Student’s Death After Arrest Ruled Homicide

A coroner’s autopsy released Thursday found that the death of a college student from Fountain Valley who was forcibly arrested outside a Grateful Dead concert at the Forum earlier this month resulted from “compression of the neck during restraint,” authorities said.

Witnesses at the scene said they saw Inglewood police officers beating Patrick Shanahan, 19, with their night sticks as they arrested him after a Dec. 10 concert.

Shanahan, a UC Santa Barbara sophomore who was home for the holidays, had gone to the concert with several classmates.

Police spokesmen, who refused to comment on the ruling Thursday, repeatedly denied that officers either struck Shanahan or used excessive force and contended that he probably died of a drug overdose.

“The mode of death is homicide,” said David Campbell, supervising investigator with the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. “It’s not an accident, not a suicide, it’s a homicide--meaning death at the hands of another.”

Campbell said Shanahan died from a “compression of the neck during restraint” in addition to “multiple injuries and acute LSD intoxication.”

“This entire incident has been a nightmare for us,” said Shanahan’s father, William, who is executive director of the 1,500-member Garden Grove Educators Assn. “My beautiful 19-year-old son is dead. . . . I am too numb to be angry.”

But the father said the coroner’s report was “good news. . . . The immediate thing that satisfies me is that Patrick’s death is not being blamed on drugs. (The coroner’s finding) makes Patrick’s killing more senseless and more ludicrous.”

Patrick Shanahan was buried Dec. 22 in New Hampshire, where the Shanahans lived before coming to Southern California.

Conceding that Shanahan experimented with marijuana but disputing his use of harder drugs, family members have hired an attorney, a private pathologist and an investigator to look into the case.

Meanwhile, the district attorney’s office is investigating the case and there is a “possibility that criminal charges will be issued,” spokesman Mike Botula said Thursday.

Inglewood police officials indicated earlier this month that they were conducting a routine internal investigation of the incident.

Shanahan was pronounced dead at 10:48 p.m. at Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood, where doctors ruled the preliminary cause of death was a drug overdose.

Inglewood Police Sgt. Harold Moret said Shanahan had been spotted by police on his hands and knees on a ramp leading up to the Forum “screaming at imaginary people and saying things that indicated he was completely out of it.”

When police tried to arrest him for public intoxication, Shanahan began kicking, biting and punching the officers, Moret said. Dozens of people witnessed the scuffle. Eventually, the officers tied his ankles with a nylon rope and handcuffed him. He was carried to a police car, where officers discovered he had stopped breathing.

One of the witnesses to the Shanahan arrest, Neal Bridgnell, 25, a student at Cal State Long Beach, said he was drawn to the scene by loud screams.

“We asked a girl what was going on and she said the cops were beating this guy to death,” Bridgnell said.

Bridgnell’s girlfriend, Christine Smitts, said police were standing in a semicircle around Shanahan hitting him with their billy clubs.

Another witness, a 24-year-old Venice woman, said: “We saw six big men, all police, coming from two sides. They kept hitting him with their billy clubs. We wanted to know why they were beating him so, but a security guard pushed us back and told us to go our own way.”

William Shanahan said the family, which includes the youth’s mother, 16-year-old brother and 8-year-old sister, regretted during the funeral that they were unable to view Patrick’s body.

“The funeral director in Huntington Beach told me that he would advise me not to view the body because I would not want to carry that picture of Patrick in my head for the rest of my life. He said Patrick suffered severe trauma to his head, back and body.”