Shoppers Spurn Pleas for Help : Cold Grips Homeless Couple

It wasn’t Los Angeles’ cold weather that was bothering Alicia and Philip Hetzel.

It was the city’s cold heart that discouraged the couple as they stood Friday in a shopping center parking lot in Studio City.

“Desperate! Been Robbed. Need a Job. We been in a cleaning business in Sacramento!” read the hand-painted cardboard sign held by Alicia Hetzel.

Shoppers hurrying in and out of the trendy shops that line Ventura Boulevard looked the other way.

No one paused long enough to ask 48-year-old Philip Hetzel about the robbery--or to look at the carefully folded police report on the dashboard of his 1969 Rambler that told how two armed men took $1,200 from him Jan. 24 in Northridge.

They didn’t stop to examine his letter of recommendation from his last employer in Warren, Mich., or to discuss the couple’s recent experience in Sacramento as housecleaners and janitors.

There was a fine line between sympathy and suspicion from shoppers, who recently have been subjected to increasing numbers of panhandlers in Studio City and to a well-publicized fraud involving parking-lot con artists, the “Yuppie Panhandlers,” pretending to be down on their luck.

“I come from a part of the world, Russia, where people are poor. I think they’re legit. If I could, I would give them a job,” said Isak Bekman of North Hollywood, who passed them on his way to a bank.

“They’re just another face asking for money. Sometimes I give, sometimes I don’t,” said Studio City resident Paul Lichtenberg, who passed the Hetzels without stopping. “It could be real or it could be a scam, either one.”

A Woodland Hills resident leaving a boutique was sure it was the latter. “You see too much of this now. If you need a job, it’s out there,” said the woman, who would not give her name.

The Hetzels said they were unaware of the “Yuppie Panhandlers,” Jeffrey Dwayne Allman, 31, and Tracy Chris Hartland, 24, who were sentenced to 15 months in jail Jan. 30 for swindling more than 300 people in the Los Angeles area by pretending to be penniless travelers. Allman and Hartland allegedly made up to $200 an hour by begging in shopping center parking lots.

Alicia Hetzel, 32, said she and her husband want to earn only enough money to return to Michigan, where Philip Hetzel worked for 10 years before permanently injuring his back in a factory accident.

The couple spent the $18,000 received from a disability settlement to move a year ago to Citrus Heights near Sacramento, where they started a cleaning business. When business dropped off, they sold all their belongings and came to Los Angeles, where Alicia Hetzel has relatives.

She said she had a falling-out with her family.

Hetzel said he was robbed as he left a temporary janitorial job at a Northridge firm two days after arriving in Los Angeles. They were living in their car and his pocket was the safest place for the money, the proceeds from selling their furniture in Sacramento, he said.

“I don’t like L.A. We just want to leave,” Alicia Hetzel said.

By day’s end, the couple had received two job leads, but no promises. They said they were hoping for a mild night because they were going to sleep in their Rambler.

“It’s a cold world,” Alicia Hetzel said.