Retiree, 82, Is Beaten by Intruder

Eleanora Logan was patiently explaining Thursday how her 82-year-old husband had been beaten the previous afternoon after apparently walking in on a burglar, when she suddenly noticed two unfamiliar young men sauntering down the quiet, one-block street in Brea.

“Here are a couple of strange-looking guys,” Logan said, getting up from her chair and walking across to the window for a better look. “They don’t belong in this area.”

Police and residents of the 200 block of South Pine Avenue believe that someone who didn’t belong in the area used a pick lying near the Logans’ house to force his way into the house while Harold Logan, a retiree, was shopping across Imperial Highway. On his way back home, Logan stopped to chat for a few minutes with a friend at the Firestone tire store next-door to his house.

Hit With Piece of Wood

Sometime between 4:30 and 4:50, when his watch crystal was cracked, the former machinist unlocked the front door of his house and surprised the intruder, who struck him on the head several times with a piece of wood that had been stacked in the car port.

Officials at St. Jude’s Hospital reported Thursday that Logan was in critical condition in the intensive care unit.

The Logans had been burglarized once before, and several other houses on the blocklong cul-de- sac had been hit during the past 25 years, yet no one had ever been hurt, and most residents consider the neighborhood a safe place to live.

Eleanora Logan, 62, found her husband sprawled on the living room floor, his keys and checkbook nearby, after she returned from work at the Orange County Department of Social Services. At first she thought he had simply fallen and hit his head, but there was too much blood, and his wallet was missing.

The burglar didn’t get much, Logan said.

“All I know is that my husband has $7 in his wallet,” she said. “A $5 bill and two ones.”

The bedroom had been ransacked, with drawers dumped, and all the telephones had been pulled from their jacks. Police, who said they have no suspects in the assault, later recovered some jewelry near a backyard wall.

In the 25 years she and her husband have lived on the well-kept block, much has changed, Logan said. Many of the families that had become close while raising their children have moved away and rented their homes out. Not far away, the Brea Mall was built and commercial development along Imperial Highway increased, bringing more strangers to the street. Logan at one point tried to start a Neighborhood Watch organization, but she found there was not enough interest. Down the street, Josephine and Joseph Messina, residents of Pine Avenue for 25 years, expressed shock at the beating.

Like Eleanora Logan, Josephine wanted to organize a Neighborhood Watch, although she said, “This is a great block.”

“This is the worst thing that’s happened on this street,” said Joseph Messina.

The Messinas’ son Michael, a detective with the Brea Police Department, grew up on Pine Avenue and still owns a house on the street, which he rents out. If he hadn’t been ill with the flu Wednesday, he would have gotten the call to investigate the case.

‘Low-Crime Area’

“I hate to see something like this happen--on any block,” the detective said. Messina said he thought the burglar was an outsider, “because of the viciousness of the thing” and because the block “is a real low-crime area, historically.”

The beating of Harold Logan by the intruder “makes no sense all,” Messina said, since “the old man wouldn’t have been able to identify him if his life depended on it.”

Another neighbor, a young mother of several children who asked that her name not be used, said that in the past she had taken no special precautions, although “I will now.”

Two carpenters working on a house directly across the street from the Logans’ said that they saw the elderly man puttering around his house, but did not notice anyone acting in a suspicious manner.

“The (intruder) must have had a lot of moxie,” said Olaf Thorson. “The neighborhood was full of people.”

Eleanora Logan, weary but self-possessed, recalled that the couple were planning to put their home up for sale next month so they could move to a city in Washington when she retired.

“This guy is a loving guy,” she said. “His great loves are dancing and fishing.” Her husband would have posed no threat to the intruder, she said. “He’s an 80-year-old man with diabetes and a little bit of heart trouble.”