The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 50

ORANGE COUNTY li CIRCULATION: DAILY 1,502,120 SUNDAY WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1994 COPYRIGHT 1994THE TIMES MIRROR COMPANY CCt 104 PAGES DAILY 25 AN EDITION OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES ORANGE COUNTY NEWSWATCH Police Disarmed Spill Clogs O.C. Freeway by Haitian Mobs i Caribbean: Roving bands storm stations in countryside and turn weapons over to U.S. troops. Some officers flee; others seek protection from Americans. By RICHARD A.

SERRANO, times staff writer LIMBE, Haiti A nonviolent people's revolt is sweeping the northern Haitian countryside, and for the first time in years the hunter is being hunted. In revenge for oppression long wrought by local police, large roving bands of angry men and boys are taking it upon themselves to disarm the Haitian police in their own communities. DISNEY DICTIONARY? If you're brazen enough to call yourself "The Happiest Place on Earthy you have to expect some people to have a little fun with your image. Disneyland has inspired a new term by the resurrected Spy magazine: "Disneyfi-catioB," defined as "the act of assuming traits more familiarly associated with a theme park than real life." And the knife twist: "Genuine Disney-fication must be tawdry, contrived, and useless." MICKEY'S PRISONER: Then there's Mouth 2 Mouth, a new teen magazine by Time Publishing, which has fun this month with a story by Rachel Camacho, a young woman detained when 6he tried to slip into Disneyland without a ticket. Writes Ca-macho: "Disneyland Jail.

The walls were covered with pictures of Walt, Mickey and Donald. Rows of happy pictures where those who have defied the Disney Honor are placed asked if I knew why I was there. I figured it had something to do with me trying to sneak into the park without paying." i 4 KAREN TAPIA Um Angeles Times Two members of a cleanup crew remove cement side Freeway in Anaheim Tuesday. Some free-sealant that spilled onto the westbound River- way traffic came to a standstill for six hours. B9 The mobs some with as many as 200 people are storming the police buildings and pillaging officers' homes, grabbing rifles, shotguns, handguns, knives, batons and ammunition and then marching proudly through the dusty streets and turning the weapons over to U.S.

military authorities. The grass-roots movement has spread sometimes faster than the U.S. military can get there to towns such as Grande Riviere and Le Borgne in the northern valleys HOARDING WEAPONS The U.S. guns-for-cash plan runs up against fear. A6 as people have become emboldened in the wake of the killings last weekend of 10 Haitian policemen in a gun battle with U.S.

Marines. On Tuesday, the people "liberated" Limbe, a town of 20,000. "Anybody who has repressed us, we are taking their guns," declared Jacques Fritz, who led a 200-man mob Tuesday morning into the home of a local police section chief. "Anybody who beat us or whipped us, we are taking their guns. So when exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide gets back, the country will be clean." But the reversal in Limbe and the other northern towns has brought chaos rather than instant freedom, wedging U.S.

troops between demands by the crowds that police who surrender to U.S. troops be turned over to the people and police officers' pleas for American protection. The soldiers, brought here to keep the peace, find themselves unable to please everyone. "My brain is racked," said an Please see HAITI, A6 Hundreds Likely Dead as Ferry Sinks in Baltic From Times Wire Services HELSINKI, Finland-Hundreds' of people were feared drowned early today when an Estonian passenger ferry with 867 people aboard sank off southwest "The number of victims will be many hundreds, I fear," Capt. Lt Mikko Montonen at the Turku Sea Rescue Center told Reuters news service by telephone.

One survivor said the ship listed and sank within five minutes. The sinking occurred sometime after midnight. Stormy seas and winds topping 56 m.p.h. were preventing rescue operations near the site of the i disaster, about 23 miles from the Finnish island of Uto off the country's southwestern coast. Montonen said about 30 people had been rescued from where the passenger ferry Estonia sank while on its way from Tallinn, the Estonian capital, to Stockholm.

There were 679 passengers and 188 crew members on board. Asked to estimate how many could still be rescued, Montonen said: "At most, some tens of percent. The conditions are terrible." He said there were strong winds Please see FERRY, A22 GSA's Johnson Pledges to Fund O.C. Courthouse Jurors More Available Than Expected, Ito Says Simpson case: Judge sees signs panel can be chosen quickly. But some analysts fear overeagerness, hidden bias.

(. willingness to serve may have predispositions about the case or may be hoping to capitalize on it by selling their stories once the trial is concluded. A detailed questionnaire and further questioning by the judge and lawyers in the case are intended to weed out any of those people before a jury is impaneled. Commenting on the willingness of large numbers of people to serve on the Simpson jury, Ito speculated Please see SIMPSON, A16 Wilson Ends Controversial Student Testing With Veto FIRED UP: Women at the county's Fire Department have reason to celebrate. This is the 20th anniversary of the first woman ever hired by a fire department in America.

Also, Jane Van Sickle, the first woman firefighter hired by the county 18 years ago, recently be-. came its second female captain. It now has 3 female firefighters, above the 2 national average. Says Van Sickle: "It was tough at first a lot of male macho until I proved myself. Now the men are used to us." LEAVING IT BETTER: Before there was a cancer center at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, before there was a Heart Institute there, before it had five outpatient centers, was before Michael Stephens took over as president and chief executive in 1984.

Stephens on Tuesday announced he'll soon leave Hoag for a bigger health services position in Seattle (Bl). Says former Hoag chief of staff Dr. Donald Drake: "Few have his strategic vision and leadership. We'll miss him." TONIGHT: Deborah Harry and the Jazz Passengers (F2) at 8, the Coach House, San Juan Cap-istrano. (714) 496-8930.

WEATHER: Partly cloudy and warm with highs in the mid-90s and lows in the upper 60s. (B8) i t. By Jerry Hicks, with Mark Pinsky The Top of Today's Newt it on A2 COLUMN ONE "give the highest priority" to enacting a new statewide testing program. Maureen DiMarco, the governor's education adviser and a candidate for state superintendent of public instruction in the Nov. 8 election, said new tests could be in place by spring.

A broad array of education, business and other groups that had been pushing for an extension of the CLAS tests condemned Uie governor's veto, which was announced by DiMarco at a Capitol news conference. Some accused Wilson of caving in to conservative religious groups that had objected to the tone and content of the tests, which were designed to measure thinking and problem -solving skills. "It's kind of like throwing the baby out with the bathwater," said Karen Russell, who teaches Please see SCHOOLS, A17 ByJEANMERL and CARL INGRAM TIMES STAFF WRITERS SACRAMENTO-Gov. Pete Wilson on Tuesday vetoed a bill that would have extended the life of California's heralded but problem-plagued student testing system, halting for now the state's controversial experiment in assessing what public schoolchildren know. In his veto message, Wilson complained that the legislation to continue the California Learning Assessment System for another five years neither required that pupils receive individual test scores nor did a good job of measuring students' mastery of basic skills.

He called on the Legislature, which reconvenes in January, to By LESLIE BERKMAN TIMES STAFF WRITER Despite Tuesday's vote in Congress denying $25.2 million needed to build Orange County's first federal courthouse, General Services Administrator Roger W. Johnson has pledged that he will find the money necessary to keep the long-awaited project on schedule. In a letter made public Tuesday by Sen. Dianne Feinstein Johnson assured the chairman of the Senate Treasury subcommittee, Sen. Dennis DeConcini that "the Santa Ana courthouse project remains a top priority of the General Services Administration." While acknowledging that the appropriations bill now before Congress does not contain funds for the new courthouse to be named after Ronald Reagan, Johnson told DeConcini, "I am committed to proceeding with this project and to completing it within the agreed upon scope." The former board chairman of Orange County-based Western Digital Corp.

said that the "GSA will identify a source for the needed $25.2 million from within the authorized funding for the Federal Buildings Fund and will submit a reprogramming request for approval of Congress in a time frame that will permit us to maintain current contract award schedules." Funds for the planned courthouse were "included in the President's budget," Johnson noted, but were cut by a House-Senate conference committee acting on instructions to cut "pork barrel" projects included in the budget by members of the Democratic majority. Please see COURTHOUSE, A16 44 .1 tl mtr-A 'f i-Jlj GAIL F1SHEH LA. Tunes Thuan Le scans a cemetery for her relatives' names. THE PAST, REVISITED North Vietnam, the land her parents fled, beckoned Times staff writer Thuan Le. On a journey mapped by family memories, she honors her ancestors, finds new hope.

El By ANDREA FORD and JIM NEWTON TIMES STAFF WRITERS LOS ANGELES-On the second day of jury selection in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the judge announced that so many people are willing to serve that he may not need to bring the full complement of potential jurors to the Downtown courthouse. "We are running perhaps 25 to 30 higher in jurors able to serve than I had anticipated from my past experience with these cases," Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito said Tuesday. Since jury selection began Monday, nearly 500 potential jurors have been screened.

Of those, 222 are still in the running and will be coming back for further questioning. Ito has said he hoped that from an initial outreach to 1,000 Los Angeles County residents, about 250 could be found who would be willing to serve on the Simpson jury. He indicated that the goal may be reached before Thursday, setting the stage for selection of the 12 jurors and eight alternates who will decide Simpson's fate. The initial success at finding jurors who are willing to serve heartened Ito, but concerned some observers, who worried about too much enthusiasm in the jury pool. "It's scary about these 'volunteer the jurors who see this as the way to their 15 minutes of fame," said Los Angeles defense lawyer Marcia Morrisey, adding that some who have been called may now see jury service "as a way to change an otherwise dull life." Other analysts warned that some prospective jurors who have voiced Why did authorities single out this law-abiding French citizen for scrutiny? There's only one reason: Javitary has dark skin.

And these days in France, people with dark skin are suspected of being Islamic fundamentalists and, hence, possible terrorists. In a massive crackdown, the conservative government has for a month been sweeping the streets, stopping as many as 3,000 motorists and pedestrians a day to interrogate them, demand their identity papers and, in some cases, search them. With no apologies, the police are focusing on dark-skinned people. And the random checks, sharply criticized by human rights groups, reflect a deeper French antipathy toward Muslims who insist on maintaining their cultural and theological Small Vanguard Presses Its Case for Jury Reforms By JOSH MEYER TIMES STAFF WRITER PHOENIX Ten floors above this sunbaked city, five women and nine men take seats in Superior Court Judge B. Michael Dann's courtroom to decide a stranger's fate and become the latest unwitting guinea pigs in Dann's grand experiment in judicial reform.

Dann welcomes the jurors and then encourages them to do what many of his fellow judges think is the unthinkable. The jurors can ask questions not raised by attorneys by slipping Dann messages, and he even proposes that jurors be allowed to discuss their notes and the evidence as they go along. Before any testimony is heard, Dann gives each a printed copy of the jury instructions that clearly Please see JURY, A12 traditions rather than assimilating French values and culture. "When the police see me, they just see a dark-skinned man, not a Frenchman," said Javitary, who was born in Martinique and who has been "controlled," as the police call it, dozens of times in recent weeks. To protect himself these days, Javitary carries his passport, birth certificate, social security card and citizenship papers.

But those documents didn't stop one police patrol from strip-searching him and then breaking apart the bead bracelets he was wearing. "I am trying to learn to tolerate it, but I will never understand it," Javitary said. "I don't know anything about politics or Islam. I'm a Catholic." Please see FRANCE, A10 Crackdown by Color in France Irvine Man Breaks Record for English Channel Swim Sports: Chad Hundeby, 23, attributes the feat to his coach, Penny Lee Dean, who held the former mark. just wanted to get across." The former Woodbridge High Government singles out dark-skinned people hunt for Islamic terrorists.

Critics link itoeeps to bias against Immigrant group that refuses to assimilate. By SCOTT KRAFT TIMES STAFF WRITER PARIS-Guy Andre Javitary, a 32-year-old construction worker, left his apartment at 2 p.m. one recent day to look for jobs. By the time he returned early that evening, he had been stopped six times on the streets and strip-searched once by By MIKE DiGIOV ANNA TIMES STAFF WRITER Chad Hundeby of Irvine shattered the English Channel swimming record Tuesday, covering the 20-mile trek from Dover, England, to Cap Gris-Nez, France, in 7 hours, 17 minutes. "The English Channel is the most widely known marathon swim.

It is special even for the Americans," he told The Times of London afterward. "However, I decided to take it as it came, because the channel is a strange beast and you never quite know how the weather, water and tides will work out," he said. "I did not expect to break the record. I School swimmer's feat prompted a daylong barrage of phone calls to the Hundeby house in Irvine and at least two impromptu celebrations, one at his younger brother's Los Angeles home and one in the Upland home of Penny Lee Dean, who held the previous channel swim record of 7 hours, 40 minutes, for 16 years. "I'm ecstatic that he did it," said Dean, who spent three years (1988-91) as Hundeby's distance- swimming coach and is now the women's swimming and water polo coach at Pomona College.

"You couldn't ask for a nicer person to destroy your record." Please tee CHANNEL, A22.