Family Defends 12-Year-Old as Outcry Grows

As prosecutors on Friday charged a 12-year-old boy in the brutal gang rape of a girl in an abandoned house, his family said he has been wrongly blamed for the assault and for the subsequent shooting death of the Watts grandmother who lived next door.

“It’s not like people say it is,” said the boy’s sister, 17. “He’s being framed because he is the youngest.”

Added an aunt: “He didn’t shoot nobody. But he knows who did it. And if he has to, he will tell.”

Meanwhile, four more youths, including another 12-year-old, turned themselves in to police Friday and were arrested on suspicion of sexual assault.

Police still consider the 12-year-old who has been charged in the rape to be the shooter in the McClain slaying, but they acknowledge that additional information suggests that there are other suspects in the killing.

As the investigation moved forward Friday, the horrifying sequence of events provoked a closer examination of the tragedy and its aftermath.

* At City Hall, politicians said the rape and killing would prompt authorities to intensify their efforts to launch a broad-stroke nuisance abatement program targeting 31,500 “problem properties” citywide. “The sad part about this entire incident is that these street hoodlums had so many houses to choose from,” said City Councilman Rudy Svorinich Jr., who represents Watts. “What we need to do is take a look at this process so other people’s grandmothers will not find themselves in the cross-fire.”

* Some people questioned the Police Department’s decision to release the boy’s name at a press conference called before the 12-year-old turned himself in. But police officials noted that they acted only after a judge had given them permission to make the name public, and they stressed that they did so to catch the youngster.

* A copy of the court order from Richard Montes, presiding judge of the Juvenile Court, shows that the judge authorized police to release the name and added: “Such release of information is granted solely for the purpose of enabling the law enforcement agency to expand its capability to aid in apprehension of the minor.”

* A total of nine youths have now been arrested in connection with the rape. The four youths who turned themselves in Friday have not yet been charged. Those charged are the 12-year-old arrested Thursday, two 15-year-olds and a 17-year-old. They face counts of kidnapping for the purpose of rape, forcible lewd act upon a child, forcible rape in concert and oral copulation in concert. They are to be arraigned Monday. The ninth suspect in custody, Reginald Barner, 20, has been charged with the same crimes, as well as one count of sexual assault with a foreign object.

* The girl, who police said was “viciously gang-raped”was not hospitalized, officials said Friday. Police Chief Willie L. Williams described the condition of the girl as “OK” and said she was “able to get up.” Lt. John Dunkin said the girl did not appear to have been beaten, but she was “significantly traumatized.”

‘He Didn’t Do It’

In the Nickerson Gardens housing project, the 12-year-old’s aunt, Regina Moody, described a troubled child who often got into scrapes at school and would stay out late--but not all night, she added.

Moody said the boy was sitting on a car hood when McClain--a familiar and well-loved figure in the neighborhood--was killed across the street by a stray bullet that pierced her neck.

“He didn’t have a gun in his hand. He was out there on the street. He didn’t do it,” she said.

Sitting among family members on a lawn across the street from her nephew’s home, Moody, 27, smiled warmly when describing the boy, one of six children.

“He’s a nice kid,” she said. “He’s just influenced by older guys. . . . The street got him involved in this mess. It got him all involved with his homies.”

Standing on the sidewalk outside her aunt’s apartment, the 17-year-old sister came to her brother’s defense: “He’s not mean. He’s not a killer. He’s a kid, he acts like a kid. He plays basketball and football.”

Moody said the boy did not know he was a prime suspect in McClain’s shooting when he returned home Thursday evening. She and the boy’s mother--her sister--went to the Los Angeles Police Department’s Southeast station with him and told him to tell “what you know,” Moody said.

McClain was killed last week as she stood on her porch on East 111th Street, across the street from Nickerson Gardens. The gunfire broke out after an argument between her grandson and several youths who were setting fire to mattresses they had dragged from an abandoned house next door.

Police said the 12-year-old was one of as many as 10 boys and young men who gang-raped the 13-year-old girl in the abandoned house, then tried to kill her by barricading her in a room and attempting to set the house on fire.

Moody said the boy’s mother, who also lives in Nickerson Gardens, and the rest of the family have experienced a range of emotions from nervousness to anger since authorities publicly released his name. (The Times, which has not published the boy’s name, generally does not identify juvenile crime suspects unless they are officially charged with serious crimes for which they could be prosecuted as adults.)

Moody said the boy was known in the neighborhood as a rapper and was taken to this year’s “Soul Train” awards by a Nickerson Gardens rap group and performed at a post-awards party.

“He loved it,” Moody said. “He felt like a superstar. They couldn’t get him off the stage.’

Broader Problem

Though neighbors had complained for months about the abandoned duplex where the girl was raped before McClain’s killing, police and building officials did not visit the site until July 16. They issued an abatement order and posted a ‘No Trespassing’ sign on the property that day, but did not send an official notice to owner Brino C. Bruno until July 29--after the fatal bullet was fired.

That is tragically typical, City Council members said Friday. “The system we have in place is not working--everyone knows that,” said Councilwoman Laura Chick, who chairs the Public Safety Committee. “If you go and talk to people who are living in the heart of Watts, or the heart of the West San Fernando Valley, you will hear the same thing: The quality of their lives is being destroyed by a vandalized or vacant building in their direct vicinity.”

For at least two years, local lawmakers have been at work on a comprehensive plan to attack the problem of empty buildings, including hiring a nuisance abatement director to coordinate activities among police officers, building inspectors, housing officials and prosecutors. But there remains a dispute over how such an effort should be funded.

Chick wants to establish four “problem property resolution teams,” hiring about 20 new employees at a cost of $1 million--$600,000 from the city’s general fund and $400,000 from a $2-million federal grant earmarked for abatement.

But Mayor Richard Riordan, who formed a nuisance abatement task force two years ago, wants the federal grant to be used exclusively for cleaning, fencing and tearing down abandoned buildings, not hiring new staff.

“I don’t know that they have shown us that they need more staff,” said Deputy Mayor Sharon Morris, noting the risk of hiring new people with grant money that could disappear in coming years. “Each of these departments have staff working on the nuisance abatement problem already. We’re asking them to do it smarter and more efficiently.”

Currently, seven building inspectors are responsible for responding to vacant-building complaints; they believe there are at least 3,000 abandoned properties citywide, and have active files on 1,977.

“Unfortunately, there’s a lot more buildings than we, with the staff we have and the money we have, can do,” said Domingo Salceda, who oversees the Contract Nuisance Abatement unit. “We have a bunch of work orders that are waiting.”

Last year, the city spent $1 million dealing with vacant buildings, knocking down 43, cleaning 150 and putting fences around 131. On top of that, officials boarded the windows and barricaded 158 buildings; two others had to have expensive metal barricades installed because the routine fences and wood board-ups kept getting stolen.

But thousands more problem properties await action. A recent report by the city administrative officer estimates that nearly 5% of the city’s 658,000 buildings need help, including more than 5,000 where there is documented crime and multiple building code violations.

“Sometimes it takes something drastic to get the council to get off their hands and get things done,” Salceda said Friday.

Chick and Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas said Friday the vacant house problem suggests that Riordan’s public safety plan--which calls for adding nearly 3,000 police officers by 1998--is too narrowly focused.

“You don’t just hire police officers, you hire for Building and Safety,” Ridley-Thomas said. “That way, you spare communities from deterioration.”

But Deputy Mayor Morris said nuisance abatement is only a small piece of the public safety puzzle.

“People are afraid to walk on the streets of Los Angeles in many neighborhoods. It’s not because there’s a nuisance house there; it’s because of many types of criminal activity,” Morris said. “What we need is more cops on the street. . . . I don’t know that you would feel safer on the street if we took the money out of the police program and wiped out these 2,000 houses in a year.”

Naming a Suspect

It was a striking departure from tradition when Police Chief Willie L. Williams and top Los Angeles Police Department brass widely publicized the name of the 12-year-old.

Cmdr. Tim McBride, a spokesman for the LAPD, said Thursday’s press conference marked the first time in his 32 years with the department that police had named a juvenile suspect.

“This is an extremely violent crime that has outraged the community,” McBride said. “We needed everybody’s help. We needed to get him into custody before he could do more harm to others or to himself.”

The department, which had a judge’s blessing to release the name only as long as the child was a fugitive, stopped using the name as soon as the boy surrendered to authorities.

Still, the episode left some observers troubled.

“Juveniles are not to be handled like a common criminal,” said Larry Feldman, a respected Santa Monica lawyer who has represented a number of children, including the boy who accused pop superstar Michael Jackson of child molestation. “Their lives are not to be ruined forever.”

Feldman acknowledged that the question of disclosing the name of a juvenile who was not in custody and who could be armed and dangerous was a difficult one. The issue, he said, requires balancing important public and social interests: Society has a right to be protected from a potentially dangerous assailant; an accused person has a right to receive a fair trial; a young person needs to have the chance to recover and build a decent life, even if his youth is tainted by a horrid crime.

Asked to balance those interests in this case, Feldman paused to consider, then responded: “If there truly is an issue that the child is a danger to innocent people, then it is appropriate to release the name. But they should limit the incriminating information.”

Using that approach, Feldman said, the LAPD might have named the boy and announced that he was wanted for questioning. That would have made his name public but would not have tainted him with accusations of a heinous crime.

The Rev. Cecil Murray, pastor of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, endorsed precautions that might have protected protected the boy from exposure. By contrast, Murray warned that identifying the boy as a suspect in such a gruesome case vilified him and might end up encouraging copy-cat criminals.

Murray said naming suspects is primarily done to hold them accountable and responsible for acts they are accused of committing. But with a suspect so young, he said, accountability is difficult to assess.

“With a child of 12, you have to ask, ‘Where does accountability lie?’ ” Murray said. “Yes, the child has accountability, but let’s not pretend that these children are not produced in some type of caldron.”

With children increasingly accused of violent and brutal acts, Murray said it may only be a matter of time until society reaches a point where names of juvenile suspects are routinely released and publicized. But until that time, he argued, disclosures should be sparing.

“I know that there are good arguments on the other side, but for now,” said Murray, “the answer is no, we should not identify a boy in a case like this.”

Under current law, law enforcement agencies often release the names of youngsters who are 14 or older and who are charged with serious crimes. Names of younger suspects generally are not released.

That may soon change, however. Legislation supported by state Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren would require agencies to make that information available in cases involving suspects of any age, as long as the crime was a serious one or grafitti-related.

Lungren, according to a spokesman for the attorney general, believes that wider disclosure of juveniles’ names would “remove the cloak of secrecy” that protects children from public shame even as they commit brutal crimes that shock the community.

But even if it passes, Lungren’s proposal would not seek to require news organizations to air or publish the names of children accused of crimes. Decision-making on that delicate question is handled by most media outlets on a case-by-case basis, and the choices of major organizations often differ.

In the recent case, for instance, many news organizations identified the child, even after he was in custody and police had stopped using his name him.

For police, however, the journalistic and legislative implications of how and when to name juvenile offenders paled in this case next to the results.

“Occasionally, when you have an extremely unusual situation, you have to step out of the bounds of your normal routine to respond,” said McBride. “That’s what we did in this case. And it worked.”

Times staff writers Jim Newton and Carla Rivera and correspondent Maki Becker contributed to this story.