2 Slain on Santa Monica Streets

At 7:30 p.m. Monday, Omar Sevilla walked east along Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, near 6th Street, en route from his 22nd birthday party to his drug rehab center.

A car pulled alongside. Its occupant shouted at Sevilla, asking where he was from.

He apparently didn’t respond quickly or well enough. Shots were fired from the car. As many as five, residents said.

Sevilla, of Culver City, fell in the driveway of the Amalfi Apartments, where rescue crews tried without success to revive him. At 8:30 p.m., he was declared dead at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center, two hours before another crew brought in Horst Fietze.

Someone had shouted at Fietze too. Then shot him.

Santa Monica, a city that went all of last year with but one homicide, suddenly had two in two hours.

About 9:30 p.m., police said, Fietze, his wife and another couple were finishing a last, late evening stroll along the palm-fringed beachfront and were returning to their hotel.

Fietze, 50, and his wife were scheduled to fly back Tuesday morning to their tiny hometown of Loebau in eastern Germany. As they walked along Appian Way, a four-block, half alley/half street behind Loews Beach Hotel, three men and a woman walked up behind them and shouted a demand for money.

“There was a communication barrier,” said Santa Monica Police Chief James Butts.

None of the Germans understood English sufficiently to comply. The thieves tried to take matters into their own hands, frisking the tourists. Police do not know quite why, but one of the robbers opened fire with a handgun, striking Fietze.

Neighbors said they heard the shot, then dreadful screams from Fietze’s wife. “It was like she was begging him not to die,” said Tina Butler. “She was screaming. Then three more shots and screaming the whole time. It seemed like forever.”

Butler and other neighbors called police, then ran out onto Appian Way in time to see what they describe as a late-model white car pull away from the scene.

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Officials on Tuesday decried both deaths, but it was clear which one the world cared more about. Before midnight Monday, local television crews were broadcasting news of Fietze’s death live from behind Loews. Before the sun came up, people started bringing flowers--sprays of yellow daisies and chrysanthemums--to lay against a tree at the site.

One woman brought an envelope with the words, “How can we help?” written on the front, and set it down on the bright green grass among the flowers. Inside, on a piece of stationery with a picture of a humpback whale on one side, she asked that the visitors not judge America by the crime, but by the sorrow that followed it. She wrote “that each one of us would have stood between you and harm’s way. . . . I only wish you could leave your pain.”

Through the morning, news people, mourners and tourists mingled at the scene. Then the journalists left to attend a news conference at which Santa Monica city officials announced the deaths and gave sympathy to the families of the dead. They sought to reassure potential visitors that Santa Monica is safe.

“Santa Monica is a community of law-abiding citizens who decry violence,” Mayor Robert Holbrook said. “We want our residents and the world to know that the safety of those who live, work here and visit here are topmost in our minds and in our hearts. We pray for those directly affected by last night’s random acts of violence and for all of us in this community who have been shaken by these events. Let us join together to send a strong message to the world--Santa Monica will not tolerate violence.”

The brief statements by Holbrook and Butts were followed by 30 minutes of questions. All but one dealt with Fietze.

Butts said Fietze’s wife and their friends have delayed their departures to help police draw a better composite picture of the suspects.

Police said surveillance videos from the hotel were also being examined for evidence.

Tourism is Santa Monica’s biggest business, with 2.3 million visitors last year. An estimated 11% of them were from Germany, the city’s biggest international market, officials said.

Even Tuesday, it was easy to find Germans walking around town. Many said they were saddened by the slaying, but saw no need to change their travel plans.

Wolfgang Rudolph, the German consul general in Los Angeles, called the slaying a disturbing but isolated incident. He said he did not expect the German government to issue any special travel advisories in response.

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The German government did exactly that in 1993 after a series of shootings in south Florida left 10 European tourists dead. Locally, in 1994, a German couple was accosted by a group of youths in the mountain resort community of Idyllwild. Gisela Pfleger, 62, was shot in the head and killed after she struggled to keep her handbag. Her husband, Klaus, was shot in the face but survived.

“It is an isolated case,” Consul General Rudolph said Monday of Fietze’s death, “a very unhappy and tragic case. We don’t see it as something typical or something people would have to be afraid of if they came here.”

Appian Way at night is a dark alley-like street that most tourists avoid, preferring to stay a block east, on the busier Ocean Avenue.

“They didn’t know the neighborhood, and they probably looked vulnerable,” Rudolph said.

Butts said Fietze was the first tourist to die a violent death in the city for as long as the city has kept records.

No one knew where Sevilla’s death fit in local history, or anywhere else.

Police said his death might or might not have been gang-related. Friends of Sevilla’s declined to talk much, except to say that the reason he was in Santa Monica, ironically, was to get away from his old life. He was paroled from prison six months ago, they said, and three months later had enrolled in the drug rehabilitation center near where he died, across a one-way, dead-end street from an overflowing dumpster.

Fietze and his friend were house painters from Loebau. He had once served in the East German army, Santa Monica authorities said.

The two couples had been vacationing for three weeks in the United States, stopping in New York and other locations. They had been in Santa Monica for only a day and were staying at a budget hotel across the street from the swank resorts that line the oceanfront.

The couples were scheduled to fly home at 11 a.m. Tuesday.

No one knew much else Tuesday, for the simple reason that Fietze died in a strange place, his life, friends and most of his family an ocean away from Santa Monica. No one had all that much to say about Sevilla, either. In some ways, his life, friends and family were just as distant, an ocean away as well, in Culver City.

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Times staff writers James Rainey and Jocelyn Stewart, staff photographer Carolyn Cole and correspondent Sue McAllister contributed to this story.