Bombing Target Identifies Olson for the First Time

After 25 years, a former Los Angeles police officer now claims he can identify Sara Jane Olson as the young woman who glared at him, eyes blazing with hatred, the night a pipe bomb was planted under his parked squad car at a Hollywood pancake house.

James Bryan, a retired security consultant, recently emerged as the sole living eyewitness who can tie Olson to the crime scene, say documents filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

He identified Olson, then known as Kathleen Soliah, as the woman who accompanied two “suspicious-looking men” near the Sunset Boulevard restaurant. He picked her picture out of a “six-pack” photo lineup and provided district attorney’s investigators with new details at a November interview.

Bryan could become the prosecution’s key eleventh-hour witness. But this witness is not without problems. Defense attorneys say in court papers that he never spoke up at the time--not in his initial statements, and not before a grand jury the following year. Why hadn’t he identified her before? He said nobody asked.

Olson’s defense was swift in challenging Bryan’s credibility, discrediting his story as either “lies” or “the result of a self-admitted stress disorder.”

Bryan claimed to be so traumatized by the bombing attempt, court papers state, that he first took a stress leave, then left the LAPD two years later with a permanent disability.

In his interview with investigators from the district attorney’s office, Bryan indicated that he has taken steps to sue Olson, saying that she “should be made to pay, both criminally and civilly.”

The details of Bryan’s eyewitness account were disclosed in a defense motion seeking a psychiatric evaluation of Bryan to determine whether he is competent to testify at Olson’s bomb conspiracy trial, scheduled to begin Feb. 7.

“This type of testimony is patently unbelievable on every level,” defense attorney Stuart Hanlon said Tuesday. “This is a sorry state of affairs for law enforcement.”

Deputy Dist. Attys. Eleanor Hunter and Michael Latin do not comment on the case outside the courtroom. But, district attorney’s spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons said, “I’m sure we’ll be responding in writing.”

Prosecutors previously have indicated in court that their only eyewitness, a plumbing supply store clerk who could identify Olson, was long dead. They have acknowledged that their case is based on circumstantial evidence, by no means “a slam-dunk.”

At the Nov. 9 interview, tape-recorded by investigators William A. Brown and Jess Gomez, Bryan said Olson was the woman he saw under the street lights with the two men shortly before midnight Aug. 20, 1975.

According to an investigative report attached to the court papers, Bryan claimed that “he remembers her face vividly because when she turned to look at him, he noticed a look of ‘absolute contempt and hatred’ in her face. He said the look on her face is etched in his mind because it was so hateful, a look that ‘you don’t get often.’ ”

He added that as he left the restaurant, a girl sitting at the window with two adults waved at him. Had the bomb gone off, he said, he is certain they would have been killed.

In their court papers, defense attorneys Hanlon and Susan Jordan described Bryan’s story as “astonishing” and “a recent fabrication,” wryly noting that “it’s quite fortuitous for the prosecution to come up with this witness 25 years after the fact, and on the eve of trial.”

Back in 1975, Bryan said nothing when interviewed by other officers at the crime scene. He did not mention the woman with hate-filled eyes during his grand jury appearance, the court papers state. He did not come forward with his story until his recent interview with the district attorney’s investigators, the court papers state.

He first recognized her, he said, when her picture appeared on a wanted poster several months after the bombing attempt.

“That’s her, that’s the gal I saw at the IHOP,” he said he told his partner, John Hall. He said he may have told his watch commander. But he never informed the investigating officers.

“He assumed that the detectives had the investigation under control,” the Nov. 9 investigators’ report stated. He added that his thinking at the time was, ‘They’ve got the person, they’ve got her photographed, they’ve got her name, they’ve got a warrant out for her, they’ve got her.”

It was a long wait. Olson was arrested near her home in St. Paul, Minn., in June. She is charged in a 1976 grand jury indictment with conspiring to kill police officers by planting two bombs under squad cars to avenge the deaths of six SLA members a year earlier during a standoff with police.