NOTEBOOK -- steve marble

In one of those brief seconds where panic and confusion merge, I thought

he was going to storm into the room with a gun and let his weapon do the

talking.

I stood there in the living room of the Irvine apartment, thinking that

maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all to confront a man whose job

involved carrying a gun.

I looked at the window, wondering haphazardly whether -- if the need

should arise -- I could jump through it feet first, roll across the ice

plant and sprint down the greenbelt to safety.

It was a long couple of seconds. But then he walked back in the room,

stared down at the shag carpeting and confessed.

He said he was ashamed. He said he realized now that he had a problem.

And he said that he had managed to mess up the one thing that mattered

most to him -- being a cop.

Bruce Ross was a cop in Costa Mesa. And, before he was finally fired and

vanquished from the force, he was a hero -- though the clothing was a bad

fit from the start.

Thanks to a San Clemente officer who is suspected of lying about being

shot during a routine traffic stop, Ross’ name has been hoisted from the

archives.

All of 31 and evidently desperate to win the affections of a female

employee, Ross faked his own shooting one February morning in 1984. Right

on Newport Boulevard.

Ross had apparently been thinking out the plan for weeks, dismissing it,

reconsidering it and finally giving in to the lure that he could become a

“hero.”

So Ross went up to an industrial complex in the north part of town and

went into a rented garage. He took a flare gun, which he had converted so

it would accept a .22-caliber bullet, and tightened it in a vice. Then he

tied a string to the trigger and slipped on a bulletproof vest that his

family had given to him as a Christmas present.

He yanked on the string and shot himself in the back.

With the dirty work out of the way, Ross cruised down Newport Boulevard,

looking for someone to pull over. He found a motorist who fit the bill,

flipped on his lights and pulled the driver to the curb. He walked up to

the driver’s window and -- doing some good acting -- flinched as if he

had just been shot.

Then he drove himself to the hospital where nurses observed the welt on

his back and marveled at his good fortunes. Thank God I was wearing my

vest, he said later.

By the next day, the television people had arrived and Ross -- holding up

his vest -- turned into a quote machine.

“I’d rather sweat than bleed,” he said. The quote became the top headline

in the Daily Pilot the next morning: “I’d rather sweat than bleed.”

But then he started bleeding. A veteran detective who was suspicious of

Ross’ hero status dug into the case and discovered the hoax.

By the time I managed to track down Ross at his Irvine apartment, the

young cop was in a confessional mood.

“A part of me enjoyed the limelight, but mostly it just added to the

shame,” he said. It was a moody conversation. He said he’d dreamed up the

hoax for personal reasons and a vague hope that it might bring some

positive attention to a police force that had been buffeted by scandal.

“The idea got the best of me,” he added.

Ross hoped his colleagues would go easy on him. He asked for a leave of

absence, a chance to get his head together. The department asked for his

badge instead.

In the last look, it wasn’t the fact that he’d done something stupid and

foolish that firmed up his reputation as a bad cop. People do stupid

things. Even cops. It was his absolute gall in trying to play the role of

hero that did him in.

And that’s because there are true heroes.

Bob Henry, the Newport Beach officer who was gunned down while trying to

help a suicidal man, is a hero.

Steve Van Horn, the thoughtful Newport sergeant who never lost his

resolve even as the leukemia wrestled life from him, is a hero.

The anonymous Costa Mesa fireman, who knelt silently over the child who’d

been killed in a grotesque preschool death spree, was a hero if only as a

symbol of what was right and what was decent.

Hero, you see, is too good a word to be squandered.

* STEVE MARBLE is the managing editor of Times Community News. He can be

reached at o7 Steve.Marble@latimes.comf7 .