No Contest Plea Entered for Battery by Ex-Officer

A former Torrance police officer pleaded no contest Thursday to charges of battery and false imprisonment for grabbing a Lancaster woman and trying to pull her into his car last January.

Roland Sabara, 35, was ordered to appear April 29 in Lancaster Superior Court, when he will be sent to state prison for 90 days to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, Deputy Dist. Atty. Chesley McKay said.

He faces as much as a year in County Jail but may be ordered only to serve probation, McKay said, noting that he will base his recommendation on the results of the evaluation. A charge of attempted kidnaping will be dropped after Sabara is sentenced, he said.

“I want to know what’s wrong with him,” McKay said. “This kind of behavior is not normal, and the fact that he was a peace officer at the time, . . . well, I’d like to see if we can get to the root of the problem and protect the general public.”

Sabara, a six-year veteran of the Torrance Police Department and a former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy, resigned his Torrance position after the department placed him on administrative leave pending the outcome of the criminal case.

The Antelope Valley resident was arrested on suspicion of attempted kidnaping Jan. 31 after witnesses told sheriff’s deputies that he had harassed several women that afternoon and then suddenly grabbed one woman as she stepped into her car.

The woman, who said she had never seen Sabara before, struggled free, managed to shut her car door and drove to a nearby auto repair shop, where a friend called deputies.

Investigators tracked Sabara down using a license number provided by witnesses.

It was not his first scrape with the law.

In August, 1990, Sabara drove his truck through a fence and into the side of a Redondo Beach house early one morning. As neighbors ran to their windows to see what the commotion was, Sabara backed up and drove away. He turned himself in the next day, just minutes after the house’s resident had discovered the license plate from Sabara’s truck in the collision debris.

He pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor hit-and-run driving charge and was sentenced to two years probation and ordered to pay a $612 fine.

His no-contest pleas Thursday place him in violation of his probation on the Redondo Beach case, McKay said.

Sabara has declined to comment on either case.