Mother Disputes Violent Image of Murder Suspect

The mother of the bouncer who has been charged with murdering a patron last week at a Redondo Beach bar said Saturday that her son never meant to hurt anyone and that reports of Eric Meyer’s violent nature are outlandish and distorted.

In a telephone interview from her Torrance home, Diane Meyer said her 32-year-old son--charged Wednesday with the Sept. 1 slaying of Michael Alvey, a Harbor City father of three--is a conscientious man who only a few years ago had aspired to be a police officer.

“This is all going to sound like sour grapes because it comes from his mother,” she said. “But . . . he didn’t do anything wrong.”

Meyer, a door host for the past nine months at Pancho & Wong’s bar near King Harbor, is accused of having thrown Alvey down a short flight of stairs onto a concrete patio, causing massive and ultimately fatal head injuries. Police said Meyer, who at 200 pounds outweighed Alvey by 65 pounds, had carried Alvey out of the bar by the neck after the smaller man got into an argument with another patron.

In interviews in the week since following the incident, former employers, old acquaintances, other patrons at Pancho & Wong’s and several of Meyer’s co-workers at the bar have described him as a short-tempered and intimidating man, and said they were not surprised to hear that he had been arrested for a violent crime.

Meyer, who is being held in Los Angeles County Jail in lieu of $250,000 bail, could not be reached for comment and has not yet retained a lawyer.

But Meyer’s mother, along with his best friend, Bob Jones, a 37-year-old refinery worker from Gardena, said Saturday that the police account of the accident and descriptions of Meyer as an aggressive bully are distorted.

In phone calls from jail, Eric Meyer told his mother and Jones that he carried Alvey from the bar in a half-nelson hold and that Alvey fell backward down the stairs and onto the concrete after Meyer released him because he was too drunk to stand, they said. Alvey’s death, they added, may have been hastened by another bar patron, who, after Alvey fell, dragged him 15 feet across the parking lot.

“Alvey didn’t deserve to die, but Eric didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” Jones said. “The guy was just doing what he thought was his job. If he was so bad, why didn’t (the owner of Pancho & Wong’s) fire him a long time ago?”

Meyer, both said, only looked threatening.

“Bouncers can’t go in there looking like little pansies,” Diane Meyer said. “They have to have a stern appearance or people will just run all over them.”

She described Meyer as “a good son and an excellent father” to his 5-year-old son, and said that despite his criminal record and harsh descriptions of him by acquaintances and co-workers, he is a conscientious and clean-living person.

One ex-boss said in interviews that Meyer was a “human time bomb” and had threatened to beat him up in 1988 after he fired Meyer for threatening a customer. Another man--the operator of a health club in Torrance where Meyer had applied for work--said Meyer blew up before they had a chance to hire him when he found out what the pay would be.

Meyer served a year in jail in 1982 for robbing a parking-lot attendant and a month in 1987 for making a phone threat. Court records show that in the phone conversation, Meyer told a man with whom he was feuding that he would dismember him while he was still alive, sodomize his corpse and throw it in a dumpster. An off-duty police officer was listening on an extension phone when the threat was made.

Meyer’s mother said that the robbery conviction was a frame-up and that the telephone threat was simply one episode in a long feud he had with a fellow body-builder who had once threatened Meyer with a gun.

“I think if someone pulled a gun on me, I might give him a sneaky phone call, too,” she said.

Diane Meyer said the year her son spent in Los Angeles County Jail was a turning point in his life. At the time, he was a semester away from a degree in sociology at Cal State Dominguez Hills and had hoped to start a career in law enforcement.

But jail derailed those plans. Continuing to live at home, she said, Meyer worked a string of jobs, most of them at health clubs, and at one point even competed in the Mr. Apollo body-building contest.

“He went to the gym every day. He never drank or smoked or did drugs,” she said.

Jones disputed accounts by other body-builders who knew Meyer and have speculated that his short temper was the result of anabolic steroid abuse. Jones said Meyer was thwarted in his one attempt at using steroids because the ones he bought were fake.

For a time, Meyer supervised an after-school activity program at Jefferson School in Redondo Beach, his mother and Jones said.

City officials confirmed Saturday that Meyer was employed by the city as a playground supervisor from September, 1987 to June, 1988. But Recreation and Parks Director Bob Atkinson said Meyer was fired from the job.

Atkinson would not say why. Another source familiar with the incident said Meyer had threatened his supervisor.