Tensions After Death Prompt Meeting : Pasadena: City directors will talk with black leaders about an incident in which a man died after struggling with King’s Villages security guards.

PASADENA —  The Board of Directors has agreed to meet with black community leaders in an effort to ease mounting tension in the city’s Northwest community over the death of Robert Earl Holloway, who died Jan. 18 after a struggle with five King’s Villages housing project employees.

Directors John Crowley and Chris Holden, along with City Atty. Victor Kaleta, City Manager Don McIntyre and acting Police Chief Bruce Philpott will meet Friday with community representative Eugene Pickett and members of five organizations. The groups include the Black Male Forum, the American Friends Service Committee, the Pasadena Community Information Center, the Nation of Islam and the Urban League.

“The need for a dialogue needs to be taken very seriously by this board,” Pickett told directors Tuesday. “We have a young kid here in Pasadena that the community feels was murdered.”

The district attorney’s office has decided not to file charges against the housing project employees involved in the incident. As a result, Pickett said, city officials should step forward on the issue.

“You have to do something, and you have to do something this week,” he said.

Another speaker, Ibrahim Naeem , director of the Pasadena-Foothill Branch of the Los Angeles Urban League, told city directors that inaction has left a “bitter, angry feeling among Northwest residents.”

He urged the indictment of the employees, revocation of the security firm’s business license, replacement of King’s Villages guards with Nation of Islam members, a citywide moratorium on the use of the bar arm and carotid chokehold used by Pasadena police and private security guards, and a halt to police practice of ordering individuals to sit on the curb or lie prone on the ground during routine traffic stops.

Pasadena Police Lt. Gregg Henderson said Pasadena police are already forbidden to use the bar arm hold, in which the forearm bone is held against the neck, cutting off air through the windpipe. In the carotid hold, the arm encircles the throat, placing the windpipe in the crook of the arm. The arteries to the brain are constricted by the muscles of the arm, causing the person to lose consciousness within seconds.

Pasadena police may use the carotid hold, provided immediate medical aid is sought, Henderson said.

However, the coroner’s office determined that Holloway, 28, died after he was forced to lie prone and pressure was applied to the back of his neck by a Gold Security Patrol employee.

Joe Goldbaum, owner of the security firm that guards the 313-unit complex along Fair Oaks Avenue, said five security employees were needed on the night of Jan. 18 to subdue Holloway because of his size and aggressiveness.

Goldbaum said Holloway was first approached by three guards at about 9 p.m. Holloway was told to leave the property because he didn’t live there, he said. A housing project rule allows the guards to arrest trespassers after issuing a warning, police said.

But Holloway was intoxicated and refused to leave, Goldbaum said. “Nobody could move him off,” Goldbaum said, explaining that Holloway was 6 feet, 7 inches tall and the security guards were small men, averaging only 5-foot-6.

The guards called the security office for backup. Responding were another guard and the security firm dispatcher, Steve Goldbaum, his son, who is also 6-foot-7, Goldbaum said.

“When the dispatcher got there, this guy, 6-foot-7, had our security guard and was trying to push him around,” Goldbaum said. The other two guards were trying to keep order among about 15 spectators.

Holloway swung at the guard and the guard took out his baton, Goldbaum said. The dispatcher then stepped in and grabbed Holloway, but Holloway bit the dispatcher on the hand and fled, he said.

The five security employees ran through the housing project and caught up with Holloway a block away, off the property at Glorieta Street and Sunset Avenue. The dispatcher then took hold of Holloway “around the chin, not around the neck,” Goldbaum said.

“This was what you call a mutual combat because they were the same size,” Goldbaum said. But, he added: “This was a big accident.”

When the police were summoned, they found Holloway prone on the ground, Pasadena Police Sgt. Monte Yancey said. The officers handcuffed Holloway, carried him toward the police car and noticed he had stopped breathing. He was taken to Huntington Memorial Hospital, where he died two hours later.

Goldbaum said his son had worked previously as a guard and had received training in the use of a baton and the neck hold. But he was working as a dispatcher because he needed to renew his expired security guard card.

Three weeks after Holloway’s death, the county coroner’s office determined that Holloway died of compression to the neck. His death was listed as a homicide. His blood alcohol level was determined to have been .17 at the time of his death. The legal limit for drunkenness is .08.

The police investigation of the incident revealed that Holloway was hit with a nightstick, sprayed with liquid tear gas and kicked during the struggle with the guards.

But Don Eastman, head of the Pasadena district attorney’s office, has decided that assault charges will not be filed against the four security guards nor manslaughter charges against the dispatcher, Steve Goldbaum.

“The fact that (Goldbaum) wasn’t trained hurts the criminal case,” Eastman said. “It weakens the criminal case.”

The lack of current security guard credentials makes it more difficult for prosecutors to prove that criminal or gross negligence was involved, he said. If the dispatcher had possessed current credentials, prosecutors could argue that he ignored his training and knowledge of lethal force and killed Holloway, Eastman said. Without credentials, the dispatcher is likened to an average person on the street with limited knowledge about what constitutes lethal force, he added.

Steve Goldbaum has denied that he choked Holloway.

Because the legal reasoning was complex, Eastman said, he sent the case to district attorney offices in Los Angeles for review before he issued his final determination Wednesday.

The district attorney’s action has angered many in Pasadena’s black community, who say that Holloway was well-liked and well-known in Northwest Pasadena.

According to Holloway’s mother, Georgia Holloway, her son attended Lincoln Elementary School, Wilson Junior High School, Blair High School and Pasadena City College.

John Kennedy, president of the Pasadena branch of the NAACP, said Holloway played on the Blair High School football team as a guard and many people expected him to become a professional football player.

Holloway was a “big, strong, affable guy who was well-liked by everyone, kind of humorous,” Kennedy said.

Records show that Holloway was convicted and sentenced to state prison in May, 1987, on charges of selling cocaine. He was arrested in April, 1989, on similar charges that were later dropped.

But his mother insists that he was a good son.

“There isn’t hardly a black American man that doesn’t have a record, and (police) give it to them most of the time,” she said.

Holloway was working part time for the Pasadena Parks and Recreation Department. Shortly before his death, Holloway asked Kennedy for help in securing a better job, the NAACP president said.

“He was an even-tempered guy. To get him angry you had to push him very hard,” Kennedy said. “He didn’t have a violent nature. He was just a gentle giant.”