Santa Paula Officer, Accused of Pointing Gun at Driver, Is Fired

A Santa Paula police officer has been fired after allegations that he pointed a service revolver at a motorist on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu during the height of freeway violence in the Southland, authorities said Friday.

Los Angeles County Undersheriff Robert A. Edmonds said that misdemeanor charges of brandishing a weapon at a motorist may be filed against the officer, Mark Palmer, 22. He is the second law enforcement officer to be accused in the current rash of violence on the freeways.

Edmonds said the sheriff’s investigation into the July 30 incident was part of the continuing crackdown on roadway violence. In recent weeks, gunfire on Southern California freeways and roads has claimed four lives and led to at least 15 injuries.

News Conference Called

Edmonds disclosed details of the Malibu incident at a news conference called by several state lawmakers, including Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles), to announce that they will propose several bills to deal with the rising tide of roadway violence. One bill to be introduced Monday, Roberti said, would make the brandishing of a weapon in the presence of a person in a vehicle a felony, punishable by up to three years in prison.

Investigators said Palmer came under suspicion after a Santa Barbara-area man, Morgan Macdonald, 41, reported that a driver in a white Ford pickup truck pointed a gun at him as he drove along Pacific Coast Highway en route to Los Angeles International Airport.

“He pointed the gun directly in my face as I looked at him,” Macdonald said in a telephone interview. “I said to myself, ‘Holy Cow! I’m in the middle of what I’ve been reading about in the papers.’ ”

Macdonald, who runs a mail-order business, said he was traveling south on the Coast Highway when the pickup truck came up behind him and was “less than four inches from my rear bumper.” The truck driver, Macdonald said, then sped through traffic, forcing one car with an elderly couple in it off the road. The truck tailgated Macdonald’s car twice more, he said.

Then, Macdonald said, the truck pulled along his Volkswagen Rabbit and the driver pointed a pistol at him. The truck driver then sped off without firing a shot. Macdonald wrote down the truck’s license number and called authorities.

“I kept thinking what a newscaster said the night before,” Macdonald said. “ ‘Just be a wimp and roll up your window.’ I did that . . . I don’t know why he did it. I didn’t do anything to make him angry.”

Authorities traced the truck to Santa Paula, a rural Ventura County community of 20,000 people, and the Police Department there.

Santa Paula Police Chief Walter H. Adair said Palmer, a rookie on the force, was put on administrative leave two days after the incident occurred and was fired on Tuesday.

Adair emphasized that Palmer was dismissed because of an “inability to meet the standards of field training . . . not as a result of an alleged or proven misconduct.” He added that the officer’s poor job performance would have resulted in a dismissal irrespective of the allegations surrounding the July 30 incident.

Palmer could not be reached and his attorney in Ventura, Louis Samonsky, did not return telephone calls.

At the news conference, Edmonds said a second truck driver, Danny Miranda, 42, of Paramount, was arrested after he allegedly used his tractor-trailer rig to try to force a woman motorist off the road late Thursday night on the Pomona Freeway near the City of Industry.

Several legislators said at the news conference that they intend to introduce bills to deal with increasing freeway violence. If enacted, the bills would:

- Increase the penalty for assault with a firearm on a person in a motor vehicle to life imprisonment. The current penalty is four years in state prison.

- Strengthen the penalty for discharging a firearm at a vehicle by eliminating the current option of serving a sentence in county jail. If passed, people convicted of this crime would be confined in state prison.

- Make the brandishing of a firearm that causes serious bodily harm a felony with a maximum sentence of four years in state prison.

Meanwhile in Sacramento, the leader of the Guardian Angels announced a drive to gather signatures demanding mandatory 25-year prison sentences for those convicted of roadway shootings.

Curtis Sliwa, 33-year-old founder of the group, said he would lead a 40-car caravan over the weekend from Southern California to the state Capitol, stopping in towns along the way to collect signatures for a measure that “will deter all the cowards and fools who have recently turned our freeways into a moving shooting gallery.”

He said his organization already had collected 48,000 signatures.

Times staff writer Jess Bravin in Sacramento contributed to this article.