Teacher Angry After Police Search Latino Youths Invited to Her Home

Barbara Nagy teaches in urban South-Central Los Angeles, but she lives on a quiet suburban street in Torrance. She sometimes invites a few former students to her condominium complex to swim in the pool, eat pizza and play computer games.

On a Sunday morning last month, two of her teen-age guests got an unexpected welcome when Torrance police stopped them and questioned them for 20 minutes on the street outside her home.

The two youths say they think they were singled out for questioning because they are Latino. And Nagy says she is outraged by how they were treated.

“They’re my invited guests. . . . It really disturbs me,” said Nagy, a teacher at Bethune Junior High School.

The Torrance Police Department does not have a policy of targeting non-Anglos for questioning, said Sgt. Ron Traber, a police spokesman.

Traber said the officers were merely responding to a call from a neighbor “who was concerned about the prospect of burglary or whatever. . . . They saw a presence in their neighborhood who didn’t belong.”

The two youths, Carlos Pineda, 18, of Los Angeles, and Rafael Gonzalez, 17, of Inglewood, say they arrived at Nagy’s home near the intersection of Carson Street and Elm Avenue while she was away fetching two other former students who also had been invited.

The youths parked their car on Elm Avenue and ate a takeout breakfast from McDonald’srestaurant, Gonzalez said. They walked to the corner, and two Torrance police cars drove up soon after, he said.

“I told him we were there for a reunion,” Gonzalez said. He said he gave the officers Nagy’s name and address but, “they didn’t believe us.”

Gonzalez and Pineda said the police searched them and pulled their wallets out of their pockets to look at identification. The police also searched Gonzalez’s car after asking permission, Gonzalez said.

Neither youth was wearing gang-like clothing, Nagy said. Pineda wore gray pants and a gray football-style jersey with white stripes on the arms, and Gonzalez wore gray jeans and a gray-and-white sports shirt, she said.

“They had a good reason to be here. They explained it to the police. They should have just dropped it at that point,” she said.

Traber characterized the questioning as “relatively quick.” He said the police were dispatched to Elm Avenue at 9:33 a.m. and left at 9:56 a.m.

One of the officers called the incident “a very low-profile contact” without name-calling or shouting, Traber said. He said one youth looked like a gang member, but the other was clean-cut. The officers had satisfied themselves and were leaving when Nagy arrived home, he said.

“I don’t see anything wrong here,” Traber said. The police have a responsibility to question non-residents when needed, he said.

The youths say that during the questioning an officer made a demeaning comment.

“One of them said, ‘Why you come here for, to have sex for money or what?’ ” Gonzalez said.

Traber, after talking to one of the officers, reported that “he heard no such comment like that.”