A 35-year-old Santa Monica man smelling of alcohol was arrested on Aug. 16 for pushing a senior citizen twice his age to the ground over a parking space.
At 6:05 a.m. officers of the Santa Monica Police Department received a radio call informing them about an assault and battery in the 1200 block of 10th Street.
When the officers arrived, they saw a 70-year-old man hunched over and rubbing his left ankle whilst sitting on the doorstep.
The officers noticed this man appeared to be out of breath and had fresh blood on his left elbow. The man looked very frail as well.
When offered the opportunity to be attended to by paramedics the man declined.
The officers asked this man what had happened and he said that he had been involved in an altercation with another driver over a parking space whereupon the other driver (aged 35) had walked up to the man and pushed him over using both open palms.
This act, claimed the man, had caused him to topple to the ground resulting in an abrasion to his left elbow and pain to his ankle.
The officers then turned their attention to the 35-year-old suspect and asked him what had happened.
He denied everything apart from the verbal argument and as the officers were speaking with him they noticed the telltale odor of alcohol emanating from his mouth as he spoke.
The officers asked the suspect how the 70-year-old man had sustained the injury to his elbow to which the suspect replied, “I don’t know…I didn’t touch him.”
The officers (who are trained to sniff out miss-truths) decided to arrest this 35-year-old man under a private person’s arrest and take him off to jail where he was charged with elder abuse.
This Santa Monica resident had bail set at $15,000.
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.
