It Wasn’t a Year That O.C. Is Likely to Fondly Recall : 1992 THE YEAR IN REVIEW. <i> A Year of Pain, Misfortune and Triumphs</i>

A dramatic New Year’s Eve bank holdup launched Orange County into a 1992 that saw flashes of promise doused by scandal, tragedy and economic freefall.

It was a year held hostage by a recession so bleak that it would shake even local Republicans’ confidence in a President born of their own political stripe.

Businesses like the Irvine Co., once thought to be impregnable, talked of vulnerability, then announced layoffs.

Long buoyed by rich tax bases, area governments and schools were forced to make unprecedented budget cuts. In tiny Seal Beach, the need for fiscal belt-tightening led to discussions of such desperate measures as surrendering control of the city’s beach to the state--which was avoided.

Springtime brought fear as rioting in Los Angeles moved local firefighters to duty dodging bullets while quelling fires in a war zone that was South Los Angeles.

And by year’s end, a string of alleged improprieties involving officials from Anaheim to Laguna Hills continued to rage with the careers of a supervisor and police chief gripped by criminal or internal investigations.

Nearly lost in all that gloom were the stories that brought great relief and news of personal triumph that would spare Orange County from suffering Queen Elizabeth’s annus horribilis.

Robbie Shinn, the infant son of a Westminster police officer, made a miraculous recovery from heart-transplant surgery, while Garden Grove’s Tony Lam helped rewrite political history as the first Vietnamese-American in the nation elected to public office.

For Anaheim, the Walt Disney Co. made an early Christmas present of a National Hockey League franchise to partly fill a sports arena that, if left empty, would have cost city residents there about $20 million over eight years.

Nevertheless, history is apt to record 1992 as the year Orange County--long held as the state’s bastion of wealth and conservatism--ran headlong into an identity crisis.

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The year was perhaps no better defined than on Election Day, when historic voting patterns were shattered. California’s most solidly Republican county, rocked by the sagging economy, duly registered its fears that day at the ballot box.

President Bush, who carried Orange County by a nearly 2-to-1 margin in 1988, received the lowest tally of any Republican presidential candidate in more than 50 years.

In one of the state’s two U.S. Senate races, barely half of the county’s voters backed Republican native son John Seymour--a former mayor of Anaheim--as he went down to defeat against Dianne Feinstein. Bruce Herschensohn, the GOP nominee in the other Senate race, did better than Seymour and Bush, but he, too, fell short.

Despite the public defections of prominent party stalwarts who included Western Digital chief Roger W. Johnson, Irvine developer Kathryn Thompson and Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder, county Republican leaders insisted that the strength of their party was still intact since all of the county’s incumbent GOP state and federal lawmakers won reelection.

But county Democrats were still gleeful, seeing opportunity in the fact that the seemingly invincible Republican machinery had been shaken. Democratic leaders vowed in the next election to make an aggressive bid to unseat Republican incumbents.

Another uppercut at the county’s conservatism landed with much surprise when Superior Court Judge James P. Gray announced his support for the legalization of marijuana, cocaine and heroin for adults. He declared that America was losing its war on drugs.

Appearing at various public forums, the judge set off a firestorm of controversy with pronouncements that the current drug laws were ineffective. He said the laws actually perpetuated crime, creating an enormous financial drain on the criminal justice system.

Politicians and local law-enforcement officials immediately denounced Gray’s plan and challenged his fitness for office. But in the months after Gray’s April statements, the debate broadened considerably when two other judges--U.S. Magistrate Ronald Rose and Superior Court Judge James L. Smith--said they, too, supported some sort of drug decriminalization.

Since then, Gray and Rose have been invited to speak about their positions at forums throughout the country.

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With judges taking particularly public positions, changes also were being noted on courtroom dockets. Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard M. King, who oversees homicide prosecutions for the Orange County district attorney’s office, said the year brought a “phenomenal increase” in the number of high-profile murder and death-penalty cases going to trial.

In the New Year’s Eve bank robbery at a Bank of America branch in Placentia, hostages who had been taken by a lone gunman where freed unharmed just before midnight, and the gunman subsequently killed himself after a freeway chase by police. In the courtroom, prosecutors took 66 homicide cases to trial, including a record six death-penalty cases.

Typically, the office has only a few death penalty and murder cases awaiting trial. King credited the rising number of homicide trials to increased crime and his office’s policy against plea bargains in such cases.

Notable cases presented to Superior Court juries in 1992 included women, children and the elderly as victims or defendants.

Aamong these was the case of Maria (Rosie) del Rosio Alfaro. In July, the 20-year-old mother of four, convicted in the stabbing death of 9-year-old Autumn Wallace of Anaheim, became the first Orange County woman condemned to Death Row. The child, who at the time of the murder had just returned home from school, was stabbed 57 times and left to die on her bathroom floor.

Going from the tragic to the truly bizarre, local courtroom watchers sat transfixed by the testimony of Omaima Nelson. The 26-year-old former model of Costa Mesa cried as she recounted years of alleged abuse, beginning when she was a child and continuing at the hands of her husband, whom she was accused of killing and dismembering. Authorities contended that Nelson chopped his body into pieces, stuffing parts into garbage bags. The man’s head and hands were boiled.

There was other testimony to the effect that Nelson had cooked and eaten her husband’s ribs, but later in the trial she contradicted those claims.

As criminal cases go, Martin Jarvies’ scrapes with the law would never be categorized as notorious, but he became a familiar figure just the same. The 22-year-old Balboa Island resident, who raises exotic animals, was cited three times in 1992, each time in disputes over the use of his animals.

His first encounter with authorities came after a pet monkey took a bite of a Fashion Island shopper in February. His odyssey through the legal system culminated when authorities found Jarvies back at the posh Newport Beach shopping center in July, trying to sell tiger cubs from the back seat of his BMW. In an interview, Jarvies said he was not a criminal, only a lover of big cats.

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Santa Ana police officers will not forget the carnage they found Sept. 20 when called to the worst traffic accident in Orange County history. Eight people were killed and 11 were injured when a church van en route to Sunday evening services near the Civic Center was broadsided by a pickup truck.

Because the van’s rear seats were not bolted to the floor and lacked seat belts, the impact scattered victims throughout the intersection of Civic Center Drive and Flower Street. So distraught were officers who had responded to the crash that officials also dispatched psychologists to provide counseling to the public safety workers.

This month, officials elected not to prosecute the van’s driver, Octavio Valentin, the church’s pastor. But police are still searching for the pickup truck’s driver, 23-year-old Fernando Hernandez Flores, who managed to escape on foot after the crash.

Never had peace been known to result from meetings of rival gangs, but over the past year in Orange County, gang members have fashioned a tenuous truce. The pact, negotiated in January from regular meetings at a Santa Ana park, has won praise from law enforcement and area leaders.

In August, about 500 Latino gang members from across Orange County codified the arrangement with a formal treaty signing that brought promises of broad disarmament and nonviolence. The action led to an unusual visit from Roman Catholic Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles, who met with local gang leaders to learn--among other things--how the Orange County experience could be duplicated in gang-infested Los Angeles.

“This is a historic moment, homeboy,” longtime gang member Pete Ojeda said at the treaty signing. “It’s something that we all want. All the killings of innocent people, it’s not necessary.”

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Largely because of a massive, $11-billion state budget shortfall, the task of governing Orange County and its cities and of operating its schools seemed to become more problematic by the day.

Before Gov. Pete Wilson signed the new state budget in September, local governments were already preparing for the worst. In county government, financial uncertainties dominated the year as the Board of Supervisors froze positions, cut back on an array of health and social services and shut some facilities to cope with budget deficits.

A drastic slowdown in development in recent years prompted the county to consolidate programs and cut positions by 20% at its Environmental Management Agency. Supervisors went so far as to order the closing of nearly three dozen facilities on alternate Fridays, beginning in February, in an attempt at further cost savings.

The summer’s state budget crisis took its toll at public colleges and universities too. Cal State Fullerton and UC Irvine were hit with the most extensive layoffs of part-time instructors and staffers in memory. Fees at both institutions jumped dramatically--about 40% at CSUF and about 24% at UCI.

CSUF President Milton A. Gordon finally acceded to the inevitable: He dropped the school’s football program for next year, with hopes of reinstating it later on a lesser level.

In April, UCI lost its leader. Chancellor Jack W. Peltason was the surprise choice of University of California regents to succeed the retiring David P. Gardner as president of the nine-campus state university system. A replacement for Peltason at UCI is expected to be named by spring.

Until this year, cities had little reason to contemplate the suffering that deep service cuts would cause, but for most, not even police and fire departments were spared in ’92.

In Santa Ana, which has served as a symbol for some of the county’s most severe social problems, city officials met limited success in their attempts to control problems related to gangs, overcrowded housing and the homeless.

The city’s best results came with its ordinance making it unlawful to sleep or camp outdoors--a law aimed at controlling the homeless population in the city. Assisted by homeless advocates, those living on the Civic Center grounds dismantled their tents and shanties to comply with the ordinance.

While the homeless population is not as visible as it once was, the case is not closed. Public-interest lawyers have joined forces to challenge similar ordinances recently enacted across Southern California.

For some municipalities, there was reason to rejoice.

On a picture-postcard day, thousands of Southern Californians flocked to Huntington Beach in July for the opening of the city’s new, $10.8-million pier. The new structure replaced the 76-year-old landmark that closed in 1988.

In Anaheim, residents are still buzzing about the Walt Disney Co.’s acquisition of National Hockey League team to play in its $103-million sports arena, set to open in the summer. With a $3-billion Disneyland expansion in the works, the hockey franchise reinforces the entertainment company’s dominant presence in the city.

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With all of the county’s recession-related sufferings, there was surely no need for other financial blows. But 1992 brought misdeeds, admitted or alleged, that cost taxpayers millions.

It started in Orange with reports that the city’s investment adviser, Stephen Wymer, had helped himself to $7 million in municipal funds. From that point, persons touched by allegations of impropriety included a veritable who’s who of local government. In Newport Beach alone, losses to white-collar crime amounted to more than $4 million.

Among the featured players: Supervisor Don R. Roth, the subject of investigations into allegations of influence peddling; Stephen A. Wagner, former Newport-Mesa Unified School District official who pleaded guilty to stealing $3.5 million in school funds; Newport Beach utilities chief Robert J. Dixon, convicted of embezzling $1.8 million, and Laguna Hills attorney James D. Gunderson, who arranged to inherit millions of dollars from elderly Leisure World residents for whom he drew wills. Gunderson is now the subject of investigations by agencies including the Sheriff’s Department and state and local bar associations.

Controversy also spread to the Newport Beach Police Department, where at year’s end Chief Arb Campbell and Capt. Anthony Villa Jr. were fired in the wake of sexual harassment allegations leveled by present and former female employees of the department.

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From perhaps the most unlikely of sources came the nation’s largest labor organization drive. After more than five months of picketing construction sites in the county and throughout Southern California, striking drywall workers forced construction subcontractors to recognize their union.

The workers’ plight first captured local attention in July when about 150 strikers--all Mexican immigrants--were arrested after running onto a construction site and intimidating strikebreakers. It was largest mass arrest in recent memory in Orange County.

Earlier this month, reports of mass starvation in Somalia caused the mobilization of about 3,000 local Marines. The troops are among a U.S. contingent of 28,000 troops to protect food shipments from bands of heavily armed marauders.

Many of the local Marines deployed to Somalia were among the force sent to the Persian Gulf and would spend their second holiday season in three years away from family and friends.

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Commuters reaped the first benefits of a massive, $1.6-billion Interstate 5 widening project with the opening of a freeway stretch widened from six to 12 lanes. The newly opened segment is between the confluence of Interstate 5 and the San Diego Freeway, better known as the El Toro Y, on the south, and Newport Avenue on the north.

But while commuters on that segment rejoiced, users of the “Orange Crush”--the interchange of the Garden Grove, Santa Ana and Orange Freeways--were severely inconvenienced by the closing of several connector ramps. Nearby residents also reeled under the double pain of pile driving, part of the freeway reconstruction effort and detours that sent motorists speeding down some residential streets.

Motorists received a break in early June when new car-pool lanes on the Orange Freeway opened, from Lambert Road to the Orange Crush. This was the first project built with money from Measure M, the half-cent sales tax for transportation improvements that county voters approved in November, 1990.

The county’s most publicized bird species--other than the swallows of San Juan Capistrano--remained in the news in 1992. The area’s builders and developers continued their unrelenting opposition to a proposal to list the California gnatcatcher as endangered.

The small, blue-gray songbird nests in sagebrush that grows in some of Southern California’s most valuable land, including the canyons around Ortega Highway and the hills between Newport Beach and Laguna Beach.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was supposed to decide by September whether to declare the gnatcatcher endangered, but it granted a last-minute delay until March.

Times Staff Writers Marla Cone, Lily Dizon, Matt Lait, Dave Lesher, Eric Lichtblau, Kristina Lindgren, Rene Lynch, Gebe Martinez, Jeffrey Perlman, Mark Pinsky, Jodi Wilgoren and Eric Young contributed to this report.