Valley Had Its Share of Heinous Crime Cases

A stop for gas, authorities said, is what made the San Fernando Valley the target of the Southland’s most terrifying crime last year: a lone gunman madly shooting children at a Jewish summer camp in Granada Hills, allegedly motivated by racial hatred.

According to authorities, after finding security too tight at the well-known Museum of Tolerance, the Skirball Cultural Center and the University of Judaism, Buford O. Furrow Jr. stumbled onto the North Valley Jewish Community Center on a quiet Granada Hills street when he pulled off a freeway for gas.

Three children, a teenager and an adult were wounded in the attack, and the gunman disappeared as quickly as he’d appeared.

The crime panicked local residents as they learned that the shooter left behind a van full of ammunition, that the suspect was also believed to have killed a postal worker and carjacked a woman as he fled, that he was thought to be a white supremacist. Authorities mounted a massive manhunt and, nearly 24 hours after the shooting, Furrow surrendered in Las Vegas and allegedly confessed to the crimes.

Even as the rate of violent crime continues to drop nationally and locally, shocking, horrifying and sensational crime cases keep cropping up in the Southland, many of them in the Valley.

The most scandalous case was the arrest, prosecution, acquittal and exoneration of a Frazier Park woman who police and prosecutors unwaveringly assert crushed her husband’s skull with a baseball bat in 1996.

In a twisted tale alleging murder tinged with jealousy, adultery and deceit, Jeanie Louise Adair, 39, said that she was the victim of her lover’s ex-wife whose hired thugs beat and robbed her, then killed Robert Adair, 40, when he blundered in on the attack.

Jurors said the case was too weak to convict, but many said they suspected the widow was involved.

In an unusual action following the verdict, however, a Superior Court judge declared Adair factually innocent.

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There were other cases in which the district attorney’s office took risks and aggressively pursued a difficult case, only to fail to sway juries.

An Antelope Valley couple charged with murder for allegedly starving their severely handicapped daughter to death because she was too much of a burden were successful in convincing 10 of 12 jurors that they were not guilty of murder. Prosecutors dropped the murder charges but will try again on the lesser charges of manslaughter and child abuse.

Another jury failed to reach a decision in the case of a man charged with manslaughter for not warning police officers that the suspect they sought during a 1997 incident was in the Chatsworth pornography warehouse where both men worked.

As the officers toured the warehouse, the suspect, Israel Gonzalez, shot and killed Glendale Police Officer Charles Lazzaretto. Two other officers were wounded in the ensuing gun battle before Gonzalez killed himself.

In a deal with prosecutors, Ronald Davey, 52, pleaded no contest this month to involuntary manslaughter for Lazzaretto’s slaying and was sentenced to three years’ probation.

Death penalties were rare. Of the four publicized Valley trials in which the district attorney’s office sought the death penalty, jurors agreed only in the case of serial killer Glen Rogers, who is already on death row in Florida.

Jurors were unable to reach decisions on what penalty was appropriate for a mentally disturbed man who set his Glendale apartment on fire, killing his wife and six children; for members of a violent street gang convicted of six murders; or the double-murderer who killed a mother waiting for her daughter to finish Bible study.

Prosecutors say they will try again this year to get the capital sentence for Jorjik Avanesian for his family’s 1996 arson deaths. Avanesian, who was initially found incompetent to stand trial, was convicted, but jurors could not reach a decision on the death penalty because they could not agree whether he was suffering from delusions at the time of the killing.

Prosecutors accepted the default penalties of life in prison in the other two cases, which were hailed as victories because the crimes were initially thought unsolvable or unconnected.

The 1993 robbery murder of 37-year-old Laurie Myles as she waited to pick up her daughter from a Bible study session in Chatsworth went unsolved for more than a year. Police eventually arrested two members of an armed-robbery ring after bullets recovered in a separate shooting by one of the men matched those that killed Myles.

Etienne Moore and LeCedrick Johnson were convicted this year of Myles’ killing and, in the same trial, Moore and Shashonee Solomon were found guilty of killing Solomon’s girlfriend because she broke off their romance.

In the year’s most complex case, seven Asian Boyz gang members were convicted and sent to prison for life, based on the testimony of two accomplices. Jurors convicted the group of six murders and 10 attempted murders in 1995 and 1996.

Three reputed Lancaster skinheads were convicted in November of Milton Walker Jr.’s 1995 death, a crime that went unsolved for three years. Jurors found that Walker was beaten to death because he was black.

Motive is also the key to the case involving the February killing of 30-year-old Christopher Rawlings, a former high school football star turned entrepreneur.

Two assailants followed Rawlings into his garage and after a struggle forced him into the trunk of his $200,000 white Bentley. As the robbers pulled out of the driveway, police arrived and gave chase. Minutes later, the driver lost control of the luxury car and it careened into a telephone pole. Rawlings died hours later as a result of his injuries.

The case became more sensational when sources revealed that the young father and ex-Marine was the focus of a federal telemarketing fraud probe.

Police arrested one man in connection with Rawlings’ slaying and are seeking another. They say the robbers’ motives were unrelated to Rawlings’ businesses practices, in which he allegedly bilked elderly investors out of millions of dollars.

Nearly two years after respiratory therapist Efren Saldivar told police that he used drugs to hasten the deaths of as many as 50 patients while he worked at the Glendale Adventist Medical Center hospital, he remains free.

Police began exhuming bodies this year in their search for the corroboration needed to file charges against the alleged mercy killer, who recanted his confession in a television interview.

But what was perhaps the most bizarre crime story in the Valley remains a mystery.

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On Jan. 2 workers at a Sun Valley recycling plant discovered a partial human torso and lower leg amid the debris. Based on a genetic abnormality on the foot, forensic investigators were able to match the body parts to missing-person report filed on a Burbank man.

The identification of Hilal Taweel’s body parts led detectives to investigate the Syrian immigrant’s uncle, who was allegedly enraged over Taweel’s spending time with his 19-year-old daughter.

In an interview with The Times, the daughter, Vilma Tawil, said that detectives found Hilal Taweel’s blood in her parents’ apartment and that detectives accused her father and brother of killing Taweel and cutting up his body at the San Fernando butcher shop where her brother works.

Though sources say that family members are the prime suspects in the crime, no one has been arrested as the slaying of the UCLA engineering student approaches its one-year anniversary.