Girl Jailed on Suspicion of Intimidating Boy, Family

The average teenage crush rarely turns sour enough to warrant a felony arrest.

But that is why police said they jailed a Royal High School girl Monday on suspicion of intimidating a witness and earlier charges of making annoying phone calls and terrorizing threats to a Moorpark High School senior and his family.

Spurned by the Moorpark High senior, 18-year-old Carolyn Grill had waged a five-month campaign of vandalism and harassment against Richard Hart and his family, said Det. Allen Devers.

Devers said Grill phoned Hart several times a day, sent unwanted pizzas and plumbers to his door and signed up for subscriptions that packed the family’s mailbox with magazines.

And, Devers said, she threatened to hurt him.

When Grill was arraigned March 13 on misdemeanor charges for the alleged threats, the judge warned her to stay away from Hart, Devers said.

The next day, he said, Grill and some of her friends allegedly scratched an obscenity into the paint on the trunk of Hart’s mother’s car, and scraped a key across Hart’s own car several days later.

That, Devers said, was enough for detectives to collar Grill on the felony intimidation charge.

If convicted, he said, Grill could face up to four years in state prison.

“She’s got some serious problems,” Devers said. “She tells me in the interview she doesn’t want anything to do with him; she’s forgotten about it. But then I see in her actions, she’s very angry and hostile toward him. I would call it a fatal attraction.”

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But Grill’s mother offers this account of the relationship: The two teens were boyfriend-girlfriend for a time. But Hart was the one constantly calling Grill’s house. And some other students who dislike Hart were probably the ones responsible for the harassment.

“This is something between two people that has gotten so far out of hand it is totally ridiculous,” said Margaret Coslett, the suspect’s mother. “The problem is that this other family thinks their son is a total angel, and they need to re-register their thoughts.”

Hart, 18, said he first met Grill at a Simi Valley video game parlor last fall. She struck up a conversation, and the two got acquainted, he said.

He got the idea that she liked him, but they never really dated, he said.

According to Hart, she started calling him at home, often several times a day. Eventually, she began calling him at his job at a Moorpark pizza shop, he said. “She wouldn’t stop calling me all the time. She would crank-call sometimes if I never called her back. She would call and hang up.”

Hart says he always punched *-6-9 to automatically redial the hang-up caller, and Grill always answered.

At one point, she came to the pizza shop, got into an argument and began kicking him when he grabbed her and tried to throw her out, Hart said. Then came the first arrest on suspicion of making annoying phone calls and threats.

The day after she was released from sheriff’s custody, Devers said, Grill and some friends vandalized a Toyota Camry belonging to Hart’s mother, Laureen, by scrawling an obscenity and other marks into the paint that cost $3,000 to repair.

Within a week, the midnight blue paint on Hart’s 1982 Oldsmobile Cutlass was also scarred, Devers said.

And at one point, Grill allegedly made a threatening phone call to Hart’s brother-in-law, he said.

“She’s been told and warned and advised and everything possible to have her leave these people alone,” said Devers, who with other detectives is trying to track down Grill’s alleged accomplices.

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Hart’s father, Tony Hart, said he has hired a lawyer to get a restraining order against Grill.

Grill’s mother said police were being unfair and ignoring her own complaints about Hart’s repeated phone calls and his alleged attack on her daughter at the pizza shop.

Grill might make threats, Coslett said, but they are empty.

“If she’s angry or something . . . she’ll answer you back and give you that look like ‘You’d better step back,’ ” Coslett said. “She’ll give you a tap or something like that. She’s not a person who’d hit you or take a knife or a gun or something, no way. That’s way over the line. I can swear my daughter would never do that.”