People and Events

Impersonating a police officer is not usually greeted enthusiastically by real cops, but they don’t seem to be holding it against Andy Wilson.

Wilson was driving into a parking lot at Fountain Avenue and Vine Street in Hollywood Wednesday when he saw two men breaking into a car and heard its nearby owner shouting, “Hey, what are you doing to my window?”

While the victim and a parking attendant chased one man on foot, two other suspects sped off in a car with Wilson in pursuit. He later told police that he overtook the pair at Cahuenga and Santa Monica boulevards, where they had paused for a light.

The 33-year-old Wilson, said by Black Belt magazine publisher Jim Coleman to be “a very talented kung fu stylist and martial arts weapons expert,” is currently working in the filming of “Chinatown Connection” as a fight scene double for actor Bruce Ly, who plays a police officer.

As it happened, Wilson was carrying a prop badge.

He says he got out of his car and showed it to the pair, suggesting that they produce their identification and then drive themselves back to the parking lot while he followed. One of them took a swing at him, he recalls, so “I put him up against the car.”

Thus persuaded, the two men returned to the scene of the crime, where genuine officers were now on hand to arrest them.

Hollywood Officer Don Bleier (the real article) said three suspects (including the one who had tried to escape on foot) are apparent members of a Salvadoran gang with a fondness for breaking into cars. Wilson, Bleier added, may be in line for a citizen’s award.

If you have ever stood in terror at the edge of roaring traffic trying to decipher your auto club card number in the dark, you may be interested in an experiment going on along the Harbor Freeway.

A dozen emergency call boxes there have just been equipped with solar-panel-powered lights to help stranded motorists read their way out of trouble. The panels gather sunlight during the day and spill it out at night.

The small lights, says Los Angeles County Department of Public Works spokeswoman Jean Granucci, “do an excellent job of illuminating the call box instructions.”

Although solar lights have been installed along freeways elsewhere, these are the first in Los Angeles County, Granucci says. They cost about $1,200 each, with the pilot project financed by the state. Your gas tax money at work.

If the county Transportation Commission decides to go all out, the tab will have to be picked up by the $1 per vehicle added to registration fees for freeway modification under recent legislation.

San Fernando Superior Court Judge Howard J. Schwab had a little something to say Thursday, right after he married Jacques Kermit Alexander, 35, to Kelly Lynn Fisher, 20.

“Society has a right to take away a person’s freedom, but never their dignity,” the judge observed.

He had just sentenced the happy couple to state prison (Alexander for eight years and the bride for six) for armed robbery and kidnaping.

The Mission Hills pair held hands and smiled at each other during the brief civil ceremony. The groom wore simple blue jail denims. The bride, visibly pregnant, had on an orange jail smock.

Police said the bride, who has a lengthy prostitution record, would lure men into a room where the groom and two other men would rob them at gunpoint.

It is a rare thing, indeed, to move from one home to another without losing something. The wife’s favorite elephant-shaped vase, a book one never got around to reading, a single bookend. . . .

Consider, then, the surprise of an unidentified man who just moved to San Dimas from another state (also unidentified by sheriff’s deputies) and found that a few items had been added to his possessions--presumably while in the hands of the moving company.

They were, says Sheriff’s Information Bureau Deputy Roxanna Schuchman, two cans of black gunpowder and four cans of smokeless powder.

He took the stuff to the San Dimas sheriff’s station, swearing he never saw it before.

Not all the finds were explosive:

Paul Germano, 35, told West Hollywood sheriff’s deputies that he sat on a bus bench at La Cienega and Santa Monica boulevards to rest and eat a candy bar. When he walked to a trash can to get rid of the wrapper, he stopped cold.

Peeking out at him from a paper sack in the trash was a hand grenade.

Deputy Schuchman says Germano picked it up and carried it to the West Hollywood sheriff’s station, where it was found to be an inert training grenade.