Mace

The cause of a sickness that affected 30 people on Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride Saturday night still had not been determined Sunday afternoon, a park spokeswoman said. But two of the six people who were treated at a local hospital after becoming sick with coughing, tight chests, burning eyes, skin blotches and nausea said a doctor told them that "a gas, something like Mace" apparently caused the malady.

County officials promised fearful Ventura residents Saturday that psychiatric patients will be kept under tighter security, after a patient was arrested last week in the fatal stabbing of 90-year-old Velasta Johnson. But the officials also answered the residents' requests for Mace and alarms with the suggestion that compassion and medication are better responses to patients who walk away from the Ventura County Mental Health facility.

A carpet cleaner charged Sunday with killing two young women told investigators he became enraged and strangled them after one sprayed him with Mace she had carried since five murders in the town last year, a prosecutor said. Alan Robert Davis, 29, was jailed without bail on murder charges after police said he admitted strangling the two University of Florida students. Davis is charged in the deaths Thursday of Eleanor Anne Grace, 20, of Ft. Myers, and Carla Marine McKishnie, 22, of Brandon.

Lyle Alzado, an imposing former Raiders defensive lineman, found himself overmatched Tuesday in an early morning encounter with a 110-pound female deputy marshal armed with a can of chemical Mace and some law enforcement friends, according to authorities.

The mother of three men on trial for resisting arrest testified Tuesday that Oxnard police officers involved in a confrontation with guests at a graduation party sprayed her with Mace and later dragged her away when she tried to protect her sons. The testimony of Dominga Flores in Ventura County Superior Court came in the trial of her three sons and a fourth party guest, all of whom assert that they were the victims of police brutality and have threatened to sue the city.

A woman at Mile High Stadium became so upset with two drunken Bronco fans after the team's 30-29 loss Monday night to Cleveland that she sprayed them and a dozen innocent bystanders with Mace. "Ten to 15 people were squirted in the face," said Dr. Michael Brunko, who works in the first-aid room at the stadium during games. "It created a bit of turmoil. She got the perpetrators, but all the rest of the people were innocent bystanders. They just got in the way of the spray," Brunko said.

The chief of the emergency department at UCLA Medical Center said he made a complaint Tuesday against a Los Angeles police officer who sprayed Mace in the face of a defenseless patient under treatment in the hospital's emergency room. Dr. Marshall Morgan of UCLA said he was told by his staff that the patient, Jason Standley, 29, was being held at the hospital in four-point leather restraints when an officer sprayed Mace into the patient's face at a distance of "about four or five inches."

A Harbor View man testified Wednesday that a San Diego police officer, mistaking him for a shooting suspect, kicked him repeatedly in the groin, struck him in the ribs with a baton and sprayed Mace into his eyes. The testimony occurred during the first day of a hearing for Allen A. Stovall, a three-year veteran who was fired from the Police Department after the incident last year and is now appealing his dismissal to the city's Civil Service Commission. The 28-year-old officer was dismissed in December.

It was like a staged train wreck at a county fair, or at least that is the way it sounded. There was more creaking and clanking and crashing and bashing and rending of metal than the Afrika Korps produced on its worst day. It was Armageddon at the picnic grounds, with nearly 180 armored warriors crashing into each other, screaming like banshees, piling up in a deafening heap of flailing broadswords and pikes and axes and swirling dust.

A Laguna Beach police officer used excessive force when he sprayed a tear-gas substance known as Mace on a woman while trying to sort out a marital dispute and must pay her $5,001, a federal jury decided this week. After the jurors condemned his action--and department policy on the use of Mace--Officer Ronald Sapp said that he planned to quit police work.