Court Refuses to Release Killer : Crime: Former UCLA graduate student was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 2 shooting deaths. Psychiatrists now say his schizophrenia is under control. But a judge has ordered him to remain at a state hospital.

On an October afternoon three years ago, apparently convinced that a homosexual Mafia was taping his most intimate acts and selling the footage to Beverly Hills cable television, Bai Xiodong shot and killed a neighbor in front of his studio apartment in West Los Angeles.

“She was lying on the street, and he was standing over her about where her feet were, and he was just firing away, firing at her head,” a witness recalled at a court hearing shortly thereafter. “Then he finished firing and turned and walked back into the building . . . very casually, like it was no big deal.”

When a man from the next block ran up to see what had happened, Bai, a graduate student in Chinese literature from China, killed him too. Bai apparently cracked under the pressures of an alien culture, his own sexual confusion and a chemical-biological propensity toward paranoid schizophrenia, doctors said.

He left Rosa Molina, 54, a UCLA health worker, sprawled in the street, her dress covered with blood, and Michael Kamf, 57, manager of a nearby building, lying in the bushes.

Retreating with his 9-millimeter Uzi and a .357 magnum revolver to his one-room apartment, he lay on the bed, surrounded by hand-scrawled placards reading, “Peepers Keep Out.” Nearby, there was a tape he had made and labeled “Peeping Sam,” a chant of Chinese and English obscenities that he would play at all hours to retaliate against what he perceived as the monitoring by his enemies, especially Molina, who had lived in the apartment above.

He picked up the telephone and made call after call, acquaintances recalled at his preliminary hearing in December, 1988.

“It’s too late. I couldn’t put up with it anymore,” he said, according to a fellow teaching assistant’s testimony at the hearing.

“I don’t know what I’m doing. I feel as if I were in a dream,” Bai told a woman friend whom he called in Detroit.

Four hours later, he surrendered to a SWAT team, walking away from the shards of a life that saw him overcome growing up virtually abandoned during the Chinese Cultural Revolution to achieve academic success, only to succumb to paranoid schizophrenia in a strange land.

Charged with two counts of murder and facing a prison term of 17 years to life, Bai was found not guilty by reason of insanity in February, 1989, and put on the bus to the Patton State Hospital, near San Bernardino, where doctors say that a mere 2 milligrams a day of the drug Stelazine--the usual dose for psychotic disorders is between 20 and 40 milligrams--has brought his schizophrenia under control. Although the law calls for Bai to stay at Patton until he is no longer a danger, a judge decided in a ruling last week that he should remain at the state hospital for at least six more months of observation.

Six psychiatrists and psychologists testified in the hearing in Santa Monica Superior Court that Bai, now 33, has done so well that he is ready for release to a residential facility in the Los Angeles area.

They said Bai, who works in the staff restaurant, paints, plays tennis and studies Japanese, has little more to gain from his stay at Patton, which costs the state $230 a day.

In his appearance on the witness stand, he showed that he can analyze his actions with subtle thoughts in fluent English, using medical terms such as tardive dyskinesia and slangy idioms such as “spacey” and “stuff like that,” with equal ease. Tardive dyskinesia, or involuntary muscle twitching, is a possible side effect of Stelazine.

“He’s simply an above-average individual,” said Kelly June, a staff psychiatrist at Patton. “There’s absolutely nothing to indicate he’d be a danger to society.”

People who have their lives more or less together before a psychotic episode are likely to maintain control once they are restored to sanity, she said, especially if they stay on their medication.

But after the testimony of an agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, it seems unlikely that Bai, who not only killed two people but also overstayed his student visa, will ever make it to the halfway house.

If released from Patton, Bai will almost certainly be deported to China, which might not be so bad, according to his attorney, Deputy Public Defender Leslie Falick.

She said a mental hospital in his hometown, the Xian Psychosis Center, has agreed to take him, and his parents and sisters, reunited after the family was broken up during the Cultural Revolution, are looking forward to his return.

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Stone argued against it, saying Bai needs more observation--a lot more--before he can be released to an uncertain fate beyond the authority of California justice.

“She (Falick) says two years and nine months is enough,” he said. “I don’t think so. I’m not saying the rest of his life. It’s just not long enough.”

Indeed, Superior Court Judge David Perez rejected the doctors’ recommendations in his decision Nov. 21, setting the next hearing for May 22.

“We’re not talking about grand-theft auto, we’re talking about the most serious crime,” Perez said.

During the hearing, the lanky Bai sat quietly in a canary-yellow jumpsuit issued by the Los Angeles County Jail Hospital, his thick black bangs hanging down to the top of his glasses.

Taking the stand, he showed the judge Polaroid shots of his artwork, including one collage titled “Cosmetic Surgery as a Work of Art,” which juxtaposes the image of a bus crashing in flames against the famous Vietnam War photograph of a suspected Viet Cong guerrilla being executed on a Saigon street.

“It’s probably better for me just to go back to China,” he said. “I’ve been away for six years, and I really need the chance to recuperate and get my stuff together and stuff like that.”

Seeking to explain what happened that sunny afternoon in October, Bai blamed “a lot of shocks, generalized into cultural shock,” and the specific shock of a sexual overture from a fellow male graduate student.

The repressed ways of a Chinese academic were not a strong enough defense for American campus life, he said, and there was no way he could face the shame of returning to China without a Ph.D.

“I don’t think I was thinking anything,” he said. “I just had an overwhelming feeling of fear, a feeling that my entrails, my intestines were rotting away.”

The blow-up was not a complete surprise to some friends. Ting Zhang, a fellow student at Peking University, said at the preliminary hearing in 1988 that Bai’s former girlfriend told Ting about the guns before she returned to China, and was “very, very frustrated” by Bai’s mental state.

“He told me a few times that he was very much besieged by a group of underground homosexuals who were trying to convert him into a homosexual,” Zhang said at the hearing. “He tried to tell them that he wouldn’t cooperate, and they just wouldn’t go away.”

Bai was also seen a few times in the summer of 1988 by doctors at UCLA who did not find him an immediate danger to himself or others, Falick said.

“Because of California law and federal regulations protecting the confidentiality of psychiatric records, we cannot comment on whether or not any person may have received psychiatric care at UCLA,” said Robert Weinstock, associate clinical professor of psychiatry, UCLA Student Psychological Services.

Bai’s fear of his neighbors was also noted by a police officer who responded earlier in 1988 to a 3 a.m. call about excessive noise from the “Peeping Sam” tape.

“Who’s to say when they’re crazy enough to pose a problem?” mused Lt. Ron Hall, commander of detectives at the Los Angeles Police Department’s West Los Angeles station. “Just because someone rants and raves. . . . Apparently he had purchased the guns some months before (the shootings). Up till then there was no indication that he intended to do anything about it.”