Closing Arguments Heard in Ex-Officer’s 2nd Trial

Superior Court jurors must decide whether a former Long Beach police officer, being tried for a second time, acted intentionally when he shot a driver during a traffic dispute, attorneys said in closing arguments Monday.

In October, a jury deadlocked 8 to 4 to convict Alan B. Ice, 47, in the wounding of Neil Cramer, a 37-year-old Santa Ana carpenter.

The incident took place Sept. 28, 1991, at a traffic light on Ward Street in Fountain Valley. Cramer, who was driving his camper with his girlfriend and 12-year-old daughter, swerved into an adjoining lane--in front of the off-duty officer--to avoid a boy who had fallen off his bicycle.

Ice began blowing his horn, and at the stop light words were exchanged. Cramer testified that he made an obscene gesture to Ice and spit on his car. Ice, a 21-year police veteran, testified that he reached for his gun when he thought Cramer was reaching for something that might have been a gun but which turned out to be a hammer.

Ice fired once, hitting Cramer and puncturing his lung. Cramer has fully recovered.

Ice is charged with assault with a firearm and firing into an occupied vehicle.

Since the incident, Ice, who was cited in a 1981 Long Beach Press-Telegram series on police brutality, was dismissed from the force for firing his gun “intentionally and without justification.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Clyde P. Von Der Ahe said the shooting was not accidental but the result of “two immature men and the way they reacted to one another.”

The prosecutor used a chart with two large, red thermometers to illustrate the escalating “male, macho” dispute between the two men.

One of the functions of the rule of law, Von Der Ahe said, is “to protect the hotheads from each other. . . . Shooting at someone who has spit on your car is not appropriate,” especially in light of the two innocent people sitting with Cramer.

But Ice’s attorney, John D. Barnett, told jurors that the off-duty officer fired accidentally when his vehicle surged forward and his defective driver’s seat suddenly rocked back.

The issues for jurors to consider, Barnett said, did not include self-defense, provocation or justification.

“The car did surge,” Barnett said. “The seat did rock.”

Ice, he said, may have been negligent in reaching for the gun and handling it.

“Mr Ice wasn’t very professional,” Barnett said. “He was stupid, but he wasn’t criminal.”