Suspect Scouted 3 Prominent L.A. Jewish Sites as Targets

Accused killer Buford O. Furrow Jr. told authorities that, while shopping for places to kill Jews, he scouted three of the West Coast’s most prominent Jewish institutions--the Museum of Tolerance, the Skirball Cultural Center and the University of Judaism--but found security too tight.

Then he pulled off a freeway to get gas and stumbled upon an unguarded target, the lesser known North Valley Jewish Community Center, tucked away in a quiet pocket of suburban Granada Hills.

According to a law enforcement source familiar with Furrow’s interrogation, the burly white supremacist from Washington state told investigators that he came to Los Angeles with mayhem on his mind, but no intention of shooting small children.

A 5-year-old and two 6-year-olds were wounded in the attack at the Jewish center. But Furrow said his targets were a teenage counselor and an older receptionist, who were also hit. “The kids got in the way,” the source said Furrow explained.

The suspect also admitted shooting to death 39-year-old postal worker Joseph Ileto, a Filipino American making his rounds in nearby Chatsworth.

Furrow was ordered held without bail Thursday on a federal charge of killing a federal worker who was engaged in performance of his job--a possible death penalty offense. County and state authorities also filed charges against him.

Furrow explained that he noticed the letter carrier while he happened to be driving by in the aftermath of the center shootings and thought it would be a good idea to kill a nonwhite person who was also a government employee, according to an affidavit filed by a government agent in federal court.

Furrow, who has a history of mental problems, told his interrogators that he got out of his car and asked Ileto to mail a letter for him. When Ileto agreed, he shot him, the affidavit said. He continued shooting as the man fell.

Details are still emerging about Furrow’s activities in recent weeks and immediately after the rampage that began Tuesday morning at the Jewish center, continued with a carjacking and ended with the postal worker’s slaying an hour later. Furrow then fled from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, where he surrendered to the FBI on Wednesday. Furrow had paid $800 in cash for a cab ride to Las Vegas, according to a taxi driver who said he drove him there.

Furrow had been in the Los Angeles area for two nights before the crimes, staying at the Hampton Inn in Stevenson Ranch in the Santa Clarita area, according to a police source familiar with the account the suspect gave law enforcement.

After Furrow allegedly abandoned a carjacked Toyota Camry in a hotel parking lot in Chatsworth, the police source said, he got a haircut and bought a new shirt. He then took a taxi to Hollywood, where he searched unsuccessfully for a prostitute and had seven or eight beers in a bar. At 8 p.m. in a 7-Eleven parking lot, Furrow flagged down cab driver Hovik Garibyan, more than two hours before police announced they were seeking Furrow for the shootings.

‘I Don’t Like to Fly in Airplanes’

At first, Garibyan recalled, his passenger asked to be taken to Los Angeles International Airport.

Then, recalled the 31-year-old Armenian immigrant who said he has been driving a cab for six months, the passenger changed his mind, saying: “Can you take me to Las Vegas? I don’t like to fly in airplanes.”

“I was just thinking: ‘Who is this person, my passenger?’ ” Garibyan recalled, saying he noticed that the man seemed to be concealing something under his arm.

Shortly afterward, Garibyan said, Furrow fell asleep and stayed that way for most of their four-hour trip through the Mojave Desert.

He did not awaken until Garibyan stopped for gas at a service station 70 miles from Las Vegas, the cabdriver said.

There was a McDonald’s nearby, and Furrow asked the cabby to use the drive-through lane to get an iced tea. He asked Garibyan if he wanted anything, the taxi driver said. He didn’t.

They started on their way again. It was almost 11 p.m. and Furrow, perhaps noticing Garibyan’s thick accent, asked him where he was from.

“Armenia,” Garibyan said.

“Why are you going to Las Vegas?” Garibyan asked his passenger.

“I’m going to gamble, to play, to enjoy,” Garibyan remembers Furrow saying. “It’s a nice city.”

Furrow told Garibyan to drop him off on the Strip outside the New York New York casino.

“I stopped under the Statue of Liberty,” Garibyan said. “We said good luck to each other” and Furrow walked down the Strip and into the night.

Garibyan then went into New York New York, sat down at a poker table and lost most of what he had just earned, he said. By 5 a.m. he was down $600 and was on his way home, he recalled.

When he got back, Garibyan told the colleague who leased him the cab, Boris Krasnov, that he had driven a fare to Las Vegas and back and was going home to sleep.

Krasnov suspected that Garibyan’s fare might have been Furrow.

“I start thinking it’s not the usual trip, not every day that you go to Las Vegas,” Krasnov said. He later called Garibyan and told him to watch the next television news broadcast to see whether the photograph of the fugitive matched his passenger’s appearance.

“I just turned on the television and I saw that it was [Furrow],” Garibyan said. “I felt lucky to be alive.”

By then Furrow had turned himself in.

He had stayed at the Barbary Coast Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas and gambled a little, according to a police source familiar with his statements.

In the morning, when he turned on the television and saw his own face on channel after channel, he decided, “I made my point,” the source said.

He still had about $2,000 in cash when he took a cab to the FBI office and turned himself in, saying, “You’re looking for me. I killed the kids in Los Angeles.”

Furrow, a mechanic by trade with a long history of involvement in the Aryan Nations, a group that believes Jews descend from Satan and should be killed, may have been contemplating an assault on a Jewish institution in Los Angeles for weeks.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said a tour guide identified Furrow from a newspaper photograph as a man who paid a brief and strange visit to the center’s Museum of Tolerance some weeks ago.

The man arrived alone and kept to himself, a docent told Hier. He paid no attention to exhibits as the tour group he joined walked around the museum, and instead stared at the ceiling the entire time. He left after about 20 minutes, Hier said.

Because the man’s behavior was so bizarre, the docent remembered him vividly, Hier said.

Furrow also told authorities that he had targeted a gay bar in San Francisco, according to the source familiar with his interrogation. But no additional details on those plans were available.

Thirty FBI agents fanned out over Washington state Wednesday and Thursday, interviewing acquaintances of Furrow, a man almost universally described as a loner. They sought to build a more comprehensive picture of his recent activities and explore possible ties to hate groups more recent than his activities with the Aryan Nations, which included a stint as a hand-to-hand combat instructor at the group’s northern Idaho compound.

“We have come up with addresses for him all over the state. . . . He has been sort of a transient,” said Michael Sanders, an FBI spokesman in Seattle. He said agents Thursday searched a storage locker that Furrow rented Saturday before heading for Los Angeles. But he would not say what they found.

During a brief appearance in Los Angeles federal court Thursday, a heavily shackled Furrow sat quietly but appeared to share a moment or two of levity with his court-appointed counsel before matter-of-factly answering a series of routine questions from a federal magistrate and being escorted back to the Metropolitan Detention Center, where he has been in custody since he was helicoptered to Los Angeles from Las Vegas on Wednesday night.

Some reporters in the courtroom, whose visitors gallery was packed with journalists and the curious, said they thought they heard the chubby, bespectacled defendant remark with a smirk: “They all like me.”

In an unusual twist, law enforcement authorities announced that the case against Furrow may unfold on two tracks.

Prosecutors with the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office filed their own murder and attempted murder charges against Furrow on Thursday in San Fernando Municipal Court, while declaring that they will work cooperatively with federal prosecutors and decide later who will try Furrow for which crimes.

Like the federal charge of murdering a federal employee on duty, the state murder count, which carries a special allegation that Furrow killed the letter carrier because of his ethnicity, is a possible death penalty offense.

State authorities also charged Furrow on Thursday with five attempted murders at the Jewish center, each of which could bring him a life term.

Federal authorities, who have no jurisdiction to prosecute attempted slayings, said they may yet charge Furrow with the community center offenses as federal hate crimes.

State authorities also charged Furrow with carjacking the Toyota at gunpoint from a 23-year-old shop worker, and federal prosecutors weighed in with an additional criminal count of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

“We formed a joint task force, and both [state and federal] prosecution teams are going to be looking at the law, discussing what the proper way to proceed is in this case,” said Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office. She said that certain charges could wind up being tried in state court while others are resolved in federal court, or that there might be a combined prosecution in one jurisdiction or the other.

She said prosecutors, as they examine the various state and federal laws that could apply to the case, have one thing in mind: identifying the “set of circumstances that will ensure the maximum time possible for this defendant on conviction.”

Slaying Called Happenstance

Furrow described the postal worker’s slaying as a crime of happenstance, according to a law enforcement affidavit filed in federal court.

“He stated that he thought the postal worker was a good ‘target of opportunity’ to kill because he was ‘nonwhite’ and worked for the federal government,” the affidavit said.

The document, filed by Postal Inspector Michael P. Delany, set forth in chilling detail how Ileto met his death.

After waiving his right to remain silent, Furrow told agents that he was driving in Chatsworth when he noticed a mail carrier whom he believed to be either of Latino or Asian ancestry.

According to the affidavit, he said he parked the car he was driving and got out with a loaded, 10-shot Glock Model 26 handgun in his back pocket.

He approached Ileto and asked if the postman would mail a letter for him, Furrow said.

Ileto agreed.

Furrow said he then pulled out his handgun and shot Ileto twice.

As Ileto bent over and tried to run away, he shot him a few more times in the back until he saw him fall, Furrow reportedly said.

He then drove off, parked at a hotel, the 7-Star Suites in Chatsworth, across the street from the post office where Ileto worked, and walked away.

Postal Inspector Delany said that when he saw Ileto dead in the driveway of a Chatsworth home, he observed four bullet wounds in his chest and what a coroner’s investigator said appeared to be a fifth wound to the back of the head. An autopsy showed that he had been shot nine times.

Law enforcement officials recovered nine 9-millimeter shell casings near the body and found a Glock 9-millimeter handgun--with only one of its 10 shots left--in the car Furrow allegedly abandoned at the Chatsworth hotel.

No witnesses reported seeing the shooting, although several heard it and one said he saw Ileto fall, the affidavit said.

Ileto, who was single and lived with his brother in Chino Hills, was a part-time fill-in worker at the post office, covering routes when regular mail carriers were not available, said Terri Bouffiou, a post office spokeswoman. Ileto was substituting for the regular carrier on the day he was slain.

A funeral was scheduled for Saturday, with burial at Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier.

In Washington state, interviews with Furrow’s former co-workers continued to fill in the picture of a hate-filled man with a short fuse.

“Little things would set him off,” said a woman who worked with Furrow at LaDuke & Fogle, a farm equipment company near the Canadian border and about 40 miles from Metaline Falls, where Furrow lived for a time with the widow of a white supremacist leader.

Dan Villers, Furrows’ boss at the equipment company, recalled that Furrow asked him when he was hired in September 1994 “if I had any problems with him being [affiliated with] Aryan Nations. And I came back to him and said, ‘Do you have any problem with me being Jewish?’ ”

“He said, ‘Yeah, I have a big problem with it,’ ” Villers recalled.

He then told Furrow he wasn’t really Jewish, and the two worked closely together.

During that time, he said Furrow often expressed hatred. “It wasn’t just Jews. It was anybody that wasn’t white,” Villers said.

David McGee, owner-manager of the Loaner Too pawnshop in Everett, Wash., said Furrow has been selling--and then buying back--guns at his store for years.

McGee said Furrow had pawned an AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle, several 9-millimeter handguns and at least one shotgun. “He was loaded with guns,” McGee said.

Furrow’s other alleged victims were in various stages of recovery Thursday.

The most seriously injured, the 5-year-old boy, who was shot in the abdomen and leg, was reported still in critical condition and on a respirator at Childrens Hospital. But he had improved since Wednesday, when he had orthopedic surgery on his broken leg, a hospital spokeswoman said.

“His vital signs are good, and he’s alert. He’s able to talk. He’s aware of his surroundings,” the spokeswoman said, and doctors are hoping to wean him from the respirator today.

One of the 6-year-old boys, also shot in the leg, was reported in good condition at the same hospital and will probably be released today, the spokesman said.

The other 6-year-old, James Zidell, finished a hamburger for lunch Thursday and waited for his father to scoop him up and take him home from Granada Hills Community Hospital, where doctors had treated a bullet wound in his left foot.

Mindy Finkelstein, the 16-year-old counselor, on Thursday left Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Woodland Hills, where she also had been treated for a gunshot wound to the leg.

She and her mother cried as her father, Dave, made a brief statement, thanking the hospital staff, paramedics and the police.

“We’re thrilled that Mindy is recovered and can go home to our family,” Dave Finkelstein said with tears in his eyes. “Our prayers and thoughts are with the other victims and their families.”

The center’s 68-year-old receptionist, Isabel Shalometh, treated for gunshot wounds to the back and arm, was released from a hospital earlier.

*

Times staff writers Josh Meyer, Caitlin Liu, Solomon Moore, Patrick McGreevy, Matt Lait, Kristina Sauerwein, Irene Garcia and T. Christian Miller contributed to this story.

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Considered as Targets

Buford O. Furrow Jr. told authorities that he considered, then decided against, attacking three Jewish institutions before finding the North Valley Jewish Community Center.

More on the Shootings * RELEASED--Two young shooting victims are released from hospitals.A26

* LAWS URGED--Clinton calls for new hate crime law and tighter gun controls.A27