Light Sentence for Killer Angers Man Who Caught Him

Joseph Idoko watched in dismay Monday as convicted murderer Baba Yusuf Dauda cheerfully thanked and offered good wishes to a Los Angeles Superior Court judge who had just sentenced him to a seven-year state prison sentence.

“He (Dauda) was laughing,” Idoko said afterward. “He doesn’t feel anything. . . . Knowing how he really doesn’t care, it’s not a fair sentence. This is not justice.”

Idoko had sought justice for nearly seven years--since March 23, 1981--when family friend Gloria Simon Aina, a student from Nigeria, was stabbed to death in her Hollywood apartment.

The quest, Idoko said, cost him $14,000 of his own money and more than 13 months of his time. Because of the money and time, he says, his marriage broke up.

Initially, the murder attracted attention as another case of big-city indifference.

Neighbors had heard the victim’s screams and one even witnessed part of the attack. But at the time, they failed to rush to Aina’s aid, or forcefully urge police to investigate.

A cursory look around the apartment building by police at first turned up nothing wrong.

It wasn’t until the next night, 19 hours after the attack, that Aina’s body was discovered by officers.

From the first, police suspected Dauda, also a student from Nigeria. For a time, he and Aina had lived together while both attended the Columbia College of Cinematography.

On the night she was murdered, Aina, 34, had received two visitors--Dauda and a new boyfriend.

In a confession written for Nigerian authorities three years after the murder, Dauda, 42, said he and Aina began quarreling about 11 p.m. that night, soon after her new boyfriend went home.

Dauda’s probation report describes him as “an obsessively jealous and controlling individual with a violent temper. He apparently was unable to emotionally deal with the thought that the victim was seeing another man. He reacted in a violent and jealous rage, stabbing the victim numerous times, causing her death.”

But in his confession, Dauda said that it was Aina who picked up a kitchen knife and began threatening him. Only after he had been cut once by the knife, Dauda said, did he seriously begin defending himself.

At one point, the violent quarrel spilled out into the apartment hallway, where a neighbor opened his door to see Aina on the floor screaming and being stabbed by Dauda. Then the witness saw Dauda grab Aina’s hair and drag her back into the apartment.

The man did not call police because, he later told a reporter, he “didn’t want to get involved.”

Back in the apartment, Dauda said in his confession, “I kept stabbing until she fell on the floor. I locked the door, looked at her while she was bleeding to death. I hugged her to myself and told her I’ll meet with her where nothing and nobody will ever come between us.”

Then, Dauda said, he put a sign on the apartment’s front door indicating that Aina did not want to be disturbed because she was studying. He returned to his own apartment, packed, called his employer to say he was leaving because of an emergency, drove his car to a dealership, where he sold it, and drove Aina’s car to Los Angeles International Airport.

Within hours of the killing, Dauda was on a flight to the African nation of Ghana.

“I wanted to see that justice was done,” Idoko told The Times in 1984, shortly after he apprehended Dauda at the airport in Lagos, Nigeria. “I wanted Baba to stand trial for Gloria’s murder and for the courts to decide (if he is guilty).”

Because he also was from Nigeria, Idoko said, he had a better chance of catching Dauda than regular law enforcement officials.

Extradition Delays

Even so, it took two trips to Africa totaling 13 months and required trailing the suspect through five countries before he finally was apprehended on June 7, 1984.

Then there were three more years of delays before Dauda finally was extradited to Los Angeles on Feb. 9, 1987.

Last month, in a plea bargain, he pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, agreed to forfeit all of the time he had spent to date in jails and accepted a six-year prison sentence for the killing, plus an additional year for using a knife. He could be paroled in 3 1/2 years.

In pronouncing sentence Monday, Judge Gordon Ringer depicted Dauda’s crime as one of “absolute callousness.”

Afterward, Dauda cheerfully told the judge: “Thank you, your honor. And have a good year.”

Ringer later told a reporter that he imposed the maximum sentence allowed under the laws in existence in 1981.

“He would definitely be killed (under justice) in Nigeria,” said the victim’s sister, Denise Simon Chattom of Glendale. Idoko agreed.

“I wanted him to be tried fairly,” Idoko, 32, said Monday of his extraordinary efforts to bring Dauda to justice. “There was no trial. . . . To go (to prison) for 3 1/2 years is just a good vacation. It doesn’t make sense.”