Nightmare Sparked by a Flashlight Is Recalled : Justice: Oceanside man was pulled from his home by police and hogtied after shining a light at a police helicopter. A suit against the city and police is set for trial in September.

To this day, James Jensen does not fully understand his arrest on suspicion of obstructing justice. Not when the Oceanside police were hovering 800 feet in a helicopter over his home at the time and his “weapon” was a Black & Decker flashlight.

It was three weeks before his wedding. Then 35, Jensen was so upset with the steady, all-hours whap-whap of chopper blades over his house that, in the midst of a chicken and rice dinner with his fiancee and two neighbors, he aimed his xenon bulb “Spotliter” and middle finger in the air.

“This was a protest that I didn’t think would be witnessed by anybody other than the three people on my deck,” said Jensen, a project manager for an architectural firm.

Within 10 minutes, two officers walked into his yard on Rockledge Street and drew their guns, ordering him to drop the flashlight. Other squad cars appeared. Pretty soon, the place was swarming with 14 cops.

The confrontation kept building. Mili Smythe, Jensen’s girlfriend, walked into the crush of officers in the front yard and tried to get some answers. Inside, Jensen and his neighbors wondered what would happen next.

Jensen opened the door a crack and an officer grabbed him. Five officers said in sworn depositions that Jensen had yanked the officer inside. Four, five and then six officers pushed into the house and Jensen ended up beneath the pile. One officer belted him with a baton once or twice.

“I remembered thinking, ‘Don’t move, and they won’t hit you anymore. Stay perfectly still,’ ” he said.

His feet bound, hands cuffed and a police baton slipped in between, Jensen was carried from his home like a roped steer, apologizing to neighbors along the way before he was dumped on his face on the back seat of a patrol car.

Much later, after being dropped three or four times on his chin--the police say accidentally--and sitting in a jail cell for hours, he was released and the district attorney decided not to charge him with assaulting and obstructing officers. His girlfriend, who had been arrested for obstructing justice, also was permitted to leave jail, and no charges were filed.

“Unfortunately, there is no crime for someone shining a light up at a police helicopter,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Charles Bell wrote in refusing to prosecute Jensen. “Therefore, since the suspect had not committed any criminal act, there was no cause for the officers to go in after the suspect.”

Smythe, Bell wrote, was “passive. (There was) no assault on the officer. Case is not criminally prosecutable and will not be filed (per) prosecutorial discretion.”

That was September, 1990, and at least two things are different today. The helicopters, whose din drove many Oceanside residents mad, are no longer in operation following a change in city elections in which a new council majority decide to discontinue the program.

Jensen, 37, and Smythe, 33, are happily married and trying to negotiate a commuter marriage between Hollywood and Oceanside, where they own homes. She works as a graphics consultant in Los Angeles. He works in Oceanside, managing the design of new churches and homeless shelters.

But that horrific scene, replayed hundreds of times in their minds, remains vivid.

Until now, they have been hesitant to talk publicly about an experience they describe as wrenching and humiliating, a pointed invasion into their privacy that forever has ruptured their trust in law enforcement and made them skittish in general.

But, because so many months have passed and their lawsuit has made new details public, Jensen and Smythe agreed to speak out about the events of Sept. 8, 1990, describing the date in much the same terms as they would the anniversary of a loved one’s death.

“I think we have this illusion that this kind of thing happens to people who deserve it,” Jensen said. “That illusion was just shattered. It doesn’t matter who you are or what your background is, it can happen to you, and you are constantly aware that it can happen again.”

Smythe acknowledges feeling paranoid and powerless, especially when she sees police officers.

“I used to feel really safe because the police were here to protect me and help me,” she said. “But to go through this is to know that is not the case. It has sort of shattered my feeling of security in this world.”

They considered moving from Oceanside, just selling their canyon-ridge home 14 blocks from the ocean and starting over someplace else where there would be less tension.

But neighbors called to offer support and let it be known they wished they had flipped off the helicopter. The local newspapers printed letters backing Smythe and Jensen and suddenly, the couple were reminded that they had friends in a beautiful, serene neighborhood. Why move?

Their thoughts are now on the lawsuit--accusations of battery, false arrest, unlawful seizure, excessive force and invasion of privacy that they feel must be remedied.

Though they are seeking damages, the suit has nothing to do with money, they say, and all to do with making sure that nobody else has to go through such a traumatic experience. The couple are suing the city of Oceanside, former Police Chief Oliver Drummond and 14 of the 16 officers.

“The night I was released from jail, I was driving to San Diego to get bail for Jim,” Smythe said. “It was about 4 a.m., and I realized what had happened was terribly, terribly wrong. I vowed then and there to stand up for what I believed was right. I don’t care what the cost is.”

In hundreds of pages of legal papers, Oceanside police officers offer their defense. What they did that night was within the Police Department’s policy, they said. None of the 16 officers involved that night--including the pilot and his observer--have been disciplined.

Officer Les Lang, the helicopter pilot, said he had been dispatched to Missouri Street, four or five blocks away, to the scene of a large party that reportedly had gotten out of hand and spilled into the street.

When the copter, called the “Eagle One,” arrived at 10:25 p.m., Lang and his partner Phil Tate could find no party. But they saw a bright light.

“I looked at the light and was momentarily blinded,” Lang said in his police report. “It was much like looking into a flashbulb on a camera. There was a dark spot in the center of my vision.”

Lang made a radio call to dispatch and asked them to track down the source of the light. Officers E. J. Luarca and Walter Syzonenko arrived at the house at the same time in separate cars. They said they walked to Jensen’s yard and watched him train the beam of light skyward.

Jensen was yelling an obscenity at the police and had his middle finger raised, said the officers, who told him to put his flashlight down because it was creating a hazard and obstructing the flight crew.

The officers said Jensen spun around and fixed his flashlight on the officers.

“The beam of light was so bright that it became necessary for me to turn my head and compromise my officer safety,” Luarca wrote in his report.

After Luarca and Walter Syzonenko ordered Jensen to put the light down, they say he moved to a table and picked something up, at which time the officers drew their guns.

Jensen, Smythe and one of the two neighbors said the officers had their weapons out when they walked into the back yard. Jensen also said he picked nothing up from the table but raised his hands over his head in surrender.

After telling the police to leave if they didn’t have a search warrant, Jensen went inside with his girlfriend and the neighbors.

Syzonenko said he called for backup units and a Taser. Luarca said Jensen walked to a door that led from an open garage to the house and asked, “Are you guys coming in or what?” Another officer, John Diaz, said, “Are you inviting us in?” and Jensen said, “Sure” but ran in the house and locked the door as they approached.

Jensen said he made no such taunts and only came to the door to get Smythe back inside the house.

Standing near the front door, Officer Patrick McCarthy told Luarca to grab Jensen if he opened the door. When Jensen did so, Luarca lunged at him. Jensen said he was overpowered by five or six officers. Luarca said he was pulled into the house, and that Jensen twisted his arm behind him and out of its socket, sending shooting pains through the officer’s arm.

Eventually, four officers fell on top of Jensen, one of them hitting him in the upper legs and buttocks with a baton.

An expert witness for Smythe and Jensen said Oceanside police did almost everything wrong that night.

Louis J. Reiter, who served in the Los Angeles Police Department for 20 years before retiring in 1981, said he found it “ridiculous” that Syzonenko and Luarca pulled their guns out and never bothered to find out what Jensen picked up from the table.

Just as ludicrous, Reiter said, was that officers believed they could arrest Jensen for obstructing justice by shining his flashlight at a helicopter 800 feet above him.

“What’s so ridiculous about it is that we tell officers . . . in the field (that if) they need to identify where they are, they use a flashlight . . . to alert the air support to their location,” Reiter said. The beam would appear “as a twinkling light. I think they have exaggerated whatever occurred there.”

The officers could have walked up to the front door and asked what was going on, he said, rather than walk to the back. If the pilot had been blinded, he would not have continued to hover over the Jensen house, as he did, and there was no reason for the officers to hang around once Jensen had ordered them off his property.

“I think at that point they should have just packed up their bags and gone home,” Reiter said. “They had nothing. . . . So all you’re doing is exacerbating the situation by hanging around and certainly by ending up with 10 to 12 (officers) in cars up at that location (and) the helicopter overhead with its spotlight on.”

It was also questionable whether Luarca should have grabbed Jensen at all or waited along with the other officers until tensions cooled, Reiter said.

“You’re opening yourself up to aggression on the part of the arrestee unnecessarily, and you’re putting yourself in a position of disadvantage because you’re now in a position of having to pull someone out,” Reiter said.

Jensen need not have been hog-tied, Reiter said, and certainly did not have to be kept tied up once he was taken from the patrol car to a holding cell.

Internal affairs documents, which essentially cleared the officers of any administrative violations, were “biased, slanted (and) opinionated” and never addressed a number of key issues, including how many times one of the officers struck Jensen or even the fact that Jensen had been hog-tied, Reiter said.

In Jensen’s mind, as he tried to sort through questions that night, especially why 14 officers showed up at his home, he thought that it may have been retaliation.

He had complained a number of times about the helicopter noise. A day or two before the incident, an officer who did not identify himself appeared at his front door and told him that the chief of police asked that Jensen not call again about the noise. Jensen said he would have to see the order in writing.

A few weeks after Jensen’s arrest, seven Oceanside officers used the canyon behind Jensen’s home to train police dogs for 45 minutes. Tom Adler, attorney for Jensen and Smythe, questions why they chose that location.

As part of the case against the Oceanside police, Adler made a 10-minute videotape that re-creates the scene on Rockledge Street. Adler hired a pilot, a cameraman from a local television station and a lighting expert who teaches at San Diego State University.

The videotape shows a helicopter 800 feet above Jensen’s house with someone shining the same Black & Decker flashlight from below. On the tape, the flashlight is as bright as a passing car headlight.

The trial is scheduled to start Sept. 8, which Adler reminded them this week, much to their surprise, was the two-year anniversary of the helicopter incident.

Last year, right around that date, Smythe started having disturbing dreams and described them to a friend. She was asked if anything traumatic had happened the year before. Then it hit her.

“I was having all these weird scary dreams about being shot by storm troopers,” she said. “After I figured out the date, it all started making sense.”