Man Officials Call ‘Pack Rat’ Is Sentenced to a Year in Jail

A man authorities call the city’s worst “pack rat” was sentenced Friday to a year in jail.

The man, Don Hyatt Martin, 50, was punished for violating his probation in two 1984 cases involving the storage of trash on his property.

Martin had been convicted Nov. 2 of charges including resisting arrest, assaulting a custodial officer, destroying city property, trespassing and loitering. The charges caused him to be found in violation of probation.

The case stemmed from Martin’s arrest in August in a neighbor’s yard and a scuffle that followed in a police station in North Hollywood. Deputy City Atty. John C. I. Rocke said the fight began when Martin refused to allow his fingerprints to be taken. Martin pushed a jail officer into a table and threw a typewriter at him, Rocke said.

Judge Isabel R. Cohen of Van Nuys Municipal Court sentenced Martin to 224 days he had already spent in jail. She also found him in violation of his probation from the 1984 public-nuisance cases, which concerned the rat-infested collection of junk in North Hollywood on one of his many properties.

For the probation violation, Martin received a maximum sentence of six months in County Jail on each of the two cases, the terms to be served consecutively.

Martin, who has represented himself in court, denounced the sentence as unfair. Rocke praised it and said the conditions on Martin’s North Hollywood property posed a health threat to the neighborhood.

Martin is to appear in Van Nuys Superior Court on Monday for another probation-violation hearing. He was granted probation in 1985 after he pleaded guilty to two counts of perjury. He admitted using phony names to obtain driver’s licenses from the state Department of Motor Vehicles.