The Prisoner

The news tip came to Los Angeles' Mirror-News Columnist Paul V. Coates on Christmas Eve. In Riverside, Calif., Coates was told, a prisoner had been in jail for twelve days. Reason for the prisoner's arrest, as stated in the official record: he was "in danger of leading a lewd and immoral life." Age of the prisoner: seven.

In a series of telephone calls, Columnist Coates learned that the child, Larry, whose last name had been kept secret by juvenile authorities, was the son of a quiet, respectable couple living in nearby Eagle Mountain, a 150-house company town where iron ore is mined for Henry Kaiser's Fontana steel mill. To Columnist Coates, the charges against Larry seemed no worse than the offenses of thousands of other curious youngsters of his age. He had, said the record, placed his hands under the dress of a little girl, aged five. Why had he been jailed? The authorities said that Eagle Mountain is a community of hard-drinking, furnace-tempered miners who might take the law into their own hands. For Larry's own safety, he had to be kept in the detention home, even on Christmas Day.

With that, Coates printed his first angry blast about "the law," which "in its majestic equality, makes more damn fool mistakes." On New Year's Day, with Larry still locked up, Coates drove to Eagle Mountain and talked to the boy's teacher, who said that he was just "a normal, average kid." He talked to the townspeople and found them a decent lot, who had even taken up a collection to help Larry's father pay legal expenses. A day later, when Columnist Coates presented the parents on his TV show, the reaction was instantaneous: shocked viewers flooded the station with 700 phone calls, 1,000 letters and several petitions, copies of which had been sent to the State Capitol at Sacramento. California's Governor Goodwin Knight even called Riverside to find out what was going on.

Last week little Larry finally got a hearing, closed to press and public, before Judge Russell Waite. After it was over, the boy went home with his parents. Judge Waite told Coates that Larry was perfectly normal, should not have been held. The problems could have been adjusted at home easily enough.

At week's end, the angry probation officers challenged Coates's handling of the story, asked: "Do you think you have helped the boy by bringing this out in the open?" Shot back Coates: "No, but I may have helped a thousand other little boys."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.