O.C. Couple See Nutrition-Violence Link : Research: Studies that criminals can be treated with vitamins intrigue pair. They’ve spent $1 million on crusade.

When their eldest son was brutally beaten and robbed in the parking lot of a bar in 1987, Everett (Red) and Mary Hodges blamed a criminal justice system they believed could have cured the attacker before he struck.

The San Clemente couple said they are convinced that if the assailant, who was never caught, had been in jail before, medical science could have been used to diagnose and treat a chemical imbalance at the root of his violence.

“This guy could have been treated if the criminal justice system had gotten its act together,” said Everett Hodges, 62, a semi-retired oilman and entrepreneur who, with his wife, has sunk $1 million so far in a crusade to stamp out violence--not with prisons, but with vitamins and minerals.

After their son’s attack in which he suffered a fractured skull, the couple decided, “by God, we are going to get the word out,” Hodges recalled.

His excitement has proved contagious.

Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside), who said he “was caught up by Red’s enthusiasm,” has authored a bill to allow nutritional analysis and research on juveniles in the California Youth Authority system and on adult prison inmates and parolees to help determine if chemical imbalances cause violent behavior, and if there’s a cure.

Having passed the Legislature, the bill is now on the governor’s desk. He is expected to review it next week.

If the bill becomes law, it will be just one more milestone on a tortuous campaign for Hodges. He figures that over the past decade he has dictated and his wife has typed a thousand letters to the governor, state senators, congressional representatives and scientists.

“I have been thrown out of the National Institute of Justice in Washington so many times that the concrete outside the director’s office is rubble,” he jokes.

Mary Hodges said the couple’s interest in nutritional therapy originally grew out of their concern about another of their four children, a son who had behavior problems throughout childhood that worsened when he entered his teens.

In looking for the cause of their second son’s incorrigible behavior, she said, they read about a researcher from Chicago who contended to have found a chemical “marker” for violence in human hair. They took that information to Dr. Louis Gottschalk, founding chairman of the UC Irvine department of psychiatry, and asked him to delve into the field.

“I was skeptical, but it seemed like an interesting idea,” Gottschalk said Wednesday.

By the pivotal year that their son Lance was attacked, the Hodges calculate, they had invested about $400,000 in the project, which tested the chemical composition of the hair of inmates in two California jails and a prisoner who had been convicted of violent crimes.

In 1991, the researchers reported that inmates who were tested had an average of three to four times the normal amount of manganese in their hair. Hair, Gottschalk explained, is a good mirror of the body’s chemical composition. But the study raised many questions.

It is uncertain why manganese, which is vital to good health in small quantities, tends to be present in large quantities in more violent people. Another question, he said, is why inmates who test high in manganese do not suffer any toxic effects from it.

Another puzzle, Gottschalk said, is whether manganese creates violent behavior or is perhaps the product of the body’s immune system when someone gets into a lot of physical fights.

“We haven’t gotten to the bottom of why manganese is elevated in the hair and whether it is working as a toxin or as a healing agent. Both are possible,” Gottschalk said.

Other studies conducted at the California Youth Authority under prior legislation by Sen. Presley (SB 107) and controlled by a state-mandated oversight committee have shown a 38% decrease in violence in a group of 134 inmates who received mineral and vitamin supplements.

Hodges, who made his fortune developing a Bakersfield oil field during the 1970s Arab oil embargo, said it is time for the nation to capitalize on the research that already has been done on the relationship between chemical imbalance and violent crime.

He said that over the past 40 years, 32 separate studies recorded with the National Institute of Justice have asserted a connection between violence and nutrition. “And nobody is doing a thing about it,” he said.

“If you discover an oil field, you develop it, and we have discovered a breakthrough in criminal violence,” he added. “Now we need a multitude of concurrent studies to convince the scientific community of its cost-effectiveness, that it saves lives and money and misery.”

If the governor signs the newest research legislation (SB 269), Hodges said, his battle for attention will have just begun. The bill would authorize a five-year study but would not appropriate any money for it.

Hodges said the research will cost another $2 million that his nonprofit Violence Research Foundation--basically, his family--can’t fund alone. So he is planning yet another trip to Washington.

“We are going to go out and get the federal government and private foundations and corporations to help,” he said.

His goal, he said, is to establish other similar studies in five other parts of the nation.

“We want the recognition that chemical imbalances in the brain need to be addressed.” he said. “If science knows what the problem is, it can address the issue of how to solve it. Nothing in the past has worked. There has been no decrease in violence and repeat crime.”