Man Shot to Death in Robbery on Encino Street

One minute Bahman Taheri was parked in his Honda Civic, talking with his girlfriend, on what police say used to be one of Encino’s safest streets.

The next, the 53-year-old grocer was arguing with a gun-toting stranger who used a pistol to smash the car’s passenger window. He fought back and it cost Taheri his life, Los Angeles police said.

The gunman shot him once in the head at 11:55 p.m. Tuesday, said Detective Rick Swanston. Taheri died at the scene, on the street in front of his apartment building in the 17500 block of Burbank Boulevard. Police would not identify the woman, who was unhurt.

Swanston said violent street crime once was unheard of in the neighborhood of apartment buildings that line Burbank Boulevard between Lindley and White Oak avenues. But Taheri’s death marked the third robbery-related homicide to strike the neighborhood since April, 1992.

“It’s still a relatively low-crime area,” Swanston said. “But in the last year or two, we’ve had three murders in that four-block area.”

Swanston said the most recent incident unfolded about 11:30 p.m. Tuesday. Taheri had driven to pick up his girlfriend, who lived in the neighborhood. The couple stopped in front of Taheri’s apartment complex to talk. They’d been sitting in the car for about 20 minutes when the gunman approached, the detective said.

When the man smashed the woman’s window with his pistol, Taheri jumped out of the driver’s side to confront him, allowing his girlfriend to escape. The man demanded money, and Taheri began arguing with him, Swanston said.

The gunman fired and ran west, toward the freeway, without taking anything. Witnesses told police that he jumped into a car parked half a block away.

Swanston said two other robbery-related deaths just days apart stunned the neighborhood in April, 1992. First, George Banafsheah was slain by two robbers who followed him from a card club in Bell Gardens to his home in the 18100 block of Burbank Boulevard. When he resisted, the suspects riddled his car with bullets, Swanston said.

Less than two weeks later, Christopher Lee Brown, a 24-year-old aspiring police officer, was shot and killed by a 14-year-old gang member when he tried to stop the boy and two others from stealing beer from a convenience store.