Suspect Was Way Out of Line in Effort to Blend In at McDonald’s

At the age of 10, Douglas Eric Girard was arrested for stealing a coop full of pigeons from the roof of a fish market. Like the birds he filched, his criminal career never quite took off.

“I guess it’s true, crime does not pay,” he recently told a probation officer, noting that he has “made enough money to get by but not to get rich.”

Even his turn in the spotlight Monday, as the central figure in a six-hour hostage incident, apparently was a result of a botched attempt to elude La Verne police, authorities said.

An officer responding to the robbery of a children’s clothing store saw Girard and a companion, Frank M. Teresi, get into line at a nearby McDonald’s, investigators said. If the two suspects were trying to blend in, they failed. Both are heavily tattooed, and wads of money bulged visibly in their socks. Girard, witnesses said, carried a gun in his back waistband.

Suddenly, the employees were huddling in the basement, customers had hit the floor and Girard had 20 captives, whether he wanted them or not. He paced, smoked cigarettes, changed his shirt and shrugged helplessly from time to time until sheriff’s deputies stormed the McDonald’s shortly before midnight.

No one was harmed. “He never pulled the gun out,” said Ramiro Gironas, the assistant manager.

“He’s a thief, but not a violent one,” said Girard’s younger brother, Vincent. “Me and my other brothers are the violent ones. We’re more likely to knock someone out.”

Girard--known to his intimates as “Dougie”--has spent most of his life in and out of youth camps and jails. Police and court records say Girard, 32, and Teresi, 39, are heroin addicts.

Teresi, described by police as the alleged “driver of the getaway car and possible lookout,” has a similar history of convictions. He was captured by Brea police in 1983 after accidentally shooting himself in the leg with a .57-caliber deringer at the end of a string of armed robberies in Orange County. Teresi was then living at his brother’s house in Anaheim.

He has other Orange County roots: His estranged wife, with whom he has an 11-year-old child, was a Garden Grove resident when she filed for divorce in 1989.

Girard is short, with slicked-back, red-brown hair, the fourth of six children. He was born to a mechanic and a housewife in Waco, Tex. The family moved when he was a youngster to South Bay.

Vincent Girard recalls his brother’s first brush with the law as an arrest, along with two brothers and some neighbor children, for stealing pigeons from a cage on the roof of a Wilmington fish market. The charges were later dropped, the younger Girard said.

But Douglas kept stealing bikes and breaking into cars, his brother said. “All we knew was crime,” Vincent Girard said. “Your surroundings make you what you are. And once you put a kid in jail, that’s it. He just gets harder and harder.”

Times staff writers Jenifer Warren and Eric Lichtblau contributed to this story.