Girl Admits Killing Woman on Whim, Rialto Police Say

In a chilling confession described Monday by police, a 15-year-old Rialto girl said she clubbed a neighborhood woman to death on a whim.

According to police, the teenager and another girl, 13, talked their way into the home of 72-year-old Manuela Ramos Fyock on Saturday evening by asking if they could adopt one of the woman’s dozens of cats.

“What do you think? Should I kill this lady?” the 15-year-old asked her friend, according to her statement to police.

Minutes later, police said, the older girl attacked the woman in her bedroom, beating her repeatedly with tools found in the house, although police declined to specify what kind of implements they were. Fyock’s bed was still covered in blood Monday.

The girls left Fyock’s house without taking anything and split up, police said. Shortly thereafter, the 13-year-old’s mother overheard her daughter talking about the killing and called 911, police said.

Both girls were arrested Saturday night. The 13-year-old had reportedly gone to a screening of the horror film spoof “Scary Movie.” Investigators stopped the movie to take her into custody.

The older girl, meanwhile, confessed in detail, Rialto Police Lt. Joe Cirilo said, and was “quite matter-of-fact about it,” showing no remorse.

The attack marks the third time in 18 months that a teenager has been accused in the murder of an elderly resident in this small city in western San Bernardino County.

“It’s getting to be younger and younger people committing these crimes,” said Helen Jones, a Rialto resident and president of the local chapter of the American Assn. of Retired People. “We seniors, we’re survivors to start with. We grew up trusting people, and now we can’t. It’s very sad.”

Although authorities plan to charge the older girl today as an adult, officials did not release either suspect’s name, citing their ages.

Fyock, an animal lover known to her flock of nieces and nephews as “Tia Nellie,” had taken in cats to keep her company since her husband died in 1976. Family members said Fyock would have been thrilled to find one of the cats a home and probably welcomed the girls into her house.

“If you can catch one, you can have one,” she told the girls, according to the elder suspect’s confession, Cirilo said.

A few minutes later, police said, the 15-year-old launched an apparently motiveless attack on a woman relatives say was too frail to fight back.

‘We’ve seen some pretty bizarre things, but this is right up there,” Cirilo said. “I wish we had a motive. I wish I could make some sense of this. But there is no explanation for it.”

San Bernardino County Dist. Atty. Dennis Stout said the 15-year-old could be sent to prison for life. He said her alleged accomplice is too young to be charged under state law as an adult and will be charged as a juvenile.

The killings have launched a debate in Rialto: Do they constitute a generational divide in crime--a trend of younger residents targeting the county’s burgeoning community of retirees? Or are they isolated incidents?

In January 1999, a 17-year-old boy beat an 85-year-old Rialto woman to death, then set fire to her home to cover his tracks, police said. Roman Barnes has been convicted of murder, burglary and other charges and is scheduled to be sentenced next month.

A year ago, an 81-year-old Rialto man was shot in the head during a bungled robbery.

Two teenagers have been arrested in that killing.

Many local officials say they see no wave of teenage crime directed at the elderly.

Dan Macallair, vice president of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, said the shock of a crime committed against seniors--and the intense media coverage that follows--creates the false impression that seniors are in danger. In fact, he said, “elderly people are among the least victimized of any segment of society.”

But Stout is concerned enough about crimes committed against elderly residents that he is preparing to launch a $1.1-million unit devoted to prosecuting such cases.

By Jan. 1, Stout said, he hopes to have three prosecutors and three investigators working solely on those types of crimes.

Stout said the special prosecution unit has become necessary partly because of the Rialto killings but largely because of the growing number of retirees across San Bernardino County. Many senior citizens come to the county to take advantage of its relatively low cost of living. Others have been left behind by military cutbacks, such as the 1994 shutdown of Norton Air Force Base.

Today, 200,000 seniors live in San Bernardino County--up from 137,000 a decade ago. Their numbers continue to grow rapidly and are expected to reach 360,000 by 2010, said Michael Decker, director of the county Department of Aging and Adult Services.

“The amount of violence perpetrated against the elderly by teenagers is disturbing and troubling to me,” Stout said.

“If there is a pattern, I can’t explain it. But I think it’s important that we . . . give these cases special attention.”

Seniors are worried too. Rialto resident Delois Rice said she and her husband installed an alarm system and abandoned their once-regular strolls in the neighborhood after the January 1999 killing of a longtime acquaintance.

“They seem to pick on the older people,” said Rice, 71. “We used to take walks. Now we don’t go outside.”

Maria Rodriguez, 66, a resident of a Rialto retirement complex, said she drove the few blocks necessary Monday to get ice cream because she and other retirees “don’t dare walk.”

Meanwhile, Fyock’s brothers and sisters and other relatives gathered at her home Monday, trying to make sense of the killing.

The daughter of a laborer and the second-oldest of seven children, Fyock grew up in nearby Colton and began working in the fields and orchards as a girl, picking cotton, figs and other seasonal crops.

She later switched to housekeeping and eventually married a widower whose home she had cleaned. He died 24 years ago.

Fyock had lived in Rialto for 36 years, most of them in the East Easton Street home where she died, Cirilo said.

Her three-bedroom home, barely visible from the street because of two towering trees, had fallen into disrepair in recent years.

Relatives said they asked Fyock to move in with them, especially after she injured her knee in March and began having trouble getting around. But she refused, insisting that she “wanted to die with her cats,” said relative Kanchana Maysey. Relatives said the cats would be taken to an animal shelter.

“She didn’t have anything,” said niece Kim Livingston of Yucaipa. “For someone to hurt her like that, it was senseless.”

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Times staff writer Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson contributed to this story.