Teacher’s Slaying Unsolved, Unforgotten

On a March morning in 1989, Hal Arthur prepared to climb into his car in front of his Sherman Oaks home and go to work. But before he could do so, Arthur was shot in the back and killed by three bullets from a .22-caliber semiautomatic weapon. The shots, according to police, were fired from across the street.

Arthur was a 60-year-old social studies teacher at Grant High School in Van Nuys, just three months shy of retirement. His slaying stunned the community and frustrated the police, who never have solved the crime.

There were no witnesses to the shooting. One person reported seeing a dark sedan on the street about the time of the shooting. Police circulated a sketch of the sedan’s driver, which yielded no results. Nor could police find a motive for the killing--by all accounts Arthur was a popular teacher and devoted family man. A former student was questioned, as was a business partner, but the investigation hit a dead-end. A $60,000 reward offered by the Los Angeles Board of Education went unclaimed.

Today, a plaque in Arthur’s memory rests on the lawn at Grant High, a reminder of the random violence that has crept into the city’s streets.

As Dan Gruenberg, one of Arthur’s former colleagues, said last year, “What you are left with is this feeling of real mortality, that this could happen to anybody . . . and they aren’t necessarily going to find the culprit.”