Attempted Murder Charge Divides Community Activists : Courts: Neighborhood Watch volunteer faces pretrial hearing in sidewalk assault that he says was self-defense.

William J. Nason says he wasn’t trying to kill anybody. Patrolling the streets as a Neighborhood Watch volunteer, he says he had no choice but to defend himself when an alleged drug dealer came at him with a knife.

Is he a crime-fighter or a would-be killer? Police and prosecutors say the latter. They have charged Nason with attempted murder, relying on the testimony of one of his comrades in the Hollywood Sentinels, a loosely organized community safety group. He is scheduled for a pretrial hearing Jan. 13.

The April 1 beating with a flashlight left Roberto T. Tamayo, a 25-year-old Mexican immigrant, with a broken jaw, multiple skull fractures and severe nerve and muscle damage, including a wayward eye and a voice that has been reduced to a hoarse whisper.

The incident also rattled the morale and heightened differences within the ranks of the Hollywood Sentinels, a volunteer group hailed by Reader’s Digest for ridding its city streets of blatant drug-dealing five years ago.

Some of the Sentinels who still actively patrol the streets are angry about Nason’s arrest in the early morning hours of April 2. They say it shows the Los Angeles Police Department cannot be counted on to work with them against dope peddlers and prostitutes.

“If it was self-defense . . . and (Nason) goes to jail, then I don’t really see how we can defend ourselves, when the police won’t answer a lot of calls from the Sentinels,” said Kedron Nicholson, who was with Nason that night.

But others in the group are dismayed by the outburst of violence, saying they get along fine with the LAPD, whose officers joined them in sponsoring a holiday picnic for neighborhood children earlier this month.

“What we had to deal with in ’88 was extremely severe,” said Debbie Wehbe, who helped found the group. “Everyone was afraid to go out of the house. No one let their kids on the streets.”

Since then, she said, most of the Sentinels have concentrated on graffiti paint-outs, tree-plantings and other long-term efforts to improve their neighborhood, which lies between Santa Monica Boulevard on the south and Sunset Boulevard on the north, and between Highland Avenue on the west and Wilcox Avenue on the east.

“The Police Department can take care of those individuals they deem unsavory,” she said. “We just want to keep our neighborhood a nice, happy place.”

Tamayo remembers little of the incident, which left him lying in a pool of blood on the 1100 block of North Seward Street late the night of April 1.

After a month in intensive care, he spent four months at the adult brain injury unit of Rancho Los Amigos in Downey, where intensive physical therapy helped him overcome the paralysis that immobilized his left side.

Tamayo, once a horse handler at local race tracks, can now stand and walk, though with some difficulty. He speaks in a rasping whisper and has difficulty drinking and eating because of a chronic cough.

“He’s physically terribly impaired and there is so much nerve damage that he has no awareness of any kind of danger. You have to be around him the whole time,” said John Read, a 66-year-old British-born actor who is caring for Tamayo at Read’s North Hollywood home.

Read, who played the role of the transporter chief, Lt. Kyle, on the original “Star Trek” series, said he has known Tamayo for three years. He said he was asked to look out for the younger man by a relative of Tamayo’s he met during a visit to Mexico.

“I looked at him and didn’t recognize him; he was so misshapen,” Read said of this first time he saw Tamayo in the hospital. “I made a commitment to help him.”

Although he remembers getting drunk at a party that night, the 5-foot-6 Tamayo, who has a record of three drug arrests, recalls little else about the events that followed. He noted that police never found a knife at the scene.

“I just want the police to lock him up,” he said of Nason, 28, who spent a week in jail before being released on bail. For now, the 6-foot-1, 180-pound Nason is under a court-ordered curfew that keeps him indoors after dark.

Nason and other witnesses said Tamayo had tangled with other members of the community patrol earlier that night, jumping on cars, picking fights with people at bus stops and throwing trash cans into the street.

After Tamayo offered to sell him some marijuana, Nason said, the two started arguing and the smaller man came at him with a knife. Nason said he tried to defend himself with a chemical spray.

“First I Maced him, and he kept on coming, then I used the flashlight,” Nason said. “I’m not sure where I hit him. I was swinging my flashlight wildly to get him away from me.”

His account is at odds with that of prosecution witness Jean-Michel Ormand, who was patrolling with Nason and others that night, a few hours after a visit to the Sentinels by City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg.

Ormand testified at a preliminary hearing that he came upon the scene after the Mace was sprayed.

Watching through binoculars, he said, he saw Nason run after Tamayo, knock him down, kneel on the sidewalk and beat him on the head about half a dozen times.

Nason then returned to the group, reported that the man was “lying there scared” and everyone went home, Ormand said.

Worried about Tamayo’s condition, Ormand came back a few minutes later, saw him lying in the same position with blood all over the sidewalk and called for help.

Based on that account, police went to Nason’s apartment, where he was arrested at 3:30 a.m.

Although his family hired a private attorney, Nason has since fired him. He said the lawyer suggested pursuing a plea bargain, which Nason considers “ludicrous.”

He said his actions were in line with the call by the LAPD’s Hollywood area commander, Capt. John Higgins, for local groups to help the understaffed force patrol their own neighborhoods.

“This is what we did, and I’m being persecuted by the police for trying to make my neighborhood safer,” said Nason, who operates a small import-export business with his fiancee.

Higgins was on vacation last week. Capt. Stuart Maislin, who was taking his place, said he was not familiar with the case.

“There’s a time and place for people’s involvement, and to get physically involved and risk their own safety is not what we expect them to do, and not what we want them to do,” Maislin said.

“We’re totally supportive of Neighborhood Watch,” said Philip Wojdak, the deputy district attorney prosecuting the case. “The fact that (Nason’s) on Neighborhood Watch patrol explains why he was there. But the interaction between him and victim in this case, it just goes completely outside of anything having to do with Neighborhood Watch.”