A Mystery From Syria to L.A.

Juan Manuel Garcia yanked on the emergency chain and brought the trash-covered conveyor belt to a grumbling halt.

There, amid the discarded newspaper and cardboard, was a partial human torso. It had been severed at the waist and the knees.

Garcia and another worker summoned their boss, Dave Ashworth, manager of Community Recycling in Sun Valley. Ashworth walked out to the three-story conveyor belt and saw for himself: The nude midsection of an adult male had made its way through the recycling maze and was a few seconds from being dumped into a pile of garbage bound for the Chiquita Canyon Landfill near Valencia.

Ashworth ordered the work site closed and told his men to clear the area. On their way out, the workers made a second grisly find. This time it was a lower leg, cut off at the knee. Closer inspection would reveal something peculiar about the foot. It was a clue that would prove crucial in a homicide investigation that so far has led from Burbank to Syria to a San Fernando butcher shop.

On New Year’s Day, 24 hours before the remains were discovered, Vilma Tawil says she was hiding in her cousin’s Burbank apartment as her father pounded on the front door.

The 19-year-old had once again run away from her parents, Fadel and Mouna Tawil, who she said held to the most conservative customs of their native Syria and wanted tight control of their unmarried daughter. They would eavesdrop on her telephone conversations, she complained. If she was in the bathroom for longer than they deemed necessary, they would demand to know why. They called to check up on her so often at her job at a San Fernando Valley McDonald’s that her boss threatened to fire her.

After the most recent blowup with her parents, Vilma had again taken refuge with her cousin Hilal Taweel. Hilal immigrated to the United States nine years ago when he was 24, and had assimilated to the culture far better than her father, who arrived 10 years ago when he was 52.

Working weekends in a Hollywood liquor store, Hilal earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in civil engineering from UCLA. His outlook, too, had changed from his early years as a young man growing up in Homs, near Damascus, the Syrian capital.

He could understand why a young woman--even a Syrian American young woman--might be interested in something other than being a wife or a mother.

But Vilma said her father did not appreciate Hilal’s willingness to act as an older brother to her. Her father was threatened and angered by it, she said. He found it disrespectful.

In August, when she had first run away to stay with Hilal in his apartment on Buena Vista Street, her father and brother showed up to take her home. She said her father repeatedly struck Hilal with his fists and eventually threatened him with a knife. Hilal tried to fend off the attack, but never became aggressive, she said.

“Hilal said, ‘I am not going to raise my hand at you. You are my uncle. I respect you.’ ”

The fight ended without serious injuries and the two men later made peace, Vilma said.

But as her father banged on the door that New Year’s morning, the earlier incident was fresh in her mind and Hilal’s, she said.

They cowered in silence, afraid of what would happen if they opened the door and Fadel Tawil were to find his daughter hiding inside--again.

Eventually her father left, Vilma Tawil said. Hilal called him a couple of hours later, but said nothing about the knocking at the door. Hilal said he had not seen or heard from Vilma, who by then had been missing for more than a week.

“My father told Hilal he wanted to wish him happy holidays and to talk to him about something, and asked him would he come over,” Vilma said.

Hilal agreed. He hopped in his old burgundy Honda Accord about 1 p.m. and drove to Fadel Tawil’s apartment on Grismer Street, about a mile away, Vilma said. He returned home two hours later, and told Vilma that he had eaten a meal with her parents and that “everything was fine.” He said they had no clue that she was in hiding at his apartment.

The two then put a video in the VCR and settled down on the couch. But not long into the movie Hilal became restless, Vilma said. At 4:30 p.m. he said he was going for a drive and asked her if she wanted to come along. She said no.

“He said he was going for a half an hour or an hour,” Vilma said. “That was the last time I saw him.”

That night Vilma Tawil watched TV and talked with friends on the phone. She said she wasn’t worried that Hilal had not returned home by the time she went to bed. She remembered that one of the New Year’s Eve phone calls he had made the night before had been to a woman whom he had asked, “When can I see you?” Vilma said she figured that he was spending the night with her.

But when he hadn’t come home or called by the morning of Jan. 2, Vilma said, she became concerned. She called Hilal’s cellular phone, but was forwarded to an answering machine.

“Where are you?” she said she asked. “I’m worried.”

About 3 p.m. there was a knock at the door. It was two men, friends of Hilal, banging hard, Vilma said.

Scared and not wanting to open the apartment door, Vilma said she went out the back door and walked around the building to the front where the two men were standing. She said she pretended to be a neighbor and did not let on that she had come from inside the apartment.

“Do you know Hilal?” one of the men asked.

She said she did.

The man then asked when she had last seen him.

She told him about 4:30 p.m. the day before.

“Well, he’s missing,” the man told her. Then the two men, who were co-workers wondering why Hilal had not reported to work, left.

By this time, Vilma said, her concern about Hilal had turned to confusion and fear. She packed her bags and slipped out of the building. She went to the Chariot Inn in Glendale, a $50-a-night hotel where she said Hilal had told her to go if she ever were in trouble and that he would come find her.

Vilma said she stayed at the Chariot Inn the next two nights before returning home to her parents Jan. 4. By then, she said, they had learned from one of Hilal’s friends that he was missing. When she confided that she had been staying with him, her parents became very angry and screamed at her, she said. They told her she was somehow to blame.

The next morning, at her mother’s urging, Vilma walked into the Burbank Police Department and told her story to Det. Carl Costanzo.

The day after telling Costanzo her tale, Vilma ran away again. She said she stayed with friends and in cheap motels the first few nights, but eventually went to stay with her uncle in San Diego.

She said about two weeks had passed when her beeper went off with a number she didn’t recognize. She dialed it and Det. Costanzo answered the phone.

“He asked me if there was anything strange about [Hilal’s] feet,” Vilma recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, the toe next to the big toe overlaps the big toe.’ ”

Most homicide investigations begin with a dead body, not parts of one.

Beginning an investigation with remains that don’t even include potential identifiers such as a hand or a head is like preparing to assemble a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle.

The piece of the puzzle that investigators started with was a general physical description of the dead man, based on an examination of the remains at the Sun Valley recycling center.

Then Gilda Tolbert, an investigator in the identifications section of the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, was combing through missing persons reports when she saw one filed in early January on a man named Hilal Taweel. Tolbert thought she may have found a match. Burbank detectives investigating Taweel’s disappearance were sent to his apartment in the 24000 block of North Buena Vista Street in Burbank.

They returned to the coroner’s office with a worn pair of shoes. The anthropologist cut one of the shoes open and examined the insole. The impression worn into the cushion revealed that the second toe crossed over the big toe--a condition identical to that on the foot discovered at the dump. It was all but certain that the dead man was Hilal Taweel.

Because the body parts were discovered in the city of Los Angeles, the case was then turned over to the Los Angeles Police Department. Due in part to its complexity, it was assigned to Tom Brascia and James Gollaz, detectives in the department’s elite Robbery-Homicide Division.

The two detectives returned to the apartment and conducted a search of their own. They found medical papers indicating that Taweel had undergone pelvic surgery. X-rays provided by his doctor matched those taken of the remains.

It was Hilal Taweel who had been murdered.

But by whom? And why?

Vilma had moved back in with her parents yet again when detectives showed up at their apartment March 12, armed with a search warrant.

Vilma, her father, mother and brother Wael were placed in handcuffs and taken to police headquarters in downtown Los Angeles for questioning. While they were gone, detectives searched the apartment.

Wael Tawil, 26, said police claimed to have found four drops of Hilal’s blood on a wall in the living room. But he said there was no blood on the wall when he and his family returned home, and that there never had been.

“I don’t know how they make these stories,” he said, using the little English he has learned since moving from Syria to join his family in Burbank a year ago.

Wael said detectives later came to the Pioneer Market in San Fernando, where he works as a cashier. He said that they asked the owner about a burglar alarm that reportedly went off the night Hilal disappeared, and that they searched the butcher’s area of the market.

Wael said he agreed to take a polygraph test about his cousin’s slaying. After the test, he said police told him the machine indicated that he responded honestly to most questions. Only one question seemed to illicit a nervous response, he said. The question: “Did I help anybody to hide Hilal’s death?”

In a recent interview at the market, where Wael Tawil still works as a cashier, he said it was clear to him where detectives were headed with the case, but that they are wrong.

“How can I cut a human,” he said. “I can’t even cut a chicken.”

Wael Tawil said he is insulted and angry that he is a suspect in the case. Worst of all, he said, his cousin’s real killer may go free because police have prematurely focused on him and his family.

“I feel mad that they took the wrong way,” he said. “They took the wrong way from the start. They’re not going to find the man that did this.”

Police also towed and searched all three Tawil family cars and searched trash bins behind the Pioneer Market and behind Chalet Liquor in Sylmar, where Vilma’s father works as a cashier.

Ashworth, the recycling center manager, said liquor stores are among the types of businesses that most commonly dump trash or recyclables at the facility. He said detectives asked him about a month ago for a list of all businesses that had their trash dumped at the center the day Hilal’s remains were discovered.

The Tawils were released from custody late the same night they were brought in for questioning. They have not been charged with any crime.

“They accused my dad and my brother,” Vilma Tawil said. “They asked me to cooperate.”

In an interview with The Times in which Vilma Tawil served as a translator for her father, Fadel Tawil acknowledged that the detectives accused him of killing his nephew.

But he said neither he nor his son had anything to do with the crime.

Despite his daughter’s statement, he denies that he went to Hilal’s apartment on the morning of Jan. 1. He also denies that Hilal came to visit him later in the afternoon.

“We didn’t do nothing wrong,” Tawil said, speaking for himself for the first time during the half-hour interview.

Fadel and Mouna Tawil expressed no emotion when discussing the death of their nephew.

Vilma Tawil said it was the police who broke the news to Hilal’s mother and six brothers and sisters in Syria. Her parents, she said, have yet to speak with Hilal’s family about the killing.

Investigators do not know how Hilal Tawil was killed. They are awaiting the results of some tests and plan to conduct more.

Dets. Brascia and Gollaz declined to discuss details of the case, citing the ongoing investigation. They refused to comment on the veracity of statements made to The Times by members of the Tawil family.

No one in the family has been eliminated as a suspect, said one source familiar with the investigation.

Stanley Dong’s mouth dropped upon hearing that Hilal Taweel was dead.

“This explains it,” he said.

For the past month, the retired professor had been trying to call his former student to see how he was doing. But a recording said the phone was disconnected.

Dong served as academic advisor to Hilal since he enrolled in UCLA in 1992. He said the Syrian government paid for Hilal’s first four years of college, but that Hilal struggled to pay his own tuition after the funding was cut off. In addition to the weekend job at the liquor store, he occasionally taught classes at UCLA.

Dong said Hilal was extremely intelligent, if not well disciplined about his studies.

He said Hilal would sometimes miss classes and then go to the professor’s office and ask for an instant encore of the lecture. Other times he would call Dong first thing in the morning and excitedly explain that he had been up all night working on some project or another and had made some kind of breakthrough.

“He marched to his own tune,” Dong said, smiling.

Deeona Columbia, a student affairs officer in the graduate engineering program, said Hilal was generous to a fault.

Every time he returned from a trip to Syria, he would bring back pastries and knickknacks, like the pencil holder on her desk with “Damascus” written across the front.

There were more extravagant gifts, too. He once presented Dong and another favored professor with swords from Syria, the handles plated with gold. Last year, after orally supporting his thesis in what academics refer to as the “final defense,” Hilal broke out two bottles of $100 Dom Perignon champagne.

“He wasn’t afraid to show his appreciation,” Columbia said.

In her job as a student affairs officer, Columbia said, she had frequent dealings with Hilal. Indeed, his folder was probably twice as thick as those of most students.

She said he was pushy, even rude, when he first arrived in her office several years ago. Because she was a woman, she said, he would lean over her shoulder and try to tell her what to do as she worked on his paperwork. But Columbia said Hilal had changed his attitude over the years and had actually grown on her.

“I really believe he finally got it,” she said.

Around Christmastime she picked up the phone and heard Hilal’s thick accent and trademark rapid fire “Hello-hi.”

He had called just to say hi.

“I know you miss me,” he said, laughing.

Back at home with her parents, Vilma Tawil is immersed in grief--and confusion.

In the days before Hilal’s death, Vilma said, he was looking for a job as an engineer somewhere away from Los Angeles. When he got a job, she said, he was planning to rent a two-bedroom apartment so she could move in.

“He was there for me,” she said in a recent interview outside her parents’ presence. “He wasn’t only my cousin. He wasn’t only my best friend. He was like a brother to me. I feel like I lost three people all at once.”

She said she constantly struggles with the idea that her father and brother may have somehow been involved in Hilal’s death.

“I am more confused than anybody,” she said. “My dad--even if he says he’s going to kill you--he’s all talk.”

She added: “But I also know my dad has his temper.”

Vilma Tawil said she agreed to take a polygraph exam, in which she was asked if she would tell detectives everything she knew, even if it implicated her father.

She said she answered “yes.” And according to the machine, she wasn’t lying.

“I don’t care who did it. I don’t care if the police come to me and say, ‘Your dad did it,’ ” Vilma said. “I want them punished.”

The Los Angeles Police Department asks that anyone with information call Dets. Brascia or Gollaz at (213) 485-2531.