Sorely Tried But Vindicated After Refusing to Cop a Plea

Probably no column of mine the past 14 months generated as much response as one in September about Dennis McIntyre’s run-in with an off-duty Newport Beach cop and the resulting death of Squawk, McIntyre’s 4-year-old cat.

Bear with me for a condensed version of the original incident.

On Sept. 3, McIntyre got into a traffic altercation with a man who turned out to be off-duty Newport Beach Officer Mark Hamilton. McIntyre, 47, claimed Hamilton cut him off in traffic on Jamboree Road, forcing him to hit the brakes hard and send the contents flying from the front seat of his pickup truck. So angry was McIntyre that at the next stoplight he got out and stormed up to Hamilton’s car and read him the riot act.

Hamilton, out of uniform and in his own car, claims that he made a safe lane change in front of McIntyre and that he doesn’t know what set him off. But, he said, McIntyre screamed obscenities at him and pounded a dent in his car. Hamilton said he then showed McIntyre his badge and told him to follow him to the nearby Newport Beach police station. McIntyre says Hamilton never showed a badge, that he didn’t know he was a cop and that he followed just to hassle him some more after Hamilton made a gesture at him. McIntyre said he assumed Hamilton pulled into the police parking lot for refuge and, acknowledging that he continued haranguing Hamilton once at the police station, said that would have been a stupid thing to do if he knew Hamilton was a cop.

McIntyre was soon arrested and charged with misdemeanor vandalism for allegedly pounding Hamilton’s car door. Squawk, who had been riding with McIntyre, eluded police efforts to retrieve her from the truck and climbed up a tree. Although McIntyre had calmed down, police refused to let him help retrieve the cat, citing their standard policy when handling arrestees.

After more than an hour of unsuccessful efforts to retrieve Squawk from a tall palm tree, she either jumped (the police account) or was poked out (McIntyre’s account) and sustained a broken jaw and a lung bruise. Later that night, Squawk died of cardiac arrest.

Now the update:

The district attorney’s office decided to file the vandalism charge against McIntyre but offered a deal: He could avoid trial by pleading guilty and paying $200 restitution. The district attorney later sweetened that to a dismissal of the charge if McIntyre paid the $200. Even though his attorney bill eventually came to $3,000, McIntyre refused, insisting he never dented Hamilton’s car.

Although I said in the original column that various aspects of Hamilton’s account sounded suspect, I questioned McIntyre’s decision to take it to trial.

Last Thursday, a jury took roughly 45 minutes to find McIntyre innocent of the charge. His attorney, Robert Chatterton, said jurors told him afterward that they didn’t believe Hamilton’s statement in the police report that he was six to eight car lengths ahead of McIntyre when he changed lanes in front of him. Why, the jurors wondered, would anyone get enraged if someone pulled into their lane from six car lengths ahead?

From that starting point, Chatterton said, the jurors had no trouble disbelieving other parts of Hamilton’s report. McIntyre had contended all along that Hamilton got mad when McIntyre yelled at him in traffic and fabricated the police report so as to get back at him.

McIntyre said he feels vindicated. “I was hoping we’d be able to prove to the jury that they would see what I saw, and that was that this man didn’t have any credibility and that he set out to get me for lashing out at him. . . . After the trial someone said, ‘See, the system works,’ and my comment was, ‘Yes, it works--if you can afford it.’ ”

That’s the chilling part of this. How many of us would have forked over $3,000 to fight a $200 fine? How many other phony police reports have forced people to pay a bogus fine rather than slug it out in court?

“There’s a giant glitch in the system,” said McIntyre, who had never been arrested before. “They count on this--the police department counts on it, the district attorney counts on it--that you’re going to give up. An awful lot of people would have just said to heck with it, and that’s not right.”

McIntyre has never defended his actions in confronting Hamilton. “I feel guilty in that I put the cat in that position. It should never have happened, but I don’t feel it’s my fault (that Squawk died). I feel remorse that I got out of the car and said something and that this is what transpired, but I don’t feel guilty for the loss of the cat.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Chris McKillop, who handled the case, couldn’t be reached for comment. District attorney’s supervisor Mel Wright said, “Traffic altercations are and can be very volatile” and that the police report warranted the filing of charges.

Newport Beach police spokesman Andy Gonis said the department still believes Hamilton’s version and that “he acted properly under the circumstances.” The department is “convinced that Mr. McIntyre is guilty,” but Gonis added that, “we have no control over what goes on in the courtroom.”

And finally: Three weeks ago McIntyre and his wife took in a stray cat, the first since Squawk. They named him Wally.