Amid Tide of Violence, Slaying Stands Out : Crime: Oakland woman was stabbed as bystanders shouted encouragement. The brutality has shaken a city hardened to urban horror stories.

Every now and then, there occurs a crime so shocking that it leaps out from the police blotter to shake a city and expose ugly truths about modern times.

For New York, it was the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, whose desperate shrieks failed to bring help from 38 of her neighbors. For New Bedford, Mass., it was the barroom gang rape of a woman by a pack of patrons who cheered each other on.

For Oakland, it may well be the killing this month of Deborah Leanne Williams.

Williams, an unemployed mother of two, was fatally stabbed in the gutter of an east Oakland street late on the night of Aug. 11. Stacey Camille Lee, 19, later confessed to police and was charged with murder.

What is haunting about this killing, detectives say, is that Williams would likely have lived if not for a crowd of 15 young bystanders who tripped and corralled her, then encouraged Lee with shouts of “Kill her!” and “Beat her ass!”

By the time police arrived, the group had dispersed. Williams, 31, had only enough strength left to murmur “help me” as an officer knelt by her side.

Although Oakland’s murder rate has steamed steadily upward in recent years, this killing appears to have distressed the city of 372,000 like no other. It seems to have aroused a primordial fear shared by all segments of society: If I’m in trouble, will someone help?

Sgt. Ramon Paniagua, a street-toughened homicide detective, said the Williams slaying demonstrates a level of “callousness and coldheartedness” he had never seen in a long career.

“To some people,” Paniagua said, his voice low and weary, “it seems that life means nothing, has no value at all.”

The homicide--Oakland’s 95th of the year--occurred in the Elmhurst district, a rough and blighted neighborhood plagued by drug dealing, vandalism and deep economic woes. Steel bars cover the windows and doors of businesses and homes, and merchants--even those who own restaurants and bars--say they close early because hoodlums make it unsafe after dark. Trash and graffiti abound.

Barber James Lyons, who has trimmed the hair of three generations of Elmhurst residents, recently added a burglar alarm to his system of defense against the outside world. Repeated break-ins, he said, left him no choice.

Lyons did not know Williams--she lived across town--but believes her vicious slaying is further evidence that Elmhurst, which “once was so very nice,” is a community in crisis.

“This used to be a thriving business area, but not anymore,” Lyons said between customers. “We’ve got places boarded up and drug dealers hanging out all over. Now this poor girl gets killed as the people cheer. Something is radically wrong.”

Down the block, Henry Hayes leaned against the front door of his business, the Wine Lite Blues club, and looked across the street at the spot where Williams was stabbed. Hayes had closed early that night, as usual, and did not witness the crime.

“But I heard all about it, and I can tell you, we’re all shook up,” Hayes said. “People around here get used to violence, but this one was outrageous, plain outrageous.”

According to police interviews with witnesses, the killing followed an argument in the apartment building where Lee lived with her husband and two children. Williams entered the building, and Lee--who said she did not know the victim but had previously seen her smoking crack in the hall--told her to get out.

Williams refused, and a fight ensued. Lee quickly got the upper hand, punching Williams and striking her with a piece of metal bed frame. Neighbors finally separated the two, and Williams fled. Lee then went into her apartment, grabbed a kitchen knife from her sink and took up the chase, she told police.

Bleeding and staggering, Williams attempted to take refuge in a liquor store, police said. But witnesses said the store owner slammed and locked the door in her face, a charge the merchant denied.

Minutes later, Williams was trapped by the group of young adults, mostly men, who had been gathered on a street corner. They knocked her down and yelled insults at her. Curled in a fetal position over the grate of a storm drain, she was stomped, kicked and struck with a wine bottle on the head.

Lee initially told detectives that the crowd’s exhortations had no effect on her behavior, noting that she was “already mad,” Paniagua said. Now, she contends that the cheers drove her to straddle Williams and stab her in the side. Now, she told one interviewer tearfully, she wishes Williams had gotten away.

Although the killing of Kitty Genovese in a middle-class part of Queens became a symbol of urban apathy, the death of Deborah Williams says something different. To Mike Nisperos, director of Oakland’s Office of Drugs and Crime, it illustrates the descent by a group of young people into savagery, a tumble spurred by the absence of discipline and morals.

“What it evokes for me is images of the killing of the character Piggy in ‘Lord of the Flies,’ ” Nisperos said, referring to the novel about a group of shipwrecked boys who revert to a savage state and attack the weakling among them. “What you have are young people who are without adult supervision, without an adequate set of values shaping what they do.”

Law enforcement officials agree, and add that although many contemporary murders appear senseless--committed over a dirty look, for example--the Williams killing appears to signify an actual thirst for violence.

“The sick thing about this one is that the participants seemed to be getting their kicks from it,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Bob Platt, who prepared the charges against Lee. “There is an amorality at work that is just disgusting.”

Psychologists caution against drawing broad societal conclusions from such cases.

“If these bystanders were just drug dealers, as police are suggesting, then they were already deviants,” said R. Lance Shotland, a professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University who has studied bystander intervention in crimes. “If that’s the case, then I wouldn’t draw any inference about what (the crime) says about the rest of us.”

So far, detectives have been unable to find the bystanders. If they do, and the evidence is sufficient, more charges may be filed.

For 14 days, Williams’ body lay in the Alameda County morgue, unclaimed and unidentified. After sorting through her 10 aliases and four Social Security numbers, Deputy Coroner Mike King found her room at the Silver Dollar boardinghouse, and tracked down a friend to identify her corpse.

Meanwhile, the Rev. Donald Miller, pastor of the Allen Temple Baptist Church, held a candlelight prayer vigil for Williams on the corner where she was slain.

And Elmhurst merchants are meeting with police and Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris, who last year declared Oakland “under siege” by violent criminals and threatened to declare a state of emergency because of the soaring murder rate. The merchants hope to find ways to make sure such savagery never occurs in their neighborhood again.