Parolee Convicted in Sexual Assaults of 4 Girls : Court: Partial verdict finds Robert Lee Donaldson, imprisoned for rape, committed attacks shortly after being freed.

An 11-year-old Pacoima girl was walking to school alone one morning in 1993 when a man grabbed her from behind by the neck and said, “Don’t turn around or I’ll kill you.”

After blindfolding the girl, the man shoved her into a vacant apartment where he ripped off her clothes and sexually violated her. Then he stole her T-shirt as a souvenir.

A jury decided Monday that Robert Lee Donaldson, a paroled sex offender, was the man who attacked the Pacoima girl and three others, ranging in age from 9 to 16, finding him guilty of 16 out of 19 charges of kidnaping, sexual assault and attempted kidnaping.

Today, the same jury, which deliberated for four days before returning the partial verdicts, will reconvene in Superior Court Judge Ronald Coen’s courtroom to decide on the remaining three felony charges.

If convicted on all counts, Donaldson could receive a sentence of roughly 157 years in state prison, Deputy Dist. Atty. Jacquelyn Lacey said.

The wave of assaults took place in Pacoima and Inglewood in the fall of 1993, just months after Donaldson was released from prison after serving 9 1/2 years for raping a boy in 1981.

Donaldson also had a record of committing sex offenses as a juvenile, evidence revealed in his previous trial.

Some of the 1993 sexual attacks occurred in the same Pacoima location as Donaldson’s earlier crimes, an area where there are two elementary schools and one middle school within a half-mile radius.

“He went back to the same block in Pacoima,” Lacey said.

After his picture was circulated in Pacoima, Donaldson moved his base of operations to Inglewood, where he continued the same pattern of early-morning attacks until he was arrested by Inglewood police in October, 1993.

Police said he was following a young girl at the time of his arrest.

Lacey said the evidence presented against Donaldson included witness identification of the victims, a fingerprint matching his found in the vacant apartment where two of the girls were raped and, in one case, a DNA match from recovered semen.

Several of the victims noted Donaldson’s pockmarked complexion, Lacey said.

Donaldson followed a similar pattern in all of the attacks, the prosecutor said. He preyed on girls, 9 to 16 years old, walking to school between 7:30 and 8 a.m.

He grabbed his victims from behind, threatened them with harm and took them to a concealed location, where they were blindfolded and raped.

Noting that victims failed to identify the tattoo on Donaldson’s hand, defense attorney Bruce Hill argued that Donaldson was the wrong man.

Donaldson’s arrest so soon after his release from prison stirred public outrage. Officials at the time blamed his release on parole on “a flaw in the system.”

A state Department of Corrections study in 1990 found that 51% of sex offenders paroled that year were back in custody in 1992.