17 Weekend Slayings Push Rate Toward a New High : Crime: The number of homicides so far is up 20% over the same period last year in L.A. County.

At least 17 people were slain over the weekend in Los Angeles County in a spasm of violence that pushed the murder rate toward a record high, authorities said Monday.

Among the dead were a Bassett man stabbed as he battled eight gang members in front of his home, an East Los Angeles man shot and robbed in his garden, and a motorist dragged from his car after an accident in Compton, beaten and left to be run over by traffic.

Law enforcement officials said the spate of lethal violence--about twice the usual weekend caseload--reflected an ongoing increase in deadly combat between street gangs, the easy availability of guns and the readiness of growing segments of the populace to use weapons to settle disputes.

Various and sometimes conflicting murder statistics are maintained by numerous law enforcement agencies in the county, but there was unanimity Monday in the tallies, each showing a rate of homicide that is about 20% ahead of last year--itself a record year by some measures.

The coroner has reported 1,628 homicides countywide through August, a 20% increase over the same period in 1989. Last year was also the county’s worst with 2,091 murder cases investigated, coroner’s officials said.

The Sheriff’s Department has reported 317 homicides in its jurisdiction this year, an increase of 21.9%. At least 125 of those killings were gang related.

The Los Angeles Police Department reported 723 homicides during the same period, a 19.3% increase over last year.

“If the trend continues we will wind up very close to our worst year, 1980, when 1,028 people were killed in the city,” said Police spokesman Cmdr. William Booth. “Too many people are resorting to violence to settle disputes.”

Sheriff’s Capt. Raymond Gott said homicide statistics tell only a fraction of the story. “I don’t think homicides are a good measure of violence at all. More people are wounded than die and we tend to forget about those folks,” he said.

Gott said a surge in gang warfare has so inundated department investigators with new cases, and attendant report-writing, that “we’re losing touch with the streets because of the paper work.”

Much of the increase in lethal violence, some officials said, can be tied to escalating retaliatory warfare among about a dozen of the region’s many street gangs.

“Since July of last year we’ve had more and more shootings and a lot more innocent people being hit,” said Sgt. Joe Guzman of the Sheriff’s East Los Angeles station. “Last week, we worked 16 hours every single day.”

Steve Valdivia, executive director of Community Youth Gang Services, said that there are complicating factors behind the escalation, making it difficult to find a clear motive or seek peace.

“There are evolutionary changes in the gang world right now, “ Valdivia said. “New gangs are challenging old ones, recent immigrants are challenging established gangs and some guys who just wanted to party are going into a killer mode.”

Among the seven cities in the nation with a population of 1 million or more, Los Angeles had the fifth-highest murder rate in 1989 with 25.5 homicides per 100,000 people. Detroit topped the list with 60.5 homicides per 100,000, followed by Philadelphia with 28.8, Houston with 26.8, and New York with 25.9.

But Washington, D.C., has become the nation’s murder capital. With 72.3 murders for each 100,000 residents, it has the highest per-capita murder rate for cities of more than 300,000.

Throughout Los Angeles County on Monday, homicide investigators and survivors alike worked to sort out the weekend carnage. It was, in some cases, a daunting assignment.

Erlinda Parra lost her 36-year-old son, Albert Domingo Simenia, in a vicious gang battle fought on her front yard in Basset in the San Gabriel Valley. Her son, apparently alone, took on eight rivals Saturday morning. Parra said the suspected gang members who stabbed her son had been attending a party across the street.

“A bunch of guys rushed him; I ran into the house and called 911,” said Parra, who has lived in the home for 30 years. “When I went back outside, I saw him lying on the ground with a hole in his side and breathing shallow . . . Then he wasn’t breathing anymore.”

She saw no way out of the gang violence, short of leaving the city. “I guess,” the mother said, “I’ll have to move if I want my other two sons to keep on living.”

Added her husband, Fernando: “You always have to be on the lookout, there is so much violence in this world.”

Several miles away in East Los Angeles, neighbors were mourning the loss of an out-of-work man who died in his well-maintained garden. William (Willy) Escamilla, 41, had lived alone.

Witnesses said he was shot at least once in the head by one or more of three men he had been talking with. A relative said neighbors heard shots and then “saw some guys walk calmly out of the yard, get in a car and drive away.” Sheriff’s investigators believe Escamilla may have been killed in a robbery attempt.

Other weekend violence left homicide investigators with these deaths to solve:

A 19-year-old man shot down at a gas station by passing gang members at El Segundo and Avalon boulevards; an unidentified man stabbed to death in an argument on Skid Row; an unidentified woman, 30, whose body was found in a South Los Angeles alley; a 20-year-old man stabbed outside an East Pasadena motel; a 30-year-old man stabbed in South-Central Los Angeles; a North Hollywood man killed in an alley shooting in Van Nuys; a 26-year-old man shot in a Koreatown drive-by attack; a 20-year-old man shot in the Mid-City, apparently in a gang dispute, and an unidentified man found dead from a gunshot wound in an East Los Angeles railroad yard.

Also, there was the shooting death of a man in Cudahy who was killed as he stopped to change a flat; the slaying a 22-year-old South Los Angeles man gunned down in his front yard; the shooting death of an unidentified man found in the back of a flatbed truck on South Hoover Street; the murder of a man in a gun battle that erupted in a Boyle Heights bar, and, lastly, the bizarre death of a 23-year-old man in Compton.

Police said this last victim had gotten in a traffic accident at Rosecrans and Acacia Avenues. He was dragged out of his car by two other motorists who beat him and left him in the street, where another car accidentally ran him down and most likely killed him.

“It’s kind of sad, isn’t it?” said Compton Police Lt. Joe Flores.

GANG-RELATED HOMICIDES Chart shows number of gang-related homicides in Los Angeles County each year over the past decade. The number of homicides so far in 1990 has already surpassed the number for all of 1980: 86 1981: 64 1982: 54 1983: 57 1984: 60 1985: 58 1986: 59 1987: 79 1988: 96 1989: 116 1990*: 125 Source: L.A. County Sheriff’s Dept.

* 1990 figures are year-to-date