Judge Vaults Rail, Helps Nab Escaping Defendant

To the horror of his clerk and the astonishment of a prosecutor, a Los Angeles federal judge bolted from his bench Monday afternoon and, his black robe flowing, dashed after a defendant attempting to escape the courtroom, helping to nab him with a hammerlock.

“I felt like a young man,” U.S. District Judge Dickran Tevrizian said afterward. “I’m 50 years old. This guy is 24 years old.”

News of the judge’s derring-do quickly reached his boss, Chief U.S. District Judge Manuel L. Real.

“He called me Wyatt Earp,” Tevrizian said in a telephone interview.

In federal court, Mondays are set aside for sentencings. Many courtrooms are crowded with defendants, families and lawyers. However, Tevrizian’s courtroom was almost empty. The judge had just read a pre-sentencing report on defendant Timothy D. Stone, 24, who had pleaded guilty to distributing 360 grams of crack cocaine.

Under federal guidelines, Tevrizian said Stone was looking at a prison sentence of almost 20 years. The defendant, a wiry man who stands about six feet tall and weighs about 170 pounds, was seated on a bench near Deputy U.S. Marshal Frederick Robinson when he dashed for the doors at the rear of the courtroom.

What followed was reminiscent of the Keystone Kops.

The marshal, of course, dashed after his prisoner.

But so did Tevrizian, a 5-foot-9, 180-pounder who still packs plenty of muscle from his youth when he was an all-city gymnast at Los Angeles High School and, later, made the team at USC.

“The defendant’s actions didn’t surprise me as much as the judge’s,” said Stone’s prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Atty. Yvette M. Palazuelos, who joined the federal prosecutor’s staff last fall. “I think he was rather courageous.”

With 20-20 hindsight, Tevrizian reflected that he might have second thoughts about chasing an admitted drug dealer again.

“He’s leaner, thinner and meaner,” the judge said.

Even so, with his clerk yelling, “Stop judge! Stop!” Tevrizian said he hurdled the low swinging rails at the front of the courtroom, dashed out the main doors and sped down the corridor.

The judge said he was concerned because his courtroom is level with Spring Street, and he thought that Stone had a chance of making it to freedom.

In a few moments, Tevrizian ran into the marshal, who was struggling with Stone in the corridor.

“We tackled him and put hammerlocks on him,” the judge said.

Tevrizian was miffed that people milling about did not help out.

“There were 40 people in the hallway and nobody lifted a finger. Nobody came to our assistance,” the judge said.

In a few seconds, however, other marshals responded to an alarm button Tevrizian had hit before he leaped off the bench.

Stone was handcuffed and hauled back into the courtroom. Then Tevrizian--saying he did not want it to appear that “I would pile it on him”--excused himself from the case so that another judge could pronounce sentence. It will be up to the marshal’s office to decide if charges should be filed in the escape attempt, the judge said.

Tevrizian, on the federal bench for five years, said his ego will be unaffected by his heroics.

“No matter how much the purse is, I refuse to fight Mike Tyson,” he said.