People and Events

A couple of hundred women inmates at the Sybil Brand Institute saluted a jail deputy with “loud cheers and applause,” the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Information Bureau says, when he saved the life of a 71-year-old woman prisoner who was choking on a piece of meat.

According to the Sybil Brand, Senior Deputy Eric Leibrich, 36, was supervising the feeding of about 200 of the jail’s already-sentenced guests Sunday evening when the unidentified woman began to choke and it became apparent that she could not breathe.

Leibrich, deputies said, quickly summoned medical attendants and then applied the Heimlich maneuver, dislodging the food particle.

“Mr. Leibrich is such a jewel,” the 71-year-old prisoner was quoted as saying later. “I don’t know what I would have done without him. You have such fine officers here.”

Deputies declined to identify the grateful lady, or even indicate what she was convicted of.

A hungry burglar stole a $100 microwave oven from a Silver Lake home, but not before he apparently had helped himself to dinner and a nap, police said.

A friend of the unidentified victim discovered the burglary when he showed up at the residence Sunday to care for the man, who is bedridden. The friend told police that crab meat he had left in the refrigerator was on the stove and kitchen table, and it appeared that someone had been eating it.

In another bedroom, the witness said, the bedcovers were reorganized as if someone had been sleeping there.

The victim told police he fell asleep at about 11 p.m. the night before and did not see or hear anything unusual.

Police said the suspect, who escaped, entered through an unlocked window.

Water truck driver Paul Herman Romero, 25, of Azusa has been notified by mail that he faces an Oct. 14 arraignment in Citrus Municipal Court for squirting some of the Azusa Rock Co.’s neighbors as they tried to hold a press conference to protest the crunching of a hillside.

Azusa Police Sgt. Ken MacChesney said the group was standing outside the rock company last July 1 when Romero “came out in his watering truck on dust control and fired up the sprinklers. They got wet.”

Romero, MacChesney said, claimed that it was an accident and that he did not realize until too late that anyone had been showered.

Two of the allegedly dampened participants, Linda Stahl-Smith and Carol Ann Montano, went to the police to seek charges against Romero. The matter was referred to a hearing officer, then to the district attorney’s office, which issued two misdemeanor battery charges.

For a mere $120,000, you can pick the name for a week-old rare giant eland that was trotted out Monday at the Los Angeles Zoo and put on display with his mom and dad.

The antelope weighed 80 pounds at birth but will eventually be 6 feet tall and weigh as much as a ton. He’ll also have a classy pair of twisted horns up to 42 inches long.

Cindy Richardson, assistant curator of education for the zoo, said his “adoption fee” (highest at the zoo) will help keep him in alfalfa, acacia leaves, apples and carrots. (You don’t get to take him home. Anyway, when he’s grown, he’ll leap an 8-foot fence with no trouble.)

Richardson said none of the other half-dozen elands at the zoo has been adopted yet. The youngster’s mother and father, who came from the Central African Republic, don’t have official names but are known to their keepers as Taurus and Crescent.

For $120,000 apiece, you can change them to Fred and Wanda.

While we’re talking about big money, it should be noted that the oversized $1-million check presented last week to the 1988 U.S. Olympic Team did not--as one might have concluded from reading the photo caption--float in from an anonymous donor.

It was signed by Barron Hilton, head of the Hilton Hotels, and was derived largely from a program under which the chain contributes a certain amount to the team each time a “frequent stayer” stops in.

On the crime front:

Asked about street gang violence over the weekend, Los Angeles Police Sgt. Joseph Brazas of the Van Nuys station said, “After four or five months, it’s starting up again. They’re stealing those Garfield cats from the car windows again . . . “