A drunk man and woman were arrested on the 1500 block of Santa Monica Beach on Aug. 9 after their fight escalated to the point where a suspected handgun was pulled from a backpack.
At 3:33 p.m. officers of the Santa Monica Police Department who were on beach patrol duties received the report of the fight. When they arrived, they spoke with a number of Los Angeles County Lifeguards who had detained a pair of suspects.
The lifeguard who had been the first to respond to the fight told the officers what had happened.
He said that a beach-goer had notified him that a fight was in progress. When the lifeguard arrived, he said the man was on top of the woman and appeared to be punching her.
As he got closer, he said the man punched the woman twice in the chest with a closed fist.
The man had then dismounted the woman and had reached into his backpack and had attempted to take out a handgun from the backpack.
The lifeguard had, at that point, tackled the man and placed him in handcuffs, thus perceivably guarding someone’s life.
The gun turned out to be an Airsoft pistol and not a real firearm. Another witness approached the officers and said that she had also seen the incident, but from a different angle.
She said that the man had started to hit the woman, and after knocking her to the ground, the woman had grabbed a glass alcohol bottle and had struck the man on the right side of his head with it.
This witness also added that she did not see the man hit the woman while she was on the ground, but that she believed that the man had been simply attempting to stop the woman from hitting him again.
The officers then spoke with the man and the woman, but the pair would not engage in conversation with them.
The officers noticed there were several empty liquor containers in the area, and that these two people looked intoxicated.
The woman also displayed some swelling to the right side of her face, just below her right eye. The officers decided that each of these individuals were at fault and arrested them both.
The woman, a 28-year-old Los Angeles resident, was charged with domestic battery and assault with a deadly weapon, while the man, aged 44, and also of Los Angeles was charged with domestic violence.
Bail was set at $30,000 and $50,000 respectively.
Editor’s Note: These reports are part of a regular police coverage series entitled “Alert Police Blotter” (APB), which injects some minor editorial into certain police activities in Santa Monica. Not all of the Mirror’s coverage of incidents involving police are portrayed in this manner. More serious crimes and police-related activities are regularly reported without editorial in the pages of the Santa Monica Mirror and its website, smmirror.com.
