The Los Angeles School District Policeman who used pepper spray against several local youths and adult bystanders near Sav-on Drugs on September 19 is under investigation for his use of force. Despite an ongoing investigation and a long history of lawsuits and formal complaints that cite violent behavior, Officer John Taylor is still working in the area. School Police Lieutenant Jose Santome, who oversees the agency’s operations in West L.A., announced last week at a Palisades Community Council meeting that an internal investigation had begun and is expected to last nine weeks. Santome insisted that the investigation would impartially examine the officer’s behavior. ‘I am not here to sugarcoat anything. If the officer was right, then we’ll defend him. But if the officer was wrong, we’ll prosecute him.’ A handful of community members expressed frustration at the news that Taylor continues to patrol schools in the area, including Palisades Charter High School, Paul Revere Middle School and local public elementary schools. Frustration quickly turned into outrage when Santome revealed that Officer Taylor has been investigated by Internal Affairs before. ‘The fact that this officer is policing elementary schools is disgusting,’ said Lanette Hackworth, a local resident who witnessed the aftermath of the after-school confrontation. Santome defended the department’s decision to leave Taylor on the job. ‘Usually, there are specific criteria that we look at like the background of the officer and the force used. Based on the totality of circumstances, we decided not to take the officer off the force.’ According to eyewitness accounts, Taylor began spraying a 13-year-old boy with pepper spray in the face after the boy asked why his friend, 14, was handcuffed and sitting in the back of Taylor’s car. Moments earlier, the 14-year-old had been arrested for using profanity directed at the officer as he was writing tickets to teenage skateboarders riding without helmets on Sav-on’s loading dock along Swarthmore Ave. Soon after Taylor sprayed the 13-year-old Revere student, several witnesses described a melee in which six to eight youths and adult onlookers were unnecessarily attacked with pepper spray. Within minutes, an LAPD helicopter and several officers from the LAPD, the Los Angeles School Police and Palisades Patrol were at the crowded scene that centered on the Village Green. The Palisadian-Post has requested an official police report of the incident, but has not yet received a report. While the L.A. School Police Department would not say how many times Taylor has been investigated and on what grounds, court records show an officer frequently identified in formal complaints and lawsuits for violent behavior. In 1999, a 15-year-old Crenshaw High student accused Taylor of excessive force. In 2001, the principal at the Los Angeles Center for Enrichment Studies in West L.A. filed a complaint against Taylor for unlawful use of force after witnessing him use a baton against a student. Two lawsuits are currently pending against Taylor from other L.A. high schools. In 2005, a lawsuit was filed on behalf of Terrance Robinson. It charged Taylor with assault and battery, false arrest and imprisonment, and intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress. Robinson was a student at Hamilton High School in 2001 and was allegedly ‘grabbed from the rear, thrown to the floor and placed in handcuffs’ by Taylor. The case was dismissed this summer, but Robinson has re-filed the case in an appellate court. This year a lawsuit was filed by Nisaa Madyun, the mother of three children at Crenshaw High. During a crowded high school basketball game in 2005, Taylor allegedly picked her then-15-year-old daughter up, threw her to the ground and struck her knees with a baton. Taylor then unbuckled the holster of his gun and threatened her to move, said Larry Daniels, a campus aide and basketball coach at Crenshaw High who witnessed the conflict. Daniels said that Taylor established a reputation at Crenshaw for violent overreaction, which included pulling a gun on a physical education instructor. According to Madyun, her daughter had to undergo surgery and physical therapy to repair the damage to her knee from Taylor’s attack. A Palisades mother, whose teenage son was sprayed and handcuffed, told the Post she plans to file a lawsuit against Taylor in coming months. Taylor’s lawyer, Calvin House, would not return requests sent by e-mail and telephone for an interview with the Post. Despite official complaints against him, Taylor has never been found responsible for misconduct. It is unknown why he has been frequently reassigned to different parts of the school district in his nine years with the School Police. Also, previous internal investigations of Taylor have not found wrongdoing. According to Lt. Santome, most officers with the L.A. School Police are investigated at some point in their careers by internal affairs. The majority of these investigations clear officers. But a lack of clear data could obscure School Police attempts to thoroughly investigate its accused officers. While the LAPD has been required by law to institute a computerized system to track use-of-force incidents, citizen complaints and other data, the independently-run L.A. School Police has never been required to implement such a system. According to Santome, the system could help investigators easily and accurately monitor individual officers’ histories. The School Police began recording use-of-force incidents for the first time this summer, but that system is not computerized. Despite a large crowd of witnesses and citizen efforts to separate witnesses from onlookers, the L.A. School Police collected few official statements at the Sav-on incident. In an effort to clear the crowd at the scene, officers ‘inadvertently’ dispersed potential witnesses, Santome said. An hour after Taylor sprayed and handcuffed students, few of the original witnesses were available, Santome added. Internal investigators are expected to use a Sav-on surveillance video that recorded some of Taylor’s interaction with the skateboarders. An employee at the store who saw the video said that only the earliest moments were in frame. LAPD’s Senior Lead Officer in the Palisades, Michael Moore, also viewed the video. ‘The problem with the video is that it’s not a complete story.” he said. “What you do see is that the officer is not getting the full cooperation from the crowd around him.’ Many of the teenagers involved in the confrontation were students at PaliHi and Revere. PaliHi Executive Director Amy Held called the incident ‘unfortunate’ and asked for witnesses to report any important information to internal investigators at (310) 445-4700. ‘L.A. School Police officers routinely patrol around campuses and their top priority is student safety,” Held said in an e-mail. “Palisades Charter HS continues to be proactive on this front, hosting annual assemblies with all students to review our discipline policy and expectations for student behavior on and off campus.”

The Pacific Palisades Chamber of Commerce will hold its annual polo tournament this Sunday, October 8, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Will Rogers State Historic Park. The public is invited and there’s no admission charge, except for parking. Families are encouraged to attend the festivities, where food will be sold by Sylvia and Vassie Naidoo. The championship game will be played at 12:30 p.m. This photograph shows action from a fundraising event last Sunday on behalf of the OPCC Access Center in Santa Monica.

Catherine Carvalho, the new principal at Corpus Christi Catholic School, stepped away from her office on Monday afternoon to help teach ballroom dancing to seventh and eighth grade students in preparation for an upcoming Halloween-themed dance. She thought it would be a good idea if they learned some moves before venturing out on the dance floor. A vibrant woman with a warm and gentle demeanor, Carvalho began her career in education in 1981 but is new to Pacific Palisades. In fact, the Los Angeles native says she had “never set foot in the Palisades until 2005,” when she became vice principal at Corpus Christi. Carvalho was drawn to the spirit of the school community. “There’s an enthusiasm for the spiritual,” she says. “They’re very much a people of faith, and that’s very edifying for me. Faith and education energize me.” Carvalho’s passion for education began when she was a just young girl, the oldest of five children growing up in Hacienda Heights. In third grade, she used to come home from school and play “teacher.” Her parents were Los Angeles transplants from Boston, and a strong New England influence persisted in their household. “You don’t have dinner, you have supper,” Carvalho says, explaining that “dinner” was served at 1 p.m. and consisted of meat, carrots, cabbage or kale and potatoes. Carvalho’s father was of Portuguese descent and her mother, a combination of Portuguese, Scottish, Irish and English heritage. She remembers that her paternal grandfather, who spoke Portuguese with a Boston accent, taught her the Portuguese word for “patience” and the phrase “God reward you,” perhaps early signs of her future calling. Carvalho attended a private Catholic school until fifth grade, when her family moved to a larger house to accommodate their growing family and could no longer afford the tuition. She entered public school at that point and, reflecting on her public and private school education, says, “I had the best of both worlds.” She had “a wonderful high school experience” at Los Altos High in the 1970s, largely because she had a diverse group of friends of various religious backgrounds’Methodists, Presbyterians, agnostics and atheists. “We would go to parties and discuss all the issues of the day,” she says. “It really challenged me intellectually and helped me understand other points of view.” Her faith led her back to Catholic schools later, as a teacher, because she wanted “the freedom to do faith formation as part of the whole education.” She began teaching in 1981 after working two years in the Respiratory Therapy department at Santa Teresita Hospital in Duarte. The hospital is owned by the Carmelite Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Los Angeles. “The Sisters did medical, retreat and educational work, and they were sent to serve in places where their talents could be used,” says Carvalho, who took her vows and was a Sister for many years. When her superiors said they needed her to work in education instead of medicine, she returned to college and finished her bachelor’s degree in liberal arts with a multiple-subjects credential from Chapman University in 1984. During this time, she also studied theology at the University of San Francisco. Carvalho supports Corpus Christi’s educational philosophy, which focuses on development of the whole person, including faith. “Corpus Christi, which in Latin means ‘Body of Christ,’ was a personal devotion of mine,” Carvalho says. “Each person we encounter is another Christ, and what we do to each other, we do to Jesus.” She believes that faith is important in the building of community because “children learn about stepping outside of themselves, doing what Jesus would do.” Already, she has seen examples of “the generous hearts” of the Corpus Christi community. “Many families of this parish have inspired me by adopting families from an inner-city parish, St. Raphael’s [in South Los Angeles],” Carvalho says, explaining that the Corpus families use personal funds to purchase gifts for the families and visit the parish with their children around Christmas time. The students also hold an annual fundraiser to provide scholarships for St. Raphael’s School. “Part of my vision is that each grade level have it own special outreach activity,” says Carvalho, who plans to continue working with parents to this end. “Parents are the primary educators.” Carvalho went into school administration in 1987 and worked as a school principal at Holy Innocents in Long Beach, Saint Theresa School in Coral Gables, Florida, and at Saints Felicitas and Perpetua School in San Marino. She earned her master’s degree in administrative education from the University of La Verne in 1994. Six months prior to coming to Corpus Christi, Carvalho received a call from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles about a special project: St. Sebastian School in West Los Angeles was closing and her job as site administrator was to close it down. The demographics had changed, the school was not receiving federal aid and enrollment was down. In a twist of fate, Joan Payden, the founder and CEO of Payden & Rygel, came to the school’s rescue and funded its “extreme makeover.” The school went from 133 students in June 2005 to 225 a year later. Carvalho calls Payden “an example of somebody who wanted to put her faith into action and did so in an inspiring way.” Carvalho’s first official day as principal of Corpus Christi was exactly one month ago, on September 5. But she had an unexpected dress rehearsal in January when Sister Patricia McGahan suffered a fall and Carvalho was asked to fill in as principal for four months while Sister recuperated. “Everybody pulled together,” says Carvalho, who was relieved “once I knew that Sister was going to heal quickly and heal well.” Carvalho says that Sr. Patricia’s accident “had nothing to do with her decision to retire” and, in fact, the longtime principal “had been pondering her decision to retire for three to four years.” Still, when Sr. Patricia told her in the spring that she was going to retire, Carvalho asked if she was sure about her decision. “We had a good old-fashioned Irish discussion,” Carvalho recalls. “There was a lot of laughter and a lot of bantering back and forth.” Following a sabbatical in her home country of Ireland, Sr. Patricia will return next year to minister in Corpus Christi Parish. “She had a special charisma all her own that’s missed,” says Carvalho, who attributes her smooth transition as principal to “the work Sister had done to make [the school] was it is today.” She believes that her own vision is an extension of Sr. Patricia’s and Monsignor Liam Kidney’s philosophy. “I felt a solidarity with their vision,” she says. “It gave me a lot of enthusiasm when I saw the zest with which they approached education.”

After numerous setbacks, including footage hijacking and an emotional lawsuit, Susan Whitmore was finally able to bring to fruition the labor of three years. Her video about grieving parents, entitled ‘Portraits of Hope,’ was screened for the first time at Gladstone’s restaurant on September 23, in the company of the parents who had lost their children and were featured on tape. Whitmore began the video in 2003, soon after her 31-year-old daughter, Erika Whitmore Godwin, died of a rare form of sinus cancer. For Susan, the project was cathartic, as she could use her own pain and grief to help others go through similar experiences. When Whitmore and her husband decided to produce a video about parental grief, a friend of Erika’s volunteered to both direct and edit the video. Unfortunately, in 2004, the friend refused to return the footage. Susan, her husband Wendell, and many of the video participants were forced to sue the volunteer to get the footage returned. ‘This was the one project that I dedicated to Erika,’ said Susan. ‘So it was like losing her all over again.’ Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben of Kehillat Israel, a close friend of the Whitmores, was witness to Susan’s double sorrows. ‘It was tragic for Susan,’ he said. ‘She had to relive the trauma and grief of losing Erika.’ After almost a year in court, the plaintiffs finally received the footage and were able to get the project back on track. ‘It was a lot of hard work,’ said Wade Turnbull, who joined with Credence Sol to take on the case as pro bono work for their law firm, Liner Yankelevitz Sunshine & Regenstreif. ‘There were a lot of obstacles, but we put our heart and soul into it, and we got it done.’ Wendell Whitmore had not seen the video prior to the September 23 screening, but he had watched the entire process of its production ‘This whole project has been such an epic struggle,’ he said. ‘Susan was going through such staggering, bone-crushing grief, and then she got her tapes stolen. But she has persevered and overcome daunting obstacles’it’s a miracle.’ Everyone involved felt the pain of losing the footage, even those who had not themselves lost a child. Said Mike Anderson, who edited the video post-lawsuit: ‘It was a long hard road and I had to share their grief. But as an editor, I tried to take their vision and execute it, and hopefully that’s how it turns out. I’m proud and hopefully everyone else feels the same.’ During the dinner hour at Gladstone’s, the dining room was filled with an atmosphere of happy excitement. The joy and laughter contrasted with what one might expect from a roomful of people who had lost a child. It seemed like the video united everyone behind a common heartache and a common goal. ‘This was the first time since Erika died that I really felt joy and excitement,’ Susan Whitmore admitted. ‘After she died, holidays lost all meaning for me, but this was like Christmas morning. I think everyone else in the room felt the same as well, because the anticipation was so thick you could cut it with a knife.’ This anticipation was fulfilled, as the hour-long video received a standing ovation at its conclusion. Viewers were crying, both out of happiness and sadness. ‘Everyone felt incredibly proud that they were contributing to society to help others who would go through this grief, knowing that there’s hope,’ Susan said. ‘But they were also honoring their children.’ The video ended with a montage of photos of all the children at different stages of their lives, set to an original version of Eric Clapton’s ‘Tears in Heaven.’ An accompanying slide show featured ‘A Heartbeat Away,’ by Scott Johnson, who arranged photos of each child to correspond to the pertinent lyrics of the song. Susan has big plans for this video, as well as for The Erika Whitmore Godwin Foundation, which she created. The Foundation publishes a newsletter and maintains a Web site (www.griefHaven.org), where parents can honor their children and access links to support groups and organizations, message boards, books, music, stories and poetry. Through the Foundation, which is supported entirely by donations, Susan and others involved hope to distribute the video to a wider audience. ‘We’d like to tell someone who is in intense grief that it’s not the end of the world,’ Wendell Whitmore said. ‘So that parents have something to cling onto, so that they don’t feel isolated, alone, and hopeless.’ Rabbi Reuben suggested that the video be used by the military, as a tool to help parents whose children are killed in action. ‘This has the potential to transform people’s lives,’ he said. ‘[The military] could leave these parents with something to grasp onto,’ Susan agreed. Already, Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara plans to obtain copies of the video to give to all families when a child dies, a policy the Whitmores hope will be adopted by other hospitals nationwide. To further spread the word, Susan speaks at lectures and events, conducts workshops and appears on radio and television. Yesterday, she traveled to Arizona to conduct a workshop and participate on a panel with with grief specialists and parents at Tu Nidito, a non-profit organization for children with life-threatening illnesses and their families. Unfortunately, said Susan, griefHaven’s limited funds makes wide distribution difficult. ‘We’re looking for someone to underwrite the costs of duplication, stamping, and mailing of the video,’ Susan said. ‘We’d like to be able to give people copies for free, but we need someone to earmark donations specifically for this project.’ Contact: The Erika Whitmore Godwin Foundation at 459-1789.

Palisades resident Kimberlee Smith was served with a compliance order to remove her family’s pet, Benny the potbellied pig, from his home on Albright Street last Friday. She was cited for three L.A. Building and Safety code violations: 12.21A(a), 12.07A.7, 12.08R1. Smith has 30 days to appeal the order, which originated through an anonymous neighbor’s complaint, as reported in last week’s Palisadian-Post. Violation 12.21 A(a) reads: “No building or structure shall be erected, reconstructed, structurally altered, enlarged, moved, or maintained, nor shall any building, structure, or land be used or designed to be used for any use other than is permitted in the zone.” This means the child’s playhouse–where Benny seeks solace from the family dogs–can only be used for a playhouse. Smith told the Post: “What if an artist turns his garage into an art studio? He could be served with an order under the same law. Or what if someone lets her dog sleep in the garage? The Department of Building and Safety could cite her.” Code 12.07A.7 says that livestock, including swine, may be kept in Los Angeles if the lot is larger than 17,500 sq. ft. The lot on Albright (west of Via de la Paz) is 9,200 sq. ft. Under Sec.12.08 R1 One-Family Zone, the keeping of equines, poultry, rabbits and chinchillas in conjunction with the residential use of the lot are permitted if animals are not for commercial purposes. Apparently, since pigs or swine are not mentioned, they are not allowed, according to this code. Since Benny’s plight was revealed last week (“Family Fights to Save Benny the Pig”), readers have been overwhelmingly supportive of Smith and her two daughters (ages 6 and 10) keeping their pet pig. Palisades attorney Connolly Oyler stepped forward and offered to represent Benny gratis. Valerie Belt sent the story to L.A. Lawyers for Animals, which is putting Smith in touch with a woman in Southern California who has dealt with zoning issues regarding pot-bellied pigs. Belt wrote, “Kalyn, from my office, has a pet pig, so I asked her for her input. She responded: ‘I do know that the USDA does not deem them food animals and they cannot be used for food as they are “not fit for human consumption.” They came into this country as pets and have always carried the status of pets.'” Suzanne Brunelle, a member of the Southern California Association of Miniature Potbellied Pigs and the California Potbellied Pig Association, wrote and said, “I am involved with both organizations and would like to forward the story about Benny.” Rebecca DiNolfi, a zoning consultant in Pennsylvania,also responded with advice: “Almost all these cases are based on the livestock laws or swine laws that were put on the books long before the potbellied pig was ever in this country, pre-1985. The laws that they use to kick a pet pig out of a loving home are always laws that if given the real definition pertain to breeder and feeder pigs, which we can prove, without a shadow of a doubt, do not pertain to our pet potbellied pigs, and never have.” The Smiths have received at least six offers from people who will take Benny to their farms or ranches, but as Smith said, “He’s part of our family and we’d miss him terribly! Just having to tell my kids about this left everyone broken-hearted and crying.” Smith hopes to put up a poster and petition at the Swarthmore farmers market on Sunday to solicit additional community support. And she recently received a request in the mail to sponsor a booth at the upcoming Palisades Village Fair, so she sent money and under sponsor recognition she wrote: “Benny, the potbellied pig of Albright Street.”