Food Fight : Ticket for ‘Eating’ Sticks in Man’s Craw

It was a bitter pill to swallow. And we’re not talking about the cough drop that Ricky Gonzales popped in his mouth while he waited for the Blue Line trolley.

What sticks in Gonzales’ craw is the $250 ticket that a sheriff’s deputy handed him for “illegally eating” as he stood last month on the commuter line’s Florence Avenue passenger platform.

Gonzales, unemployed and recently arrived from the Paiute Indian Reservation in Nevada, claims he was nursing a sore throat when he reached for the Halls Mentho-Lyptus Cough Suppressant Tablet. He was written up for eating “hard candy.”

Today, Gonzales, a resident of Long Beach, plans to go to the Compton Traffic Court to fight the citation.

“I had the flu that day,” Gonzales said of his Nov. 23 trolley ride. “But my wife was sick too. So she asked me to go to the Indian Center in Commerce for her to pick up a Thanksgiving turkey. I wasn’t eating. Cough drops aren’t food.”

Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies who patrol the Blue Line say they don’t consider cough drops as food either. But candy is--and it accounted for many of the 139 tickets for eating that deputies wrote last month on the trolley route.

“We want the trains clean and looking nice,” said Sheriff’s Sgt. Robert Costa. “But we encourage deputies to use common sense when they see something in someone’s mouth.”

Transit police who patrol the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s companion Red Line are encouraged to do the same, according to Police Capt. Dennis Conte. Officers there have issued 250 food citations so far this year.

He said officers usually look the other way when passengers are carrying food, as county auditor’s worker Alfonso Valenzuela was doing the other day as he toted a bag of chocolate-chip cookies off the subway at the Civic Center station.

But passengers tell stories of commuters being ticketed for such things as feeding a baby a bottle and carrying groceries.

“A guy down at the other station there told me he got a ticket for chewing gum,” commuter Henry Perkins said Monday as he waited at the Florence platform.

George Bird Jr., a Torrance lawyer who has volunteered to help Gonzales, said he’ll ask that the throat lozenge case be dismissed.

Bird said that his client has gotten over the flu but is still jobless and has a 2-month-old child to support.

This is not a good time for Gonzales to have to cough up a $250 fine.