Girl, 12, Raped in Apartment Building

Police and their dogs searched unsuccessfully Wednesday for a man who had crawled through a window of a Pacific Palisades apartment building and raped a 12-year-old girl at knifepoint.

The rapist apparently removed a screen and forced open a window just before 5 a.m. Wednesday and terrorized the girl for as long as an hour before leaving, Los Angeles Police Department officials said. The girl, who was home alone at the time of the assault, was not stabbed. She was treated for the rape at a Westside hospital.

The attack, which occurred in a small apartment building on Sunset Boulevard, shocked residents in the quiet neighborhood of shady pepper trees and natty lawns.

As investigators used dogs to search the area Wednesday afternoon, residents said they worried that the culprit had studied the habits of the victim and her mother and struck when he knew the girl was alone.

“He had to have known the pattern,” said Deborah Stote, a tenant in the same apartment building. “That’s the problem with living in a safe place, you don’t expect something like this.”

Stote said the girl and her mother are “great neighbors. She’s a great mom.”

According to investigators, the girl’s mother had left the apartment for work at 4:30 a.m. About 5 a.m., someone in the neighborhood heard a scream and called police.

The officers, however, were sent to the wrong address and found nothing unusual, said Sgt. John Pasquariello, an LAPD spokesman. Police finally learned of the crime an hour and a half later, when the girl’s mother called 911 to say that someone had broken into the apartment. By that time, the intruder was gone.

The girl described her attacker as a white male, between 20 and 25, about 175 pounds and roughly 5 feet, 9 inches tall with a medium build.

For much of Wednesday, a steady stream of motorists craned their necks to look at the apartment building, which was surrounded by police. Some drivers stopped to pass tips along to investigators. One woman complained that transients sometime search the area for cans. Others described strangers they had seen in the neighborhood days before.

Just after noon, police used two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department search dogs to attempt to pick up a trail from the victim’s residence.

After leaving the apartment however, the dogs simply circled the block and returned to the residence.

“We hoped the dogs would get a scent of something,” Pasquariello said. “Right now we don’t have any suspects.”