Scene of Capture Unaltered by Touch of Fame

Immediately after seeing a composite drawing of the Night Stalker suspect on television, Tina Pinon turned to her father and begged him not to leave their East Los Angeles house for a few days.

That was four years ago, and like millions of others in Southern California at the time the teen-age girl was fearful of a nocturnal visit by a vicious serial killer.

“Don’t worry, mijita, “ Faustino Pinon told his then 15-year-old daughter that hot August night. “If he comes to our house, I’ll catch him.”

A few days later, Pinon was true to his word.

Pinon, a 60-year-old retired auto worker, was checking a transmission leak under another daughter’s fire-engine-red 1965 Mustang when a shadowy figure dressed in black leaped over his back-yard fence and into the already running car.

“I have a gun. I want the car,” the stranger said.

“I don’t care what you have,” Pinon shouted back. “You’re not taking my daughter’s car.”

A struggle over the keys ensued. The men grappled on the grass. The stranger broke away and dashed across the street. There, he tried to steal the car of another neighbor, Angelina De La Torre, in the 3700 block of East Hubbard Street, a residential area of mostly working-class Latinos just east of the Los Angeles city limits.

Moments later, the would-be car thief was pummeled into submission by a mob of angry neighbors, including Pinon, Angelina’s husband, Manuel De La Torre, who clobbered the suspect on the head with a metal pipe, Pinon’s next-door neighbor, Jose Burgoin, and his sons Jaime and Julio.

Only a few of them knew at the time that they had just caught one of the city’s most notorious criminals, or that Ramirez had been on the run for more than four miles that morning, zig-zagging his way through alleys and back yards and trying to break into cars.

The chase had begun at 8:30 a.m. when an unidentified resident telephoned the Los Angeles Police Department’s Hollenbeck Division to report that a man matching the description of the Night Stalker was acting suspiciously at Euclid Avenue and Garnet Street.

Black-and-white units and a police helicopter were already closing in after 9 a.m. when Ramirez made the mistake of trying to steal the car of Pinon’s daughter.

“Congratulations,” a police officer at the scene told Pinon that day. “That’s the Night Stalker suspect, Richard Ramirez.”

Tina began to cry uncontrollably. Her father started to shake hard.

The capture, which was called “heroic” by city officials including Mayor Tom Bradley, brought a swift and unexpected end to seven months of terror wrought by the then-25-year-old drifter from Texas.

It also brought a measure of fame to Hubbard Street and its heroes, each of whom has a wall in their home set aside for numerous plaques they received from city, county and state officials in honor of their bravery.

On Wednesday, Pinon, wife Reyna, and daughter Tina sat quietly together on a brown sofa in their modest stucco house and watched on television--live and in color--as Ramirez was convicted of 13 murders and 30 related felonies.

Pinon yawned when the verdicts were read. An ice cream truck’s bells rang outside, and he asked if anyone was hungry. He seemed bored. His share of the excitement had come four years before.

Elsewhere on Hubbard Street, neighbors spoke of relief.

“It’s just a relief that he is going to be punished for what he did,” said Al Trainor, 30, who lives a few houses down from Pinon.

“I always tell people about how he was captured in front of my house,” Trainor added.

Many of those who lived on the block at the time of the capture have since moved away, and for all appearances Wednesday Hubbard Street appeared much as it had that Saturday morning in 1985--a quiet, blue-collar residential street. Nothing much has changed as a result of its brush with fame.

Now, Pinon, De La Torre, the Burgoins and perhaps as many as 17 other people involved in the capture are wondering whether they can lay legitimate claim to an estimated $80,000 in reward money pledged by public agencies and private groups including the city and county of Los Angeles and the state of California.

The money was pledged for the apprehension of the suspect but was not to be distributed until the end of Ramirez’s trial.

“I haven’t thought about what I’ll do with the money, if I get any,” said Burgoin, a retired construction worker living on a monthly pension of $1,078. “But sure, I could use it.”

Pinon, however, did not hesitate at all when asked what he would do with his potential share of the reward money.

“I’m going to get that darn car fixed,” he said of the Mustang, which is now parked in his back yard. It has a leaky transmission.