Santa Maria Sans Michael: Back to Semi-Normal

By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 12, 2006

SANTA MARIA, Calif. -- First of all, the parking spaces!

Plenty for everyone, because, really, it's just another normal Wednesday in the life of the small, stucco, Spanish-tile-roofed Santa Barbara County Superior Court complex. You know the one.

But without the metal police barricades and fences now, no screaming fans from Germany, no crazy lady releasing doves, no satellite trucks and cables snaking across the lawns and sidewalks, nobody coming or going in silk pajamas. You pull right in and marvel at all the serenity. Inside, people are pleading no contest to possessing controlled substances or driving while intoxicated. In a matter of minutes, a thief is sentenced to probation, fined and told by a judge, "You are to stay out of the Sam Goody."

It's as if that Michael Jackson stuff never happened.

But it did. A year ago, a teenage boy took the stand in Courtroom No. 9 and testified that he was molested by Jackson at the singer's ranch. It was Court TV legal analyst's heaven; it was a Nancy Grace godsend. A droning three months of testimony and cross-examination followed, and Jackson was acquitted. (He promptly left the country; last week, state officials ordered Neverland ranch, his home and private theme park 30 miles south of here, closed for failure to pay his employees' salary and workers' comp insurance.) Jackson's trial was repeatedly described on the news as having a "circus atmosphere," but, really, it wasn't. It was orderly. It was Mayberry -- if it weren't for the subject matter.

When it was over, on a June afternoon, one of the more vivid memories the people who work at Superior Court have is how fast the media packed up and abandoned them -- leaving all that trash and wires and dead shrubs.

"The media were very effective at moving on; that's what they do. So it was over, like that. The shrubs have bloomed again, the grass has come back," says Darrel E. Parker, assistant trial courts executive officer, who ran the day-to-day logistics of California v. Michael Jackson . "I have to say -- and there were of people who told me this, and I felt it, too -- about a month or so after it was over, there was this weird . . . malaise, like 'Wow, I can't shake this.' It was a funk; that's the only word I can think of."

Even though the courthouse is right next to Santa Maria's lone shopping mall, many people in this town of 83,000, three hours north of Los Angeles, were able to ignore the fuss completely -- if they wanted to. ("Welcome Canadian Golfers," read a big sign in the Holiday Inn lobby this time last year. "Welcome Canadian Golfers," it says again now.)

But many of the courthouse regulars liked it. It started every day at 8 a.m. and ended at 2:30 p.m. Some days it felt as if the court was running a summer camp for tabloid reporters, who would file their stories manically, breathlessly; then, at night, the Fleet Street freelancers and maybe the Japanese film crew, along with their new stateside colleagues, would all go to a bar down the street, Maverick's, which has a mechanical bull, and they would goad one another into riding it. It was Jacko porn by day and "Urban Cowboy" by night -- how American and frivolous it all seemed.

Even months later, Parker says, he went across the street to Coffee Diem, where owner Carmen Jenkins served lunch and coffee to hordes of media and starry-eyed fans or curious passersby. "Carmen was in the right place at the right time, that's for sure," he says. "And she says to me, 'You know, I'm only just now getting over all of it.' "

"Oh, we miss them so much. It hasn't been the same at all," says Jenkins, who at the moment has two customers. She is perhaps the only person you'll ever meet who loved having a media scrum camped on her street. "And it's not the money, not the business that I'm talking about. It was the total ambiance -- the people I met, the activity," she says. "And you know, people ask me, 'How's that new Beemer' that I bought with all the new business -- which I didn't."

Some events put a town on the map in a way it might not like to be remembered -- Waco, Tex., and its Branch Davidians, or Oklahoma City and the federal building bombing. The datelines pile up, but the place is never to be revisited again by all the networks. Santa Maria will for many people remain the place Michael Jackson walked free.

"Something like that won't happen here again," Parker says. "It's like the hundred-year flood. Something will happen somewhere -- every 10 years. Just not to us. It's California, there are lots of celebrities. It's bound to happen."

On this particular morning, Parker says, he was walking into his office when a man asked him two questions: "He said, 'Is this where I pay my traffic ticket?' and I said yes, and then he said, 'Is this the place Michael Jackson was?' and I said yes, and he said, 'So I'm going to get in trouble for doing nothing, and he got off,' and I said yes."

So, then, a kind of normality. ("This place was never normal," says a woman working behind the bulletproof window where the adjudicated masses pay an assortment of court-ordered fines.) The courtroom where the Jackson trial played out is currently being used for jury selection for the trial of Bruce Lynn Sons, who was charged in 1995 with the killing of a state highway patrolman in Bakersfield. His first conviction was overturned in 2002; two other trials resulted in a hung jury, and so Santa Maria was picked in a change of venue, and there's a gloomy sense of futility about this, Parker says, far more than the 18 months the entire Jackson saga -- from arraignment to acquittal -- took.

"Four days and they haven't seated a single juror yet," Parker complains. ("Why can't it be quicker, like Michael Jackson was?" whines an elderly woman in the jury pool to one of her cohorts while they're on break.) In the courtroom next door, Commissioner John F. McGregor is working through a laundry list of arraignments with an assistant DA and a public defender. Many cases deal with methamphetamine, shoplifting, drunk driving. There's a domestic violence charge. Upstairs, a woman from New York pleads out a forgery charge. She gets her probation paperwork and comes down to the entryway and calls her boyfriend, telling him in another language to come pick her up. She paces back and forth across the very spot where Jackson and his entourage arrived each day last spring.

Back inside, a peroxide blond transgendered woman in floral capri pants and a sleeveless hoodie is facing meth-possession charges. She fidgets and sighs and switches seats every five minutes. Her court-appointed attorney at last advises her to plead no contest; she wants a trial. Bring on the drama. The whole thing is pushed back a few days and she leaves in a swirl and gets on her bike, repeating, "Oh, my gosh" over and over, and begins pedaling away to some other sort of Neverland.

In his office, the day's proceedings winding down, Parker shows off some of his Jackson mementos: a framed printer's plate of the front page of the Santa Maria Times from the acquittal verdict. TV reporter Diane Dimond's book, "Be Careful Who You Love," about all the dirt -- "signed," he says. A rubber ducky on the wall that refers to an inside joke among the staff.

In the weeks after the trial, to cheer them up, Parker threw an appreciative barbecue for the staff. One hundred sheriff's deputies and other key players were given framed, pastel courtroom sketches from the proceedings, donated by the artists who drew them.

Rodney S. Melville, the judge in the Jackson case who is well regarded for keeping the trial sane and orderly, has gone back to his usual diet of family court matters in a smaller courtroom. (On this day, he is in San Francisco representing the county court at a budget committee hearing.) Tom Sneddon, the district attorney who lost the case, is going to retire after a new DA is elected this fall. Thomas Mesereau Jr., Jackson's defense attorney, and his colleague Susan Yu abruptly dropped their client three weeks ago, without comment.

And Jackson has been living in Bahrain all this time, according to the Associated Press. Tabloid rumors have him doing push-ups every day, considering a macho makeover to reignite his career. The state has given him until Tuesday to make financial amends with his staff, which hasn't been paid for months. Local animal welfare agencies have taken many of Neverland's animals away.

Parker shrugs.

"People ask me about Michael Jackson, or if I've seen him since, as if I have any connection at all to him," he says. "I ask them, 'Have you seen Elvis?' "