Arrests

Ryan Dallas Cook was homeward bound on his motorcycle on an October night in 2005 when he clipped a stalled, darkened SUV that had rammed into a concrete barrier on the 55 Freeway, an impact that hurled him to the pavement, where he was hit by several passing cars and died. Police said the driver of the SUV was a Hyundai executive who had allegedly spent a long night drinking.

Shortly after she sat down at her desk on the third floor of LAPD headquarters Friday morning, Det. Stephanie Lazarus was told a suspect in the basement jail had information on one of her cases. The 25-year police veteran went quickly downstairs. As Lazarus removed her firearm to pass through security, she unknowingly walked into a trap. There was no suspect -- only questions about a terrible secret police believe she has been harboring for more than two decades.

He was a former lawman who called himself "Mask" and advocated a hold-nothing-back lifestyle that helped transform mixed martial arts fighting into a craze and turned his own fighting apparel company into a multimillion-dollar business.

A karate instructor at a Costa Mesa self-defense studio was arrested this week on suspicion of molesting a 4-year-old girl whom he was giving a private lesson, authorities said Thursday. Jon Patrick Harrison, 61, of Anaheim is charged with one felony count of lewd acts on a child. Harrison has been a martial arts instructor at United Studios of Self Defense for 10 years, and authorities worry there could be other victims, said Orange County Sheriff's Department spokesman Jim Amormino.

Federal authorities in North Carolina on Monday arrested seven men who they said had trained with high-powered weapons as part of a terrorist conspiracy to wage an Islamic holy war overseas. The men -- including a father who, authorities said, trained in jihad camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and his two sons -- sought to provide material support to terrorists and to murder, kidnap, maim and injure people overseas, according to a seven-count federal indictment.

Beverly Hills hedge fund manager Bradley L. Ruderman surrendered to FBI agents Friday after being criminally charged in federal court in Los Angeles with bilking investors out of about $44 million in a wire fraud scheme. Ruderman's surrender came two weeks after a federal judge shut down his hedge funds, Ruderman Capital Partners and Ruderman Capital Partners A, in response to a civil suit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

For some defense lawyers, the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was less about racial profiling than about how persons can be arrested simply for speaking angry words to a police officer. The laws against "disorderly conduct" give police wide power to arrest people who are said to be disturbing the peace or disrupting the neighborhood. In Massachusetts and elsewhere, courts have said the "disorderly acts or language" must take place in public where others can be disturbed.

A day after saying that police "acted stupidly" in arresting a black Harvard University professor in his own home, President Obama appeared to soften his stance Thursday, spreading the blame more equally between the police and the arrested man. Obama had previously implied during a news conference Wednesday that Henry Louis Gates Jr., his personal friend and one of the nation's preeminent African American scholars, had been a victim of racial profiling by the police.

A routine vehicle search by Los Angeles Airport Police ended with the nonroutine discovery of 16 guns and roughly 1,000 bullets stowed in the bed of a pickup truck late Friday morning. The driver, Phillip Joseph Dominguez, 47, of Orange, was booked on suspicion of transportation of weapons and held in lieu of $50,000 bail, according to the LAPD.

For 34 years, the rape and murder of 80-year-old Alice Lewis remained a mystery. There wasn't even a suspect. But five months ago, a routine traffic stop in Los Angeles yielded DNA evidence that police said opened the door for solving the cold case and arresting the alleged killer. This week, Dennis Vasquez, 50, was arrested in the 1975 strangulation of the woman at her Meier Street home in Mar Vista. Because he would have been only 16 at the time of the crime, Vasquez appeared Friday in Juvenile Court in Inglewood.