Investigators of Attacks Cite El Toro Units

More than a third of the sex-related assaults reported in private rooms at the scandal-tainted 1991 Tailhook Convention occurred in suites rented by aviators associated with the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, according to a government report released Friday.

Prepared by the Department of Defense, the report concludes that 83 women were grabbed, fondled, or more seriously assaulted during a boozy, four-day convention of military aviators at the Las Vegas Hilton in September, 1991. Seven men also said they were accosted.

Nineteen of the attacks occurred in private suites on the hotel’s third floor, while the rest were reported in a third-floor corridor and other public areas.

The study describes in detail five “indecent assaults” on women, including a military officer and an officer’s wife, that took place in Suite 308, rented by former members of Marine Corps Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron 3. Disbanded in 1990, the squadron formerly was based at El Toro.

The centerpiece of the unit’s “hospitality” room was a drink dispenser affixed to a 5-by-8-foot mural of a bull rhinoceros, the squadron’s mascot. The dispenser itself was a sexual device shaped like a penis.

According to the Pentagon, men drinking in the suite forced or tried to force the five women to place the device in their mouths to drink. The dispenser was serving a mixture of rum, Kahlua, milk, ice cream and ice. One woman reported that on one occasion, a man standing behind the mural removed the device and replaced it with his penis.

A sixth assault took place in a separate suite rented by members of Marine Fighter Attack Training Squadron 101, based at El Toro. In that incident, a woman in the company of a Marine captain said a drunk British pilot bit her on the left hip, hard enough to penetrate her clothing and draw blood.

Defense Department investigators reported a seventh incident, in which two women attacked a 29-year-old Marine captain in the Rhino suite, pulling his shorts below his knees.

No attacks were reported in suites rented by two other El Toro units, Marine All Weather Fighter Attack squadrons 12 and 24, according to the Pentagon document.

The investigators noted, however, that members of attack squadron 12 affixed another sexual device to a four-foot-high sheet-metal “Green Knight” that they used to prop open the door to their rooms, Suite 318. The Green Knight dispensed margaritas, the Pentagon said.

The report also says that members of attack squadron 24 staged private parties in Suite 320 on all three nights of the Tailhook Convention during which professional strippers performed.

According to the Pentagon, files on at least 140 officers involved in Tailhook incidents are being referred to the acting secretary of the Navy for possible disciplinary action. It is not known how many are associated with El Toro. However, informed sources told The Times on Friday that at least nine former El Toro officers initially were under investigation, including three for offenses serious enough to be considered possible felonies.

Marine Capt. David Prudhomme, identified in the report as the coordinator of the Rhino suite, said Friday that he had not seen the Pentagon document and would make no comment. Prudhomme is assigned to the Marine Corps’ public affairs office in Los Angeles.

Of the incidents involving El Toro aviators, those that occurred in the Rhino suite drew the most attention from military investigators.

Investigators said they were unable to determine how much the former members of VMFP-3, as the Rhino squadron is known, spent on alcohol, but concluded that most of the money was devoted to production of the alcoholic mixture. Rhino revelers caused $530 in damage to the suite, the Pentagon said.

In addition to forcing women to drink from the rhinoceros, investigators said “other activities . . . included women exposing their breasts to obtain squadron T-shirts . . . ‘mooning,’ (and) consensual sex.”

Men “wearing Rhino horns and believed to be aviators were ‘butting’ women with their horns in the third floor hallway,” the report states.

A 24-year-old Navy lieutenant junior grade told investigators that when she went into the suite with a male aviator, the aviator pushed her mouth toward the rhinoceros, attempting to force her to suck it. She escaped when another woman volunteered to drink from it, she said.

The wife of a Navy lieutenant reported that she was walking by the Rhino suite with a friend when a man wearing a Rhino horn on his head stepped into the corridor and grabbed her arm.

Her friend grabbed her other arm, and, according to investigators, the lieutenant’s wife began screaming for them to stop because they were “yanking my arms out.” The friend released her arm, and she was pulled into the suite.

Once inside, the 50 people in the room began chanting as she was pulled toward the rhinoceros. Her friend finally succeeded in pulling her from the room, but investigators said the incident left the woman “shaken and unnerved.”

Another woman, an 18-year-old student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said she struggled and screamed for help when four men in the Rhino suite pulled her away from her friends, circled her, and began chanting and pushing her toward the rhinoceros. A friend pulled her out of the suite.

In another incident, a 23-year-old woman from San Diego who had broken her leg in an earlier accident said a man in the Rhino suite grabbed one of her crutches, and began pulling her toward the rhinoceros.

“The victim recalled that she looked specifically at the area of the (device) and noticed that an unidentified male standing behind the mural had removed the (device) and placed his penis in the hole where the device had been,” the investigators said.

At that point, a friend pried the woman’s crutch away from the man who was holding it, and they left the suite, the report says.

Staff writer Gebe Martinez in Orange County also contributed to this report.