Bar Bouncer Known as a ‘Human Time Bomb’ : Crime: Eric Charles Meyer had a history of violence before the fatal Redondo Beach bar incident for which he is charged with murder of club’s patron.

A bouncer charged with murder in the death of a patron at a Redondo Beach bar was described Thursday by former employers and fellow bodybuilders as a “human time bomb” who in recent years threatened to dismember one fellow weightlifter, “snuff” another with a high-powered rifle and beat up an employer who had fired him.

Eric Charles Meyer, 32, of Torrance was charged Wednesday after a customer he had ejected from Pancho & Wong’s near King Harbor died of massive head injuries.

The patron, Michael Alvey of Harbor City, was taken to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center after Meyer threw him off a bar balcony early Saturday and died three days later without regaining consciousness.

Meyer’s boss at Pancho & Wong’s, David Letchworth, said Meyer had seemed professional and had come to him with good references. And a longtime friend of Meyer’s family, John Edwards of Hawthorne, said Thursday that Meyer was “a real good guy” who was planning to move soon to San Diego to live with his girlfriend and 6-year-old son.

But according to court records and some who knew him in the 15 years since he graduated from West High School, Meyer--known as “Mad Dog” among bodybuilder friends--had problems reining in his temper for years.

“The sad thing is, I’ve known him for 20 years, and he was a hell of an athlete at West High,” said Russell (Spike) Day, 43, who had managed the now-defunct Disc Gym in Torrance where Meyer regularly worked out. But Meyer, he said, underwent a drastic personality change in the 1970s that Day and others blamed on anabolic steroids, which are used by some bodybuilders but are illegal without a prescription.

“After about four good years, his body was at the saturation point,” Day recalled. “His body freaked out on him.”

Day said in the late 1970s and early 1980s he repeatedly asked Meyer to stay away from the gym because of his “extreme mood swings and tantrums.” A bitter feud developed, and Meyer grew progressively so violent that Day and the Disc Gym twice went to court for restraining orders against him, Day said.

The West High yearbook shows that Meyer was a member of the class of ‘75, and on a 1988 job application at another South Bay health club he wrote that he had attended college for four years.

In 1982, court records show, Meyer was sentenced to a year in jail for the strong-arm robbery the year before of a parking lot attendant in Torrance. An accomplice who wielded a knife during the robbery was given a stiffer sentence, records show, but both Meyer’s attorney and the prosecutor urged the judge to be lenient with Meyer, who they described as an honor student and an exemplary citizen.

Day said that when Meyer was released from jail, he returned to the Disc Gym and asked for “a second chance.”

“But after about a year, he was harassing people again,” Day said. In 1987, Meyer was sentenced to 30 days in County Jail after he was convicted of making threatening phone calls to Roy Thomas, a fellow bodybuilder at the Disc Gym.

According to court records, Meyer threatened to “dismember your body while you are still alive and cut off your fingers.” He also threatened to sodomize Thomas’ corpse and throw it in “a dipsy dumpster,” records show.

The conversation was monitored at the club by former Torrance Police Lt. Don Feil, who, though off duty, was asked by Day to listen in on an extension phone, so Thomas would have corroboration in court.

The trial record said the phone threat was one of a series made against Thomas. In the court record Meyer denied harassing Thomas, saying it was Thomas who had initiated the threats.

Thomas said Thursday that he is not surprised that Meyer has been charged with a violent crime.

Thomas, a 6-foot-5-inch, 260-pound construction worker said he earned Meyer’s wrath after he stood up for “some people (Meyer) wanted to intimidate.”

Day said in that 1987 he, too, was threatened by Meyer, who “would call me up and say, ‘We got a rifle, and . . . we’re going to snuff you on your way home, so have a good day.’ ”

But after Meyer’s 1987 jail term, Day said, Meyer never returned to the gym, which closed the following year.

Meyer, however, continued to work out at several other health clubs in the South Bay, and was fired from at least two Torrance establishments in 1988. One former employer said Meyer was “a human time bomb” who vowed to beat him up when he fired Meyer for threatening a customer.

Another, Beau Warren, manager of Family Fitness Centers in Torrance, said Meyer quit in a rage after just a few days as a weight training instructor when he decided the pay wasn’t good enough.

“He just blew up, and we said, OK--we’ll see you,” Warren said. “He was kind of a hothead.”

Meyer, who remains in Los Angeles County Jail in lieu of $250,000 bail, had a similar history in his nine months at Pancho & Wong’s, co-workers said.

The week before the incident with Alvey, they said, he had carried a customer still seated on a bar stool out of the restaurant and threw the man down a flight of stairs. Another patron, Brian King, 24, of Los Angeles, said that six weeks ago, Meyer mistook him as the instigator of an argument and kicked him so hard in the chest that it left a bruise that remained for weeks.

Reached at Meyer’s home in Torrance, his parents declined to comment. Meyer, who was to have been arraigned Wednesday in South Bay Municipal Court in Alvey’s death, postponed his plea, saying he needed more time to hire a private attorney.