Wednesday, November 25, 2015
Page 3
Services to be Held Saturday for Judge Ellen DeShazer
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Services will be held Saturday for Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Ellen C. DeShazer, who died Sunday night at the age of 76.
The funeral service is set to begin at 10 a.m. at Mount Moriah Baptist Church, 4269 S. Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, CA 90037. The phone number is (323) 846-1950.
Repast will follow immediately at the church. Interment will be at 12:30 p.m. at Forest Lawn, 1500 E. San Antonio Drive, Long Beach, CA 90807; the phone number is (800) 204-3131.
DeShazer was a deputy district attorney from 1984 until 1989, when she became a municipal court commissioner. Then-Gov. Pete Wilson appointed her to a Compton Municipal Court judgeship in 1995, and she joined the superior court through unification in 2000.
She helped open Compton’s drug court in 1998 and added Proposition 36 duties in 2001.
One of the attorneys who staffed her courtroom in those days was a deputy alternate public defender, Gary Tanaka, who is now a Los Angeles Superior Court judge and was a colleague of DeShazer at the Compton Courthouse following his 2009 appointment.
DeShazer, he told the MetNews yesterday, was not only a diligent judge, but “an absolutely delightful person.”
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