BRIEFLY.

Day late and suspect short

VAN NUYS -- An hours-long standoff Friday in search of a kidnapping suspect who police believed was holed up inside an apartment with a hostage turned out to be wrong -- by a day.

The alleged kidnapping actually occurred Thursday and was not ongoing, as family members believed, Los Angeles police Sgt. Juan Reyes said.

Police responded Friday morning to a domestic-violence call in the 7200 block of Allott Avenue and evacuated residents in an apartment building after learning that a recently released convict might be holding his girlfriend against her will. Repeated calls to the apartment went unanswered.

Police entered the apartment about 2 p.m. after learning that the alleged victim was accounted for.

"He was not in the apartment," Reyes said of the suspect.

Police are looking for the 25-year-old Latino man, whose name was not released.

-- Daily News

Clerks jump would-be robber

STUDIO CITY -- A robber who held up a Vons on Friday made a quick getaway -- via an ambulance to a local hospital, police said.

To guard their till, grocery clerks jumped an armed bandit at 4:20 p.m. at the market at Ventura and Laurel Canyon boulevards, Los Angeles police Officer Norma Eisenman said.

The injured man was taken to a nearby hospital, fire officials said.

A Vons store official who declined to give his name confirmed that grocery clerks had overcome a middle-age robber who had a gun.

-- Daily News

Glendale man dies in car crash

GLENDALE -- A 22-year-old Glendale man was killed early Friday when his speeding car left the roadway and slammed into a tree, police said.

The crash that killed Edward Bagdasarian occurred about 12:30 a.m. on North Verdugo Road near Monterey Road, just north of the Ventura Freeway, police spokesman John Balian said.

Bagdasarian was traveling southbound on Verdugo about 60 mph when he lost control of his compact car, which jumped a curb and hit a large tree.

-- Daily News

SLA supporter gets longer term

A woman who helped members of the urban guerilla group that kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, and who spent years living under an alias, had a year restored to her sentence for attempting to blow up LAPD police cars, according to court papers obtained Friday.

Sara Jane Olson, 60, who once lived in Palmdale, was sentenced to 14 years in prison after pleading guilty in October 2001 to two counts of attempted explosion of a destructive device with intent to commit murder, more than 25 years after she was indicted.

She had appealed her attempted bombing sentence to the state Board of Prison Terms, which cut a year off her term.

The state Attorney General's Office appealed the board's decision, and Thursday, an appeals court panel ruled that a lower court acted improperly when it allowed her to appeal her sentence to the Board of Prison Terms without using the correct court procedures.

Olson, a supporter of the Symbionese Liberation Army, was on the lam until her June 1999 arrest in St. Paul, Minn., where she had been living with her husband and three children.

-- City News Service