Impostors

A store security guard who told police he was a counter-terrorism agent with the Department of Homeland Security was arraigned Wednesday on charges of impersonating an agent and carrying a loaded firearm. He pleaded not guilty to all the counts. Orange police arrested Kevin Javaheri, 49, in late February after they approached him in a strip mall restaurant where he was sitting with a loaded gun in a shoulder holster, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Keith Bogardus.

They had police badges, "Housing Authority" uniforms, bulletproof vests and firearms. They cruised the streets of Los Angeles in an LAPD-style cruiser equipped with police radios, side floodlights and metal prisoner partition. But these three men were not cops. For months, authorities believe, they targeted Latino street vendors, pretending to be detectives. They took cash from the vendors and issued fake citations for unlicensed vending and other misdeeds.

Stanford University officials said Thursday they were investigating claims that a young Orange County woman passed herself off as a student, talked her way into several dormitories and lived on campus for eight months. The university would not disclose the woman's name or the circumstances surrounding her alleged ruse, but the school's student newspaper identified her as Azia Kim, 18, a graduate of Troy High School in Fullerton.

Azia Kim arrived at Stanford University last fall from Fullerton and took up residence on campus at Kimball Hall. She ate in the dining hall and seemed to do her homework, often working late into the night on school papers. She told people she was a human biology major and talked about her upcoming exams. There was only one problem: She had not been admitted as a student.

WHEN David Vanegas was going to Rice University, school officials say, he gravitated to large lecture classes where he wouldn't stand out. At mealtimes, he never seemed to have his ID card handy and relied on friends to let him into the dining hall. In the evenings, he persuaded students to let him stay overnight in their dorm rooms. But his schoolmates began to notice odd things about him, like he never seemed to have any homework.

A convicted sex offender who said he just wanted some respect tried to pass himself off as a teenage member of English nobility -- until some high school journalists uncovered his past. Joshua Adam Gardner, 22, visited Stillwater Area High School three times in December and January, posing as Caspian James Crichton-Stuart IV, the Fifth Duke of Cleveland. He told students that he was 17 and interested in attending the school. He also said he was 27th in line for the British throne.

Did a group of ringers secretly ring in the new year at Pasadena's 2006 Rose Parade? The answer is yes. But that hasn't resolved a lawsuit over whether officials at the Pasadena Unified School District tried to cover up what they did. The suit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, alleges that local school officials have hidden the fact that out-of-towners were recruited to fill the school district's All-Star Marching Band during this year's rainstorm-soaked parade down Colorado Avenue.

The White House said it would discipline two government employees who impersonated journalists to scout locations for a presidential Gulf Coast visit this month, the Washington Post reported Saturday. The Post quoted a couple whose home in Gautier, Miss., was wrecked by Hurricane Katrina as saying two men identified themselves as Fox News journalists during a visit to the couple's home. Elaine Akins told the newspaper that the men later identified themselves as Secret Service agents.

A 76-year-old man claiming to be a doctor went door-to-door offering free breast exams, and was charged with sexually assaulting two women who accepted the offer, police said Thursday. One woman became suspicious after the man asked her to remove all her clothes and began conducting a purported genital exam without donning rubber gloves, investigators said. She phoned the Broward County Sheriff's Office and the suspect fled.

A prominent European high-tech executive was arrested Wednesday at his Bel-Air estate on suspicion of posing as a police officer to buy at least one gun, widening an international investigation that began with the crash of a rare Ferrari in Malibu. Carl Freer, 35, allegedly flashed a badge from an obscure San Gabriel Valley transit authority and said he was a sworn police officer so that he could purchase a gun from a dealer without the required background checks, authorities said.