2 Fullerton Football Players Cleared in Fatal Fistfight

The Orange County district attorney’s office Wednesday decided not to press charges against two Cal State Fullerton football players in the beating death of a Marine from El Toro, calling it an “excusable homicide” that was brought on by the victim’s own drunken, belligerent state.

Bryan Brown, a deputy district attorney, said senior prosecutors deliberated for two days before deciding not to charge the football players in the April 7 beating death of Staff Sgt. Richard William Bottjer.

Bottjer, 30, died in a fistfight with quarterback Carlos Siragusa, 21, and wide receiver John Gibbs, 22, in a darkened parking lot across from a popular Fullerton night spot. Bottjer and another Marine, Cpl. Thomas Duran, had scuffled with the athletes inside the bar minutes before and had taken the fight across the street after being ejected by bouncers, according to police.

Bottjer, a flight information specialist at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, was pronounced brain dead 20 hours after the fight. His heart was later used in Orange County’s first heart transplant, implanted into a 26-year-old Huntington Beach man.

Brown said it was clear from interviews with as many as 25 witnesses that Bottjer had died in “mutual combat”--what amounted to a fair fight. Evidence showed that Bottjer had started the original scuffle in the bar and then challenged the football players to continue the fight once they were outside. He also took the first swing, Brown said.

The autopsy report listed the cause of death as brain injury caused by a single punch landing behind the victim’s left ear.

Brown said prosecutors were convinced that men from both sides had been drinking heavily, and he confirmed that Bottjer’s blood alcohol level was 2 1/2 times the legal limit for being drunk at the time he was admitted to a hospital emergency room.

The ruling immediately drew an angry reaction from the dead Marine’s parents, who said they would ask the U.S. Justice Department to look into the way Orange County authorities had handled the investigation.

“There should have at least been a trial,” Ralph Bottjer, the Marine’s father, said in an interview. “Some kind of charges should have been brought, either manslaughter or second-degree murder or something. This is not the end of it.”

The Bottjers have been in Orange County since the death. They live in St. James, N.Y.

Stephan A. DeSales, an attorney representing the two players, said they were “relieved that the DA chose not to prosecute, based on the facts of the case.”

At Cal State Fullerton, football coach Gene Murphy issued a statement approving of the prosecutor’s decision and said he would immediately lift the suspension of Siragusa and Gibbs. He added, however, that both players would forgo spring drills to concentrate on classes.

Siragusa refused to comment as he was leaving Murphy’s office Wednesday. Gibbs could not be reached.