5 Others Who Dared Lauded : Spray Can, Courage Mix for 61-Year-Old Heroine

Margaret L. Roberts, 61, didn’t have time to think, only to act.

She walked out of a supermarket near her home in Burbank and saw a man and woman struggling in the parking lot. The man had his arm around the woman’s neck. Roberts ran to the woman’s aid, pulled an aerosol can of tear gas from her purse, aimed it and demanded: “Let her go!”

“He said, ‘She’s my old girlfriend,’ and I said, ‘I don’t give a damn who she is. Let her go!’ ” Roberts said Friday of the March 2 incident.

The attacker did as he was told. He let the woman go and ran to a nearby car. But the 23-year-old victim’s good luck didn’t end with Roberts. Two other shoppers, Michael Morris and Harris Posner, noticed the commotion, ran to the car and pulled out the assailant. A few minutes later, they handed him over to police.

On Friday, the three who foiled the attack were thanked by Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner. Roberts, Posner, 34, of Burbank, and Morris, 28, of the Burbank area, were among six San Fernando Valley-area residents honored as heroes for “not looking the other way.”

‘Demonstrated Courage’

“They demonstrated they possess the one quality we would all like to see in ourselves--courage,” Reiner said at a small ceremony at the Burbank Courthouse. “These people have been tested. They have shown that they will respond--even at some jeopardy to themselves.”

Reiner said the man the Burbank threesome captured was not the woman’s former boyfriend but a former sex offender who was charged with attempted kidnaping in the incident.

Also receiving Courageous Citizens Awards from Reiner were:

Robert Kurowski, a former police officer, who followed a hit-and-run driver involved in a March 3 fatal accident near Kurowski’s Northridge home, stopped the driver and held him for police.

Danil Torppe, who looked out the window of his Studio City home Feb. 29 and saw a man breaking into a house across the street. Torppe captured the man for police.

George Reynoso, 34, of Van Nuys, who spotted three burglars near his home Jan. 9 and attempted to stop them by blocking their car with his own. The burglars smashed into his car and kept going. Reynoso gave chase and the suspects got away, but Reynoso recovered two pillowcases full of stolen property and gave police information that led to the suspects’ arrest.

After the heroes received certificates from Reiner and were photographed by family and friends, humility was the order of the day. Reynoso even downplayed the dent his crime fighting had put in his car.

“It was very minor,” he said. “I’d do it all again. You have to do what you have to do.”