Opinion ID: 1169826
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Crimes against Sharon Rawls

Text: On April 13, 1986, at approximately 5:15 a.m., Hattie Foster was awakened by the sounds of a woman screaming please, please stop. Hattie woke up her husband, John, who got up and opened a window. John determined that the screams were coming from an abandoned apartment building at 1118 East 80th Street, behind the Fosters' home. Grabbing a three-foot-long machete, John went outside and approached the abandoned apartment building. A man, whom John had never seen before, came out of the front entrance with shoes in his hand. When confronted by John, standing tall at six feet four inches and weighing two hundred seventy-two pounds, the man looked nervous. He denied being with a woman in the building, and walked away. (No one ever located or identified this man.) John then saw defendant looking at him from a window in the abandoned building. Apparently in response to a telephone call from Hattie Foster, Los Angeles Police Officers Joseph Avila and Charlotte Smith arrived at the scene at 6 a.m. John Foster was still in front of the abandoned building. Defendant came out of the building, pushing a bicycle. The officers stopped him and conducted a patdown search. Upon retrieving a knife, the officers handcuffed defendant and ordered him to kneel. Defendant denied any wrongdoing. He said that he had been with his girlfriend in the building and that there was another man in the building. Defendant then reached into his right front pants pocket, pulled out a piece of paper, and dropped it to the ground. When Officer Avila picked up the piece of paper and put it in defendant's left front pocket, defendant said, This is not mine. The item was later determined to be a letter from Superior Warehouse Grocers responding to a request from Sharon Rawls for a check-cashing card. The handwriting of Sharon Rawls and her sister was on the back of the letter, which also bore Sharon Rawls's fingerprint. When Sheriff's Deputy Nathanson arrived at the scene, he took custody of defendant. The deputy noticed a bloodstain on defendant's sweatshirt, an injury on his right hand, and fresh abrasions on his right elbow. No money or other property belonging to Rawls was found on defendant when he was booked at the jail. Another deputy, William Gleason, found the body of 27-year-old Sharon Rawls, a prostitute, on the floor of a bathroom in the abandoned building. Her pants and underpants were pulled down around the lower parts of her legs, and a wad of cloth was stuffed in her mouth. There were a number of abrasions on her face, on the back of her neck, on her elbows, on her fingers, and inside her mouth. No money was found on Rawls's person. The next day, April 14, 1986, the police searched defendant's room at 1160 East 80th Street and found victim Durneall H.'s bus pass. The autopsy of Sharon Rawls was performed by Deputy Medical Examiner Susan Selser. Dr. Selser did not testify at defendant's trial, where the medical evidence was presented by her supervisor, Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran, an expert in forensic pathology and the Chief of Forensic Medicine of the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner's Office. Based on his experience, a review of Dr. Selser's report, and photographs, Dr. Sathyavagiswaran attributed Rawls's death to asphyxia due to compression of her neck and also obstruction of her airway. Douglas Ridolfi, a senior criminalist with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, testified that a large amount of semen was found both in Rawls's vagina and on her panties, and that some of the semen came from someone who was a blood type A secretor. Defendant is a type O nonsecretor, as was murder victim Rawls. [1] In Rawls's vagina, Ridolfi discovered a foreign enzyme that could not have lasted very long within a vaginal sample. He attributed the enzyme to intercourse occurring shortly before Rawls's death. Ridolfi stated that based on [defendant's] enzyme markers, I felt that he could be included as a possible donor of more recently deposited semen. The bloodstain on defendant's sweatshirt was consistent with Rawls's blood type, which is shared by approximately 6 percent of the general population in Los Angeles County.