Councilman Pratt Calls Police Probe of Killings Racist

Echoing the concerns of some black residents in Clairemont, San Diego City Councilman Wes Pratt said he is “disgusted” and “appalled” by what he called a racist police inquiry into the recent slaying of Holly Suzanne Tarr, an 18-year-old Michigan woman who was stabbed to death.

Because the man seen fleeing the scene was described as black, said Pratt--the lone black member of the council--he believes the focus of the investigation has taken the form of a racial vendetta, in which all blacks in the area are under question. He said the media as well as the San Diego Police Department are to blame.

“When a person is murdered and the suspect is white, I don’t hear it said that we should round up all white folks of a certain age and question them,” Pratt said in an interview.

“We have to be careful in this city about how we deal with such an unfortunate, tragic situation. Blacks are just as horrified as whites about this crime.

“If the general feeling is based on emotion and overreaction and fear, it says less about any one crime and more about San Diego’s inability to deal with race relations. I’m disgusted and appalled by this. I find it disturbing.”

Police, however, said they are only following standard investigative procedures.

“We’re interviewing people who fit the description,” said Sgt. Dorothy Powell, the police spokeswoman.

“In this case, it’s black males. And the reason we interview them is to eliminate them as suspects. Once we eliminate them, we hope we won’t have to contact them again.”

Pratt’s concerns were echoed Thursday by black and white residents in Clairemont, who said police and community efforts to apprehend a suspect have, at times, bordered on harassment and abuse.

Clairemont High School officials acknowledged Thursday that they provided investigators with attendance records and physical descriptions of the estimated 30 to 35 black males enrolled in the school.

But so far, no one’s efforts have led to the apprehension of the man who killed Tarr, the most recent of three young women to have been stabbed to death in a two-block area in the past three months.

Tarr, a high school senior from Okemos, Mich., had come to San Diego during spring break to visit her brother, Richard, a space systems engineer at General Dynamics who lives in a one-bedroom apartment at 3410 Cowley Way, in a complex called Buena Vista Gardens. His sister died there shortly after noon 10 days ago from a stab wound to the chest.

Tarr was the third young woman to have been murdered in that area since Jan. 12. On that day, the body of 20-year-old Tiffany Paige Schultz, a student at San Diego State University, was found at 3187 Cowley Way. The San Diego County coroner listed the cause of Schultz’s death as multiple stab wounds.

On Feb. 16, 21-year-old Janene Marie Weinhold, a student at UC San Diego, was found dead from stab wounds to the chest at 3301 Clairemont Drive.

The crimes bear strikingly similar characteristics, leading homicide agents to concede that they may be the work of a serial killer. Each victim was female, similar in age and physical appearance. All were stabbed in upstairs apartments in the middle of the day. No sign of forced entry was apparent in any of the cases, authorities say.

The last case is dramatically different from the first two, however, in that a suspect was sighted and confronted, and was chased before getting away.

Police describe the suspect as a black male in his late teens or early 20s, about 5-foot-8, with short hair. He was seen leaving the area in a “primer-paint-colored” Ford Pinto.

On the day of the murder, Richard Williams, a 58-year-old maintenance man for Buena Vista Gardens, was summoned to the apartments after a neighbor heard a scream coming from an upstairs unit.

Williams said he entered Richard Tarr’s apartment with a passkey and, finding the door was chained, broke the chain and pushed open the door. Williams told police that a man ran toward him holding a knife over his head, and that he tried to stop him. Williams said he never saw the man’s face, which was covered with a pillow case.

He said later in an interview with The Times that, because of the color of the suspect’s arms, he believed he was “Mexican.”

Suzanne Rosborough, the manager of Buena Vista Gardens, said Thursday that two employees of the complex, as well as a resident, saw the man flee after the pillowcase had been removed, and all say the man was black.

Police recently filmed a Crime Stoppers public service announcement, scheduled to be aired on local television, in which a black actor plays the part of the suspect.

Pratt, meanwhile, said there is no excuse for singling out black males in general as suspects.

“I’ve observed in the past that, any time we have an incident in San Diego involving people of color, and the incident is controversial or criminal, there exists this undercurrent of racist reaction,” Pratt said. “It’s unfortunate that such a thing keeps happening again and again, because it feeds a divisiveness that really eats at the heart of human relations in this city.”

Pratt said the incident bears “similarities” to a murder in Boston, where a white man apparently wounded himself in the stomach, shot his pregnant wife and then blamed the killing on a drug-crazed black man. A black man was arrested in the case, and the media reported the husband’s version until he committed suicide after becoming the prime suspect.

Pratt said that incident “polarized an entire city, and this one has the same potential.”

John Price, a 15-year-old student at Clairemont High, was walking home on Cowley Way on Thursday after visiting a friend. Price, who is black, said the reaction of residents to seeing him on the street has been “peculiar” and “unusual” since Tarr’s murder. He said an elderly woman who saw him Thursday “started running away from me, sprinting, really,” after he smiled and said hello.

Another black man interviewed Thursday afternoon on the same street asked not to be quoted by name, but said he has been stopped twice by police officers, and once by a resident, and was “interrogated” each time about the murder.

“I’m a resident here, and there aren’t many of us here,” he said, referring to black males at Buena Vista Gardens. “I’m a light-skinned black man, and they say the suspect was, too, but that shouldn’t give anybody license to stop and hassle me on the street. I’ve had enough of it.”

Peter Schroeder, vice principal at Clairemont High, said school officials gave police attendance records and physical descriptions of every black male student at the school.

“They did a thorough attendance check, as well as going over physical descriptions of all of the black male students, and, to the best of my knowledge, none of our students fit the time and place of the crime,” Schroeder said.

Melanie Petersen, deputy legal counsel for the San Diego Unified School District, said the school would be within legal guidelines to provide such information to police.

“Given that eyewitness data pinpointed a black male as a suspect, I think it would have been appropriate to give such information to the police,” Petersen said. “Whether that’s right or wrong, well, that’s the business of the Police Department. We were simply complying with a specific law enforcement request.”

In a related incident that has strained race relations in the area, some members of the Guardian Angels, a voluntary crime watch group, chased a black man through the area who they thought might be a suspect, according to Rosborough, the manager of Buena Vista Gardens. She said she personally observed the incident.

“Although they have black members and although Weston Conwell (the head of the Guardian Angels in San Diego County) has denied it, I saw it happen,” Rosborough said.

“It happened right outside the door of the office here. They followed him--or ‘shadowed’ him, as they like to say--and they harassed him, plain and simple. The police had spoken to this guy and eliminated him as a suspect, and yet the Angels went after him.

“I understand from the police officer who was working the mobile crime truck that night”--a unit that has since left the area--”that the man came running to the truck, pounding on the door. From what I hear, he was scared to death. The Angels still seemed to think he was a suspect, but why would a murder suspect run to the mobile crime truck and beg for help?”

Conwell could not be reached for comment Thursday. Powell, the police spokeswoman, said she did not have “the slightest idea” whether the Angels harassed a black resident in the area, “but we are looking into it.”

Rosborough said Anza Management Co., which oversees Buena Vista Gardens and adjacent Canyon Ridge, the site of another of the murders, does not keep a list noting names and addresses of black tenants.

Meanwhile, Powell said the police have sent information about the suspect to the FBI, hoping for “a more detailed psychological profile” of the killer or killers.