Police Group Honors Officers, Civilians for Their Heroic Acts

Officer Scott Hebert of the Oxnard Police Department knows what it’s like to go out on a limb--or in this case, a 12-inch ledge on an overpass 60 feet above a major highway.

Responding to a message on his car radio on a mid-September day in 1991, Hebert and Officer Randy Coates raced to the Channel Islands Boulevard overpass of California 1 to find a woman standing on a concrete ledge outside the bridge’s chain-link fence.

As a Fire Department rescue team moved into position below, Hebert tried for almost an hour to calm the woman. She inched back and forth along the ledge, leaned backward and occasionally held onto the fence with only one hand. Spontaneously, Hebert made a judgment call.

He climbed out onto the ledge, sat with the woman and talked with her--long enough for the Fire Department to hoist a ladder within arm’s length.

“When I got out there, I had some serious white knuckles holding onto that fence,” Hebert recalled last week. “I thought, Whoa! She even tried to jump through the ladder on the way down, but I grabbed her.”

Hebert is one of several police officers and civilians across the county who were honored at the 19th Annual Medal of Valor awards dinner Saturday evening.

Hosted by the Peace Officers Assn. of Ventura County, the event at the Doubletree Hotel in Ventura attracted about 400 guests.

Hebert wasn’t trying to be a hero, he said, but was just doing his job. “We are trained in police academy to deal with suicidal subjects, but a lot of it is just common sense,” he said. “You play it by ear.”

For going that extra yard while risking life and limb, the Peace Officers Assn. awarded Hebert with Ventura County law enforcement’s highest honor--the Medal of Valor.

“It was exciting,” Hebert said. “It’s the stuff all police officers dream about. However, we don’t always get recognition when it happens.”

Officer Gary Jones of the Ventura Police Department also was awarded the Medal of Valor.

Jones had been working traffic control at the Ventura Fairgrounds on Garden Street last August when he saw a bus with about 40 passengers stall on the tracks near Harbor Boulevard.

“I was horrified when I looked up and saw a train approaching,” Jones said.

He sprinted more than 50 yards to the driver’s window and shouted to the driver, who unintentionally backed farther onto the tracks, positioning the bus away from the roadway.

With the train bearing down on the bus at 65 m.p.h. and the panicked passengers screaming, Jones continued to shout instructions to the driver, telling her to drive through a chain-link fence ahead. Finally, the driver got the bus in gear and drove through the fence, avoiding disaster by less than a second, witnesses said.

“I just reacted,” said Jones, who is married and has a 2-month-old son. “I wasn’t thinking about anything but getting that bus off the tracks.”

Jones said he is excited and honored about the medal. “I’m trying to keep a level head about the whole thing,” he said.

The highest civilian honor, the Medal of Merit, was posthumously awarded to Dominic Ortega, who drowned Feb. 8 while trying to pull a friend from a rain-swollen swimming hole in the Santa Paula Canyon.

Ortega, a 19-year-old Air National Guardsman, had set out on a hike with two friends, Darrel Brown, 21, and Brian Smith, 20. Midway through the hike, Brown headed for a popular swimming spot called the Punch Bowl. He dove in and was immediately pulled under by a whirlpool. Smith, who was standing on shore, pulled Brown out with a branch but could not reach Ortega, who had dived in to save his friend.

Other award recipients were:

* Pilots Chris Spangenberg and Dave Heald, crew chiefs Larry Hanson and John Hoelker, rescue crew members Earl Matthews and Bob Naef, and civilian volunteers Mark Smitley and Glenn Conley.

All are attached to the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department Aviation Unit Search and Rescue Teams, which flew about 20 missions and rescued 35 people during the deadly floods of Feb. 12.

All received Medal of Valor awards, except for Smitley and Conley, who received the Citizen’s Medal of Merit award.

* Officers Ron Chambers and Craig Reiners of the Simi Valley Police Department.

Chambers and Reiners fatally shot a Simi Valley man Dec. 1 as he pointed a gun at Michael Gennaro, who had been forced to lie face down on his front porch.

Both Chambers and Reiners received Medals of Merit for risking harm to save Gennaro’s life.

* James Adams, John Estrada and Raymond Landon, who on Feb. 6 chased, disarmed and held an Oxnard bank robbery suspect until police arrived. Each of the three was awarded the Citizen’s Medal of Merit.