Santa Ana Department Blamed : Officer’s Final Message: They ‘Took Away Future’

In an eerie tape left behind for his widow, a former Santa Ana police sergeant accused of raping a 14-year-old Orange County girl before killing himself blamed the Police Department for stealing his life’s dreams and driving him to suicide.

“We had a future, we had dreams, we had a way to go,” James Earl McDonald said, his voice cracking on the tape as a weeping Judy McDonald played the recording at her attorney’s office in Irvine. “Then the Police Department came along and just smashed all those dreams and took away the future and took away the hope.”

McDonald’s recording was played publicly on the same day he won a posthumous vindication.

The state Workers Compensation Appeals Board, which had been considering McDonald’s case while he was still alive, announced Tuesday that he was psychiatrically disabled and entitled to compensation from the City of Santa Ana for his demotion and firing in 1986.

In the dramatic 10-minute tape, McDonald poured out two years of frustration about how a soured business venture, a failing marriage and what he believed was an insensitive Police Department led him to take his own life:

“I don’t feel like a man any more. I’ve got no career, I’ve got no pride and I can’t even keep the woman I love happy. I sit back, I think what can I do and I draw a blank every time. There’s nothing left for me to do (Judy), except let you go. That’s the hardest thing I’ll ever do.”

Judy McDonald, 29, said she decided to air the tapes Tuesday to try and explain how the stalwart sergeant she married three years ago had changed to the suicidal “stranger” accused of raping a Newport Beach girl.

Press accounts of her husband portrayed him unfairly, she said.

“I know there is a lot of trauma to the young girl and her family,” she said. “But the man in the truck who killed himself was not my husband. It was the sickness that killed my husband.”

The ruling by the compensation board leaves open the possibility that his widow and two children by a previous marriage can collect $30,000 to $40,000 in back pay and disability benefits.

The board’s judge, David L. Zimmerman, rejected city arguments that McDonald’s temporary disability was self-induced by the conduct that led to his demotion and firing from the Police Department in 1986.

The Santa Ana Police Department declined Tuesday to comment on the case. It was unknown if the city planned to appeal the judgment.

City Atty. Edward Cooper could not be reached for comment Tuesday. Terrence Grace, the city’s legal adviser to the Police Department, and City Manager David Ream did not return telephone calls.

News of the compensation board’s ruling brought her little comfort, Judy McDonald said.

“For the last two years this situation has destroyed my marriage and my life,” she said. “Getting money after he’s dead, it doesn’t do much good. Nobody trusted or respected him. He was tormented. “

That torment culminated last month with death by his own hand.

On the afternoon of Feb. 20, McDonald handcuffed and kidnaped a former scuba diving student whom he had met as a volunteer instructor at the Boy Scouts of America Sea Explorers’ base in Newport Beach, according to police.

Over the next eight hours, he allegedly raped the girl at his mobile home near Lake Elsinore. With the girl locked in the camper shell of his pickup truck, he then drove to a mountain road near Running Springs and parked. Alone in the cab, he put a .38-caliber pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

In the truck, police later found four tapes, two of them for McDonald’s wife, one to the couple’s attorney and one to a former business partner accused by McDonald of failing to return the $30,000 life savings he had invested in a business deal. It was unknown when McDonald recorded the tapes.

Judy McDonald was accompanied Tuesday to her attorney’s office by Gene Shabinaw, a close friend of McDonald’s who had spoken with him days before his death.

“I saw him a couple of days before when he stopped by the bank. He was upbeat and we were talking about going lobster diving at the end of the month,” Shabinaw said.

“He had also talked about the hearing. He was happy that they had backed up the fact that he was telling the truth, but he had some uncomfortable feelings about it overall.”

McDonald said she was not sure that her husband wanted to return to the Police Department, but he did want to be cleared of the charges. On the tape, he spoke of his need to be vindicated:

“I thought, OK, I’ll prove them wrong. I will show them how fouled up they are and I will try to start again, but it was hard,” McDonald said. “It was really hard. I couldn’t just ignore all those dreams, couldn’t ignore all those hopes. They were always there in the background. They kept saying, ‘Jim, you’re going to have to work harder. You’ve got to prove things, you’ve got to make things right.’ So I tried.

“I would have done anything to change what had happened. If the (expletive) Police Department had wanted me to lie to them, I would have lied to them if I had known.

“So there really is not much choice. I’m going to leave you . . . not because I want to, but because I love you, and because somewhere in the back of my mind I think maybe there will be another day, there will be another time. There’ll be another place where we can be happy, and I can be back with you again.”

McDonald was “obsessed with proving his innocence” and had thought about killing himself and other members of the Santa Ana Police Department for at least a year, according to psychiatric evaluations included in court files and documents submitted during compensation board hearings.

Under California law, Zimmerman said, he had only to find that the disability was work-related. “The injury arose out of (McDonald’s) belief that he was harassed in the investigation and disciplinary proceedings and that he was unjustly demoted,” Zimmerman wrote in his opinion.

McDonald appeared to require “substantial psychiatric treatment,” Zimmerman added. He “was but a shell of his former self.”

The judge’s ruling came as a tragic exculpation for those who tried to help McDonald when his life fell apart two years ago.

“It’s too bad he’s not alive to be vindicated,” said Barry C. Spatz, a marriage and family therapist who counseled McDonald when he was demoted from sergeant to officer. “I just wonder if the (Santa Ana Police Department’s) punishment fit the crime two years ago that set this whole thing off. When they took away his uniform, they took away his reason to live.”

McDonald, a 17-year veteran of the Santa Ana department, saw his career begin to crumble in April, 1986, when he was demoted from sergeant to patrol officer. He allegedly lied to his superiors about a shooting-incident report involving an officer under his supervision.

That summer, while under counseling by Spatz, McDonald was dismissed from the department for not showing up for work.

Two police internal affairs investigators were waiting July 14 at Spatz’s Santa Ana office for McDonald to arrive for an appointment. They handed him a letter saying he was deemed to have resigned for unexcused absences.

McDonald collapsed, weeping and shaking in the waiting room, Spatz wrote in a letter later that day to the Police Department, criticizing the handling of McDonald’s dismissal.

The next day, McDonald requested reinstatement to his police job but the appeal was rejected Aug. 5 in a one-sentence letter from Deputy Police Chief Eugene B. Hansen.

In a deep depression, McDonald spent the next two months just sitting at home until his third wife, Judy, left him, according to his testimony at a workers compensation hearing.

On Spatz’s recommendation, McDonald turned to work as a scuba instructor, a pursuit he had learned while a police officer.

He went to work for the Open Water Habitat Dive Shop in Orange, where he learned to dive, before later volunteering as an instructor with the Sea Explorers’ program in Newport Beach.

McDonald had sought professional counseling for his depression, but he never could complete any treatment, his widow said Tuesday.

“He was someone just destroyed inside,” she said. “He sat in a chair day in and out, and he didn’t talk to anybody. (Santa Ana police) jerked him around and procrastinated, and he just became emptier.”

The compensation board’s ruling for her husband came too late. “It’s too bad,” she said. “The decision would have changed his life.”