Eu Beaten in Robbery at Her L.A. Home

California Secretary of State March Fong Eu was attacked in her Hancock Park home Monday night by a robber who beat her with the blunt end of an ax and dragged her around by the hair while demanding money, police said.

Eu was listed in satisfactory condition Tuesday at Westside Hospital, where she. is expected to remain for several days while doctors treat multiple facial cuts and body bruises. Her hospital suite and home are under guard by two-member teams of State Police.

Chief Deputy Secretary of State Anthony L. Miller said Eu, 64, had been “physically and emotionally traumatized” by her experience. But he said she has “already requested that paper work be brought to her. She’s a very defiant woman. She’s a small woman but very feisty.”

Miller predicted that she will be in full command by today. Eu is expected to undergo plastic surgery later to repair facial scars.

Eu and her husband, Henry, had entertained dinner guests earlier in the evening, and she was “doing paper work” in a dining room area about 10 p.m., when the robber entered from the back of the house, grabbed her by the hair and demanded money, Miller said.

“She was repeatedly hit over the head with the blunt end of an ax,” he said. “He pulled her to the floor by her hair and repeatedly kicked her and dragged her by her hair through the house.”

Miller said Eu continued to scream and struggle with the assailant.

“She tried to reason with him,” he said. “. . . He continued to beat her. He even dragged her upstairs. . . .”

Miller quoted Eu as saying, “Please don’t hurt me. I’ll give you what you want,” and the robber shouting, “Shut up or I’m going to kill you.”

Eu found about $300 in a bedroom and gave it to her attacker, who left her on the patio and fled, Miller said.

Henry Eu found his wife shortly after the attack ended. He told investigators he was taking a bath in another part of the house and could not hear her screams. He called police and Fire Department paramedics, who took the secretary of state to the hospital.

Police searched Eu’s neighborhood, a gated and guarded community called Fremont Place, located near Wilshire Boulevard, for the attacker, described as a black man, 5 feet, 8 inches tall, about 30 years old, weighing 140 pounds and wearing dark clothing. They found no one.

Los Angeles police spokesman Lt. Dan Cooke said the description is similar to that of a man suspected of several other crimes in the area, but he said a nolist of victims had not been compiled by Tuesday afternoon.

Investigators could not immediately determine how the intruder got past the community’s security fence and guarded gate or how he entered the Eu home.

Eu’s press secretary, Caren Daniels-Meade, said there is speculation, however, that the robber might have entered the home when Eu and her husband escorted their guests to the front curb about 9:30 p.m. or that the man entered through a back door.

Daniels-Meade, said the secretary of state has lived at Fremont Place, where homes range in cost from $800,000, for about 10 years.

Eu maintains offices in San Francisco, Sacramento, San Diego and Los Angeles. But, according to Daniels-Meade, Eu and her family prefer to live in Los Angeles.

Easy Victory

The first Asian-American to hold statewide office in California, Eu won easy relection to a fourth term last week with 69% of the vote over Republican Bruce Nestande, an Orange County supervisor.

Eu was born in 1922 in Oakdale, northeast of Modesto in Stanislaus County, and grew up in the back of a laundry in San Francisco. After earning degrees at the University of California, Berkeley, Mills College and Stanford University, she successfully ran for the state Assembly and was elected secretary of state in 1974.

She divorced her first husband in 1970 and later married Henry Eu, a millionaire from Singapore and Hong Kong.

Aides said Tuesday that the State Police, the agency with the responsibility of protecting state officials in public, had not been assigned to guard Eu’s home before the attack but that the policy might be changed.