Crimes Break the Idyllic Spell in a ‘College Town’

The UCLA perimeter, like a lot of campus perimeters, is stacked with cheap apartments that are, in turn, stacked with student life. It is one of the few spots left in the city where you will still find, say, a garage with not one, not two, but three rusted-out Karmann Ghia convertibles, so rickety yet so fuel-efficient. The sort of neighborhood where startling numbers of residents prefer their window dressing tie-dyed.

It is, in short, less a perimeter than a campus annex, a kind of free zone to which sweatshirted kids graduate when they’ve outgrown their dorm rooms and are ready for that brick-and-board bookcase and the half-dead fern on the windowsill. And until this winter, the throngs who live there behaved as if it were, in fact, a magic place where a kid could ease into adulthood, where the city couldn’t get at them.

Until.

That’s a word you hear a lot around UCLA now. Until. Also before.

As in: “We live over on Veteran and before, we didn’t even have a door that locked. The locks were broken.” This from a 20-year-old named Chin Lam, who shakes her head now, incredulous.

As in: “Until this happened, our windows were always open, just to air out the apartment because it gets stuffy.” That from a 20-year-old named Jessica Bardas who now won’t walk around the corner alone after dark.

As in this, from Kate Dunnett, 21, and near graduation: “I don’t think anybody thinks something like this is going to happen in their little town, until, you know. . . .”

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Until February. That was when it started. On the 18th and again on the 23rd, a prowler broke into campus area apartments and tried to rape the young women inside. When the victims woke to find him on top of them, they screamed until he ran away.

Then on March 4, in the same neighborhood, someone tried to break into five apartments in one night. In one case, he had time to yank the phone out of the wall before the roommates of the young woman sleeping inside got home and scared him off. In another, he surprised a group of students and beat one so badly that her facial bones were fractured. Descriptions of the assailant changed from week to week--first he was slim and white, then slim and Asian, then black and stocky. In each attack, however, there was this common denominator: A window or door had been left unlocked.

The local and university police formed a task force. A reward was offered. Fliers with a composite drawing were posted. Campus seminars were organized on self-defense. Then, around St. Patrick’s Day, another attack occurred, a rape in which the woman was kidnapped on her way out of a Westwood mini-mart. By this time, the area was so jittery it scarcely mattered that the suspect had a different MO and a different description. The point was clear: Life was going to be different.

This warren of apartments, of funky crash pads where, if your roomie forgot her key, you could leave the door open--well, it wasn’t going to be so trusting anymore. A fog had lifted, and what it revealed was a tiny clearing of bright kids in the thick of a big, big city. There was no free zone, no “little town.”

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It’s never been easy to pigeonhole UCLA. Like the city it’s named for, it’s not quite urban, but neither would anyone describe it as pastoral. It’s probably a testament to the Southern Californian’s capacity to compartmentalize that people have, for ages, seen UCLA as a kind of nice college-suburb. Crime and danger could course all around it, hurting all sorts of good people, and yet, for reasons that now look like sheer, stubborn denial, the book on UCLA was that bad things didn’t happen there.

Now as finals ended and the neighborhood emptied for spring break, the investigation was continuing and the suspect remained, as they say, at large. Left unspoken was the fact that as campus threats go, this could have been worse, could have been, say, like the threat at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where three young women are missing. Still, startling numbers of residents were using the words “wake-up call.”

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Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.