Carjack Killings Cast a Glare on the Ordinary : Crime: Deaths of two students from Japan caught public attention. But the county averages 16 slayings each weekend, mostly unnoticed.

For all the attention they received, the slayings of two students from Japan were only two of 25 homicides last weekend in Los Angeles County--and involved only one of more than 300 carjackings that occur in the city every month.

The killings of Takuma Ito and Go Matsuura in San Pedro on Friday revealed, as dramatic crimes often do, the unfortunate gap between the attention lavished on homicides that capture the public imagination and the numbing anonymity in which most violent deaths take place.

On average, 16 people are slain each weekend in Los Angeles County. Because the news media focus on the extraordinary--and there’s nothing extraordinary anymore about killings in Los Angeles County--many of those deaths go unreported.

But the killings of Ito and Matsuura were different:

* Like Yoshihiro Hattori, the victim of a highly publicized fatal shooting in Louisiana in 1992, both Ito and Matsuura were from Japan. Their deaths reinforced a growing perception overseas that the United States in general, and Los Angeles in particular, are dangerous.

* Unlike the victims of most violent crimes, Ito and Matsuura were members of relatively affluent families and were well-educated.

* The slayings of Ito and Matsuura prompted responses from the mayor of Los Angeles, the governor of California and the U.S. ambassador to Japan.

* The crime took place in the midst of a widely publicized billboard campaign designed to frighten the public into supporting the salary demands of the Los Angeles police union.

The 21 billboards, which went up last week, show a woman being carjacked at gunpoint. The billboards’ caption reads, “Warning: This Can Be You Without the Police Dept.”

On Tuesday, the Police Protective League announced that it was taking the billboards down, saying it was “just not right” for the union and city officials to be “going after each other” in the wake of the tragedy.

Ito, a Japanese national, and Matsuura, a U.S. citizen who grew up in Japan, were shot in the head at close range about 11 p.m. Friday as they got out of their car in the parking lot of a Ralphs supermarket, detectives said.

Declared brain-dead soon after the attack, the young men--students at Marymount College in Rancho Palos Verdes--were taken off life-support systems at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and pronounced dead Sunday night. Acting on an anonymous tip, police found their stolen Honda Civic late Sunday near where the students were shot.

The Los Angeles County coroner’s office said last weekend’s death toll was higher than normal, but not all that unusual.

On average this year, 16 people have been slain during a typical weekend. On the weekend that began Feb. 18, 29 people were killed. On the weekend that began May 21, 1993, 30 people were slain.