77-Year-Old Stops Taggers on Bus With Citizen’s Arrest

The two teen-age taggers hardly noticed the 77-year-old man shuffling toward them on the city bus.

They should have.

B. R. Chavez was their worst nightmare--a senior citizen with an attitude. Chavez had been riding city buses in the San Fernando Valley for 12 years and hated “those brats” who want to mark public property with spray-paint. Before the bus had traveled a block, this diminutive retiree would make a citizen’s arrest of the 18- and 15-year-old boys, one of whom has since pleaded guilty to a charge of vandalism.

“I remember how the buses used to look in the morning, all clean and nice,” Chavez said. “Now it’s just terrible. The kids are out of control. I can’t stand it!”

On a recent Saturday morning, Chavez, after a late breakfast in a Van Nuys restaurant, got on a half-filled bus along Sepulveda Boulevard, heading to see some buddies at a bowling alley.

When he asked the teen-agers what they were doing, one of them looked at him, sneered and mumbled something in Spanish. The only word Chavez could make out was viejo, which means “old man.” Then the youth went back to tagging.

Chavez took out his wallet and held up a card. “I’m from city and county. I am going to have you arrested,” he said.

Chavez put the card back in his wallet before they noticed that it was his 1985 “sustaining membership” in the Republican Party. “It’s got an eagle on it,” he said. “From a ways back, it looks official.”

Chavez had noticed a police car up ahead.

“The police are waiting right up ahead,” he said. Chavez called to the bus driver: “Please stop the bus, I am going to make a citizen’s arrest.”

The police searched the boys, finding the markers and formalizing the arrests.

Chavez is a hero in the city attorney’s office, where they issued a news release about his heroic act. The 18-year-old was sentenced in Municipal Court to three days in jail, 30 days of graffiti removal and two years of probation. He was also banned from riding city buses, except to and from school, and from possessing any markers or spray-paint. The 15-year-old was released to the custody of his parents.

Chavez praised the police, courts and bus company for how the matter was handled. But that doesn’t mean they are off the hook forever.

Chavez said he gets along well with most of the bus drivers, but he has noticed that they sometimes speed away from the bus stop without letting senior citizens take their seats.

“One of these days I will see one of them fall,” Chavez said, “and that day I will report the driver.”