Woman Dies After Being Stabbed in Carjacking : Crime: Police are seeking leads in the killing of a bank customer who was attacked near an automated teller. Her 13-week-old fetus also died.

A Sherman Oaks woman has died of the wounds that had already killed her unborn fetus after she was stabbed near an automated teller during the San Fernando Valley’s latest fatal carjacking.

Sherri Foreman was getting into her 1984 BMW, parked about 40 feet from the Great Western Bank in Sherman Oaks, after apparently withdrawing cash from the teller machine about 9 p.m. Tuesday. She was approached by a man who demanded her car and then stabbed her in the abdomen, Los Angeles Police Detective Stephen Fisk said.

Foreman, 29, was the third person to die after Valley carjackings in the last month.

Fisk said that the self-employed beautician managed to set off her car alarm, which probably made her attacker flee without the vehicle.

A man at a nearby mini-mall heard Foreman’s screams, rushed to her side and moments later dialed 911, Detective Daniel DeJarnette said.

Foreman’s 13-week-old fetus died shortly after the attack. Foreman died Wednesday night at Northridge Hospital Medical Center, Fisk said. “It’s just getting sickening out there,” Fisk said. Police were searching Thursday for the man who had helped Foreman after her attack so they could interview him.

DeJarnette said that before she died, Foreman described her assailant and told police that he said he wanted the vehicle.

Whether Foreman refused her assailant’s demand remained unknown Thursday, but police said there were no signs of a struggle. Foreman’s purse was taken in the robbery, but police found her cosmetics and identification scattered 30 feet away. No weapons were found.

DeJarnette said that Tuesday’s attack did not appear to be part of a pattern and that he knew of no previous robberies at the bank on Riverside Drive, near the Fashion Square shopping center.

He said the assailant may have picked his victim because of her size. Foreman, who was 5 feet, 2 inches tall and weighed 100 pounds, was much smaller than several women shown by a bank videotape to have used the teller machine right before her, DeJarnette said. DeJarnette described the area surrounding the machine as dimly lit. By comparison, the area surrounding teller machines across the street is well lit, he said, and a security guard was stationed at the parking lot there.

Others agreed. “The parking lot over there is really dark,” said Niki Maldonado, a sales assistant at a Clothestime store across the street from Great Western.

Maha Kidess, branch manager of the bank, said that the parking lot is lit with cylindrical lamps positioned at 15-foot intervals in bushes and under the trees and that there is lighting over the automated teller and the building wall facing the parking lot.

Nevertheless, Kidess said, her bank plans to review its security procedures.

“We’re always reviewing security to make sure our customers are safe,” Kidess said. “‘We’re very sympathetic about what happened. We’re very upset.”

Foreman lived in Sherman Oaks with her boyfriend, Bobby Brock, known as Bobby Rock in the music industry, Brock said Thursday. He said he is a drummer for Nelson, the band featuring Matthew and Gunnar Nelson, twin sons of the late Rick Nelson. The couple had met a year ago, Brock said.

“It was a very intense relationship,” Brock said. “We accomplished as much in one year as many people do in a lifetime.”

On Thursday morning, Foreman’s father, Alex Foreman, 62, quietly expressed his anger at the man who killed his only daughter.

“If it had been a knife, she’d be alive because that would have been a clean cut,” Foreman said as he sat in his Westminster living room. “But he stabbed her with whatever he used to try to break into her car, and it tore up everything inside of her.”

News of the stabbing shook nearby business owners and the customers at their Sherman Oaks shops.

“We never had anything like this happen before in this area,” said Sam Mona, owner of Compliments boutique in a nearby mini-mall. “I think it’s terrible.”

Alexia Robinson, an actress on the daytime soap opera General Hospital, said she was terrified by news of the stabbing because she used the same bank machine Thursday morning.

“It scares me, it really scares me,” Robinson said. “Why couldn’t they just take the car?

” . . . Why did they have to take the lady’s life?”

The killer is being sought for murder, robbery and attempted car theft in connection with the attack, DeJarnette said.

Authorities describe the killer as a black man in his 30s, about 5 feet, 9 inches tall, weighing about 165 pounds and wearing a red beanie, a blue jacket and possibly a blue sweater, DeJarnette said. Police said they are also investigating the possibility that there was an accomplice.

It is unlikely that the assailant would be charged with double homicide in connection with the stabbing, authorities said. Los Angeles district attorney’s office spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons said that in order for somebody to be charged with the murder of a fetus, “it has to be a fetus that if born . . . would survive outside of the womb.”

Tuesday’s attack was one of at least six such incidents reported in the Los Angeles area in the the last month.

On March 25, a young man fleeing the robbery of a Van Nuys grocery store stole a car at a railroad crossing then crashed the stolen auto into a power pole and was killed.

Police arrested a 24-year-old man March 23 who allegedly carjacked a Mercedes from a Northridge intersection and later crashed the car.

On March 15, a gunman killed Naghi Ghoraishy, 74, and fled in his Mercedes after a carjacking at a gas station near Ghoraishy’s Chatsworth home.

Four days earlier in Canoga Park, a 14-year-old boy allegedly carjacking an auto pushed Esther Keely, an elderly passenger, into the street, breaking her jaw, hip and nose. Tuesday in Juvenile Court in Sylmar, the youth pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the attack.

In South-Central Los Angles on March 16, Emmett Barney, 22, his 19-year-old wife, Mignon Taylor, and their 2-year-old son were wounded by gunfire during an attempted carjacking.

The spate of violence has prompted Gov. Pete Wilson to call for state legislation that would classify carjacking as a violent crime and would impose stiffer penalties.

Although a federal anti-carjacking law went into effect five months ago, the state law is needed because carjackings do not always meet the specific circumstances needed to invoke the federal statute, Wilson has said.

During a news conference Thursday dealing with the attack on Foreman, Los Angeles police detectives said they would no longer use the term carjack . LAPD spokesman Lt. John Dunkin, in a telephone interview, said the department has always and will continue to refer to such crimes as “robbery grand theft auto.”

However, the term is used in the federal legislation, which makes the crime a federal offense. The FBI in Los Angeles also uses the term and gathers statistics on the number of such crimes, FBI spokesman Steven Berry said.

People who were near Woodman Avenue and Riverside Drive between 8 and 9 p.m. Tuesday are asked to call Los Angeles police detectives at (818) 989-8377.

Matthew Heller in Los Angeles and Times staff writers Thuan Le and Bill Billiter in Orange County contributed to this story.