Two Teen-Agers Held in Slaying of Honor Student

Acting on a public outpouring of telephone tips, police homicide investigators arrested two suspected gang members Tuesday in connection with the slaying of Alfred Clark, a 17-year-old honor student at Paramount High School who was gunned down in broad daylight a day before his graduation, authorities said.

The suspects, teen-agers identified as members of a Compton gang, were booked on suspicion of murder, said Lt. Derry Benedict of the Los Angeles County sheriff’s Homicide Division. Their names were not released.

A two-week investigation involving about 20 officers, including members of the sheriff’s anti-gang program, led to the arrest of a 17-year-old suspect at a high school in unincorporated Riverside, Benedict said. That suspect is accused of fatally shooting Clark in the chest after Clark refused to surrender his portable CD player in a crowded McDonald’s restaurant across the street from Paramount High School on June 17.

A second suspect, age 16, was arrested simultaneously at a home in East Rancho Dominguez, near Compton, Benedict said. He was described as an accomplice who fled with the killer in a van.

Robbery was the only apparent motive for the slaying, Benedict said.

The slain youth’s stepfather, Luis Silvestre, said the arrests have brought a sense of relief.

“It does give me some satisfaction that 10 years down the road, I won’t have to look back and wonder who took my son,” Silvestre, who raised Clark for most of the youth’s life, told reporters summoned to a news conference at the family home in Paramount.

“If it was going to take the rest of my life, (the crime) was going to be solved,” Silvestre said. “That would have been my mission in life.”

Silvestre said that although he is not a believer in capital punishment, he hopes the teen-age suspects are tried as adults.

“It was an adult crime,” he said.

Clark, who carried a 3.5 grade-point average while playing football and setting school records as a track sprinter, was regarded as an “all-American young man” by school administrators and friends who said he had never been involved with gangs or crime. Clark had been accepted as a scholarship student at UCLA, where he planned to major in business while competing on the track team.

Although about 40 witnesses were interviewed by investigators, a barrage of publicity about the slaying and subsequent telephone tips provided vital information that led to the arrests, according to Benedict, who discussed the arrests at a news conference.

“We have received literally hundreds of telephone calls from all over the county,” the homicide investigator said. “And eventually, following up on those leads, an arrest warrant was obtained.”

Investigators learned of two nicknames that tied the two suspects to the shooting, Benedict said. However, he declined to disclose the nicknames or to say whether any weapons were recovered for fear of jeopardizing the case.

The suspects, who were being detained at a sheriff’s substation in Lakewood, are due to be tried as juveniles, but investigators plan to ask that they be tried instead as adults, Benedict added.

“Alfred was an exemplary student and athlete,” the detective said. “This was a tragedy, I believe, that touched us all.”