Traffic Stop Focus of Probe by Police : Law enforcement: African American church worker claims he was harassed by officers at gunpoint.

Beverly Hills police are investigating an African American church worker’s complaint that police pulled a gun on him and verbally harassed him during a traffic stop that did not result in a citation being issued.

The incident marks the second time in less than a year that an African American has claimed he was unfairly stopped by police in the city.

Pat Earthly, a handyman at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills and an aspiring musician, says police stopped him on Jan. 7 after he pulled into a parking structure on Roxbury Drive while on his way to a doctor’s appointment.

The 27-year-old Los Angeles resident says one officer demanded to know why he had not pulled over when police first began trailing him, and drew a gun when the church worker climbed out of his car.

Earthly asserts he had not seen police following him. He says the officers called him derogatory names, warned he would be shot if he moved and asked his reason for being in the city. After producing his car registration and license, he was told he could go, he says.

Earthly, who has worked at All Saints since August, says police stopped him six times previously, but that the Jan. 7 incident was particularly threatening. He reported it to his supervisor, parish administrator Jean “Sam” Williamson, who passed word on to Rector Carol Anderson.

The two church officials were scheduled to meet with Beverly Hills City Manager Mark Scott on another matter the same month, and they used the occasion to bring up the alleged harassment. Scott referred the matter to the police department for investigation.

“It’s a terrible story. It’s not the kind of thing that is supposed to happen,” Scott said last week.

Police Lt. Joseph Lombardi says Earthly has been unable to identify the officers by looking at photos of the city police department’s 128 members, adding that he had “come up with a name that may be a possibility.”

“We’re checking into that,” Lombardi said.

Lombardi calls Earthly “very credible.”

“He’s very down-to-earth and a nice person,” Lombardi said. “He never really (said) it’s a racial thing, but I think he’s looking at it that way. My only questions were why did they stop him, had a crime just occurred and did he fit (a suspect’s) description?”

Earthly, a native of Louisiana, said he had not complained about other times he had been stopped and questioned by police while driving through the city because he considered the incidents minor annoyances.

“I didn’t want to blow them all out of proportion,” he said.

Lombardi describes Earthly’s complaint as “pretty uncommon.” However, last year Edward Lawson, a 46-year-old African American, complained that he, too, was unfairly stopped--and then arrested--by Beverly Hills police.

A civil-rights activist and actor, Lawson had been the subject of a landmark 1983 Supreme Court ruling that individuals who do not appear to be involved in criminal activity have no obligation to carry or produce identification when stopped by police.

Lawson pursued that case after his habit of taking long nighttime walks in predominantly white neighborhoods in San Diego led to his repeated arrests on vagrancy charges.

He was stopped by Beverly Hills police on March 30, 1993, in front of the Beverly Hills apartment of a business associate and was charged with a trio of misdemeanors after police reported that he failed to produce a driver’s license or other identification on request.

But last May, the charges were dropped in Beverly Hills Municipal Court after Deputy Dist. Atty. Lisa Hart agreed that “there was insufficient evidence to justify the stop of the defendant.”

Lawson, a Venice resident, has said repeatedly that he believes racism was the reason police pulled him over--a charge police deny. He was stopped after a Beverly Hills resident told police she saw a black man in a car with a license number similar to Lawson’s vehicle in the vicinity of an elementary school. According to police, children had been sexually harassed at the school in the past.

The police found no evidence that Lawson had behaved inappropriately near the school. After he was arrested, he said he had slowed down in the area of the school because he was required to do so by law.