MEDIA / KEVIN BRASS : Sagon Penn Surfaces in New Legal Hassle: Tuck’s Divorce

Sagon Penn’s name continues to pop up in the strangest places, evidenced by its appearance in the divorce papers of Channel 10 newsman Michael Tuck.

A clause in the otherwise typical divorce agreement, reached last year, stipulates that any profits Tuck receives from an NBC miniseries on Penn will be donated to charity. If Tuck doesn’t give the money to charity, the court retains jurisdiction to divide the property, according to the agreement.

“I’ve never heard of a miniseries being part of a divorce,” the program’s producer, Stockton Briggle, said with a laugh.

Briggle is the producer of the recent television movies “A Bridge to Silence” and “The Alamo: 13 Days to Glory.” In 1987 he struck a development deal with NBC and dispatched two writers, Travis Clark and Steve Duncan, to San Diego to research the Penn story.

In 1985, Penn, a young black man, shot two San Diego police officers and a civilian ride-a-long, killing one of the officers. After his attorney argued that Penn was defending himself from a racially motivated attack, Penn was acquitted in two trials that struck the raw nerve of racial tension in San Diego.

The two writers gave Briggle an outline for a 4-hour miniseries on Penn, and the movie deal has lain relatively dormant since then. But it is not dead.

The program is still on NBC’s production schedule, said Briggle, who is producing the program in conjunction with Fries Entertainment, producers of recent television docudramas on Lyndon Johnson and the Hillside Strangler case. Briggle said he is looking for a new writer for the project, after Clark and Duncan were called away from the project to work on a television series, “A Man Called Hawk.”

Although Briggle has discussed paying key players for their cooperation, he has not signed any of the principals to contracts.

“We have maintained a close relationship with some of the principals,” Briggle said, with the notable exceptions of Donovan Jacobs, the officer accused by Penn of initiating the confrontation, and Colleen Riggs, the wife of slain policeman Thomas Riggs.

Briggle’s representatives contacted Tuck, along with most people involved in the case, in 1987, seeking cooperation in the development of “The Sagon Penn Story.” Tuck, who often supported Penn’s story in his “Perspective” segments, made it clear at the time that any money paid him for his cooperation would have to be donated to charity, if indeed he received any money at all. The clause was put into the divorce agreement at the insistence of his ex-wife’s attorney, Tuck said, in case he changed his mind about donating any profits to charity, something he said he has no intention of doing.

Tuck says the producers were talking about “$50,000 or $75,000” for his help, figures Briggle says are “optimistic.”

Since most of the story already has been played out in San Diego courtrooms, making it part of the public domain, it may not be necessary to pay any of the principals, Briggle said.

The movie he envisions would not seek to portray Penn as a hero, or to concentrate on the racial overtones of the case, Briggle said. He’s fascinated by the vastly different perceptions people have of the same incident.

“There are so many stories of so many things gone wrong,” Briggle said. “There’s Sagon Penn, who was going to apply for a job with the Police Department. There’s Donovan Jacobs, who was doing his job to the best of his ability as he saw it. There’s (former San Diego Police Lt.) Doyle Wheeler, who felt he had to tell the truth as he saw it. (Wheeler testified against Jacobs and later was injured by a gunshot to the head in his new home in Seattle in a still-unexplained incident.) There are a lot of broken lives in this.

“There are no good guys or bad guys; there are vast areas of gray here.”

Since it was never his intent to portray Penn as a “big hero,” Briggle said Penn’s recent legal troubles--initially charged with suspicion of attempted murder after a confrontation with his ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend, he has been charged with misdemeanor battery--would not affect the project.

“It’s just more ripples in the pool,” Briggle said, adding that once a writer is found, the project should “gel very quickly.”

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