The Latest: Photographer of Nancy Reagan motorcade arrested

A longtime Los Angeles Times photographer was arrested for allegedly refusing to cooperate with police while transmitting photographs of the funeral motorcade of Nancy Reagan.

Deputy Chief David Livingstone of the Simi Valley police says officers were responding to a report of a suspicious vehicle about three-quarters of a mile downhill from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, where the public viewing for the former first lady was being held.

Livingstone says the photographer, 65-year-old Ricardo DeAratanha, refused to identify himself and balked at providing identification, and was arrested for resisting and obstructing officers.

[...] Mark Werksman, an attorney for the photographer, tells the LA Times that his client provided "multiple unassailable press credentials" and the officers "kept asking him for more ID."

The attorney says the officers grew angry when DeAratanha suggested that his Brazilian ethnicity and tan skin was behind their questioning of him.

Some 3,115 visitors paid their respects Wednesday to the former first lady who lies in repose at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library where her funeral will be held on Friday.

About 1,500 people had visited Nancy Reagan's casket at a public viewing and more than 1,000 were still waiting to see her, but the setting as visitors stood before the casket was quiet and intimate.

The groups in the room with Mrs. Reagan at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library were kept deliberately small, and people said they had no sense of being rushed or hustled through as they stood before the casket.

Library officials said they had to increase the number of buses taking visitors to the hilltop library from 10 to 15 to handle all the people wanting to pay respects.

Each person who passes by the former first lady's casket departs with a card that says, "With gratitude for your expression of sympathy in honoring the life of Nancy Davis Reagan."

Shuttle buses are bringing mourners to the hilltop Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, where her casket was brought earlier Wednesday by motorcade from a Los Angeles-area funeral home.

A local police officer and a firefighter in dress uniform form an honor guard.

Earlier, people watched from freeway overpasses as a motorcade carried the casket from a funeral home in the Los Angeles suburb of Santa Monica to the Ronald Reagan Presidential.

A motorcade carrying Nancy Reagan's casket to her late husband's presidential library northwest of Los Angeles has turned onto the Ronald Reagan Freeway, a state route named in his honor in the 1990s.

The California Highway Patrol is running a rolling closure of freeway onramps on Wednesday as the hearse and other vehicles in the procession head from a mortuary in Santa Monica to the library in Simi Valley.

Earlier, about 20 members of the former first lady's family and close friends attended a brief, private service at the funeral home as several hundred onlookers gathered on a nearby boulevard.

A brief, private service attended by Nancy Reagan's relatives has ended and her casket has been transferred from a Santa Monica, California, funeral home to a hearse for a motorcade to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

Medical assistant Jeanie Maurello remembered the former first lady as very classy and recalls her "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign.