Man Held in Assaults on 2 Girls

A convicted sex offender has been arrested and charged with kidnapping and sexually assaulting two young girls in nearly identical cases near his San Fernando Valley home, authorities said Wednesday.

The girls, ages 6 and 7, were playing just yards from their own residences and were abducted while their parents were momentarily distracted.

“These crimes were in safe neighborhoods. Adults were nearby,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Ann Marie Wise said. “This case is every parent’s worst nightmare.”

Police arrested Michael Terry Ward, 51, at his Woodland Hills home Monday after state Department of Justice investigators matched Ward’s DNA profile, already on file from a Ventura County sex-case conviction, with evidence gathered in the Oct. 4 kidnapping and assault of the 7-year-old in Winnetka.

In May 2001, the 6-year-old victim was kidnapped near her Canoga Park home and forced to perform oral copulation, but no DNA was available in that case, authorities said.

Det. Jesse Alvarado said the Los Angeles Police Department received more than 200 tips from the public. But investigators did not single out Ward as a suspect until this week, after state crime lab testing resulted in a DNA “hit.”

“There is an initial screening and then there has to be more testing,” Alvarado said of the delay. “There are a lot of safeguards so we don’t arrest the wrong individual.”

Ward, a self-employed painter and drywall installer, pleaded not guilty at his arraignment late Wednesday and was being held in lieu of $7-million bail. The 20 counts filed against him include rape, sodomy, forced oral copulation, kidnapping to commit rape and aggravated sexual assault on a child. If convicted, he could be sentenced to multiple life terms in prison, said Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office.

Ward has a history of sexual assault. In 1983, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison after being convicted of sexually assaulting a 17-year-old Ventura County girl, according to Alvarado.

Police said the two most recent abductions occurred about three miles from Ward’s house on a street adjacent to Parkman Middle School.

On Oct. 4, an intense manhunt began minutes after the 7-year-old disappeared from her next-door neighbor’s frontyard near Sunny Brae Avenue and Michale Street.

“She had been playing with friends, but she happened to be standing alone near the front door because she was preparing to go home,” Wise said. “And suddenly she’s grabbed.”

More than six hours later, the girl wandered into a bar about a mile away, her hair still wet from a shower she said she took with her captor. Ward allegedly raped and sodomized the youngster in his pickup truck. He took her to the residence he shares with his 95-year-old grandmother and continued to sexually assault her, according to Wise, then dropped off the girl in the parking lot of the Gold Cadillac Bar.

Two weeks later, police said they had no suspects but believed the same man was responsible for a “virtually identical” unsolved crime that occurred four years ago in nearby Canoga Park.

In the earlier case, the 6-year-old victim was riding her bike two doors from home while her mother was gardening in front. “She turned her back for an instant and her daughter was gone,” Wise said.