Suspect Held in Rapes of 2 Teachers at School

A 19-year-old Los Angeles man was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of raping and robbing two teachers in a kindergarten classroom at the 99th Street Elementary School as they prepared for the academic year, police said.

No students were on campus at the time Monday, but several area residents were angry that school and police officials released no information about the case for two days.

“They had a rapist running around here,” said Jessica Conley, whose four children attended the school. “It would have been good to know that. I have granddaughters that visit me a lot. No police told us anything.”

Homicide Det. Greg Stone said police “can’t stop our investigation to go out and make press notification. Our business is to capture people and pursue leads. We released something as soon as it was practical.”

Investigators had a lead within an hour of being notified, Stone said, and worked 48 hours until they arrested the suspect.

Antoine Marshal was booked on several felony charges, including sexual assault, robbery and kidnapping, and is being held in lieu of $1-million bail, police said. He is also suspected in an early morning robbery of a teacher last month at Barrett Elementary School, about two miles east of 99th Street Elementary, school district police said.

“This kind of a tragedy obviously is a very serious one,” said Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Roy Romer. “It affects the morale of everyone in the school. We need to be right on top of it to ensure we’re doing everything to prevent it from happening again.”

Becki Robinson, a teachers union vice president, said she and a colleague visited one of the victims at California Hospital Medical Center on Monday afternoon.

The woman indicated “that she still wants to teach but would prefer not to be at that school,” Robinson said, adding that union officials have not been able to reach the other teacher.

Romer, who was notified of the assaults Monday soon after they happened, said the Los Angeles Police Department asked the district not to release any information until officers could investigate.

The school’s Room 34 was still being treated as a crime scene Wednesday, Romer said.

School district Police Chief Wesley C. Mitchell said that not releasing information “certainly allowed us to conduct our investigation without it coming to the suspect’s attention.”

He said his staff worked the streets with Los Angeles police officers, gathering tips from area youths. “We picked up some nicknames” that led police to the suspect, he said.

“The people in that community of the 99th Street School knew what was going on,” Stone said. “They were the ones calling us and giving us that information to pin down the suspect.”

Still, some neighborhood residents did not know what had happened, and some expressed dismay that news was not widely disseminated sooner. Some said they watched television news broadcasts and checked newspapers, but found nothing.

“We have children,” resident and part-time school employee Martha Gallardo said. She described the classroom where the attacks occurred as “very isolated.”

“We want to be safe, but also be informed,” she said.

The attacks occurred at 10:30 a.m. Monday as the two kindergarten teachers--one starting her first year, the other her second--were setting up their shared classroom in a separately fenced, one-story building near the school’s main classroom structure, authorities said.

The attacker entered the classroom armed with a handgun and demanded money from the two teachers, said LAPD spokesman Jason Lee. While holding the two women at gunpoint, the intruder sexually assaulted them and took their money and cell phones, Lee said.

Other employees saw the man as he walked the women out of the school and they began yelling to attract attention. The women were then able to escape as the assailant fled on a bicycle, Lee said.

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Times staff writer Martha Groves contributed to this story.