Boy Who Spotted Suspect’s Car Gets Wheels of His Own

About 90 minutes before the Night Stalker struck at a Mission Viejo home on Aug. 25, a sheriff’s deputy was several blocks away taking a report from a 13-year-old boy who had seen a “suspicious” car, Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates said Thursday.

There was no immediate reason, Gates pointed out, to believe that the orange Toyota whose partial license number was provided by James Romero III was the car used in the Stalker attacks, previously confined to Los Angeles and San Francisco areas.

But the connection was made through a fingerprint found in the car, and young Romero had helped break the case. He was not publicly identified until Thursday.

At a press conference held to commend and reward the youth, Gates said there was “no question James provided us with the most important piece of information we received out of 2,000 phone calls” concerning the Mission Viejo attack, in which 29-year-old Bill Carns was shot three times in the head and his fiancee was raped.

Gates called the slightly built eighth-grade student “the hero of Orange County” and presented him with an off-road, three-wheel motorcycle and $4,500 in cash from private donors.

The motorcycle obviously caught the boy by surprise. “Guy,” was all he could say as he stepped around television cameras to inspect the vehicle.

He had been working on his old motorbike in the garage of his home about 1 a.m. when he saw the Toyota, a sighting that helped lead to the capture of Stalker suspect Richard Ramirez. He declined, however, to disclose exactly what prompted him to call sheriff’s deputies.

Gates said he would not discuss details of the boy’s sighting of the orange Toyota until after filing the case with the Orange County district attorney’s office, today or early next week. The youth said that when he spotted the car and got its license number, “I didn’t really know” its significance. “I did what I could,” he said. “I just hope other people who see stuff like that report it.”

Family Attends Event

“If he was up to 1:30 in the morning working on that (motorbike), he’ll be up to 3 or 4 with this,” said his father, James Romero, 46, a civil service employee at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. Also attending the ceremonies were the boy’s mother, Emily, 39, and his sister, Lisa, 16.

Young Romero is the first person to receive cash rewards in connection with the Night Stalker case, Gates said.

Gates said he has written the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Night Stalker task force recommending that Romero be given “a substantial” portion of the more than $75,000 in reward money to be dispersed there.

Asked if he felt like a hero, the boy said simply: “Yeah.”