Robbers Kill Woman as Her Son, 9, Watches

A woman waiting for her daughter outside a Bible study class in Northridge was gunned down in front of her 9-year-old son despite complying with a demand by robbers that she give them her purse, police said.

Laurie Myles, 34, of North Hills was shot once under the left arm at close range as she sat in the front seat of her compact car. Myles, a bookkeeper and mother of three, died a short time later at Northridge Hospital Medical Center.

“We’re having a prayer meeting and--bingo!--something like this happens,” said Charles Casper, a Los Angeles city fire captain who was host of the church gathering. “You wonder what good prayer does.”

Authorities said Myles had apparently stopped at a nearby photocopy store and was heading to pick up her 17-year-old daughter at the Bible class when two men began trailing her small white car.

When she arrived at a private home where the class was being conducted, at least one of them approached the driver’s side of the car, demanded cash and--although she quickly complied--shot her, police said.

Moments after the 9:10 p.m. shooting, the victim’s son, Joshua Adams, burst into the home in the 8600 block of Louise Avenue and interrupted the study group from nearby Shepherd of the Hills Baptist Church.

“My mother’s been shot!” he cried, collapsing into tears. A dozen people attending the meeting rushed out to find Myles slumped in the front seat of her car, which was parked on the street, blocking the driveway of the home.

Chris Holowaty, the youth pastor and first on the scene, said the passenger door was open and the window had been smashed out of the driver’s side door. There was blood on the car seat, where Myles was slumped, he said.

“She wasn’t moving, just very still,” Holowaty said. “Just the way her body was, it wasn’t in a comfortable position. I knew that something was very wrong.”

Rushing out soon after him was Dana Martin, the victim’s 17-year-old daughter, who had been in the home with eight other teen-agers.

“Dana had been waiting for her mother and we knew she had arrived, because the dog had started barking,” Holowaty said.

When she saw her mother’s body, she ran back inside the living room, hysterical, he said.

Mila Casper, a church member who held the weekly meetings with her husband, got a blanket.

“I came out with the blanket but Chris stopped me before I could get to her. He said ‘Don’t go any further. It’s bad.’ ”

As they waited for paramedics, the stunned teen-agers gathered on the front lawn of the Casper home, in a tree-shaded neighborhood where $500,000 homes stand near gritty, blue-collar thoroughfares.

“We assumed the worst, that she was dead,” Holowaty, 23, said. “The kids were crying, embracing each other, trying to console Dana. The boy was very quiet, almost numb. At that point, we were pretty scared of every car that drove by, afraid that these guys might come back.”

Investigators on Thursday had few details on the robbers, whom they described as two young men, one about 19 years old.

The San Fernando Valley has had dozens of “follow-home” crimes since 1988, two of which have ended in death, authorities said.

“What makes these cases so startling and alarming is the sudden intrusion into people’s regular lives,” said Deputy Chief Mark Kroeker, commanding officer of the LAPD’s Valley bureau. “When in their car, people feel like they’re in a cocoon, protected with family and friends. Then, suddenly, they’re confronted by a hostile attacker. It’s a form of outright street terrorism.”

Kroeker said such crimes are particularly frustrating for authorities.

“Time after time in prevention seminars, we tell people how to react in a crime such as this,” he said. “And from what I understand, this woman did everything she was supposed to. She gave up her property without a fight. And then, in an offhanded way, this suspect just kills her.”

Members of the Myles family were asked by police not to make any public statements. Friends came and went from their home in the 9300 block of Woodley Avenue throughout the day. Thursday.

Myles was married to Philip Myles in 1989. Her three children, including the 9-year-old who witnessed her shooting, are from two previous marriages.

Much of Myles’ life seemed to revolve around her fundamentalist Christian beliefs, and she met her husband in a Bible study class, friends said. But there was a troubled side to her, too. According to court and official records, she had been arrested on several occasions and was convicted of shoplifting cosmetics from a Thrifty store in 1992. The court record in the shoplifting case also made reference to a 1990 conviction for unlawful use of a hypodermic needle.

But “she was a beautiful lady who knew the Lord and who was very proud of her daughter,” said Mila Casper, who met Myles several years ago when Dana and her own daughter, Irene, became active in the drill team at Los Angeles Baptist High School.

“We saw each other at games at school and talked about our daughters, how nice it was to have two young Christian girls who were so outgoing,” she said.

Irene has since joined the school’s cheerleaders, and Dana is a leader of the drill team, she said. Both regularly attended the Bible classes.

Friends said that the Myles family are members of Church on the Way, a Pentecostal congregation in Van Nuys, but that Dana also regularly attends the Bible meetings at the Casper home.

Church members set up a trust for the family Thursday. At the high school, students gathered in prayer and attended counseling session.

“This kind of thing causes you to think twice,” Casper said. “There’s a lot of evil in this world. No place is immune, not even this quiet neighborhood.”

Jess Moody, pastor of the 6,000-member Shepherd of the Hills Church, added: “Not the family of course, but in a way, we all deserved this. We have lowered our standards all around. We have got to have a spiritual awakening in L.A. It’s just terrible that it may take a tragedy like this to inspire it.”

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Ann W. O’Neill, Julio Moran and David Colker and researcher Dennis Clontz.