Families Struggle to Cope With a Painful Verdict

Police work is at the very soul of the Wibe and Riggs families. Wibes and Riggses become cops. Or they marry cops. They believe in the criminal justice system. They represent the system.

But on Friday, both families were saying that the system had failed them.

Their boy, San Diego Police Agent Thomas E. Riggs--the Sweetwater High School graduate that Colleen Wibe fell in love with and married and had a son with--was dead.

And the man who shot him, Sagon Penn, was free--cleared by yet another jury of charges of killing Tom, and cleared by a district attorney who saw no point in subjecting a city to a third trial on charges two juries couldn’t decide.

The whole, inexplicable thing--the fact that a police killer could be acquitted in a conservative city like San Diego; the fact that from the start, fingers were pointed at Tom Riggs and Donovan Jacobs, as if they had shot and killed someone--had made Tom’s parents, Anne Riggs and Charles Riggs, a retired San Diego police sergeant, sick to death of the system and sick to death of police work.

‘A Thankless Job’

“We’d never advise anybody to become a policeman today--never,” Anne Riggs said by phone from the couple’s retirement home at the Salton Sea. “It’s a thankless job for lousy pay.”

Her husband was napping. But Mrs. Riggs said he had talked the night before about how even before Tom was killed, the joy had left police work for him, an old beat cop who had worked all over San Diego in 20 years with the department.

“When he started on the Police Department, the community cooperation and the community spirit and the working together were marvelous,” she said. “He saw that deteriorate. And that’s why he retired early.”

Charlie Riggs’ son Tommy, the fourth oldest of the couple’s seven children, had already been a San Diego cop for three years when his dad quit the force in 1982, at age 51.

Two years later, Riggs’ son-in-law, San Diego Police Officer Timothy Ruopp--his daughter Kathy’s husband--was gunned down on duty.

Six months later, Tommy was dead.

“When both Tom and Tim wanted to go on the Police Department, Charlie did not necessarily encourage them to go on,” Anne Riggs recalled. “It was a two-way street. He didn’t think it was that good an idea to get into it, yet he was proud to see they would go on and do it.”

The doubts by now have smothered the pride. “There’s definitely been a (turnaround) since then,” she said.

Gloria Wibe held her daughter Colleen’s hand Thursday as the jury’s verdicts were announced. Kathy Ruopp-Probett, Tim’s widow, was there beside Colleen, too. So was Tom’s sister Patty Goudarzi, whose husband Harold is a San Diego police sergeant.

Colleen’s dad, Sgt. Ronald Wibe of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, was working his job in the sheriff’s juvenile diversion unit.

On Friday, Gloria Wibe said she couldn’t be mad at police and police work. “We cannot alienate ourselves from that,” she said. “That has been our life.”

But she is torn. One of her other daughters--she did not want to say which one--recently took a test for admission to the San Diego Police Academy.

“She said she feels she needs to do something worthwhile with her life, and she can think of nothing more worthwhile,” Mrs. Wibe said.

The Wibes don’t know what to make of that daughter’s ambition. “We are really struggling with that at this time,” Gloria Wibe said. “We certainly don’t want to discourage her, but after the events, it’s very difficult.”

That got her thinking about Tom Riggs, the son-in-law she regarded as a son.

“That boy was just absolutely delighted to be a policeman--he was as happy as he could possibly be,” she said. “It was what he really wanted, and he was very definitely the type of person who should be a police officer--really caring about the community, really feeling he was doing something worthwhile.”

Somehow, she said--because of arcane rules of evidence that keep incriminating information about defendants out of court, and because of the artful defense put on by Sagon Penn’s lawyer, Milton J. Silverman--the juries that acquitted Penn never really viewed Tommy that way.

“We do not feel any bitterness towards Sagon Penn himself,” Wibe said. “I guess it’s just the whole system, the way it’s built. The victim is made out to be the criminal. It not only goes for us, but for so many other cases also, where you’re not only penalized for having lost someone, but you’re completely dissected.”

This case had gone wrong for the Wibes and the Riggses from the start. Even the early news reports, Gloria Wibe and Anne Riggs remembered, suggested that there was perhaps some wrongdoing on the part of the officers--that maybe Penn was victim, not perpetrator.

Anne Riggs blames newspaper and television reporters for creating a misperception of the events.

“All of a sudden, from being a media very supportive of the Police Department, they did the exact opposite,” she said. “It seemed like everyone was biased in what made a good news story. It makes much better news to make a racial issue out of something that wasn’t a racial issue. It sells newspapers to say it was a racial issue, and it sells advertising on television.”

The reporters had talked to eyewitnesses, and the eyewitnesses were saying that Jacobs had beaten Penn for no reason at all. They said Jacobs called Penn racist names while he slammed Penn with his baton.

It was enough to make the Wibes, at least, wonder if it really wasn’t Police Agent Donovan Jacobs who was responsible for Tommy’s death. But they were a cop family, and they refused to jump to that conclusion about another cop.

“Rather than making a judgment, we got to know Donovan,” Gloria Wibe said. And when they did, they were convinced he was not at fault.

“Seeing how he reacted--the fact he can’t hurt an animal, much less a human being--it’s just not in his nature to act the way they painted him,” she said. “So that was just dismissed once we got to know the man.”

Anne Riggs knew, too, that there was no way her son and Jacobs could have gone after Sagon Penn the way some of the witnesses described.

“We know Tom was even more cautious after Tim was killed,” she said. “Now how could anyone conceivably think two people were gonna beat to death a guy in front of all those witnesses? You can’t be that dumb. The dumbest cop on the beat wouldn’t do that.”

And racist? Tom Riggs wasn’t a racist, his mother insisted. One of his sisters is married to a black man, after all. “We probably are a very unprejudiced family, and we judge people by themselves and not by their color or what they believe in,” Anne Riggs said. “None of us thought of this as a racial thing until it was made so by the newspaper.”

Sagon Penn’s family doesn’t want to make this case out as some kind of race war, either.

At Friday’s meeting of the Catfish Club--the informal get together at Christ United Presbyterian Church where black and white civic leaders talk each week about whatever’s on their mind--Penn’s father, Thomas Penn, sought to erase the picture that some have drawn from Sagon’s prosecution.

“I’m afraid people have this attitude of, ‘It’s the big, bad police jumping all over the Penn family,” he said in an interview after lunch. “The truth is, the police haven’t done anything to my family. Although I will never be able to forget this, I hold no animosity toward them.

“Everybody has to learn how to forgive,” he said. “What happened was an isolated incident.”

Added Penn: “My only concern is to prevent something like this from ever happening again. Not just to blacks, or whites, or whateverbut for all San Diegans.”

The Wibes and the Riggses have a more immediate concern. They’ve got another trial to think about. Tim Ruopp’s accused killer, Joselito Cinco--charged with killing Ruopp and Officer Kimberly Tonahill and wounding Officer Gary Mitrovich--is being tried for murder in Orange County.

The cop families won’t be spending much time in court, though. Tim left behind five kids, and Kathy Ruopp-Probett is in no position to go running up to Orange County everyday to sit in court, her mother, Anne Riggs, said. Her sisters are like their mom--they have a lot of kids too. And those kids aren’t going to be made to sit there as the system gives Joselito Cinco his due.

“The children of this household, of this clan,” Anne Riggs said, “have gone through too much as it is.”

Times staff writer Gene Yasuda contributed to this report.