Victim’s Wife Relives Shooting

Marlene Bryant returned to the beach Friday, to the spot where five days earlier her husband had been mistakenly shot and critically wounded by Newport Beach police, and the memories of that hot and violent night came pouring out.

She remembered hearing the officer--who only seconds earlier had felled her husband with a shotgun blast--expressing disbelief that the man was unarmed.

“I don’t see a gun here,” the officer’s partner told him, according to Bryant. “There is a gun! I saw it,” the officer insisted. “I don’t see one,” his partner replied. “All I see is a stereo.”

She remembered the 14-year-old boy whose realistic toy gun had alarmed beach-goers and prompted police to draw their weapons in search of a reported armed man on the beach at about 3 a.m. last Sunday.

Bryant said she was handcuffed after the shooting and seated beside the boy. She said he asked the officer who had fired the shot: “Am I the cause of this? Am I going to be blamed for this?”

“Shut up,” Bryant said the officer replied. “Haven’t you caused enough trouble? See what you made me do.”

The boy became “very, very quiet,” Bryant said.

A police spokesman Friday said the boy had good reason for pause. He said that the officer who shot Bryant’s husband, Sundaga Bryant, made a split-second decision to fire when the man turned toward him with what the officer perceived to be a sawed-off shotgun held at waist level. It turned out to be a portable stereo on a shoulder strap.

If the boy, or any of his three friends who also had realistic toy guns, had done the same when confronted by police, the result probably would have been the same, the spokesman said.

“If they had had the guns in their hands and had turned towards the officers, the officers would have fired. That’s what they’re trained to do,” said Officer Bob Oakley. “Put yourself in their position. It’s a life-threatening situation.”

The officer who fired the shot, Derek Duncan, has been transferred temporarily to administrative duty and is receiving psychological counseling. Duncan, 25, is a three-year veteran of the Newport Beach force who had also worked for a year as an Orange County sheriff’s deputy.

Sundaga Bryant, a 26-year-old Liberian citizen who lives in Orange, remained in critical condition in the intensive care unit of Fountain Valley Regional Hospital on Friday after multiple surgeries to repair damage to his left arm, colon and stomach. Further operations are planned.

And Marlene Bryant was on the Balboa Peninsula, demonstrating her version of what had happened that night to her lawyer, to the Liberian consul-general from Los Angeles and to reporters.

Couldn’t Find Party

She said that Saturday night, she and her husband headed for a housewarming in West Covina. They couldn’t find the party and were returning to Orange County after midnight, looking for relief from the heat. Saturday’s high temperatures had been in the 100s, and nighttime brought little relief, she said.

Bryant said her husband suggested going to the beach to “get some cool air.” They stopped for some beer and wine cooler, went home to pack an ice chest, then set out for Balboa.

Bryant said they parked in the municipal lot to the west of the Balboa Pier. The time stamped on their parking lot stub shows they arrived at 1:47 a.m. Sunday, she said.

According to local ordinance, the beaches in Newport are closed after midnight. But it was a hot Labor Day weekend, and the area was still alive with people, Bryant said. There were perhaps 20 people on the beach that fronts the parking lot, and “the whole pier had a lot of people, like everybody had the same idea--to cool off.”

Oakley said police normally run a 4-wheel-drive patrol car up and down the beach to clear it after midnight--if they can spare the time. He said he did not know whether anyone made the effort that night. “It was unusually crowded,” he said.

Bryant said that she and her husband spread their blanket on the beach fronting the parking lot where the sand begins to slope steeply toward the surf. They were almost even with the western edge of the parking lot, about 500 feet west of the pier.

Bryant said the couple then went for a walk along the shoreline, he carrying his long, thin portable stereo by a strap from his left shoulder, she carrying a purse under her arm.

Oakley said that sometime during this period, several people on the beach approached a city employee and told him they had seen a man on the beach carrying a sawed-off shotgun. The employee called police shortly before 3 a.m., and the entire patrol force assigned to Balboa--six or seven officers--rushed to the scene. Oakley said they probably arrived more or less as a group at the parking lot and would have begun spreading out for a search. They were expecting to confront a well-armed man, he said.

Bryant said that when she and her husband returned to their blanket, she sat and her husband stood, his left side toward the approaching officers, his stereo still slung under his left arm.

“Why are you sitting down?” Bryant said her husband asked. She said that she wanted to shake the sand from her shoes.

“Ready to go?” he asked.

“What time is it?” she said she replied, picking up her watch from the blanket. She said it was a black, unlighted digital watch, but that there was enough illumination coming from the lights in the parking lot to read it easily. The light was good enough to discern the colors of people’s clothing down the beach, and to tell whether they had coolers or radios with them, she related.

Bryant’s watch read 2:52, she said, and when she looked up, she saw the officers running toward them, crouched over.

Two officers were coming directly from the parking lot, one with a shotgun and another with a flashlight that shone on her husband, Bryant said. Another officer was coming from the parking lot closer to the pier, his flashlight shining on the officer with the shotgun. “I said, ‘The police are here,’ ” she recalled. “. . . The first thing I thought was, ‘They are trying to clear the beach.’ Then I saw the gun.”

At that moment, the officer with the gun was about 15 feet directly to her husband’s left, she recalled. She said she heard a shout of “Drop it!” followed immediately by the sound of a round being chambered and then the blast of the shotgun.

Police say that Sundaga Bryant turned toward the officer, who, believing the stereo to be the reported sawed-off shotgun, fired. Marlene Bryant said the shot came too quickly for her husband to turn. The doctor treating Sundaga Bryant said during a press conference that Bryant was struck in the left side and the shotgun pellets passed through his side, abdomen and into his right arm.

She said she crawled to her husband, but an officer shouted, “Don’t touch him. Put your hands up.” She said she complied, and the officer asked, “Does he have a gun?”

“No, look, no gun,” she said she replied. “There’s been a mistake.” She said Friday that she is convinced that the officer believed he had seen a gun.

She said an officer told her, “We just winged him.” It was then, she said, that the officers discovered their mistake.

She said they handcuffed her and led her to a low concrete wall at the edge of the parking lot almost immediately. She said by the time she was ordered to sit there, a handcuffed, 14-year-old boy was already seated there. He was wearing an military-type jacket and dark pants. The boy was later identified by police as the person who had been seen and reported by beach-goers.

Police said he had been carrying a paint-pellet gun such as those used in combat games. Oakley said that as far as the Police Department can tell, “the officers acted properly, based on the information they were given.” He said Duncan has been an “exemplary” officer with high ratings and a citation for heroism for saving a person from a burning vehicle.

“I think, basically, when we get back to what we know about this incident, Derek Duncan had information of a man with a sawed-off shotgun on the beach,” Oakley said. “All the conditions existed for him to believe or perceive the situation with Mr. Bryant to be life-threatening. Under those circumstances, he did what he was trained to do.”