D.A. Probes Alleged Cover-Up of Hit-Run by South Pasadena Police

The district attorney’s office is probing the South Pasadena Police Department after charging an officer with a hit-and-run crash that his colleagues allegedly covered up, officials confirmed Thursday.

“It is obviously fertile ground,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Mike Carroll of the department’s Special Investigations Division, which handles corruption cases. The probe goes beyond the actual crash, authorities said.

Interim South Pasadena City Manager Linda Holmes said the probe was sparked when the city’s Police Department last week submitted its investigation of the crash to the district attorney’s office. She denied a public records act request by The Times for the department’s full report on the crash and its aftermath, saying prosecutors told her that while the district attorney’s investigation continues, the documents should not be released.

“There is more investigation going on,” she said, declining to comment further.

The new investigation continues a steady downpour of bad news for the San Gabriel Valley city. South Pasadena Police Chief Thomas Mahoney is on paid leave in the wake of revelations about the department, which is also being examined by a city-hired private investigative firm. The woman whose car was damaged in the hit-and-run has sued the city, and a 27-year-old local woman alleges in a claim that she had sex with two on-duty officers. That woman said she was allowed to use the department’s shooting range and gym during the period of the trysts, which ended shortly before she was arrested after firing a gun in the Police Department lobby.

The crash occurred Sept. 8, 1995, when a Camaro driven by Scott Ziegler--with another off-duty cop in the passenger seat--hit a parked Honda on Pasadena Avenue, then sped off, prosecutors say. Ziegler, the son-in-law of former South Pasadena Mayor Ted Shaw, initially told officers that his car was not running but later changed his statements, Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Grosbard said.

Ziegler was fired but then rehired two weeks later by Mahoney, who had been on vacation at the time of the crash, officials said. Ziegler’s name was omitted from a police report on the crash until this month, when Mahoney had it added after inquiries from The Times.

The woman whose car was damaged, Marisa Colatriano, alleges in her lawsuit that she was never paid for the more than $500 in damages to her car, and that for two months police told her that they did not know who hit her car.

City officials say Mahoney had told them that Colatriano had been paid, and that prosecutors had declined to file the case. But Grosbard said his office had never seen the case until South Pasadena police brought it to them last week.

Ziegler on Tuesday was charged with misdemeanor counts of hit-and-run and providing false information to a police officer.

Times staff writer Nicholas Riccardi contributed to this story.