Strange Woman Turned Deadly in Bus Siege

When the stocky woman with close-cropped red hair boarded RTD bus 2005 at 3rd Street and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, other passengers noticed her--and remembered. Later, they would recall how she had seemed angry, disoriented, threatening.

The woman wandered up and down the bus, muttering about Nazis, the Mafia, foreigners. She grumbled that she hated everyone. Some people laughed nervously. Others tried to ignore her, convinced that the odd woman was just another sad but harmless piece of human flotsam adrift in the city’s transit system.

But half an hour into her Wednesday night ride, as the Santa Monica-bound bus crossed Gower Street in Hollywood, Esther Rachel Rogers produced a blue-steel .357 magnum revolver and began to load it. At once, all the snickering and nonchalance ended. What had seemed to passengers just one more encounter with a Los Angeles crazy turned terrifying, and then it turned deadly.

It would all end about three hours later in Beverly Hills, with one passenger slain at close range by Rogers. She was killed in a flurry of police bullets from a special tactics team.

By late Thursday, authorities still had not determined where Rogers--a 42-year-old woman who said she was the daughter of Auschwitz concentration camp survivors--was coming from Wednesday night or where she was bound. Nor did they know what prompted her to put two bullets into the chest and arm of the 30-year-old French citizen and Venice resident sitting only four feet from her.

Bus drivers had their own questions: Why had 18 minutes elapsed between the driver’s initial radio call for help and the first known response from police? Why had the transit district’s own officers not been summoned?

Rogers had always posed something of a mystery to the neighbors who lived near her disheveled Martel Avenue bungalow just south of trendy Melrose Avenue. They remembered a woman who at times seemed “sweet, gentle and loving” but also “very deeply disturbed . . . depressed and paranoid” and “not in touch with the real world.”

Only two weeks ago, said neighbor Sam Shvartsmann, she had to be wrestled to the ground in front of her house by Los Angeles police after brandishing a handgun. Los Angeles Police Lt. Fred Nixon declined to comment.

“She was a strange woman,” said another neighbor. “You can tell by looking at her house.” She nodded toward the cracked plaster and peeling paint that made Rogers’ light green California bungalow stand out in an otherwise tidy neighborhood. Next to a front yard choked with knee-high weeds, a white Cadillac with four flat tires sat rusting in the driveway.

Peter Rotsten, 47, who said he had known Rogers for 20 years, said she told him that both of her parents survived Auschwitz.

Rogers, who was 5 feet 6 and weighed 205 pounds, was prone to dramatic mood swings, said said Linda Gershon, 34, who described herself as a friend of Rogers for 10 years.

Rotsten said Rogers was unemployed, “very much a loner” and spent much of her time walking. “I saw her two weeks ago,” he said. “She walked across Beverly Boulevard through traffic, grabbed my hand and just held it. I said, ‘Esther, are you all right?’ She said, ‘I can’t talk. I’ve got some real problems.’ ”

Warrick Sims, a neighbor for two years, said that he found Rogers to be “a very sweet, gentle, loving woman” with salt-and-pepper hair, and that she used to help the homeless.

“Yesterday,” Sims said Thursday afternoon, “she changed the color of her hair--it was bright orange. It was nice to see her taking care of herself. I thought it was a good sign.

“For her to have a gun seems truly exotic, really bizarre.”

It seemed less bizarre to Hollywood resident Mike Devine, an actor, parking attendant and regular RTD rider. He said everybody who rides the buses around Hollywood knows her.

“She usually sits in the back and goes off onto some kind of bizarre racial things,” he said. “It’s like a sing-song or strange rhythm. A random rhythm. She’ll make up dialogue like what the different races can do to their private parts, cutting off the parts of the body, or crucifying themselves. Hitler this and Hitler that.”

His description matched the recollection of riders on RTD Route 4 early Thursday. They recounted Rogers muttering odd comments from the moment she boarded in front of the Bradbury Building downtown at about 9:10 p.m.

“It (the bus) was half full,” said passenger Lewis Rogers. “This weird woman said she hates the blacks, she hates the Spanish people, she hates the white people. Nobody didn’t say nothing to her.”

About 9:45 p.m., witnesses would recall, as the bus neared Gower Street in Hollywood, Rogers pulled a handgun from her bag. Alternately waving it, resting it on her lap and hiding it in her bag, Rogers kept up her ranting.

One passenger crept up to warn the bus driver, who has not been identified. RTD spokesman Greg Davy said the driver radioed his dispatcher at 9:50 p.m. that a female passenger was waving around an object that might be a handgun.

Nine minutes later, RTD logs show, the dispatcher alerted the Los Angeles Police Department. For reasons transit officials could not explain Thursday, the threat was not immediately reported to the RTD police.

Earl Clark of the United Transportation Union, which represents drivers, would suggest later Thursday that the incident had raised serious security questions.

“The RTD police have to look into this and explain to drivers why this happened, why it took so long to respond to a driver with a passenger waving a gun,” Clark said. He said he believes the transit police are understaffed and plans to raise safety as an issue in contract talks now under way.

“That is part of the investigation,” Davy said. “We want to find out what happened in that (18-minute) gap.”

Davy said the driver was not certain what the passenger had in her hand, and such calls are considered a “priority” but not an emergency requiring immediate police assistance. Police are automatically dispatched only when the driver presses the silent alarm button, which the driver did not do until the shooting began.

In fact, the driver kept to his route after Rogers drew her gun, driving through West Hollywood and toward Beverly Hills. Passengers apparently were too afraid or not sufficiently alarmed to leave the bus as it made its usual stops.

Another nine minutes passed before the dispatcher responded to the alert. Eighteen minutes after the gun was reported, the dispatcher, who has not been named, asked the driver to more fully describe the woman and her weapon.

There was no time.

Patrick Hin, 24, of Hollywood, witnessed the shooting.

He recalled how Rogers--who was listed in voter registration records as being foreign-born--had been saying very loudly but to no one in particular, “I don’t like Nazis and Mafia on this bus. . . . I don’t like foreigners.”

She then, Hin said, turned her attention to the French man a few rows ahead of her.

“She said, ‘I don’t like Hitler or the Mafia,’ ” Hin remembered. “The guy was smiling. . . . She took out a gun . . . she loaded it . . . he looked at her . . . then boom, boom--twice. He said ‘Ow!’ ”

After Rogers shot the man, whose name was not released pending notification of his family , she pointed the gun toward the floor, Hin said.

“She was looking under the seats in the middle of the bus as I ran out with the others,” he said.

The driver pulled the bus over between Alta and Arden avenues, hit the silent alarm and fled with the other passengers, one of whom dragged out the shooting victim.

Beverly Hills police arrived first, at 10:15, about four minutes after the driver had hit the silent alarm. The bus was still running, its interior lights blazing and its electronic destination sign pleading, “Emergency--Please Call Police.”

The Sheriff’s Department Special Weapons Team was summoned when it was determined the woman was still inside the bus. Beverly Hills police were not sure if she was holding hostages.

“What I need is for you to step off the bus. That’s all you have to do, a negotiator called out through a bullhorn. “We want to help.”

At midnight, a squad of special-weapons officers in olive-drab jumpsuits gingerly approached the rear of the bus, compact Heckler and Koch MP-5 submachine guns slung under their shoulders. They crept to the bus, grabbed the shooting victim by the heels and dragged him away. He was declared dead on arrival at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Another hour of pleading passed fruitlessly. One sheriff’s spotter reported that the woman was crouched in the back of the bus, her gun pointed to the front.

A stun grenade was tossed in the front door of the bus and several sheriff’s deputies followed. Muzzle flashes illuminated the grenade’s eerie, lingering smoke. After a few seconds, someone yelled that the suspect was still moving and more gunshots followed.

Times staff writer Louis Sahagun contributed to this story.

RTD Violence

Wednesday’s bus shooting was one of several violent encounters that have occurred on RTD buses:

May 5, 1990: Thirteen-year-old Angel Ruben Hernandez, while riding a southbound bus on Broadway with his father at 6 p.m., is fatally wounded by gunfire during a fight between two other passengers.

April 24, 1989: In an unprovoked attack, Ramon Rios, 17, is shot to death by two gang members while heading home at 7:30 p.m. on a bus in South-Central Los Angeles. Rios was not a gang member.

Feb. 25, 1988: A gang member boards a crowded South-Central bus at 3:45 p.m. and opens fire on rival gang members with a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol, wounding four teen-agers.

April 1, 1987: A 13-year-old girl is shot in the face by a 14-year-old sniper while riding an afternoon bus in Pacoima.

Feb. 11, 1986: A disgruntled passenger fires a gun on a crowded bus at 1:30 p.m in South-Central, shattering a window and slightly wounding a passenger.

Oct. 30, 1984: A smoker on a downtown bus is stabbed to death at 1 a.m. by another passenger upset by his smoking.

April 22, 1983: A transient kills one passenger and stabs three others--including the driver--at 7:30 p.m on a bus in South Los Angeles.

Feb. 8, 1983: A gunman is shot and killed by police on Hollywood Boulevard after he terrorizes fellow passengers.

SOURCES: Times and wire reports

Compiled by Times researcher Michael Meyers

Transit Tragedy

Sheriff’s deputies in Beverly Hills stormed a Southern California Rapid Transit District bus early Thursday morning and killed an armed passenger, hours after she shot to death a fellow rider. According to authorities, here is what happened:

A Esther Rachel Rogers, 42, boards bus downtown at 3rd Street and Broadway about 9:10 p.m. Eyewitnesses recall her as angry, disoriented and muttering.

B About 9:45 p.m., Rogers brandishes a large handgun. Driver radios dispatcher at 9:50 p.m., as bus passes Gower Street. He continues driving, apparently to avoid antagonizing gunwoman.

RTD dispatcher alerts LAPD, but not RTD police, at 9:59 p.m. Nine minutes later, at request of police, dispatcher seeks further description of assailant.

C At 10:11 p.m., Rogers opens fire, hitting fellow passenger in chest and arm. Bus rolls to stop on Santa Monica Boulevard between Alta and Arden drives. Victim is dragged out by another passenger; 16 others and driver flee.

Victim, a 30-year-old French citizen living in Venice, lies outside bus about two hours until rescuers can reach him. At hospital, he is pronounced dead.

Police negotiators, using bullhorns, urge assailant to surrender. She reportedly remains crouched in back of the bus, with gun pointed forward.

At 1:10 a.m., after hours without response, Sheriff’s Special Weapons Team armed with submachine guns storm front door behind diversionary grenade.

Rogers is killed by several bursts of submachine gun fire.

Note: Drawing is an approximation