Two Sisters Found Shot to Death in Apartment

The man in the nearby apartment said he first heard a loud crash. Then came the urgent knocking at his front door.

When he opened it Thursday afternoon, there stood the 9-year-old girl who lived across the hall in the Crenshaw district building, weeping.

“My mother’s been shot,” she said.

With the distraught child in tow, the neighbor said, he rushed to the girl’s apartment and found not just the girl’s mother but also her aunt shot to death, their hands tied behind their backs.

“We believe they were executed,” Los Angeles Police Lt. Bruce Hagerty said Friday. He would not disclose a motive for the shootings, but said investigators are searching for a man seen driving from the scene.

The dead women were identified as Kimberly Cofield, 28, and her sister, Gidget Jacobs, 26.

They shared an apartment in the 4100 block of Buckingham Road with Cofield’s two children, the girl and a boy who is about 4.

Witnesses said they saw a short, stocky man “with a beer belly” and distinctive scar--beginning at his lip and running under his chin--leave the building through a back alley just after the shootings. He drove away in a white Toyota pickup truck with silver letters on the tailgate, they said.

“Possibly, he knew (the victims),” Hagerty said, noting that there were no signs of forced entry. On the other hand, he said, “it could be just as simple as an open door.”

There also were no indications of robbery, and investigators do not believe that the killings were drug or gang-related, police said.

Neighbors on Friday described the victims as outgoing women who shared care of the children.

“They were neighborly,” said the 40-year-old man who discovered the bodies, who asked that his name not be used. “Everyone who lived around here would come by and speak to them.”

Apartment manager Bilal Muhammad said Cofield walked her daughter to school and then went to a job-training program.

Muhammad, who took care of the children for several hours after the murder, said they were in the apartment when their mother and aunt were murdered.

“They said their mom kept telling them: ‘Go back in the other room. It’s all right.’ ”