Discarded Wallet Leads to Arrest of Harbor City Suspect in Slaying

When hospital pharmacist Jolene Hori was killed by two robbers outside her home in Hastings Ranch last month, Pasadena police had trouble cracking the case.

Descriptions of the gunmen from the two witnesses who had accompanied Hori to her house on Riviera Drive after dining with her were vague, and the killers left little evidence behind.

But a wallet discarded after a second holdup, and a single fingerprint found inside it, led authorities on a brief odyssey last week that included a gang shooting in Duarte, a high-speed car chase--and the arrest of a Harbor City man in the slaying.

Pasadena Police Lt. Van Anthony credited the patrol officers who found, and carefully handled, the stolen wallet; the investigators who spotted, and identified, the fingerprint, and members of a surveillance team who were following the suspect when the Duarte shooting occurred.

Their efforts, he said, resulted in the arrest of Rashidia Keyatch Jake, 22, in the Hori murder. Three of Jake’s companions were also taken into custody in the Duarte shooting.

“Any time we can put these kind of dangerous people away and make the community safer, we’re very, very happy,” Anthony said.

The Oct. 18 slaying of Hori, 34, who worked at Santa Teresita Hospital in Duarte, was the first--and deadliest--of three violent holdups in Pasadena’s northeast neighborhoods last month, police said. Police suspected that the same people were behind all the crimes, and Jake faces charges in each of them.

On Oct. 20, two men were robbed at gunpoint in the 2100 block of East Orange Grove Boulevard. On Oct. 26, a man and woman were held up in the 1500 block of Casa Grande Street. The woman was shot once in the face but survived.

“We noticed from these robberies a similarity in the way they were committed,” Anthony said.

The critical clue turned up after officers found a wallet that apparently had been thrown away after the Orange Grove holdup.

Anthony said investigators found a fingerprint on a business card in the wallet, and the state’s crime computer identified the print as Jake’s.

On Nov. 4, Jake was spotted in the Pasadena area. The North Region Surveillance and Apprehension Team--which includes Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies and officers from several San Gabriel Valley cities--was alerted, and task force members began tracking the suspect.

That night, a stakeout team watched as Jake and three companions allegedly entered an apartment complex near Highland Avenue and Huntington Drive in Duarte.

Gunfire erupted, and Jake and his friends ran out, fleeing in a Hyundai sedan, authorities said.

Deputy Albert Pelaez, a gang investigator working out of the sheriff’s Temple City station, said two men in the complex were shot in what was an apparent dispute between rival gangs. Charles Stepney, 20, wounded in the neck and back, was partially paralyzed and remains at an undisclosed hospital, the deputy said. Tonio Alford, 24, is also hospitalized with an intestinal wound, he said.

After the shooting, the surveillance team and other officers pursued the Hyundai to a dead end on Halstead Street, south of Foothill Boulevard, in Pasadena. After a brief foot pursuit, during which one suspect was bitten by an Arcadia police dog, the four men were arrested, investigators said.

The other suspects were identified as Frederick Romance Robinson, 24, of Temple City; Charles Moore, 21, of Pasadena, and Tharal Ray Thomas, 18, of San Bernardino.

Near the suspects’ car, officers found a handgun, apparently tossed away by one of the suspects, Anthony said. Ballistics tests were performed on the relatively rare, .380-caliber Bryco pistol.

“The gun we recovered from that scene was the gun used in the Riviera Drive homicide,” Anthony said.

On Friday, the district attorney’s office charged Jake with the Hori murder. He was also charged with robbery and attempted murder in the Orange Grove and Casa Grande holdups.

Jake and his three companions were also charged with gang conspiracy and attempted murder in the Duarte shooting. All four remain in Los Angeles County Jail pending arraignment today in Pasadena Municipal Court.

Pasadena police, meanwhile, were trying to determine whether any of the men arrested with Jake was the second robber in the Hori slaying. So far, none of them have been charged in that case.