Patrol Car Ferried Judge During Fires : Police: Captain says he ordered ride for Edward Rafeedie after fearing he’d misled him about survival of his Malibu home.

When roadblocks across the charred Santa Monica Mountains limited access to fire-ravaged neighborhoods last week, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department used a patrol car to transport a federal judge from the Downtown courthouse to his Malibu residence.

The patrol unit, assigned at the time to the city of Calabasas, was dispatched Thursday morning to Downtown to pick up U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie and his wife, Ruth. They were driven in the car to their home in Malibu. After confirming that the house was unharmed, the Rafeedies rode back Downtown. In all, the car was out of service for five hours and 15 minutes.

Capt. Donald Mauro, commanding officer of the Lost Hills/Malibu Sheriff’s substation, took full responsibility. He said the judge did not request the ride, which was ordered after sheriff’s officials feared they had misled him about whether the home survived.

The incident started, Mauro said, when his secretary received a message last week that one of the houses in the hard-hit Rambla Pacifico area belonged to a federal judge.

On his own, Mauro said, he had a unit check out the house and relayed to Rafeedie the news that it was OK. But a friend phoned him to say the judge was still receiving calls of sympathy for the loss of his house.

“Then I got worried,” Mauro said. “Was there room for a screw-up on this?”

He dispatched another deputy, who reported the house destroyed.

As it happened, Rafeedie’s house is the only one on his street that didn’t burn, and its numbers were scorched off, leading to the mix-up by the second deputy.

Rafeedie, appointed to the federal bench in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan, has a reputation among government and private attorneys as one of the toughest, gruffest and most street-smart judges in the federal courthouse.

A USC law graduate, Rafeedie, 64, may be the only onetime carnival barker to have made it to the federal bench. Just before and after World War II, he made a living running carnival rides at the old Pacific Ocean Park in Santa Monica and later traveled the carny circuit with a portable horse race game called Derby.

Rafeedie could not be reached for comment Saturday.

Mauro said the trip was consistent with services the Sheriff’s Department was offering to other residents.

“We transported lots of people into the back side of Topanga and Malibu in areas that were closed off or were difficult to access,” he said.

Those residents, however, rode in three sheriff’s vans that picked up people stopped at sheriff’s roadblocks.

Calabasas Councilwoman Karyn Foley said she viewed the incident as an abuse of public resources but was inclined to judge leniently, considering the heroic service performed by the Sheriff’s Department during the fires.