Arrest Fails to End Fear for Women at USC : Crime: Students no longer feel safe on campus after three recent rapes. Relatives of suspect say he's innocent, a police scapegoat.

By SHAWN HUBLER

Sept. 30, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

The women have all left the sunny courtyard complex where two USC students were raped last week. They drop by only occasionally, to pick up a change of clothes, male neighbors say. They don’t stay more than a few minutes.

On the locked door and whitewashed windowsills of the West 30th Street cottage where the nighttime attack occurred, the fingerprint dust is still visible. Never mind that police say the prints there belong to a man jailed on $240,000 bail.

The students do not feel safe.

“We’re moving out,” said a woman with long, curly hair as she unlocked her door to the unit across the courtyard from where her 20-year-old neighbors were attacked early Wednesday.

“My parents say I’m supposed to live in the sorority house from now on, or move back home with them. I haven’t been able to sleep here since it happened anyway.”

Across the USC campus Saturday, from the heavily secured dormitories to the inner-city streets just off campus, students expressed frustration and fear after three students were raped only blocks from the university.

On Thursday, Los Angeles police arrested Willie Damon Taylor, 28, who had grown up near the campus, in connection with the rapes--two last week and a third in a nearby apartment on Sept. 17. Authorities said Taylor had been paroled from state prison only 11 days before the first attack, and had a lengthy criminal history.

But in an interview Saturday, his family said that if Taylor is guilty, the women are not the only victims of the criminal justice system.

“If the system has failed anyone, it has failed Willie,” said the suspect’s mother, Saundra Taylor of Pomona. “All along, since he first got arrested, I begged them to let him see a psychiatrist, to get him some help. No one would listen. They all refused.”

She believes her son is innocent, a scapegoat for Los Angeles police desperate to do something about yet another series of campus rapes. In 1988, for example, university officials beefed up security after instances in which several students were sexually assaulted after being kidnaped from campus underground garages. Seven years earlier, the university announced plans to revamp campus security and buy two police dogs after a rumor, denounced as unfounded, that a local gang initiation rite called for the rape and murder of students.

Saundra Taylor acknowledged that her son was no angel. Willie, she said, grew up in the neighborhood around USC, and spent much of his youth involved in the sort of “penny-ante” joy riding and car burglary about which visitors to the campus have long complained.

“We lived on 36th and Vermont, right across from USC,” she said. “All through our neighborhood, people would go to games and park their cars on the street. And then the little guys would get in their cars, and if the doctors who owned them had cameras and stuff, they’d take them.”

Detectives said Willie Taylor was arrested five times as a juvenile; his mother said she got so worried about him as an adolescent that she got him a Big Brother. When Willie was 16, she said, she packed up and moved to San Diego, hoping for “a better life.”

But in 12th grade, she said, her son dropped out of high school and ended up in and out of jail on various charges ranging from parole violations and robbery to the rape of a Long Beach woman in 1985. By the time he won his most recent parole, she said, he had spent so much time behind bars that his only job experience was a one-month stint at a McDonald’s restaurant.

In the month since his release, his mother said, her son has shuttled between Pomona, where she and Taylor’s sister, Phyllis, live, and the old neighborhood around USC. That, they said, was where he told them he went on Tuesday night; but, they added, he told them he did not rape anyone while he was there.

“I can’t believe it,” Phyllis Taylor said. “If he did a crime, he has to do the time. But we tried to ask for help, over and over again. And we talked to him about it, too, many a time, asking him to get himself together and get a job. But he was just hardheaded. He just couldn’t leave that neighborhood alone.”

Located at the edge of South-Central Los Angeles, in a part of the city where walls have graffiti and windows have bars, USC has for more than a decade struggled to maintain an oasis of security for its 30,000 students.

About 200 security guards roam the campus, 60 of whom are armed and Police Academy-trained. A tram system shuttles students from building to building so they won’t have to walk the campus alone; an escort service runs until 2 a.m.

Freshmen women said they felt fairly protected in their dormitories, which are guarded by campus police and secured by computer locks that open only at the insertion of valid student I.D. cards.

But more seasoned students were less confident.

“They’re naive,” said graduate student M.P. Gaspich, referring to younger students. Gaspich said she felt in constant peril at USC, particularly walking to and from evening classes and particularly in light of reports of campus violence elsewhere.

“Universities are a magnet for crazies. Look at what happened in Berkeley last week,” she said, referring to the mentally deranged gunman who held 33 hostages in a campus-area bar and shot 10 people, killing one--a student.

Campus police acknowledge that their security system pales against that of public universities such as UCLA, where sworn peace officers constitute the police force. They note, however, that the three most recent rapes were off-campus, and that a suspect was apprehended within days.

Meanwhile, Saundra Taylor said, the arrest of her son doesn’t mean crime at USC will go away.

“When he was in jail, it was happening, too--the rapes, the same thing,” she said. “Only difference is, now they say it’s him.”