Luck Has Its Limits : Man Escapes Robbery Ordeal but Pleas for Help Are Ignored

It was, Al Oliver mused Wednesday, very disappointing.

Here he was, disheveled and naked from the waist down, except for his shoes, standing in broad daylight in the parking lot of an Inglewood park, having just fought off an armed robber who had taken his money and then attempted to sodomize him before Oliver wrestled the gun away, avoiding two shots in the process.

And now all he wanted was for some bystander to call the cops.

And they wouldn’t.

“There’s a blue Cadillac over there with three people in it. I say, ‘Would you please call the police?’ and they say, ‘Yeah, man’ and just drive off. I see three other people 20 or 25 feet from me; asked them the same thing. Nothing happened.

“It’s kind of obvious something’s wrong. Here you are distressed and here are people who wouldn’t put themselves into jeopardy by simply calling the police.”

For all that, Oliver, a 55-year-old engineer from the Crenshaw district, was lucky to be alive, investigators at the Los Angeles County sheriff’s Marina del Rey station said. They and Oliver described his nightmare this way:

Tuesday afternoon, Oliver had just walked out of an American Legion post on West Slauson Avenue near Inglewood when a man in his early 20s confronted him with a gun at Oliver’s car.

The assailant, whom investigators declined to describe, ordered Oliver to hand over his money and sit in the passenger seat. Then the attacker drove him to Centinela Park, about a mile away.

“He’s driving with one hand on the wheel, the gun in his other, talking about using my car to kill someone who had tried to kill his uncle,” Oliver said.

Once at the park’s parking lot, the gunman accused Oliver of holding back some of his money and began hitting him, Oliver said. Then he ordered Oliver to disrobe and get into the back seat, saying he planned to sodomize him, Oliver said.

“I told him that other people (in the park) were looking. He said, ‘Where at?’ and looked through the rear window and now the gun was pointing to the side of the car instead of toward me.

“I had to do something. I grabbed the gun and he pulled the trigger. The gun went off. There’s a hole in the ceiling. Only through the grace of God am I talking to you because he was only eight or nine inches away.”

As the pair struggled in the back seat, the gun went off again, missing both men. Eventually, Oliver managed to wrest control of the gun, jerk open the car door and push himself and the gunman onto the ground. The assailant then fled.

After his pleas for assistance went unanswered, Oliver went inside the car and found that the suspect had left the keys. He drove himself back to the American Legion post, where he telephoned authorities, and was then treated at a local hospital for cuts and bruises.