On a Once Quiet Street Violence Reaches a Couple’s Front Door

Early Wednesday morning, a man who had been chased by an attacker through a Sepulveda neighborhood and shot in the back desperately pounded on the door at Bill and Ruth Smith’s home and then collapsed on the front porch.

Bill Smith called police and then watched through closed windows until officers and paramedics arrived. The retired couple has lived in the 8500 block of Orion Avenue for 20 years. In recent years they have watched crime problems increase.

But the shots and screams and terror were far from anything that the Smiths ever expected would happen so close. Likewise, residents on Orion expressed shock over Wednesday’s shooting, which left two sisters dead and a man in critical condition.

Although Wednesday’s shooting was motivated by an apparent domestic dispute, which many neighbors said could happen anyplace, they said they were left wondering if it was one more step in the decline of their neighborhood.

“The violence is getting closer all the time,” Ruth Smith said. “We had been wondering how far things could go. We have considered moving, but we haven’t made up our mind. This certainly makes you think again.”

Los Angeles police said the shooting was rooted in domestic problems between the gunman and two of the victims, who lived five houses from the Smiths.

Police said Dean Roger McGrath, 29, entered a duplex and fatally shot sisters Marleene Evelyn Taylor, 32, and Kathleen Taylor Fien, 30. Anthony Deluca, 28, ran from the house calling for help, but the gunman chased him down and shot him in the back, police said. He collapsed on the Smiths’ front porch and was in critical condition at an undisclosed hospital. McGrath was arrested about 12 hours after the shooting.

The neighborhood of small, neatly kept houses and a few small businesses runs alongside the San Diego Freeway and is just one block south of a neighborhood where streets were barricaded by police this year in an effort to curtail drug sales.

Most houses are surrounded by fences, and there are many “Beware of Dog” signs. The noise of the freeway is tamed by a concrete sound barrier that rises behind the homes. But some residents said little has stopped crime from creeping into the neighborhood.

Two years ago, residents signed petitions and got the city to close a pedestrian tunnel under the freeway because it was being used by drug dealers. But residents such as Frances Beals said she still sees drugs and prostitution making inroads on the street.

“I can look out my windows and see them doing their thing--they’re still around,” said Beals, who runs an auto towing business from her house.

Beals said she believes many of the problems might be the result of the barricades across streets in the neighborhood to the north. Police acknowledge that the roadblocks have displaced some of the crime, but officers said no single neighborhood has borne the brunt of that migration.

Susan Ventrella has owned a nursery on the block for five years. During that time, she has seen the neighborhood change gradually from a friendly place where young families established their first homes to one where residents are more and more on edge.

“It’s scary,” she said. Many families have moved away in the last few years because crime on neighboring streets has crept closer, she said.