Robberies

Two 17-year-old girls have been sentenced for torturing and butchering an elderly woman, less than three weeks after a pair of 10-year-olds were charged with murdering a toddler. Again, a troubled nation is asking, how could this happen? Edna Phillips, 70, was throttled with her dog's leash and stabbed or slashed 86 times. The mental images of the crime have shocked the nation just as the video pictures of little James Bulger being led to his death did last month.

Gunfire echoed once again through a neighborhood bordering USC early Wednesday, unnerving a community still reeling from the double slaying of two graduate students last week. A campus police officer shot and wounded a man suspected of robbing four students at gunpoint as they walked along the university's fraternity row around 12:30 a.m. The students were not injured. The incident comes as the campus continues to grieve the deaths of two students from China who were shot and killed April 11. The officer-involved shooting occurred not more than a block from where a memorial service was held Wednesday evening for the students slain last week.

If he ever returns to prison, Jerry Dewayne Williams knows he'll probably never get out. To stay clear of trouble, he has left behind the Compton neighborhood where police knew him and cut ties with friends from wilder days. Once a hard partyer, the 43-year-old says he prefers the company of a mystery novel or a "Law and Order" episode on television. Williams is one of more than 14,000 felons who, under California's three-strikes law, face a possible life sentence if they commit another felony.

In announcing a $125,000 reward in the killing of two Chinese USC grad students, Los Angeles police officials said Friday that they hope to identify an assailant in dark clothing and a dark-colored car that sped away moments after the attack. The slayings may have been a robbery gone wrong, authorities said. LAPD Deputy Police Chief Pat Gannon said items are missing that belonged to the students, who were shot on a residential street less than a mile west of the campus early Wednesday.

Three suspects pleaded not guilty Monday to charges stemming from a robbery and car chase in which a teenager was shot to death by police. The two boys from Pico Rivera, one 15 and the other 17, were charged with assault with a deadly weapon and firing at an occupied vehicle. Because of their ages, their names were not released.

Two brothers who worked as police officers were convicted Wednesday of participating in home invasion-style robberies staged to look like legitimate law enforcement raids, prompting the judge to say that the case underscored the need for aggressive outside oversight of the Los Angeles Police Department. "I've never heard testimony like I've heard in this case," said U.S. District Judge Gary A. Feess, who has practiced law since 1974 and was appointed to the federal bench 12 years ago.

Colton Simpson's autobiography impressed literary critics last fall with its raw account of the L.A. gang underworld and his war stories of life as a thief, thug and triggerman in the bloody battle between the Crips and Bloods. The book, "Inside the Crips: Life Inside L.A.'s Most Notorious Gang," was publicized as a tale of the former Crip's redemption, one meant to divert youngsters from street crime and jewelry heists.

A 53-year-old man who fatally shot a Tustin clerk during a $20,000 robbery was sentenced to death Friday after the slain man's relatives confronted the gunman for the first time. John Clyde Abel, who is already serving a 44-year prison sentence for a series of unrelated robberies, continued to proclaim his innocence moments before Orange County Superior Court Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald sentenced him to die for his crime.

Admitted python thief Jeffery Quon couldn't slither out of a six-month jail sentence Thursday. The 25-year-old Anaheim Hills man pleaded guilty in October to stealing 14 exotic ball pythons valued at $75,000 from a breeder's home, court officials said. The snakes were stolen in January 2004 from Jeff Houston's Anaheim Hills home, where he and his wife had been breeding the reptiles for three years for retirement income, he said.

Los Angeles Police Department officials said Tuesday they had arrested two juvenile gang members in connection with two robberies in the Silver Lake area. The arrests were made Saturday by undercover officers tracking local gang members believed to be responsible for the robberies, said LAPD Capt. Bill Murphy. Two youths, ages 15 and 16, were taken into custody on suspicion of armed robbery in two robberies near Hyperion and Rowena avenues. -- ruben.vives@latimes.com

Three men convicted of purse snatching -- one of whom was sentenced to 99 years in prison -- were exonerated Friday in Dallas. They are the latest examples of men who have been wrongly convicted of crimes in Texas. Darryl Washington, Marcus Lashun Smith and Shakara Robertson were arrested in November 1994 and charged with aggravated robbery. The victim could not identify them, but witnesses who gave chase claimed the trio was responsible. As a result, a jury convicted Washington, who received the 99-year sentence, while Smith and Robertson accepted plea deals and were sentenced to probation.

The man suspected of killing five people in a San Francisco home Friday was ordered to be deported six years ago, but remained in the United States when his native country of Vietnam refused to cooperate, authorities said Monday. Binh Thai Luc, 35, of San Francisco was arrested Sunday, two days after the bodies of three women and two men were discovered in an Ingleside district home. On Monday, officials revealed that Luc had been taken into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in August 2006 after he completed an eight-year prison sentence for assault and attempted robbery.

The headlines reflect a previously unknown cruelty: a woman gunned down in a rich Cairo neighborhood, a rash of carjackings, a deadly soccer riot, a stream of smuggled arms that have given muscle to criminal gangs once easily outgunned by police. The revolution that inspired this country one year ago has set loose a menacing air that Egyptians find unfamiliar. Bristling beneath the political battle for power against the ruling generals is an insecurity over crime and a bitterness that has darkened Egypt's congenial nature.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer was at his Caribbean vacation home late in the evening one recent Thursday when a man wielding a machete cut his way through a screen door, walked into the living room and demanded "money, money, money," according to Colin Smith, the gardener. The thief on the island of Nevis "looked more nervous than we were," Mary-Anne Sergison-Brooke, Breyer's sister-in-law, said in an interview from her home near Oxford, England. "Nevis is such a nice, friendly island.

A high school football star, whose talents on the playing field once seemed certain to carry him out of South Los Angeles, was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison without the possibility of parole for murdering the mother of a girl who was set to testify against him in a robbery case. The sentencing of Tyquan Knox, 23, came nearly five years after the January 2007 shooting, in which he was found to have strode up to Pamela Lark, 49, outside her home and shot her multiple times at close range as her grandchildren looked on. In that time, prosecutors tried three times to convict Knox, once a standout wide receiver at Crenshaw High School who had attracted the attention of college recruiters from several top-tier schools.

A series of armed robberies of distressed motorists along Inland Empire freeways earlier this month has prompted the California Highway Patrol to form a special task force and increase early morning patrols. The robberies all occurred in the early hours of Sept. 18 and 19. In two incidents, the robbers fired shots, though no one was hurt, authorities said. The suspects, who remain at large, are described only as three or four men wearing hooded sweat shirts. "There are isolated incidents where things like this happen," said CHP Officer Daniel Hesser, a spokesman for the department's Inland Division.

Three men and a woman were arrested Wednesday after a man and his dog were shot and wounded during a home-invasion robbery in the Hollywood Hills, police said. Three of the suspects forced their way into a home in the 8200 block of Mannix Drive about 1:40 a.m. while the fourth waited in a getaway car, according to a Los Angeles Police Department statement. They ordered the victim to open a safe and took large quantities of cash, the statement said. It was not immediately clear what prompted the suspects to open fire.

The home of a prominent former subprime lender was the target of a home invasion robbery in a gated Newport Beach community Tuesday night, an attack that left three people injured and police searching for two suspects. Nine people were inside Daniel Sadek's home when four men armed with handguns forced their way into the residence in the upscale Pelican Ridge community of Newport Coast, demanding cash and jewelry, police said. A fifth suspect, officers said, waited outside during the robbery.

That stunning rise in the price of gold is having a ripple effect: A rash of jewelry store robberies, street muggings and home burglaries. Now, merchants are stepping up security and police are warning everyone against flaunting their bling. When Capt. Mark Olvera, who runs the LAPD's Newton Division, spotted a beefy man with a gold chain around his neck the other day, he worried the guy might become a victim. "He looked like he could take care of himself," Olvera said. "But that's a couple thousand dollars ... on him. " So far this year, gold chains have been snatched from the necks of at least 110 people during street robberies in Olvera's South Los Angeles division.

A high school football star, whose athletic talent could have delivered him from the streets of South Los Angeles to a college campus, was convicted Monday of murdering the mother of a girl who was set to testify against him in a robbery case. The verdict against Tyquan Knox, 23, comes after two previous trials ended in hung juries. This time, jurors concluded that Knox, a standout wide receiver at Crenshaw High School who had attracted the attention of college recruiters from several top-tier schools, was the gunman who strode up to Pamela Lark in a parking lot one morning early in 2007, put a gun to her face and fired five times.