Source: www.celebritymound.com
A frantic pregnant woman told a 911 operator she had been hit and was in pain shortly before actor Ryan O’Neal was arrested for alleged assault and firing a weapon in an altercation with his son.
In recordings released Monday by the Sheriff’s Department, JoAnne Berry, who authorities described as a friend of O’Neal’s son, Griffin O’Neal, pleaded for an ambulance.
“I got hit by something. I can’t see. Help me! Help me!” Berry said, as an unidentified man in the background asked her where her keys and bag were.
“I’m in a lot of pain. … I need an ambulance,” Berry said.
In a call from the Malibu sheriff’s station to California Highway Patrol, a dispatcher said Berry reported being hit in the eye.
Berry did not say in her call who hit her or the object used.
Sheriff’s deputies arrested O’Neal early Saturday at his Malibu home for investigation of assault with a deadly weapon and negligent discharge of a firearm. He was booked and released on a $50,000 bond.
The district attorney’s office, which would determine whether to file charges, had not received the case by late Monday, said spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons.
Accounts of who started the altercation differed sharply, with O’Neal saying he was defending himself against an enraged son and the actor’s daughter claiming her father was lying.
The incident happened after O’Neal arrived home after dining out with a group of friends, including his former girlfriend Farrah Fawcett, according to O’Neal’s manager and a friend who attended the dinner. The group had been celebrating Fawcett’s 60th birthday and that she was cancer-free after four months of treatment.
In a statement, the 65-year-old actor said Griffin was at the house and began “wildly swinging a fireplace poker.”
His son grazed him four or five times and “aimed at my head, I ducked, he hit his own girlfriend in the head,” O’Neal said in an interview published Monday in the Los Angeles Times.
“I got a little nervous at that point and fled to my room … and I got my gun,” he said.
O’Neal said his son began to come up the stairs with the poker. “So I just fired it (the gun) into the banister, and that scared him and he fled,” he told the newspaper.
The pregnant Berry was slightly injured in the incident and treated at a hospital and released, said O’Neal manager Neil Hassman.
Charlie Mattera, a close friend of O’Neal who had been at the dinner and arrived at the house shortly after the incident, said O’Neal told him that when he got home Griffin was beating up his younger brother, Redmond.
“Griffin attacked his brother, Redmond, smashing an ashtray over his head,” Mattera told The Associated Press. “Ryan walked into this and told Griffin to get out of the house. He couldn’t do anything but protect himself and Redmond.”
But O’Neal’s daughter, Tatum, who was not present during the incident, said it was Griffin who was trying to protect Redmond.
“No matter what my dad is saying in the press, Griffin was not trying to start a fight with him,” she told the program “Entertainment Tonight” Monday. “He was attempting to protect Redmond.”
Hassman said Tatum had only gotten Griffin’s account, since she and her father had not spoken for years.
“I would be hesitant to buy into anything Tatum says about her father, or her brothers for that matter,” said Hassman.
Griffin, 42, Redmond, 22, and Berry, 22, could not be reached for comment. There was no listing for their phone numbers. Ryan O’Neal declined to be interviewed, Hassman said.
Hassman said O’Neal returned to the set of the TV show “Bones” despite the actor’s arm being a “little sore.”
The twice-divorced Ryan O’Neal, known for his boyish good looks, went from a TV soap opera to an Oscar-nominated role in “Love Story.” He also appeared in films including “Paper Moon,” “Barry Lyndon,” “Green Ice” and “Zero Effect.”
O’Neal had Griffin and Tatum with his first wife, Joanna Moore. Tatum co-starred with her father in the 1973 movie “Paper Moon,” for which she won an Oscar for best supporting actress. O’Neal was romantically involved with Fawcett for years. They never married but had one son, Redmond.
Griffin and Ryan have clashed before. In 1983, police were called to their home after a fight in which the elder O’Neal knocked out two of Griffin’s teeth, the Times reported. No charges were filed.
Griffin was given an 18-day jail sentence for not performing 400 hours of community service ordered by the judge who found him guilty of reckless boating in the 1986 accident that killed Gian-Carlo Coppola, the son of film director Francis Ford Coppola.
He pleaded no contest to a drunken driving charge in 1989 and was sentenced to probation. In 1992, Griffin avoided a possible three-year jail sentence by pleading no contest to charges he shot at his estranged girlfriend’s unoccupied car. At the time, he agreed to spend one year in a live-in drug rehabilitation program and serve five years on probation.
