‘Murder by Strangers’ : From Gang Gunfire to Freeway Shootings, L.A. County’s 1987 Homicides Often Linked by Their Random Nature

Deloris Allen was walking down the aisle of Union Baptist Church when a stray bullet fired during a neighborhood feud crashed through a stained-glass window. Allen, 42, who had just completed choir practice at the Watts-area sanctuary, was struck in the head and killed.

Trucker Mark Rodney Sanford, 26, was standing in a Pacoima parking lot when he chanced within the cross-hairs of a sniper’s rifle. Moments later, Sanford slumped to the asphalt, dead, the victim of a 14-year-old who shot him on a dare from a second-floor apartment window.

DeAndre Brown, 9, was playing in a sandbox at a South-Central Los Angeles park when he was caught in cross-fire between rival street gangs. He was hit in the neck and died less than an hour later.

Jessica Shaner was sleeping on a couch in her parent’s home near Universal City when a Camaro driven by a drunk driver--who was eventually convicted of second-degree murder--crashed through the house. The 4-year-old was slammed through a wall before her lifeless body came to a rest.

Freeway Shootings

In Los Angeles County this year, death at the hands of others has come in a multitude of manners and locales: churches, playgrounds, parking lots; a midsummer rash of random freeway shootings that left five people dead.

Through mid-December, the Los Angeles Police Department had reported a total of 779 slayings. The Sheriff’s Department recorded an additional 353 homicides through Dec. 28.

In pure numbers, homicides appear to be remaining steady or declining slightly--up three in the sheriff’s areas but down 32 in the city compared to the same periods in 1986.

Still, many of 1987’s most tragic and highly publicized murder cases reflect a growing trend in Los Angeles and across the nation: that of strangers killing strangers, be it for random retaliation, robbery or no conceivable rationale at all.

Domestic Violence

“Most murders in former times in the United States were (domestic violence perpetrated) by friends and relatives,” said USC sociology Prof. Daniel Glaser, a criminology expert. “The most dangerous place was in the home.

“But murder by strangers is an increasing development,” Glaser said. “Now you’re getting more murders that are quite impersonal and involving random targets.”

In particular, experts say, Los Angeles has been afflicted this year by a wholesale wave of gang- and drug-related murders, particularly in black neighborhoods of South-Central Los Angeles.

“Starting in the latter part of 1986, we noted a tremendous increase in violent gang assaults,” said Sgt. Robert Snowden of Inglewood’s homicide division. “A gang attack and a retaliation and a retaliation to the retaliation and it just goes back and forth. A lot of it is territorial disputes over the distribution and sale of narcotics. Others are straight retaliation of acts of vengeance by rival gangs.”

Drive-by Shootings

Continuing a trend of several years, most gang-related homicides occurred in drive-by shootings in which heavily armed youths spray bullets at anyone and everyone standing in the vicinity of a rival gang’s hangout.

In the drug-related cases, people generally kill because “they need more drugs or they owe money to a drug dealer and get killed,” said investigator John Swanson, the head of Compton’s homicide division.

Through mid-December in Inglewood, of 35 homicides recorded, 13 were gang-related and nine were drug-related. In Compton, where a majority of murders this year have been attributed to drug or gang activities, the total stood at 79 in mid-December, compared to 60 for all of 1986.

In sheriff’s jurisdictions, 77 gang-related killings had taken place through Dec. 22, compared to 59 for all of 1986. LAPD officials, meanwhile, reported 179 gang-related deaths through November, an increase of four over the same period last year.

“It’s a war out there. If you compared it to Chicago in the 1920s, we certainly have much much grosser conduct. You think of the blazing guns, but since when in Chicago did they have such figures?” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Genelin.

Effects of Cocaine

Genelin, head of the district attorney’s hard-core gang division, blames a large part of the violence on the physical effects of cocaine.

“Coke is not what you’d call a peacemaking drug. It’s an excitant, an irritant so that people who use cocaine are much less placid than somebody who uses another type of drug,” he said.

On Thanksgiving weekend alone, nine gang members were killed on the streets of South Los Angeles, Compton and Lynwood. In another November case, a 17-year-old gang member was inadvertently killed by a friend’s gunfire as he and two other friends were shooting to death a member of a rival gang in front of a liquor store near the Imperial Courts housing project.

All too often, however, innocent victims die from stray bullets.

Besides Brown and Allen, who were killed in a playground and in a church, respectively, other senseless deaths included those of:

- Mabelle Elam, 66, a housemother for abused children who was struck in the back by a stray rifle bullet from a street gang gunfight as she sat at a desk inside her Compton home.

- Pauline Moore, a 53-year-old Compton grandmother known as the “Prayer Warrior” by fellow parishioners at her Lynwood church, whose home was riddled by bullets that police theorized were meant for a nearby house known as a drug-dealing haven.

- Juventia Uriarte, 11, slain by stray gunfire in her Highland Park home as she looked out the window at a confrontation in which four unidentified men shot at her cousins.

“One of the things bothering us is the people firing the bullets have no regard for where they will end up. They don’t consider or care about the end result,” Sgt. Snowden of Inglewood said.

In Los Angeles, police say, a majority of gang-related homicides this year have involved bystanders, robbery victims or others who do not belong to gangs.

Meaningless Killings

Los Angeles has also been replete with other examples of totally tragic and meaningless bloodletting.

“We’re seeing more cold homicides, where someone happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said UCLA lecturer Nancy Allen, who researches murders and counsels victims’ families.

In some cases, the deaths centered around robberies.

Tustin church elder David Eugene Thompson, for example, was shot in the head by thieves who took $30 from him when he stopped at a public phone booth near the Los Angeles Coliseum to summon help for a disabled church bus.

Welder Ricardo Reyes, 26, of Huntington Park was shot and killed in Compton by an armed robber who rode to the crime scene on the handlebars of a bicycle driven by an accomplice.

Other cases have involved misplaced grievances.

Ed Smith, 83, upset about a burglary at his South-Central Los Angeles home, grabbed a handgun after an argument with his wife and began shooting at people in his path. Before killing himself, Smith fatally wounded his stepdaughter and two neighbors.

‘Party House’ Fire

In Redondo Beach, a teen-ager set fire to a “party house” apartment, killing three youngsters inside, after they refused to wake up and socialize with him.

Also apparently falling into this category was the Dec. 7 airline crash that authorities believe was caused by Long Beach resident David A. Burke, 35, who allegedly smuggled a revolver aboard to carry out a revenge murder scheme against the man who had fired him from his job at USAir. With all 43 aboard killed, including Burke and his former supervisor, Raymond F. Thomson, Burke is suspected of having committed the worst mass murder in California history and the second worst in U.S. history.

Although the plane crashed in San Luis Obispo County--and thus the deaths are not being tabulated in Los Angeles’ homicide figures--the plane did take off from Los Angeles County, where both Burke and his boss worked.

Another bizarre 1987 murder was that of Catarino Reyes, 43. Authorities charge that the Highland Park baker was randomly abducted and killed by associates of jail inmate Michael Birman as part of a plot by Birman to provide authorities information to help negotiate his way out of incarceration.

Coke Ring Slayings

Also killed under highly unusual circumstances were South Los Angeles coke ring employees Marcus (Sugar Bear) Byers, Kim Edwards and Reginald (Slim) Chastang. The three were allegedly executed for breaking some of the highly organized “Simply Raw Crew’s” 35 written rules of employment, which carried penalties ranging from suspension to death.

Among the most highly publicized 1987 murders locally have been those of two youngsters, Raheed Parwez, 11, and Wendy Masuhara, 14, and of well-known Los Angeles restaurateur Alberto Sarno.

Dr. Khalid Parwez has since been arrested in the death of his son, whose body was dismembered and thrown into a Hacienda Heights trash dumpster. Ex-con Roland Norman Comtois and an accomplice are charged with the abduction, molestation and murder of the Chatsworth teen, who was shot in the head along with a friend who miraculously survived. Parolee Ralph Mora, 33, stands accused of murdering the owner of Sarno’s Caffee Dell’Opera during an attempted robbery in front of the victim’s Los Feliz home.

With the multitude of murders, those receiving public notice represent only the tip of the iceberg.

Little-Publicized Killings

In the Hollywood homicide division, detectives have investigated 38 little-publicized slayings this year, including one in which an 11-year-old boy watched his father stab his mother to death; that of a 39-year-old Bulgarian who escaped to the West five years ago, who was found dead in a hotel room he had entered with a prostitute; and the death of a 50-year-old man who was stabbed more than 90 times in an apparent homosexual rip-off robbery in his residence.

“It never ceases to amaze you,” said veteran LAPD Detective Russell L. Kuster, homicide coordinator for the Hollywood division. “I mean, God, how can somebody stab someone 90 times? Give me a break. I’ve been here 17 years and you think you’ve seen everything but they’ll always find a way.”’

Indeed, at this point, some experts wonder whether murder has become so commonplace that the public has become inured.

“Unless it is a really heinous-type murder, it doesn’t really shock the conscience like it did even 10 years ago. I think people are becoming apathetic to it,” Lt. Darrell Gordon of the sheriff’s homicide bureau said. “It’s kind of cold to say it, but I tend to feel a lot of people feel it’s a way of life.

“However, in most cases,” Gordon hastened to add, “people do come forward and provide information on murders more so than they do on some other crimes.”

‘Less Shocking’

Glaser, meanwhile, said that murder is still “news because it’s still exceptional. But it’s less shocking and it’s less exceptional than it used to be.

“The price is more in fear than in actual measurable numbers,” he continued. “The price is in people being afraid to go out at night or go into certain areas or having anxiety when they are out. There’s a cost of freedom and people spend more on guns and locks and bars.

“It also tends to encourage stereotyping of minorities. That’s unfortunate because people who don’t have personal contacts with minority groups tend to generalize from the highly publicized cases that are atypical of any group.”