Molester May Have Struck Again : Crime: A man grabs a 15-year-old girl at a bus stop. Police are unsure whether the incident is connected to 32 other attacks.

A serial child molester may have claimed his 33rd victim Wednesday, grabbing a 15-year-old girl’s crotch as she sat at a bus stop and running away, but police were unsure the incident was connected to the series of assaults that have triggered anxiety throughout the San Fernando Valley.

Police said the case would be referred today to a special task force to determine if the assault was committed by the same man believed to have molested the other victims.

“It may be related to the others, the series, but we are not completely sure at this point whether it is or isn’t,” said Lt. Joseph Garcia at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Valley headquarters. “To err on the side of caution, the task force will look at it to make sure we don’t lose a potential case.”

“On the face of it, it appears related,” Garcia said. “It’s a young girl approached by a suspect, and her sexual areas were touched.”

Another department spokesman, Officer Don Cox, said the victim reported being attacked by an African American man--as the Valley molester has been described--but that there were other details that led police to believe the case may not be the work of the same man.

“It does not appear at this time to be related to the other cases,” Cox said. “But there are still some things they are looking into.”

The assault occurred about 1:30 p.m. in the Lake View Terrace area, near the corner of Van Nuys Boulevard and Dronfield Avenue. The man came up behind the girl as she sat on the bench, grabbed her crotch and ran off, police said.

“She screamed and got away,” Garcia said. “She went one way and he went another.”

Police arrested one man, but cleared him as a molester suspect after the victim saw him at the LAPD’s Foothill Station and said he was not her attacker. He remained in custody on an unrelated warrant, police said.

Garcia said the victim will be shown police composite sketches of the serial molester today to determine whether her assailant fits the same description.

If the case is determined to be the work of the serial molester, it would mark the first time he has ventured into the Police Department’s Foothill Division.

Police have recorded attacks blamed on the molester in the four other Valley divisions since the first incident was reported in February, including the Nov. 3 rape of a 9-year-old girl in Canoga Park.

The molester has assaulted male and female victims between the ages of 5 and 21, and strikes mostly in the morning, police said. They described him as an African American man between the ages of 35 and 45, who stands 5-feet-10 to 6 feet tall and weighs 180 to 200 pounds.

Garcia and Cox said task force detectives did not know whether the assailant in Wednesday’s case matched that description, other than being African American.