Homicides on the Rise in San Fernando Valley : Violence: Killings up more than twice the rate of the city as a whole. Many victims are ordinary people going about their business.

A churchgoing couple are slain in their Granada Hills home. Their children, 4 and 6, are not spared.

A hard-working catering truck owner is stabbed and shot to death, his body left with those of his 13-year-old son and three employees off a remote canyon road in Sun Valley.

Two teen-age friends are forced to lie on the floor of a Subway sandwich shop in Northridge, then both are shot in the head execution-style after a robbery.

Homicide is on the rise in the San Fernando Valley, once America’s quintessential suburb, now a place of increasing urban ills and fears. As of Dec. 7, according to the most recent police figures, 137 people had died by violence this year in the Valley--a 14.5% increase over the same period last year. The discovery in La Tuna Canyon on Tuesday of the bodies of Ismael Cervantes Sr. and four others from his catering truck brought the official total to 142. Two other people were shot and stabbed to death Thursday and Friday.

Many of the deaths have been barely noticed, grim statistics chalked up to gangs and drugs. Others--such as those of the Yoo family of Granada Hills, of Cervantes and the catering truck crew, and of childhood friends James White and Brian Berry--stunned the city.

“It used to be considered that the Valley was an area that was separate from the rest of the city and that the downtown areas had violence while the Valley was luckily immune,” Van Nuys Municipal Judge Michael S. Luros said.

“The scenarios of finding a family of four murdered or five people from a lunch truck dead were things you read about happening elsewhere. Now you have them here. People are becoming very concerned and they are scared.”

Violence is increasing throughout Los Angeles, where the year-to-date homicide tally as of Dec. 7 was 982, rapidly approaching a 1980 record of 1,028 for the year.

The Valley still posts the fewest homicides compared with the Police Department’s three other area bureaus in the south, central and west sides of the city. But in the Valley between 1989 and the present, homicides increased at more than twice the rate of the city as a whole, police records show.

“We used to say we kill more people in traffic accidents than murder, but that’s not the case anymore,” said Deputy Chief Mark A. Kroeker, the Valley’s top police official. He said there has been an average of nine traffic fatalities a month in the Valley this year, while killings have averaged about 12 a month.

“It is something you think about all the time,” said Stuart Schlosser, owner of the Subway franchise where White and Berry, both 19, were killed last June. “Things are happening in the Valley that never happened before.”

The man charged with the killings was a former employee who was facing financial difficulties and used the money he stole to rent an apartment, authorities said. He is awaiting trial.

Drugs, gangs, the poor economy, overcrowding, a rootless society and a proliferation of handguns are among the reasons suggested by police, academics and clergy.

Lewis Yablonsky, a criminologist at Cal State Northridge and the author of a book on gangs, said the Valley’s increased ethnic diversity has heightened residents’ suspicions and has added to the tendency to dehumanize others.

In the last decade, Anglos have dropped from 74.8% to 58.4% of the Valley’s population, while the number of Latinos and Asians has roughly doubled and the number of blacks has risen from 2.6% to 3.4%. The Valley’s population has increased from about 1.3 million to 1.5 million, according to the 1990 census.

“Where people relate to each other almost as objects there’s a tendency toward higher incidences of crime in general and violence in particular,” Yablonsky said.

Yablonsky also said a sense of hopelessness among youths, bred by poverty and intensified by the poor economy, contributes to the popularity of gangs, which inevitably leads to violence.

Gang rivalry is to blame for 42 deaths in the Valley this year.

Other highly publicized cases in the Valley this year include that of rookie police Officer Tina Kerbrat, the city’s first female officer to die in the line of duty. Kerbrat, 34, was shot in the head with a .357 magnum revolver as she stopped two men for drinking on a Sun Valley street.

In March, Camille Gibbs, 45, of Canoga Park was fatally shot by a thief in the parking lot of Topanga Plaza Mall as she loaded her car with packages. Police arrested Emelito Halili Exmundo, 28, of Canoga Park several hours later after he was shot in a struggle with a liquor store owner he was allegedly trying to rob.

In August, Julian Ramirez Contreras, 51, of Van Nuys was shot to death in the park near the Van Nuys Recreation Center after he questioned an armed man who tried to rob a few dollars from a card game kitty. Police have arrested Lanell Craig Harris, 25, of Van Nuys, who is awaiting trial.