‘Brave Lady’ Reflects on Her Battle With 2 Burglars

Dorothy Dawson has always considered herself a liberated woman. For instance, the 67-year-old Fullerton homeowner drives around in a 240Z sports car and says she is ready to take on the world, especially the bad guys.

“What is right is right and what is wrong is wrong,” said Dawson, who grabbed a young man she caught burglarizing a friend’s house last November and told him: “Hey, stay there. You’re under arrest.”

She saw another man rushing out with a VCR and grabbed for him, forcing him to drop the device. He escaped in a car, but Dawson got the license number. Police arrested him within the hour.

While all this was going on, the other suspect ran off and is still at large. “She’s one brave lady,” said Fullerton Police Detective Fred Bybee. “We’re really proud of her, but we certainly don’t recommend anyone else doing that,” he added.

Bybee said the suspect is awaiting trial on six burglary counts after a preliminary hearing.

Dawson, who works full-time as a secretary, said she doesn’t belong to the neighborhood watch. “But I own my own home and you have to watch out for it. There are people who are aware what’s going on in their neighborhood and I’m one of them.”

The Fullerton City Council, in a recent formal ceremony, presented her with a commendation for her courage and willingness to get involved in capturing the burglary suspect in late November.

The hullabaloo over her confrontation with the burglars is disconcerting to Dawson. “I think everyone is making too much out of this,” she said. “This is really sort of embarrassing. I’m a feisty little gal and I’m not afraid of anything, even though I knew I was no match for them. I guess most women my age and size just don’t do this sort of thing.”

She is 5 feet, 3 inches tall.

She also said it was probably “real stupid of me” to confront the burglars. “But I’m not afraid of anything.”

During her encounter with the two suspects, Dawson remembers, the first suspect kept pleading, “Lady, lady,” while she held on to him and yelled for someone to call the police.

She said it was a matter of impulse to confront “this crazy kid” when she saw him scaling a 6-foot-high wall. “I asked him what he was doing, and can you imagine, he told me he was getting a drink of water. The whole thing didn’t feel right and didn’t smell right.”

The whole affair was a matter of principle, she said. “I work every day and if they want something, they ought to go to work and earn the money for it.”

Ten years ago, Janice Turner was one of seven women who broke new ground by becoming one of the first women paramedics in Orange County.

“I guess at that time you could call that a kind of frontiering,” said Turner of Anaheim Hills, who recently became the first female member of the Anaheim Hills Rotary Club. “This time, I was just looking for a service organization in my community. I didn’t think I was going to be the first woman.” She notes that there are a number of other Rotary Clubs that have women members.

Although she said she has worked in a male-dominated field for years, Turner said she is not an avid women’s liberation movement person. “I didn’t join the Rotary Club to make a statement,” she said. “That was not part of my motivation.”

Turner, 39, a registered nurse and currently paramedic services coordinator for the Orange County Fire Department, said her aim was to “do something that was (a) public service,to give something back to my immediate community.”

Acknowledgments--Martha Hernandez, an 8th-grader at La Habra’s Imperial Middle School who is active in community programs and sports, has been named 1988 Girl of the Year by the Boys and Girls Club of La Habra.