Crime Beat

him now. He tries to keep his sleeve over the “Get High” tattoo and regrets the day he got it. He says he wants another chance. That’s the bottom line: another chance. But deep down, he knows it might be too late for Billy Schroeder.
    “I’m hoping to someday get another shot at society,” he says. “I don’t want to be thrown completely away.”
    Billy Schroeder turned his back on society but now hopes it won’t do the same to him. He seeks sympathy for the devil, so to speak. But it is hard to come by.
    “I like Billy Schroeder,” says Detective Bill Cloud. “But I have no sympathy for him. I have sympathy for the people he stole from. They have to put up with the feelings of intrusion and their losses for the rest of their lives. They worked all their lives so they can have some of these possessions, and somebody breaks in and it’s all gone.”
    Those sentiments are echoed like the clanging of a jail door: “He was destroying people with what he did,” Detective Dermot Mangan says. “He has got to pay something for that.”
    “It’s sad,” says burglary victim Gladys Jones. “Sure the kid needs help. But the people he hurt also need something. When I think of what I’ve been through and that I’m only one of the hundreds of people he did this to, I still feel very angry and hurt.”
    Lawyer Norman Elliott Kent, who was appointed to defend Schroeder after he confessed to his crimes, declines to use pat arguments like drugs made Schroeder do it, he’s a product of his environment, he deserves a break and so on. Much of that is valid, but somewhere along the line Billy Schroeder made a choice. There is responsibility somewhere.
    “Billy was a drug addict and drug money burns quickly,” Kent says. “And for all that he managed to steal, there is nothing left but hurt victims and a troubled defendant. All Billy has to show for it is his empty pockets, his drug addiction and a jail term. If there is a lesson in all of this, that is it: to let people know what can happen. His message is that in the end everybody loses.”
    I T’S MORNING in the east wing and a small group of high school students are gathered in the multi-purpose room for a tour of the jail. With all the banging of the heavy doors, sharp clacking of electronic locks and echoes bouncing off the steel and concrete, the students have to lean forward to hear the speaker.
    The speaker is an inmate here, a young man with a prematurely aged face. He is here to tell them that he is a loser who found out how to win, how to make it the right way too late. Don’t be like me, he wants to tell them.
    “Hello, my name is Bill,” he begins. “And I’m a drug abuser.
    “I started doing drugs when I was 11 years old. And pretty soon after that I started going through people’s windows. I hurt a lot of people. And here I am. . . .”

LYING IN WAIT
AMBUSH SHOOTING
Nurse killed trying to aid man on street.
    LOS ANGELES TIMES
    February 23, 1989
    A PRIVATE NURSE who stopped her car in the hills above Studio City and apparently got out to help a man lying in the street was fatally shot Wednesday when the man stood up and pulled a gun, Los Angeles police said.
    No arrest was made in the ambush killing of 40-year-old Lucille Marie Warren at Montcalm Avenue and Woodrow Wilson Drive in an exclusive neighborhood of hillside homes.
    Warren was shot at 6:45 a.m. while on her way home to Inglewood, police said. She had left a house on Montcalm where she worked as a night nurse.
    Investigators said there were indications that she was the specific target of the fatal attack and may even have known her killer. Detectives are investigating whether Warren, who was divorced and lived with her two teen-age children, was involved in any personal disputes that could have led to the shooting.
    “This doesn’t appear to be a random encounter,” said homicide Detective Mike Coffey.
    Motive Unknown
    While the motive for the shooting was unknown, police said, the killer may have been in the street because he knew that Warren was approaching and would stop if she thought someone needed help.
    “She was a nurse,” said Lt. Ron LaRue. “If you knew she was a nurse, you could find a way to make her stop. The suspect was lying in the street and she stopped.”
    Warren had been working at the home in the Montcalm cul-de-sac at least two months, police said. Officials of a Van Nuys-based registry of nurses, through which police said Warren was referred to jobs,