Suspect Doesn’t Match Clothes Slasher Sketch

Police say a composite sketch has failed to determine whether a man arrested last week on suspicion of slashing designer clothes at several Los Angeles department stores is also the person sought in similar Orange County vandalisms.

Investigators in Costa Mesa and Newport Beach said they still have nothing that connects the Los Angeles man to the slashings of more than $50,000 in clothes at two county shopping malls this year.

“There’s no hard evidence,” Newport Beach police spokesman Robert Oakley said. “We don’t have a witness to our crimes.”

Augusto Guzman, 38, was arrested earlier this month on suspicion of felony vandalism after a security officer at JW Robinson’s in Northridge Fashion Center in the San Fernando Valley allegedly watched him walk through the department store with a razor blade in his hand and collect several items of clothing, Los Angeles police said.

Oakley said police believe that Guzman is schizophrenic. The suspect will not say whether he has been to the county stores that reported slashed clothing, he said.

“He doesn’t admit or deny being here,” Oakley said.

In one Newport Beach incident, at Forty Love in Newport Center Fashion Island, witnesses reported that a suspicious-looking man was in the store about the time that three Sergio Tacchini warm-up suits were found slashed, Oakley said. Police developed a composite drawing based on those accounts.

“We don’t know whether he (the man described by witnesses) was a suspect or not,” Oakley said. “We don’t even know if he was related to the incident.”

Authorities said the attacks in Los Angeles and Orange County were similar because in both areas a vandal hit a variety of shops. But the composite drawing of the Orange County suspect does not match a photograph of Guzman that Los Angeles Police sent to Newport Beach and Costa Mesa investigators, Oakley said.