Serving a Life Sentence, Says Woman Paralyzed in Shooting

The neighborhood is one of the most exclusive in Long Beach, with $1-million homes and quiet streets shaded by pepper trees that rustle in the summer breeze.

Here in a sprawling six-bedroom house, Julie Alban is learning to live without the use of her legs. “I have a life consisting of the most tedious tasks,” says Alban, 22, a former member of her high school tennis team. “Just dressing myself is a task now.”

The family of the man accused of shooting her lives across the street.

“I think about it all the time,” she said. “It’s very painful. He’s really gone on with his life while what I have is a lifetime imprisonment.”

The man is Bradley Ackerman, Alban’s former boyfriend and the stepson of Daniel H. Ridder, chairman of the Long Beach Press-Telegram and one of the city’s wealthiest and most prominent citizens. Ackerman, 23, recently pleaded not guilty to a charge of attempted murder in the June 8 shooting of Alban, who testified at the preliminary hearing that he shot her in the back while she slept, then turned the gun on himself.

Change of Venue Request

On Monday, Ackerman’s attorneys will appear in court to request that the trial be moved to Los Angeles. Because of pretrial publicity, they say, it would be difficult to obtain a fair trial in Long Beach, where the case dominated the front page of Ridder’s own newspaper and quickly became the talk of the town.

The story had all the markings of a made-for-TV movie. Ackerman was rich and handsome, a young man who had honed his tennis skills on a back-yard court and, by age 16, was a national junior champion. Alban was bright and beautiful, a pre-law student whose father is a prominent orthopedic surgeon and one-time Republican candidate for state Assembly. The two sets of parents were good friends who had traveled overseas together.

“Why do this when they both had such beautiful lives before them?” her father, Dr. Seymour Alban, was quoted as asking.

But Ackerman supposedly was pushing for marriage. She was not ready.

Just hours after the shooting, Ackerman, who recovered from his wound, scribbled a note to Dr. Alban asking: “Will you ever talk to me again?” It was unclear whether the note was meant for Dr. Alban or his daughter. And, the next day, Ackerman wanted to know if he and Julie could still have children together, according to the Press-Telegram.

‘I’ve Lost a Lot’

Three months after the shooting, such comments still enrage Julie Alban, who sees the accused gunman as a self-centered person who refuses to recognize the consequences of his action.

“Before, I was thinking about law school and how exciting it was to finish college,” she said in an interview, her first since the shooting. “Now I’m an invalid. I really feel cheated. I’ve lost a lot.”

She has known Ackerman since since she was 6 and he was 7. But they hadn’t become close until a year ago, after a chance meeting at an annual benefit for cancer research held at the Ridder home, an event both had attended regularly since childhood.

For a time, things went smoothly, Alban said, although Ackerman could be possessive, sometimes repeatedly calling her friends and family to find out what she was doing.

Then Alban graduated from UC Santa Barbara and began making plans to attend Southwestern University Law School in Los Angeles. And, although Ackerman was uncertain about a career--trying a few jobs in the year since his graduation from UC Irvine--he was leaning toward taking a job with an insurance company in England, raising the prospect of separation.

In June, just days before Ackerman was scheduled to fly to London for a last interview, he asked to stay overnight at the Alban home while his parents were out of town, something he occasionally did. They had a long talk in her room, Alban said, during which she reiterated her unwillingness to make a commitment.

Ackerman eventually retired to a room down the hall, she testified at the preliminary hearing, but returned six hours later--about 7 a.m.--carrying her father’s .38-caliber pistol, which he had taken from a car in the garage. He shot her in the back, police said, then shot himself in the chest.

Thrown from her bed by the impact of the shot, Alban crawled 40 feet to a telephone where she dialed 911 for paramedics before calling her parents in another wing of the 6,000-square-foot house, far enough away that they didn’t hear the gunshots.

Taken to the same hospital, the former sweethearts lay for a time in nearby rooms. While Ackerman recovered, Alban fought various infections stemming from her severed spinal cord. Her family provided armed guards by her room at one point, she said.

In an emergency hearing shortly after the shooting, a Long Beach Municipal judge set Ackerman’s bail at $100,000 with the provision that he be kept in a locked psychiatric facility. Three weeks later, Ackerman’s attorneys asked that he be released, arguing that he would more quickly return to mental stability outside an institution.

The move prompted Alban to issue her first public statement on the case, a letter distributed to the media by friends of the family. “At this time I live in fear,” she wrote. “I would like to ask my friends and relatives to help with my protection from Bradley. He is a dangerous person, and I would like to see that everything is done to keep him from hurting me.”

But Ackerman’s attorneys prevailed. After an emotional hearing, bail was reset at $500,000 and the provision removed. Ridder, who was quoted in his own newspaper characterizing his stepson as “no threat” to Alban and “grief-stricken over what he has done,” provided the bail money.

Alban said she got personal assurances from the newspaper executive that Ackerman would no longer live at his family’s Long Beach home. But recently, she said, she was horrified to see him pulling into the driveway there in the front seat of Ridder’s car.

“I’m disappointed,” she said, “that next door neighbors who were such good friends could be so insensitive.”

Ackerman’s attorney, Joseph Ball, said his client would not discuss the case.

Ridder, who recently resigned as the Press-Telegram’s publisher to become its chairman, also declined comment. “My heart goes out to the girl,” he was quoted as saying after the shooting.

Alban was released from the hospital last month, although she still spends much of her time in physical therapy at Memorial Medical Center of Long Beach. She is learning how to get around in a wheelchair.

When she wheels it into court Monday, she said, she will have something for her former boyfriend--a book on spinal injuries.

“He shouldn’t be able to close his eyes to what he’s done to me,” she said. “I don’t believe he realizes the seriousness of his crime.”

She sees her anger as a phase she must work through before she can get on with any semblance of a normal life. She hopes that when she’s a little more comfortable with her disabilities, she will be able to go to law school as she had planned.

“I’d like to be an advocate for people who’ve gone through what I have,” she said. “I’m not going to let Brad Ackerman stop me. He’s already taken so much of me, but I refuse to let him have it all.”