Friends Eulogize ‘Almost Mystical’ Girl

Family and friends of Teak Dyer had planned to gather Friday to celebrate the popular teen-ager’s graduation from Palisades High School.

Instead, as the sunshine broke through the coastal fog and shimmered on serene Lake Shrine at the Self Realization Fellowship Friday, mourners held hands, cried and remembered with love and pain the brief life of the exuberant young girl who was murdered Wednesday.

“She was excited about the future. She wanted to make her life really count. She was concerned about the homeless, about pollution of the planet, about injustices in the world,” said her mother, Jackie Dyer, who is controller for motion picture producer Steve Tisch.

“Unfortunately Teak has become a symbol of what she hated most in this world--people being unkind to others.”

Teak Dyer’s partially nude, bullet-riddled body was found on the floor of a Pacific Palisades office restroom early Wednesday. Rodney Garmanian, a Reseda guard for a security company that protects the upscale offices and homes in the area, has been arrested on suspicion of murder, police said.

Los Angeles Police Detective Randy Mancini, who is heading the investigation, noted that such violence is “highly unusual” in the close-knit affluent Westside village. The last murder occurred more than two years ago.

“Professionally, all murder investigations are tough,” the veteran detective said. “But this case has been especially disturbing. I guess it’s her youth. She was still such a child. She was 18. But I’m a parent, too, and I know they are always your babies.”

Dyer had attended a private graduation party at the Santa Monica Pier with schoolmates Tuesday evening. What happened to her afterwards is not clear. Police would not reveal what they believe transpired between the time she left the party and when the county coroner’s van was called to pick up the slender, brown-haired, green-eyed girl, who died of three bullet wounds to her upper torso.

Several friends of the girl said that she had been dropped off in the heart of Pacific Palisades, at a parking lot at 15200 Sunset Blvd. where she had left her car. The building at that site is where she was found slain. It includes real estate and law offices, a yogurt shop where she once worked and a surfing gear shop. But another acquaintance who had been at the party said that the girl had hitched a ride to the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Chautauqua Boulevard.

Police would neither confirm nor deny these reports.

Detective Mancini said that Garmanian, a private security patrolman, reported finding the girl dead in the second-story restroom when he went to unlock the building around 6 a.m.

“He told us that he went to the building as part of his routine to open it for people to come to work. He said he discovered her in the ladies’ restroom. Later, when other events developed and evidence was recovered, we were led to believe there was probable cause to arrest him.”

MacGuard Security Systems, for which Garmanian worked, is one of the largest such firms in the Pacific Palisades area. Guards working for the company patrol area businesses and homes on foot and in patrol cars. “We are cooperating with LAPD and have been instructed not to discuss the facts of the case, said Kirk MacDowell, president of the security company. “Our hearts go out to the friends and family of the young girl.”

Dyer had planned to study film direction at UC Santa Cruz this fall. She had grown up in Pacific Palisades and attended the exclusive Westside Dye School and Brentwood School.

Friends said that it was her father, Rod Dyer, who fostered her interest in the arts. Rod Dyer is a prominent graphic designer who created many of the famous album covers for Capitol records in the 1960s. He has since formed Rod Dyer Group Inc., which creates movie posters, trailers and business designs.

“I remember she used to come in Rod’s office when she was 5 years old and sit there at the table, drawing quietly for hours,” said one colleague. “He was very proud of her. She was an absolutely beautiful young girl.” Besides her father and mother, she is survived by brothers Dylan and Craig, a sister, Susan, and grandmother Helen Andre, all of Los Angeles.

While she enjoyed typical teen-age pastimes such as hiking, bicycling, waitressing at a local restaurant, giving parties and decorating her room, she also had a more spiritual side, friends said. They eulogized her as a young woman who had given much to others without expectation of anything in return.

Melissa Karz, 17, a close friend, said: “She loved being free and being in nature. She loved yoga and peaceful spiritual things. In fact she was almost mystical.”

That philosophy showed in the way she treated others, added another friend, Danielle Weiss, 17.

“She was popular, but not in a conceited way. She really cared about people, she was concerned and gentle. She touched us all.”

Times staff writer Carla Rivera contributed to this story.