Valley Crime Fell Last Year, but Residents’ Fears Soared : Police: Despite improved statistics, many feel violence has become more widespread and less predictable.

The victims’ list is like a snapshot of the San Fernando Valley--the place they lived, the place they were killed. They were white, black, Asian and Latino. One was a 2-year-old child, another a 74-year-old man. One homeless woman was killed on the Pacoima street where she lived. A man was shot to death in Chatsworth because someone wanted his gold-colored Mercedes-Benz.

While they dreamed of Hollywood stardom, athletic careers or quiet motherhood, they died doing the banal: pumping gas, walking home from school, withdrawing money from a bank ATM. Two men were shot and killed as they slept inside their homes.

Statistics from early December, the latest available, showed there had been 128 homicides in the San Fernando Valley in 1993, down 7% from 137 at the same point in 1992.

Robberies, burglaries and aggravated assaults also had decreased in the last year and, of the five crimes classified as major by the Los Angeles Police Department, only the number of rapes has gone up.

In fact, the Valley’s crime rate of about 80 major crimes per 1,000 people is significantly lower than the city’s overall rate of 98.5 incidents and also below rates in Seattle and San Diego, which generally are regarded as safe cities.

But in the San Fernando Valley, once America’s prototypal safe suburb, where explosive growth during the past 30 years can be traced to those seeking refuge from crime somewhere else, fears about random and rampant violence were fueled this past year by a series of cold-blooded and arbitrary killings, where the innocent were gunned down in places previously immune from such violence.

Despite the improving statistics, to many Valley residents crime seems more and more widespread, less predictable and closer to home. Perhaps most tellingly, it has taken a place as a conversation icebreaker alongside small talk about sports and the weather.

“At every party I’ve been to lately, the only thing people talked about was crime,” said Mark Little, a writer who lives in Encino. “It’s just eating away at everyone. It’s strange because it also seems to bring people together, gives strangers something to say to each other.”

The police officers paid to patrol the Valley’s 250 square miles and 1.3 million people are well aware that they are battling public perception about crime almost as much as they are fighting crime itself.

“The perception is based on the reported incidents of violent crime, not just here, but all over the country,” said Deputy Chief Martin Pomeroy, who took over command of the LAPD’s five Valley divisions two months ago. “Really, the only thing we can do is continue to work closely with the people in the community and let them know that with community involvement we can reduce crime even more.”

In 1993, it was a spate of killings in places regarded as safe havens, or areas believed to be safe because they were public and open, that ignited the public’s fears--and anger.

One of the year’s first murders was the shooting death of a 12-year-old girl outside the Boys & Girls Club in Pacoima. For 27 years, the Glenoaks Boulevard club had been an island for children, a world apart from the violence that often holds the area’s residents prisoner.

Here, guns, alcohol and drugs were verboten . Warring gangs coexisted peacefully.

But on Jan. 9, 1993, at about 12:30 a.m., as Tiffany Dozier was waiting outside the club for her mother to give her a ride home, a burst of gunfire erupted from a passing car and a bullet struck the girl in the back.

“We’re living under a blanket of fear,” Leroy Chase, executive director of the club, said after Tiffany’s death. “If you can’t have activities at a Boys & Girls Club, where can you have them?”

A seventh-grader at Maclay Middle School, Tiffany had been among 170 young people attending a dance organized by parents to keep their children off the street and out of trouble.

The alleged shooters had apparently been aiming at rival gang members in a crowd, although police said Tiffany was not a gang member. Later, two teen-agers and a 20-year-old were charged in the shooting.

Just five days after Tiffany died, on the opposite end of the Valley in Porter Ranch--a wealthy community so safe authorities were unable to remember the last time a person was murdered there--another young person was gunned down.

This time the victim was 19-year-old John Michael Holden, an assistant manager at Ameci’s In & Out Pizza & Pasta shop.

Though he had once sucked down eight-ounce bottles of Robitussin cough syrup when he couldn’t find a better high, and served a stint in jail for a series of residential burglaries, Holden had turned his life around.

He had a job, was taking art classes at a local junior college, and counseled young people who had also had brushes with the law.

The night he was working, Holden was only there as a favor for a co-worker who couldn’t make his shift. When the two men came into the restaurant, Holden, apparently sensing trouble, stepped in front of his counter crew to help them.

The men ordered a pizza, then one drew a gun and demanded money. Holden complied, quickly handing over $450 from the register. The man shot anyway.

A few weeks later, a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old were arrested on suspicion of killing Holden.

Over the year, homicides in the Valley dropped about 6.5%, robberies fell 5%, and burglaries declined 8.5% from the year before. The rates of auto theft, thefts from vehicles and traffic accidents also were down. But reported rapes shot up 20%--from 388 in 1992 to 467 in 1993--an increase police officials were unable to explain, aside from mentioning several repeat rapists who inflated the numbers.

During a rape and robbery spree in late May, for example, four men terrorized several neighborhood parks in the West Valley, leading police to issue warnings to residents not to use parks near their homes at night. Before they were captured during a police stakeout, the men--whom authorities described as transients--had allegedly raped two teen-age girls and one woman and robbed at least 10 people in parks in West Hills and Chatsworth.

It was not rape but murder, those seemingly arbitrary slayings where there appeared to be a clear distinction between good and evil, on which the media and public became fixated--sometimes blurring the line between perception and reality.

Twenty-nine-year-old Sherri Janine Foreman was happy, pregnant with her first child--a woman family and friends said had everything to live for.

On March 10, after Foreman had withdrawn $40 from a bank automated teller machine in Sherman Oaks and was walking back to her car, a man attempted to rob her, but ended up plunging a knife into her abdomen. Both Foreman and her 13-week-old fetus were killed.

The murder sent a shock wave across the Valley, as yet another safe place and time--daylight hours in an area busy with street traffic, under constant surveillance by a security camera--had been violated.

Although ATM robberies are relatively rare, with just 499 statewide in 1992, according to a California Bankers Assn. survey, some swore never to use the machines again, day or night. After Foreman’s murder, the public perception was that using ATMs was akin to walking into an ambush.

In response to those fears, two ATMs were placed inside Valley police stations and the Sherman Oaks bank tore down a wall behind which police believe Foreman’s killer, 43-year-old Robert Glen Jones, had hid for more than an hour before the attack.

Six months later, another innocent victim in a public place, Laurie Myles, was sitting in her car in Northridge with her 9-year-old son, waiting to pick up her teen-age daughter from a Bible study class.

Two men pulled up and demanded her purse. The 34-year-old woman gave it up, but one of the men shot her through the heart anyway as her son watched helplessly from the back seat.

Despite rewards totaling more than $32,500, Myles’ killers have not been caught.

“There is a lot of outrage,” Detective Tom Broad said after her slaying. “You have a woman who is an innocent victim who was in the process of conducting her daily business. . . . I think the public has the right to be outraged.”

Although it was one of the most shocking, Myles’ slaying was just one of more than a dozen high-profile crimes that sparked widespread outrage and fear during the past year.

No part of the San Fernando Valley went untouched.

* In Chatsworth, during one of dozens of Valley carjackings, Naghi Ghoraishy, 74, was fatally shot after he pulled into a gas station to fill his 1989 Mercedes-Benz. Police were so desperate to find his killer that they re-enacted the March crime on videotape a la “Unsolved Mysteries” and persuaded local television stations to play the tape during newscasts. Still, there have been no arrests.

* On the same February day, Micheal Shean Ensley, 17, was shot and killed by a fellow student during a midmorning snack break at Reseda High School, and Rocio Delgado, 16, was killed by a stray bullet as she walked home from Cleveland High School in Northridge. After the shooting, Micheal’s 15-year-old alleged killer was arrested at a nearby bakery where he was eating a doughnut and drinking a lemon drink. Three teen-agers have been charged with Rocio’s slaying.

* Eight-year-old Nicole Parker was sodomized and apparently choked to death in November before her body was stuffed into a suitcase. She had been kidnaped outside her father’s Woodland Hills apartment while playing with a ball. Her nude body was found inside a suitcase, in the closet of a neighbor, Hooman Ashkan Panah, 22, who has been charged with the crime.

* A serial molester preying on schoolchildren and young adults across the San Fernando Valley is believed responsible for raping a 9-year-old girl and fondling and grabbing at 31 others in a spree that dates back to last February. Despite the largest LAPD manhunt in recent memory, the man eluded police and led many frightened parents to escort their children to and from school.

* In April, a former employee of MCA opened fire on the company’s world headquarters, a Universal City high-rise known as the “black tower.” The most seriously wounded were two secretaries on the 14th floor. Five others throughout the building were cut by flying glass.

* On Easter Sunday, a 2-year-old boy was killed in cross-fire when a gunfight broke out after an Easter egg hunt and picnic in Encino’s Balboa Park.

There also were extreme responses to some of the violence, not all of them successful.

In February, over the objections of the ACLU, the city won a sweeping court order barring gang members from 112 square blocks between Van Nuys and Sepulveda boulevards. The injunction prohibited otherwise legal activities, such as possessing portable telephones, in the area around Blythe Street. Three gang members had been convicted for violating the injunction by year’s end, but some residents continue to fear leaving their homes.

In August, members of the South Winnetka Neighborhood Watch cleared a section of railroad tracks of cardboard box homes, sleeping bags, clothes and food that belonged to two homeless men who had adopted the area. Residents feared that the men might accidentally ignite the overgrown brush in the area and start a fire that would burn down their homes.

The neighbors also planted bougainvillea, which they called “green barbed wire,” hoping the prickly vine would discourage other transients from sleeping along the tracks.

When the two men--Jose Aleman Menjivar, 47, and Ismael Rodriguez, 42--returned, they became upset that their few belongings were gone. In search of their possessions, including a wallet and passport, the men entered the adjacent home of Raymond John Komoorian.

Komoorian surprised the two in his bedroom, who he said were stuffing a pillowcase with his clothing and jewelry, and then, he later told police, they came toward him. He opened fire.

Menjivar was killed. Rodriguez was hit twice in the chest and, though neither transient was armed, Rodriguez later was charged with murder as well as grand theft and residential burglary. Komoorian, a 47-year-old air conditioning mechanic, was not arrested.

Discussing the violent encounter later, then-Deputy Police Chief Mark Kroeker summed up the mood of many crime-weary Valley residents: “I sympathize with Neighborhood Watch people. I don’t see it as a vigilante mentality. They’re trying to (protect) a quality of life. People aren’t going to take it. They’re at this stage in the city.”

Times staff writers Alicia DiRado, John Johnson, Ann W. O’Neill and Julie Tamaki and special correspondent Thom Mrozek contributed to this story.