Questions, Pain Linger Over Fatal ’95 Mall Shooting

It was a murder that sent shock waves reverberating through middle-class homes across the Valley, as much for its unlikely cast of characters as for the unseemly threat it posed to streets long considered safe.

The killers were members of a Van Nuys street gang; their getaway driver the teenage daughter of a wealthy Encino developer. Along for the ride were three 16-year-old girls with private school backgrounds and privileged families.

The victim was a Taft High sophomore, at a movie with friends on a Friday night when he was shot down in the parking lot of a West Hills mall.

The June 1995 drive-by shooting of Ramtin Shaolin spotlighted the allure of gangster culture among Valley teens and shocked neighbors of the popular mall in much the same way the killing of a UCLA student in Westwood years before had personalized the menace of gang warfare there.

“It was one of those things that really hit close to home,” said Encino attorney Ben Reznik, who is active in Israeli emigre circles. “Everybody was saying ‘That could have been my son or my daughter’ ” either shot and dying on the pavement, or driving by with guns blazing.

The murder hit the Valley’s Jewish community especially hard. The Shaolins are Jews from Iran, and two of the girls in the car are from Jewish families that immigrated here from Israel.

“We know our kids can do other things--some have been involved with drugs or other kinds of illicit things--but to be part of a drive-by shooting . . . that elevated it to a whole new level that just shocked the conscience,” Reznick said.

Now, after almost two years, the final chapter in the criminal case has ended in a Sylmar juvenile court. There, Yael Oved--who drove the car as her companions fired--was allowed to plead guilty to being an accessory after the fact and sentenced Tuesday to probation and community service.

Oved, 19, is the only one of the four girls involved to face criminal sanctions. One was not prosecuted; authorities could not locate her. The other two were granted immunity from prosecution and testified against their two male companions, who were both tried and convicted of murder in August.

The two Van Nuys men, now 20 years old, are serving life terms in prison--life without parole for triggerman Tommy Lee Williams and 26 years, plus five life terms, for Elliott O’Neal Singletary, who instigated the dispute that led to the shooting.

Both men belonged to a group of graffiti taggers they called Every Woman’s Fantasy. They had street gang connections and criminal records. When the shooting occurred, Williams was out on bail on charges of selling drugs and carrying a gun, and Singletary was awaiting trial for “beating a man nearly to death with a baseball bat,” police said.

But the gang’s parties were popular and well-attended, attracting girls from all over the Valley--girls like Yael Oved, who wound up dating Singletary.

The girls hung out with the two Van Nuys men--whose gang monikers were “Chocolate” and “Ace Capone”--”for the thrill of it,” LAPD Det. Bob Howe told reporters just after their arrests. “It was sort of a Bonnie-and-Clyde kind of thrill,” he said.

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On the night of the shooting, Oved was driving, with Singletary in the front seat next to her. In the back were three friends, Shameka Randle and Natalie Eiger, both students then at a prestigious Sherman Oaks private school, and Jennifer Akbar, an Encino teen who had bounced among several Valley high schools. Along the way, they picked up Williams, a friend of Singletary’s, but a stranger to the girls.

Their plan, one of the girls testified, was to “buy a few bottles of beer and party” at the apartment of Singletary’s friend--Akbar’s boyfriend--across the street from the Fallbrook Mall. But the friend wasn’t home, so they drove to the mall to use a pay phone to page him.

There, Singletary encountered Shaolin and his friends leaving the movie theater, dressed in typical teenage garb--baggy pants and T-shirts. Singletary asked if the boys were gang members, then took offense when one of them cursed at him and answered derisively, “No. . . . Do we look like gangbangers?”

Singletary became “upset and angry,” one of the girls said at his trial, and after consulting privately with Williams, told Oved to douse the car’s headlights and ordered the other girls in the back seat to duck as they cruised the mall parking lot.

Suddenly, she testified, the car stopped and Williams leaned out a back window and fired several shots into the crowd. The bullets grazed several of the youths, killed Shaolin and seriously wounded one of his friends.

Singletary then directed Oved to drive to the home of a friend. There, Williams washed gunpowder from his hands and he and Singletary drank beer. Two of the girls said they left, calling friends for a ride home.

Police got a break in the case almost immediately. The youths with Shaolin were all from Iranian immigrant families and one recognized Akbar as the sister of a friend. Her family also hails from Iran.

Police tracked down that brother, then brought Akbar in for six hours of questioning. “She lied through her teeth” when she first came in, recalled West Valley Det. Jary Quinones. “But finally, she began to tell the truth. And that led us to the other girls. And we started picking them off one at a time.”

Two of the girls, as well as Singletary, later came into the station on their own, said Quinones, because they realized they were being sought. But none, it seems, felt troubled enough by the killing to come to police at the start.

That is part of what troubles Quinones about the case and its final disposition, which lets all four girls go free.

“These were kids that have everything going for them, that have all the advantages that the average kid doesn’t have,” he said last week, after Oved was sentenced. “They’re used to getting everything they want when they want it. . . . Somehow they oughta be made to take responsibility here.”

But James Blatt, Oved’s lawyer, said holding the girls to adult standards is unwarranted and far too harsh. “Sure, she should have stopped the car, took the keys, walked away, but does she have the experience to make those kinds of decisions?” he said. “No. . . . She did not use good judgment, but she was 17 years old. She didn’t have the kind of life experience that it takes to be able to find a way to walk away, to stop it. And she was scared.”

They were so naive, these girls, that their primary concern after the shooting was that they get home in time to make curfew, one lawyer with knowledge of the case said. “Williams is washing the gunpowder off his hands, and they’re looking at their watches, worried that it’s after 11:30.”

But that reasoning doesn’t wash with Singletary’s attorney, who says his client was no more a hard-core criminal than these girls. He had a job, a fiancee and a 6-month-old child and was planning to settle down after one last evening out, attorney Phil Nameth said.

“These are spoiled upper-middle-income children who’ve got nothing better to do than go out and drink underage and associate with kids who they ought to know will cause them problems,” Nameth said.

“If they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, well, so was my client, and he’s doing life in prison.”

And Quinones isn’t buying the notion that naivete can excuse indifference to murder. Or that these were sheltered young girls frightened by two gangsters or corrupted by the fast life.

“This was not about race or income or where you go to school,” Quinones said. “This is about values, your basic values that you get from your family.

“They can get in court and claim amnesia. They didn’t know he had a gun, they didn’t know he was a gangbanger . . . but it all goes back to what you believe in and who you associate with.”

He admits the ordeal has been hard on the families of the girls involved. One mother fainted when he came to arrest her daughter. Another refused to believe that her “wonderful child” could be involved in a murder.

But he compares that to the pain felt by the family of Ramtin Shaolin. “That family is destroyed,” he said. “There is no way they’ll ever get over this.”

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Quinones has seen lots of crime scenes, consoled lots of grieving families, but he will never forget his encounter with Shaolin’s family at the hospital, as the boy died.

The father pounded his chest and shred his clothes in agony, Quinones said. And friends say the mother walked around in a daze for months, mourning her child. The family moved from Los Angeles after Shaolin’s death, friend say, and can still barely stand to speak his name. They attended none of the court proceedings and have not spoken to the media.

They have filed a civil lawsuit against the families of the four girls involved, as well as the two men convicted of their son’s murder. But their lawyer says that is not about money. They are wealthy enough, friends say, that when he died, Shaolin had a new BMW waiting in his driveway for him to get his license. It is about justice. And answers.

And the Shaolins are not the only ones seeking answers. The communities that produced these girls and provided what they thought were sheltered lives have questions too.

“After we got past the shock, the general conversation at the temples was, ‘What went wrong? How did these girls end up there?’ ” said Reznik, whose law firm represented Oved’s father several years ago in a development dispute. “And I’m not sure anyone has the right answer.”

Those answers are hard to come by. All the girls’ families have retained lawyers to handle the Shaolins’ civil suit, and none but the Oveds’ attorney would talk about the girls for the record.

Times staff writer Andrew Blankstein and special correspondent Dade Hayes contributed to this story.