Police Rescue Two Kidnaped Women Held for Ransom

Police foiled a kidnap-for-ransom plot early Monday, rescuing two women who had been held blindfolded all night and arresting four suspects--some of them members of a Crips gang--who allegedly abducted the two and demanded more than $100,000 from relatives for their safe return.

The victims--Rhonda Ervin, 26, and Toni Merceron, 27--were rescued at 6 a.m. by undercover Los Angeles police officers who had stationed themselves near the intersection of Manchester Avenue and Avalon Boulevard in South Los Angeles, where the kidnapers believed the ransom exchange was going to take place. The officers found the women unharmed in the back of a van driven by one of the abductors.

The women were kidnaped shortly before 10 p.m. Sunday night from Ervin’s apartment on 91st Street in South Los Angeles and taken to an unknown location where they were held for eight hours, police said.

A group of men, armed and wearing ski masks, had broken into the apartment and were waiting for the women when they, along with Ervin’s boyfriend, returned home from a day at Lake Hughes, according to police and Merceron. The men forced the women to lie face-down on the floor and covered their heads with ski masks.

“They came in the house, turned on the lights and there was a bunch of folks there who said, ‘OK, everybody get on the floor,’ ” said LAPD Detective Lou Boozell.

Detectives said the boyfriend, Zarricor Glasper, 26, escaped by jumping off a balcony outside a second-story window. But the women were blindfolded, put inside a van and driven to another apartment.

Said Merceron: “They told us to lie down on our stomachs with our heads down and they said, ‘Don’t say anything.’ ”

Police said they believe that as many as seven men were involved in the kidnaping and that some, if not all, were gang members, although they do not believe the incident was a case of gang rivalry. The other kidnapers were still at large.

Police also said they believe Ervin was the main target of the kidnaping. Asked about a possible motive, Boozell said, “greed, money, dope, whatever they could get their hands on.” Merceron said Ervin’s apartment had been ransacked and that both women were robbed of jewelry and that Ervin also lost a telephone pager.

Although Boozell said Ervin believed the kidnapers abducted her by mistake, the men apparently knew Ervin’s family. According to Merceron, the kidnapers telephoned her friend’s mother several times and threatened to kill the women if Ervin’s mother did not come up with the cash.

“At 4 a.m. they woke us up,” Merceron said. “They had called the family demanding money. . . . They told us that if the family didn’t have the money by the time the street lights were off, they would kill us. We kept asking them: ‘Was the family cooperating?’ They told us not to worry.”

Police recovered a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol from the alleged kidnapers but would not release the names or ages of any of the suspects.

Two of them were arrested shortly after the kidnaping, at about 11:30 p.m. Sunday, when LAPD patrolmen stopped their car. The third was arrested at his apartment in the Avalon Gardens housing complex after a woman who had been sent by the kidnapers to pick up the ransom money was taken into custody and tipped police off to his whereabouts.

The fourth was arrested at the scene of the supposed ransom exchange, when members of the LAPD’s Special Investigations Section stopped his van and found the women inside.

The SIS squad is a special undercover surveillance unit that focuses on dangerous criminals. In a widely publicized case, six of its members were cleared in federal court last week of allegations that they violated a bank robbers’ civil rights when they shot her and killed her companion during a robbery in 1982.

“They did a good job,” Jim Bryan, the LAPD robbery-homicide detective who handled the kidnaping investigation, said of the SIS’ efforts Monday. “They got four individuals in custody and nobody was shot. . . .”