Kidnapings Los Angeles

A 21-month-old girl was found in Koreatown about 20 minutes after she was taken, apparently unintentionally, by a robber who forced the child's 59-year old baby-sitter out of a car and struggled with her before driving off, police said. Camille Perez was found wandering on a street three blocks from the site of the incident--the 3600 block of West 6th Street--where she had apparently wriggled out of her car seat that was found nearby. Police Sgt.

Evil is never pure. So when Roland Norman Comtois died on Death Row, he was buried quietly by his family, who remembered him not as the child killer and drug addict he surely was, but as a loving father and brother. The rest of the world will remember Comtois, if at all, as the cruel drifter who abducted two Chatsworth teen-agers back in 1987, killing one and leaving her friend for dead in an abandoned station wagon.

A 12-year-old boy believed to have fired the shots that killed an 82-year-old Watts grandmother July 26 was charged with murder and attempted murder Wednesday. Because the boy is under 14, California law requires him to be tried in Juvenile Court and limits his penalty to being confined to the California Youth Authority until the age of 25. He has been in custody since the week after the shooting on rape charges.

Crips gang member Eric Wright, 18, who escaped from the overcrowded 77th Street police station jail last weekend, turned himself in Saturday, police said. Buford Bates, 24, a fellow Crips member who also escaped with Wright, was still at large. A third prisoner, Thurston Price, 27, who also escaped over the weekend, was captured Monday. Police said Price, who had been arrested on suspicion of burglary, was not a gang member.

A Woodland Hills man charged with kidnaping his ex-girlfriend and beating and raping her for three days admits he struck the woman with a metal bar, but not so severely that it should be considered torture, his defense attorney said. Attorney Harland Braun, representing Michael Kyung Lim, said Tuesday that the beatings with a metal bar were "a boyfriend-girlfriend fight that got completely out of control."

A Superior Court judge sentenced a Kern County man to three years probation for the attempted kidnaping of a Canoga Park woman who was accidentally shot and killed by her husband in a rescue attempt. Joe A. Yohn, 27, of Rosamond was granted the probation in connection with the death in July of Linda Jane Corum, 52. Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Leon Kaplan also ordered Yohn to stay away from the victim's family and neighborhood and forbade him to carry firearms.

A psychologist testified Thursday that Gregory Scott Smith's kidnap, rape and murder of 8-year-old Paul Bailly of Northridge had all the earmarks of premeditated sexual sadism. Christopher Hatcher, a San Francisco expert in child abduction cases, testified in Smith's penalty trial in Ventura County Superior Court that evidence in Paul's death resembles evidence in dozens of other child slayings that he has analyzed.

Salvador Galindo was at a Sears store in East Los Angeles when he made a costly mistake, telling a salesman in a voice loud enough for others to hear that he would be back to buy furniture with some of the $8,000 he had in a nearby bank. Galindo, 73, explained that his wife had been asking him for weeks to buy a new living room set for their Montebello home.

Two young brothers kidnaped six weeks ago were reunited with their parents in Los Angeles Wednesday evening after a cross-country flight from New York, where they were found at John F. Kennedy Airport. Anthony Dixon, 3, and Cassel Dixon Jr., 4, were found early Wednesday morning holding hands, hungry and frightened but in good condition at the airport.

The suspected kidnaper of a homeless Orange County girl may have attempted to abduct at least 10 other children in the Los Angeles area by luring them into his pickup truck, police said Monday. "Some things match and some things don't," said Manhattan Beach Police Sgt. Jack Zea. "We are going to look . . . at his background to see where he has been the last couple of weeks."