Runaway Shot After She and Friend Are Kidnaped, Then Raped in Griffith Park

A 15-year-old runaway from a Pasadena home for troubled girls survived an execution-style shooting early Monday after she and another runaway were raped in Griffith Park by two young men who picked them up in South-Central Los Angeles and promised to take them home, police said.

Authorities said the men took the girl to a secluded part of the park, where they forced her to kneel with her hands clasped behind her head and then shot her twice.

But she escaped death when the bullets fired at her head deflected off her hands and went through her scalp. The unidentified girl was in fair but stable condition late Monday at County-USC Medical Center.

“She was real lucky,” police spokesman Bill Frio said.

Investigators said the other unidentified runaway, age 14, was also going to be shot, but she managed to escape, eventually making her way to the park’s ranger headquarters near the Crystal Springs picnic area shortly before 1 a.m.

The girls ran away Sunday afternoon from Rosemary’s Cottage, a private facility in Pasadena where Los Angeles County places abused, emotionally troubled and other problem girls.

Police Not Called

Officials there noticed that the two runaways were missing but did not call police.

“We’ve had AWOLs before,” said assistant director Keith Hayashi, “and the reality is, What could the police do? They’re too busy.”

The girls rode RTD buses through parts of greater Los Angeles, eventually ending up Sunday night in a neighborhood near Main and 66th streets.

There, Frio said, they met a man about 20 years old whom one of them apparently knows.

“The girls wanted to go back to Pasadena and this ‘friend’ said he knew someone with a car who could help them out,” Frio explained.

On the way to Pasadena, one of the men pulled out a small-caliber handgun and announced that they were going to “shoot us some Bloods (gang members),” investigators quoted the girls as saying.

Shortly afterward, the men drove their 1980 dark-brown Cadillac to an unlighted section of Griffith Park, where they raped the two girls.

The 14-year-old girl then escaped, finding her way to the ranger headquarters.

But the other girl was pulled into a brushy area about 150 yards from the Golden State Freeway and shot. The gunmen then jumped into the Cadillac and drove away.

A park ranger heard two shots and sped to the area, finding the wounded girl staggering along a park road.

Authorities did not have complete descriptions of the two attackers but said one was about 20 years old and the other appeared to be 16.

Hayashi declined to talk about the two girls but said that most of the 34 girls there were placed at the facility by the county Department of Children Services.

Most girls at Rosemary’s Cottage have been removed from their homes because of physical and sexual abuse by their parents or because they ran away from home.

“Most of our girls are angry, confused and upset,” Hayashi said. “They usually have a problem adjusting to the structure and the rules that have to be followed here.”

The two-story dormitory where the girls lived is located in an unfenced area surrounded by Japanese pine trees, which nearly hide the building from passers-by. Officials there said the girls are not locked inside their rooms but are only supposed to leave the grounds with their counselors’ permission.

The attack, coincidentally, occurred only hours before Mayor Tom Bradley held a press conference at the Griffith Park Ranger Station to sign an ordinance extending limited police powers to rangers patrolling city parks.

The new law permits rangers to make arrests and cite violators, but it does not allow them to carry firearms.

Bradley and others at the signing ceremony praised the new law but pointed out that it would not have helped rangers prevent that morning’s shooting.

“It was an isolated incident that could have happened anywhere,” said Capt. Noel Cunningham, commander of the Police Department’s Northeast Division.