Gun Battle’s Heroes Had Helpers

Police weren’t the only ones in for a long day’s work when two bank robbers turned North Hollywood into a battle zone Friday. As the ordinary business day took a turn toward the bizarre, merchants in this densely packed business district were also called to action.

Dentist Jorge Montes found himself crouched in a stairwell, injecting local anesthetic and applying ointments meant for tooth patients on the bullet wounds of a squirming policeman. Around the block, Heilig-Meyers furniture store employees scrambled to find furniture pads to use as blankets for the wounded.

When police asked to use the store as a command post, manager Phil Palagonia didn’t think twice. “It seemed there was an urgency so I just said, ‘Sure,’ ” he said. “I didn’t call my bosses or anything.”

He gave the officers a large map the store uses for deliveries and store employees helped clear out the dinette section to convert it to the equivalent of a military headquarters in a battle. Police took over the phones.

Palagonia said he was impressed by the police commanders. “Everything flowed. Everyone was working together,” he said.

Police asked Palagonia if they could pay for anything, but although he’s a little nervous about his phone bill, he said he probably won’t send the department any bills.

Before the end of the shootout, which left 17 police officers and civilians wounded and the two bandits dead, a nearby Union Bank of California branch had become a refuge for dozens of rescued hostages, and the bank managers had become makeshift police secretaries.

Also drawn into the fray were employees of Hughes market, across the street from the bank, who herded customers into a back room and brought them electric heaters when they complained of cold. Even Max Holiday, whose business was blocks away from the action, played a role as self-appointed shootout printer: He plastered the neighborhood with fliers thanking the LAPD.

Police closed down blocks around the crime scene all day, so that in robbing the bank, the bandits also indirectly cost scores of merchants a full day’s sales.

That’s a lot of money for many of the mom-and-pop businesses in this district, home to furniture stores, doughnut shops, sports-card stores and auto-part shops. Some merchants also sustained damage to their property.

But despite the inconvenience and losses, a few business people got a lot of work done--though not of the usual sort.

Montes, who grew up in East L.A. and chose his profession after a dentist told him he had “some talent with his hands,” stood by his window as the first fusillade of gunfire ripped loose.

He opened the door and saw blood smeared on the walls and two wounded LAPD officers flopped on their stomachs in the stairwell. His assistants Imelda Diaz and Mariam Luna ran for supplies as Montes fumbled frantically with the belt of Officer James Zboravan, who was wounded in the back and yelling with pain.

“A bullet had severed leather on his belt, but it wasn’t quite broken. So I’m trying to turn him over to unbuckle it . . . but there were these two holes in the buckle and--” Montes broke off--”I just wanted to get that belt off so fast.”

Montes, Zboravan, and Officer William Krulac, who had shrapnel embedded in his ankle, spent more than half an hour huddled down above the stairwell.

Krulac lay poised the whole time, watching down the stairs with his shotgun drawn.

“Zboravan would be talking and then suddenly go, ‘Aarghh!’ I asked, ‘Where are you feeling the pain?’ ” He responded by saying, “It feels like,” and gave initials for obscene words, Montes said. “He was so respectful of my dental assistants, he wouldn’t say the actual words.”

Montes thought back to the first-aid classes and cadavers he’d dissected in dental school. He used his dental syringes to inject anesthetic around the inch-deep gash in Zboravan’s back. Finally, he remembered a special dental-surgery gel used on bleeding gums. He slathered it into the wound, and the bleeding stopped at last.

If Montes’ day was dramatic, that of Teri Wright, a customer service manager at Union Bank, was simply long. Until 9 p.m. she took police phone calls, paged detectives and brought water to the waiting former hostages.

Although the bank was packed with police and FBI agents, “it was very quiet. You could tell there was just this tension,” she said.

Montes, Wright and other merchants said their lasting impression from the day was the courage of the police officers they helped.

Ditto for Holiday, owner of Plaza Printing, who became so fascinated with the sight of somber-faced cops speeding past his shop to the crime scene that he was inspired to print up fliers that say, “Thank you LAPD.”

The yellow-and-white fliers also carry a subheading: “When public safety fails, civilization ceases.”

“What impressed me was these officers,” said Holiday. “It was as if they were going to save their own family.”

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