Police Seek to Calm Fears After Rape : Crime: Patrols are increased around campuses after abduction of a La Quinta High student in a supermarket parking lot after school. Attacker is being sought.

Police fanned out to area schools Wednesday and principals tried to calm students’ nerves in the wake of an abduction-style rape of a 16-year-old girl as she walked home Monday from La Quinta High School.

Capt. Steve Martinez said officers have been in touch with several schools in the area and have made themselves available to school principals.

“We offered our assistance if they have had calls for information from parents, or if they want us to do a presentation on safety,” he said.

Police also have been distributing flyers with a composite sketch of the man and his car, and are looking for anyone who may have seen him force the girl into the vehicle at knifepoint in a busy supermarket parking lot.

The man, who abducted the girl at the Ralphs parking lot in the 15400 block of Brookhurst Street at 3:40 p.m. Monday, is Latino, in his late 20s or early 30s, 5-foot-4 with a chunky build, according to the police description.

He had short black hair, brown eyes, a full mustache and several days’ growth of beard. The man has a scar on the left side of his face that is 1 1/2 inches long and widens at the top, and he was wearing a large gold wedding band on his left pinky finger, police said.

The car he was driving is described as a black 1972 four-door Cadillac Fleetwood with oxidizing paint. It has black leather seats and had fast-food trash inside. The car also has a gray primer paint spot about the size of a softball on the left rear fender, just above the wheel, according to a description that the victim gave police.

The victim was in the parking lot when the man pulled up in his car and abducted her, police said. He drove her about 300 feet into the alley behind the store and raped her before throwing her from the vehicle and taking off on McFadden Avenue.

Martinez said the victim had a scraped left arm but was otherwise physically uninjured.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, school officials cautioned students over the public address system to walk home in groups and to report any suspicious activity.

“Essentially what we’ve done is make announcements and really try to encourage kids to be a lot more aware of what’s going on around them, even in the daylight hours,” La Quinta Principal Mitch Thomas said. “And if at all possible, don’t go home alone. Go home with a buddy.”

Thomas stayed at school until after dark Tuesday, along with other teachers and administrators, to make sure that students were safely picked up, a precaution he said they will stick to until a suspect is apprehended.

“Everyone is trying to help out,” he said.

Abduction rapes are extremely rare, and Monday’s was the first that Martinez can remember in Westminster in his 20 years on the force.

The Police Department has assigned two additional detectives to the case and on Tuesday called in its unit of bicycle officers on their day off to patrol La Quinta High School.

The brazen nature of the crime has stunned school officials.

“Broad daylight, a shopping center, a main street, and two or three blocks from school. Who would think something like that could occur?” Thomas said. “It just seems impossible, when you drive by that corner, that someone wouldn’t have seen something.”

Anyone with any information about the incident should call Detective Tom Green at (714) 898-3315, Ext. 306.