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ABDUCTION

Sunday, August 6, 2000, West Hills, Los Angeles

 

It was a typical morning in the West Hills section of Los Angeles on a warm summer afternoon. Pauline Mahoney was returning from church with her two boys and one of their friends, and as she approached the intersection of Platt and Ingomar Streets, she suddenly witnessed a sight that ripped apart the tranquility of the day. At least two young men, and possibly three, were beating and kicking a young teenager, who lay on the ground, trying to defend himself. As Pauline recalled later, “The boy they were beating was a young man. They were really beating the crap out of him!”

Mahoney would recall that it was four young men beating up the lone individual, when, in fact, it was two or three against one. Nonetheless, despite her error in numbers, she witnessed a severe beating in progress. Mahoney recalled, “The lone boy was lying on the ground, so I couldn’t tell if he was thin or heavy, but he was not an overweight boy. He was lying down against a wall, and the others were kicking and beating him. It was all happening as I was driving by. I observed all of this for about twenty seconds, and then they threw him into a white van. The young men who were beating him were all white, and all of them had short hair. The victim was also white.

“My vehicle was only about four or five feet away from them. I drove up to a stop sign, and instead of making a right-hand turn, which I would normally do to go home, I continued forward in order to get the license plate number. I drove by slowly and got the license plate number, and then continued on slowly, looking in my rearview mirror just to kind of see what was going on. The van started to drive away, and it left one of the attackers on the street. It stopped to let him get in, and I was trying to look inconspicuous. Then I made a right at the next block and went home.

“My two boys in the car with me were six and nine years old. I wasn’t able to write down the license plate number right then, so me and the boys stated the number out loud as we saw it, and continued repeating it until we got home. Then I wrote it down before I made a phone call. It was only about a minute from the time I saw the boy being beaten until I got home and made the phone call.”

Mahoney’s voice was excited as she called 911 at around 1:00 P.M. on August 6, describing the beating and what appeared to her to be a kidnapping. As far as things she observed, the boy who had been beaten did not voluntarily climb into the van, but rather was thrown in against his will.

Amazingly, there was a second phone call that went to a 911 dispatcher about the same incident. It was from a woman via her cell phone, and though she refused to give her name, the information she gave was similar to that of Mahoney. The caller described young men beating a boy as he lay on the sidewalk near a wall. Then the attackers threw the young man into a white van and drove away.

Despite such good information, especially from Mahoney about the van’s license plate, nothing would go right from that point forward. The dispatcher who took the call from Mahoney reported it to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) as “an assault with a deadly weapon with subjects still on scene.” In fact, it should have been labeled as a more urgent dispatch—“an assault still in progress.”

When LAPD officers Brent Rygh and Donovan Lyons arrived on the scene at Ingomar and Platt, there was no assault in progress by that point; there were no assailants, no victim, no van. Officer Rygh said later, “I thought it was some high-school kids just slap fighting, or horsing around, the way high-school students tend to do.”

Officer Rygh did call Pauline Mahoney on his own cell phone, but he never went to see her in person. When he took the information she had given about the van’s license plate, he ran the numbers, but mistakenly thought the address of the van’s owner was a long distance from the scene, rather than close by. Officer Rygh and his partner did not go to the van owner’s address to check up on the whereabouts of the van. Nor did they pass on the information they had to other nearby police agencies.

Further mistakes were made on the second 911 call by a dispatcher. This dispatcher labeled the call as an “information-only broadcast,” instead of the correct labeling as a “kidnapping in progress.” Officers Rygh and Lyons never got any information about this second message at all, since it was deemed to have such low priority.

Little did the LAPD know at the time that the white van was now traveling out of the county, eventually heading for Santa Barbara. Inside, it held four young men, three of them kidnappers: twenty-year-old Jesse Rugge, twenty-year-old William Skidmore and nineteen-year-old Jesse James Hollywood. Their victim was fifteen-year-old Nick Markowitz, and his half brother, Ben, had once been Hollywood’s pal and fellow drug dealer. But on August 6, 2000, Ben was no longer Jesse Hollywood’s friend, and the feud that had gone on between them for six months now took a dangerous turn for everyone involved.