Anger, Confusion Mount in Hunt for Molester : Education: Outraged parents gather at forum, demanding to know why they weren’t notified sooner of assaults.

Shouting questions from the audience, sometimes swallowing tears of frustration, aroused parents at a community forum brought police and school officials to their feet Friday night to defend the way the officials handled a string of child molestations.

While some of the 150 audience members gathered at Sutter Middle School quietly lined up at a microphone to ask their questions of three Los Angeles police detectives, an LAPD captain and a representative of the Los Angeles Unified School District, other parents shot up from their auditorium seats, shouting complaints.

“Why did it take my principal two weeks to notify the parents?” yelled Christine Disimile, the mother of two children. “Two weeks! How are we supposed to protect our children when we’re not notified?”

The target of the parents’ anger shifted throughout the evening. Sometimes they shouted down Capt. Valentino Paniccia of the West Valley Division as he said repeatedly that police were only recently able to tie together 25 child molestations in the Valley over the past 10 months.

Other times, they demanded Joseph Luskin of the Los Angeles Unified School District explain the procedure for notifying parents of crimes against students.

But the refrain was the same: Parents, some of them holding children by the hand or in their laps, wanted to know why they were not told that more than two dozen children had been stalked and assaulted while walking to Valley schools.

Some audience members quibbled with police over the dates that information had been disseminated. Several parents rose to say that their children’s schools still had not distributed any information about the crimes or how to safeguard the students.

Many parents, especially those who first learned of the rash of crimes when the news story broke Tuesday, have spent the past week publicly raising questions at PTA meetings, impromptu run-ins at school gates and principals’ offices about police and school tactics.

But Friday night’s session at the Sutter school was, for most parents, their first chance to vent their frustrations on people they blame for the communications breakdown.

“Parents are not being told about anything that is happening because the communication has fallen apart,” said Caterina Smith, mother of two elementary schoolchildren.

Paniccia, taking over for Detective Duane Burris--who had tried in vain to use a map to emphasize the large area over which the crimes occurred--repeatedly voiced the defense: Police only recently came to believe that the crimes were committed by the same person.

“We were not holding back information, trying to use your children as bait,” Paniccia said. “We did not know that we had one suspect until Wednesday, the third of November.”

It is unclear when police told particular schools about crimes in their areas. The Nov. 3 rape of a 9-year-old girl on her way to Fullbright Avenue Elementary School--the crime that prompted police to begin re-examination of similar, lesser crimes--was brought to Fullbright Principal James Grover by a parent.

After learning about that crime, and reporting it to police, Grover has said he still was not apprised of any other similar crimes. He, however, brought the situation with his student to the attention of other principals in his immediate area, and to Fullbright parents.

And when they compared notes, at least one other nearby principal said a student of hers was probably approached by the same man.

All week, some school officials had been trying to organize a response to the news, drafting letters to parents within hours of learning about the attacks. Others held emergency meetings with parent leaders to explore beefed-up security proposals. Many spent hours on the phones, learning more about the crimes and then trying to allay the fears and anger of frantic parents.

Other schools were slightly ahead of the news. While no school was officially informed of a pattern in the attacks until late in the second week of November, some school administrators had told parents as early as September about isolated incidents that had occurred in the vicinity of their schools.

“Why wasn’t the community aware of this?” asked Ellen Eckard, the PTSA president for Sutter Middle School and the organizer of the forum. “Parents and community people are very angry that this wasn’t publicized sooner. And if things were publicized sooner, maybe some of these children would have been spared.”