Parking Case Finally Ends

After nine months, 19 sentencings and untold damage to the image of UCLA and its football program, the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office decided against pressing charges in the final two pending cases and said the much-publicized handicapped-parking case has come to an end.

“I think it does [mean that], at least for the football team,” said Deputy City Atty. Brian Williams, who handled the case. “If we receive no more cases from the UCLA Police Department and have no more information come in that needs to be looked at, we are proceeding as if the investigation is closed.”

Non-athletes at UCLA have also been charged, although Williams did not know how many because those cases were handled by another department. But he said the decision not to try running back Keith Brown and former Bruin Akil Davis on charges of illegally possessing a handicap placard was made because of a technicality.

Brown and Davis thus became the only two current or former Bruins not to be charged among the 21 cases handed over to the city attorney. The 19 others pleaded no contest and received the same plea-bargain sentences--two years’ probation, 200 hours’ community service and $1,485 in fines.

“It sort of took on something of gigantic proportions that I wasn’t expecting,” Williams said of the case that snowballed from a Jan. 16 traffic stop into a public-relations nightmare for the university. “But I knew when we got the case that it was something unusual. Here you had the ultimate irony, where the most able-bodied people at the school were getting the cards and parking spots that were supposed to go to the people who really needed them.”

*

In the fourth quarters of the last three games, UCLA has been outscored, 43-6, and has committed four turnovers and had one kick blocked.

“We’ve got to look at what we’re doing in the fourth quarter and emphasize getting better at it,” Coach Bob Toledo said.