Personal Property

You can drive into this dusty fleck of a town near the Texas-Louisiana state line if you're African American, but you might not be able to drive out of it -- at least not with your car, your cash, your jewelry or other valuables. That's because the police here allegedly have found a way to strip motorists, many of them black, of their property without ever charging them with a crime.

Her suitor had the ring, but she lost her dowry. It was buried beneath the fallen limestone cliffs that smashed her home and smothered her neighborhood two months ago, killing at least 200 people. That morning seems long past, but there are still funerals and newly made orphans when the digging men pull another body from the rock and grit. It goes on like this, names whispered in alleys, hearts broken.

The sight may be a little shocking, Paul Boneberg warned a visitor. And it was. There, removed from tissue-paper wrappings in a storage box, were the wingtip shoes, striped suit and white shirt that gay activist and San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk wore Nov. 27, 1978, the day he was assassinated. Dark bloodstains remained visible around the shirt collar, and small holes -- from bullets -- could be seen in the suit's blue and gray material.

THE decisions are made in a scary, smoky instant. A wildfire is blazing toward the front door: What to take to safety? What to leave behind? One woman in Malibu grabbed her old wedding ring and divorce papers. A Santa Clarita man showed up at an evacuation center with four suitcases but little memory of what he and his wife threw into them. "Probably not what we need," he said, clutching his pillow. An Escondido woman, her head cloudy with panic, rescued her $1,000 Christian Louboutin shoes.

SOME were happy discoveries -- a child's handmade Mother's Day card, singed around the edges but its essence still intact. Or in Patti Grant's case, an engagement ring recovered from the rubble. (See photo on Page 1.) More than 2,000 homes burned across Southern California in the last two weeks, and as victims began sifting through the ashes, Times photographer Mel Melcon recorded what they found: the touchstones that miraculously survived, the mementos ruined by the flames.

For Andrew and Laura Golder, the garden isn't so much a backdrop for the home but rather an extension of it -- an expression of one's personality, a place of memories and meaning. But how can one create a distinctly personal landscape, especially when space is at a premium? The answer came from landscape architect Michael Schneider of Orange Street Studio in L.A., whose design is artful on its own, yet flexible enough to accommodate the couple's particular style. -- Craig Nakano

When Lee Crandell got the call late one Saturday evening, everything seemed routine. Someone had died. Colleagues in the Los Angeles County coroner's office had taken the body away. Crandell was called to secure the property. What the person had was "a lot of brown bags, lunch-sized bags," recalled Crandall, a property custodian of nearly 40 years who is now retired. "There were a hundred of those bags." They all were stuffed with cash.

Two former Simi Valley residents are suing Metrolink and its operator for allegedly causing their house to flood so badly during a February storm that they can no longer live in it. In a suit filed Friday in Ventura County Superior Court, Gary and Deborah Moss are seeking unspecified damages from the Southern California Regional Railroad Authority, which runs Metrolink, for the losses caused by the river of mud that swept into their home last winter.

QUESTION: We have some rentals and want to know about our legal responsibilities for a tenant's personal property. Since March 1995, our renter has been out of the country on a "business trip." The rent went unpaid for eight months when we finally heard from him last August. He sent a few checks, but his funds were always insufficient to cover them. His brother authorized us to store his belongings in the apartment basement and rent out the unit so we could make our mortgage payment.

On Wednesday, Los Angeles police arrested Gilbert Aragon of Granada Hills, intending to book him for an alleged parole violation. By the time the day was over, though, Aragon was in jail on a completely different charge: receiving stolen property from a years-old burglary. In an amazing twist, a jailer who had been asked to hold a bag of Aragon's personal property recognized his own long-lost pocketknife among the suspect's things.