facts to prove that Reuman had crossed over the double-yellow line into the oncoming lane of traffic.”

Since the witnesses all arrived after the crash, Bascue said, the case against Reuman depended on circumstantial evidence.

“Building a circumstantial case is like building a brick wall,” Bascue said in an interview. “Each piece of evidence is a brick, and brick by brick you build a wall. We ended up not with a wall but with a single brick.”

The other bricks were excluded or crumbled as Jack Weedin, the deputy public defender representing Reuman, raised doubts about the credibility and thoroughness of Hamilton’s investigation, Bascue said.

“These are always difficult cases where you are circumstantially reconstructing what happened,” Bascue said.

What Might Have Been

“I don’t want to get into a fight with LAPD,” he added, “but in this case there were things that could have been done and should have been done that were not done.

“When officers arrive at a scene it is reasonable to expect that they will ask if the scene has been tampered with and to include this in their diagram and their report. It is reasonable to expect them to inquire about this. I have no knowledge that they did. . . .

“It is reasonable to expect that officers will take down the name of every witness, take down every license plate (of cars in the area) and to attempt to identify every witness there.” Often, he said, police reports include only the names of some eyewitnesses, just enough to qualify for filing of a criminal charge.

Police Commander William Booth, senior spokesman for Chief Daryl F. Gates, said even if Hamilton’s investigation is found wanting he is certain it is an isolated example and there is no need to review overall policies and procedures.

“I think we have a situation here in which if something was wrong let us find out what was wrong,” Booth said. “And if we were wrong we’re going to try to correct it.

“It may be, in this one case, that our investigators were not as efficient in terms of gathering evidence and presenting it as we could have been. But it won’t require a policy change or a procedural change, I can assure you of that.”

Booth and Capt. Dolson both expressed incredulity at Delgadillo’s claim that initially she was refused an expert witness. “If someone believes an expert witness isn’t available I guarantee that one telephone call to any of a number of top-level people in this department would solve that problem immediately,” Booth said, adding that “effective and efficient complaining is also timely complaining.”

He also rejected any suggestion that the culture of the Los Angeles Police Department lends itself to officers feeling their job is essentially done once they get a criminal filing, which clears a crime on the police books.

“The posture of this department,” Booth said, “is that an officer’s job is not completed until all of the facts are gathered and presented to the district attorney or other prosecuting agency for filing a criminal charge, and then the testimony of the officer is presented along with every fact that can be gathered. That is definitely a part of the mission of police officers.”

The Los Angeles Police Department collects data on arrests, but not by individual officers, Booth said. He said LAPD does not collect data on convictions.

“In the court system today,” Booth said, “it is very difficult to find cases that are decided on the truth of the matter because there are so many rules that it becomes a chess game, a game unto itself, and the effort to get to the truth has taken a back seat to the way that court cases are conducted.

“It’s the police department’s mission to make sure the truth is there and available and all evidence is collected and presented to the court” regardless of how the courts are run, Booth added.

Scott Clifford Reuman doesn’t fit the profile of a drunk driver, his probation sentencing report states. He has never been charged with drunk driving or cited for a traffic violation, such as reckless driving.

He’s a student now, learning how to repair medical electronics gear. He’s been a musician in an Oregon band named Wheatfield and a truck driver.

“There was no evidence in this case that shows my guilt,” Reuman said. “I think if the cops had done a better job investigating, this case would never have gotten past the preliminary hearing.”

Sentencing him to county jail, he said, will take him away from helping disabled students. “I am a heck of a lot more value to the community working here than in jail,” he said.

Reuman said when he realized his windshield was smashed by a teen-ager, not a deer, “I felt horrible. I was a wreck. I remember saying to somebody, ‘Doesn’t anybody have anything we can cover him with?’ ”

‘Loss of Dignity’

He said Marshall doesn’t seem to care what the case has done to him. “I winced at some of the things she said about me in court, calling me a murderer. The feelings of loss of dignity can be overwhelming. I feel bad that she feels that way about me.”

Reuman said if it had been his son he would not have reacted as Marshall did, would not have called the driver of the car involved a murderer.

He said he also would not have brought a score of supporters to the sentencing, as Marshall did, in an attempt to influence the judge.

Marcy de Jesus, MADD’s local administrator, said having family and friends of the victim appear at the sentencing “makes the judges know the community cares and is watching the judge. With some of them it makes a difference” in the sentence imposed.

Reuman said that even if he had been the cause of Matthew’s death it would be wrong to blame him alone.

“Why is it only me? People drive too fast on Roscomare. There are no lines on most of the road. Why haven’t the authorities come up and painted lines? . . .

“Why am I the sole brunt of this?”

Harlene Marshall has no quarrel with the jury in her son’s case. She served on a murder trial jury in the late ‘70s. She thought it odd that so many things were only suggested or implied and the jury obviously didn’t get all the facts.

And she remembers “how carefully we listened. I was amazed at how I was able to separate the literal evidence from the emotional impact of the crime. We had choices: robbery, first degree, second-degree murder or manslaughter or acquittal, and the prosecutor wanted robbery and first-degree murder.

“In the jury room we all felt the guy was guilty, but the evidence was thin and we finally convicted him of robbery and second-degree murder. Afterwards, the bailiff told us that under the defense table, where we couldn’t see, the guy was in ankle chains because they thought he was so dangerous. I remember having chills that we almost let him go.

“So I knew in Matthew’s death . . . I knew the jury had to be torn between what evidence the police gathered and what they didn’t do.

“And jurors have to go by the judge’s instructions. The judge said that in a circumstantial-evidence case if you have two possible scenarios and one points towards guilt and the other towards innocence you have to choose the innocent scenario. I didn’t think much of the defense’s case, but because of what the police didn’t do, it was enough to put doubt in.

‘I Wanted to Kill Him’

“Considering all that, I would have voted acquittal,” she said.

“When the verdict was read I looked at Reuman and I wanted to kill him. He walked out swinging his orange book bag--Matthew had a gray one--and I thought, ‘he’s going back to school, back to school, back. . . .’ ”

After the verdict was read, Marshall remembers, somebody whose identify is lost in the anger of that moment told her that it was unlikely Reuman would get jail. And if he did, she remembers being told, it almost certainly would be postponed so Reuman could finish his spring studies.

Marshall said her fury grew until it killed all rational thought.

All weekend she stormed about her house. “I couldn’t sleep. I felt like it was my job to see this through for Matthew. I felt like it was my job.

“Then on Sunday night I heard--or imagined or wanted to hear it--I heard Matthew say to me, ‘Let it go, Mom.’ I decided then that I couldn’t go through another night like that and so I let it go. I decided what was done in Matthew’s case was done, but I wasn’t going to let this happen to another mother,” she said.