O'Neal 'fired gun in self defence'
Actor Ryan O’Neal said his arrest at the weekend came after he fired a gun in self defence to prevent his son from hitting him with a fireplace poker.
O’Neal told the Los Angeles Times newspaper he arrived at his Malibu home on Saturday night from having dinner with a group of friends, including former girlfriend Farrah Fawcett. They had been celebrating Fawcett’s 60th birthday and that she is cancer-free after four months of treatment.
O’Neal’s son Griffin, 42, who has a history of alcohol and drug problems, was visiting. O’Neal said Griffin grabbed a fireplace poker, started swinging it and grazed him four or five times.
He “aimed at my head. I ducked. He hit his own girlfriend in the head,” O’Neal, 65, told the newspaper. 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 into the banister, and that scared him and he fled,” he said.
Sheriff’s deputies arrested O’Neal for investigation of assault with a deadly weapon and negligent discharge of a firearm. He was released on a €38,000 bond.
Griffin O’Neal’s pregnant girlfriend was slightly injured, treated at a hospital and released, said Neil Hassman, Ryan O’Neal’s manager.
Sheriff’s deputies and Hassman could not provide details on what caused the dispute.
“I’ve spoken to people involved and no-one knows why it escalated like that,” Hassman said today. “Ryan feels terrible about what happened.”
Griffin O’Neal was found guilty of reckless boating in a 1986 accident that killed Gian-Carlo Coppola, the son of director Francis Ford Coppola, and later received an 18-day jail sentence for not performing 400 hours of community service ordered by the judge in that case.
He also pleaded no contest to drunken driving in 1989 and was sentenced to probation. In 1992, he pleaded no contest to charges he shot at his estranged girlfriend’s unoccupied car. At the time, he agreed to spend a year in a live-in drug rehab programme and serve five years on probation.
