CRIMINAL MIND > FORENSICS & INVESTIGATION

Beverly Hills Cop

A Rape Turns into a Double Murder

Abandoned Stolen Car

At approximately 1:24 a.m. on the night of the rapeand armed robbery, the suspect, driving what was an unreported stolen vehicle (the children had no way to report what had happened as they were still "wandering the streets naked and stunned" at the time), ended up running a red light at the intersection of Rosecrans Avenue and Sepulveda Boulevard (approximately 5.5 miles from the Hawthorne rape scene).

Officer Richard Phillips

Twenty-eight-year-old officer Richard Phillips and his twenty-five-year-old partner, Milton Curtis, both from the El Segundo PD, just happened to be sitting on the corner of Rosecrans and Sepulveda killing time before the end of their shift. Curtis had been on the force for only two months. Both men were happily married. Between them, they had five children.

Officer Milton Curtis

After watching the man run the red light, Curtis and Phillips pursued the vehicle until the suspect pulled over near Pacific Avenue, a semi-rural road fringed with trees, fields and a large oil refinery.

It was the middle of the night. Nobody was around.

The suspect then got out of the stolen vehicle as a second El Segundo unit with two additional officers pulled up.

One of the two officers who had just pulled up to the scene asked Phillips, who was standing in front of the suspect while Curtis questioned him, if everything was "okay here?"

"We're fine," Curtis said as he waved a citation in the air he had obviously written. "No problem. Just a red light violation."

Satisfied that Phillips and Curtis had the situation under control, the second patrol car took off.

Within a minute and a half after they left, the suspect pulled out a firearm and began shooting Phillips in the back as he walked away from him to return to his squad car. In the midst of the commotion, Phillips was able to return fire, one bullet striking the suspect in the back, a second and third hitting the stolen vehicle.

But the suspect then walked over to the squad car and, at pointblank range, shot Curtis three times as he sat in the squad car calling into base, alerting dispatch as to what was going on. "Officers shot! Send ... ambulance."