Counts Against Deputy Accused of Prank on Boss Are Dismissed

Criminal charges were dismissed Tuesday against a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who had been accused of having entered the license plate of her boss’s car into a state computerized list of stolen vehicles.

Deputy Kathy Kay, suspended since her indictment in May, 1985, was acquitted by Superior Court Judge Kathleen Parker, who found the evidence insufficient that Kay was the deputy who made the false computer entries.

During the past two weeks, Deputy Dist. Atty. James E. Koller called seven deputies to the stand in an effort to prove that the six-year deputy had falsified government records by entering Lt. Walker Force’s car into the stolen vehicle list, with the warning that he was “armed and dangerous.”

“But the court agreed the evidence was entirely too speculative to justify a verdict against her,” said Kay’s attorney, Bradley W. Brunon, who made the motion for dismissal.

According to Koller, the charges were difficult to prove, because “it was a circumstantial case, since there were no eyewitnesses.”

Moreover, in cross-examination, the deputies acknowledged that Force had been the target of other pranks by various perpetrators, including his being sent a dead rat on Valentine’s Day.

“The fact of the matter is, he was an . . . unpopular supervisor,” Brunon said. “My feeling is the message the department wanted to send--that they were ready to criminally charge someone for these pranks--has been received.”

Kay, 34, had faced a possible three-year prison sentence if convicted. Force, who at the time of the license incident was a supervisor in Lynwood, has since been transferred to the downtown Criminal Courts Building.