Girl Who Melted a Tough Judge Doesn’t Get a Second Chance

It wasn’t supposed to end this way.

Not the case of Felicia Bell, the teen-age looter, barely five feet tall, who had come before one of the county’s toughest judges to apologize “for my stupidity”--and thus changed the way hundreds of riot prosecutions were handled in Long Beach.

Superior Court Judge Arthur Jean, a former gang prosecutor, on the spot scrapped plans to sentence all that city’s looters to at least 90 days in jail. After reading the letters on Bell’s behalf from her pastor and grandmother and from the young black woman herself (“I’ve hurt my family, my church, myself”), he decided to go much easier, to impose community service on all those, like Bell, who had clean records before they were swept up in the riots of 1992.

It was exactly a year ago today that Bell, then 18, got her moment of fame as the looter who melted a judge’s heart, an encounter that provided a touch of healing optimism during the season of darkness in Los Angeles.

But it was also a year ago today that Bell again wound up under arrest. And this time it was not for anything as impersonal as looting a shirt from a swap meet. The charge was battery on a 90-pound Korean-American woman.

Attorneys later debated whether the events of that day were best described as a racial incident, ethnic “miscommunication” or merely the cruelest of ironies--one of the quickest cases ever of someone paying a price for fame.

Whatever it was called, the result was the same. Felicia Bell, the onetime symbol of optimism, today sits in jail.

*

June 14, 1992, was a Sunday and, after services at New Jerusalem Baptist Church, Bell met up with two girlfriends and headed for Venice to join the weekend throngs along the strand.

All three had cause to celebrate. Lynette Smith, 21, was advancing her career as a dancer, winning a prized regular spot on “Soul Train.” Also making inroads in show biz was Chandralekka Scott, then 18, whose infant daughter had the cute looks perfect for TV commercials. What’s more, she was pregnant again, just weeks away from having another girl.

And Bell? Well, that was the day her touching story made the front page of The Times. But the others had not seen the article yet.

“I wanted to know what the judge said about Felicia,” Scott explained later.

So they left the beach to find a news rack. One was outside a small grocery. Scott picked up a paper and, by her own account, walked a few steps past the entrance to the grocery--without having paid for the paper.

The owners emerged, Korean immigrants who were husband and wife. The tiny woman was pointing at her eyes, indicating she was watching Scott. Her husband, meanwhile, was “yelling angrily at us,” Scott said.

The man grabbed the thick Sunday paper. Scott said the plastic strip around it caught on her wristwatch and pulled her to the ground. She said her friends, concerned about her pregnant condition, moved in to help her.

But a witness--a hostess at a restaurant across the street--disputed the claim of self-defense. She said the three young women simply ganged up on the Korean woman, Ja Suk Sim, 37, knocking her to the ground, stomping her and pulling out tufts of her hair.

It got worse. Sim’s husband went back in the store to find a pipe. A car valet at the restaurant, a Latino, tried to intervene but was stopped by other onlookers, young black men. Soon they were fighting, too.

Blacks fighting Koreans. Latinos fighting blacks. The city’s worst tensions were exploding right there in the street.

The restaurant hostess called the police. When they arrived, they arrested the trio of friends, including Felicia Bell, and seized Exhibit A, the newspaper.

*

After several delays, Case No. SA010633 came to trial last month in Santa Monica Superior Court, before Judge Robert W. Thomas.

The defense attorneys downplayed the incident as a misunderstanding. One spotlighted the “language problems” of the grocers. Another argued that Bell and her friends might have been fearful for their lives, aware of how a Korean grocer shot an African-American teen-ager, Latasha Harlins, the year before. And Scott’s attorney said “this whole situation is rather ironic,” noting how the women merely wanted to read about Bell’s role as a repentant defendant.

“You can tell by looking . . . they’re not tough girls, they’re not gang girls,” he said.

But the judge said the one impartial witness had been persuasive. He found the trio guilty of battery, a misdemeanor.

He sentenced Scott and Smith to 100 hours community service. The implications were greater for Bell, however, because she was on probation from her riot conviction. Thomas set her sentencing for last Friday--and warned that her freedom might end then.

“I want to cry,” Bell said as she left court, “but I’m not going to.”

*

She didn’t cry, either, when she faced the music Friday.

Her attorney said she was planning to enter Long Beach City College in August and appealed to the judge to “show a little more patience.” But there was no attempt to put on a big display this time, with emotional appeals from her minister and the like.

Indeed, Deputy Dist. Atty. Steve Barshop reminded the judge how Bell had talked her way into “this incredible break” in Long Beach.

The history was not lost on her Santa Monica judge.

“You convinced the court you were somebody special and then you come back and violate the law . . . You violated a trust,” Thomas said.

“This is not the most horrible event that has happened in this city,” he added, “(but) I do have to give you jail time.”

He gave her 90 days--the same term that Judge Jean had planned to impose a year earlier, before she stepped before him and melted his heart.