Serial rapes fuel debate on landlords' security role

Mary Gonzales lives in self-imposed lockdown. When her fiance is at work, she keeps the doors and windows to their one-bedroom apartment shut tight. Her pit bull puppy stands guard on the patio. She won't take the trash out or walk the dog by herself even in broad daylight.

Ignore for the moment that Gonzales forks over $495 a month in rent and that the place sometimes feels more like a cell than a home.

"I'm a prisoner," she said. "I can't breathe the fresh air and hear the outdoors. I have to leave everything closed because if it can happen at night, it can happen during the day."

Just after 4 a.m. May 18, a young woman was raped at Flamingo West Apartments, 3950 Mountain Vista St. Authorities count her as the seventh and most recent victim of a serial rapist who has terrorized the Las Vegas Valley since December 1996.

The attack has left Gonzales, a Flamingo West resident since March, so shaken that when she walks to her car alone at night, she brings along a cordless phone.

"I freaked out because I used to keep my windows open," said Gonzales, 32, who works in housekeeping at the Luxor hotel-casino. "I thought this was a safe place."

No longer. That's why her fiance, Jermaine Wesley, put in extra window locks and bought the pit bull. It's also why the couple and Gonzales' 15-year-old son want to move out later this summer.

Gonzales realizes no apartment -- or house, condo or duplex, for that matter -- offers a crime-free guarantee. Still, while the rapist remains at large, and with most of his attacks happening in southeast Las Vegas in the vicinity of Flamingo West, she wonders why her complex provides only one nighttime patrol officer.

"For what I'm paying (in rent), they should have more people. If I'm paying that much and other people are paying even more, then they should have more security," Gonzales said.

Her gripe is not an uncommon one among apartment dwellers. To be sure, tenants, landlords and law enforcement all agree the good guys can't be everywhere at once. Personal safety, as the phrase implies, is ultimately a personal matter.

At the same time, there's a sense among renters that even as they take it upon themselves to install dead bolts and chain locks, property managers skimp on their end. Talk to enough tenants and a consensus emerges: When complexes of several hundred units employ only a single security officer -- or, just as often, none at all -- it seems that what management companies really want to guard is the bottom line.

And with a sexual predator prowling the city, it's no surprise that renters, especially women, think landlords are shirking their responsibility.

"We should have at least two security guards, one at each end of the complex," Joyce Breece, another Flamingo West tenant, said. "It's not asking much."

[STORY BREAK HERE] One of the few solid clues in the rapist case surfaced in late March. A 24-year-old woman sleeping in her apartment at the Flamingo Polo Club, 3110 E. Flamingo Road, managed to pull off the assailant's black wool cap as she defended herself.

As police pondered the new bit of evidence, Flamingo Polo owner Paul J. Bertuccini mulled how to prevent tenant paranoia.

"When I first heard about it (the attack), I thought, 'I'm going to lose half my residents over this,'" he said.

Bertuccini went on the offensive. To ease tenants' anxiety, he ordered workers to add pin locks to sliding glass doors in every unit. They also installed window locks and longer screws in door jambs.

The upgrade, which cost $3,000, was money well spent. Instead of a tenant exodus, the 180-unit property sits 95 percent full -- and that's without on-site security.

"I've always felt safe in this complex," 45-year-old Theresa Benbenek said. "I feel more vulnerable out there, away from the complex, than I do here."

Other properties hit by the serial rapist have sought to allay residents' fears with similar tactics:

* After a woman was assaulted March 5 at the St. Croix Apartments, 6661 Silverstream Ave., ConAm Management Corp. extended the hours of its courtesy patrol and offered special window locks to residents. The company also intends to hold self-defense classes for tenants.

* Realty Management upped the frequency of its drive-by patrol at the Copper Sands Apartments, 8101 W. Flamingo Road, following a Feb. 7 attack, and posted a $5,000 reward for the rapist's capture.

* Although officials at B&R Property Management, which oversees Flamingo West, did not return repeated phone calls for this article, Breece said that within days of the May 18 incident, workers trimmed shrubs to improve sight lines around the complex and installed additional outdoor lights.

Stout Management, Oasis Residential Inc. and other companies with properties near Flamingo and Pecos roads, the general location of five of the attacks, have cinched up safety procedures as well, from boosting patrol hours to posting a police sketch of the suspect.

Noticeably absent from the list may be the most obvious of precautions -- hiring more security officers. Yet to the popular notion that guards provide a cheap deterrent to apartment crime, property managers counter with a two-part rebuttal: they're not that cheap, and they're not always much of a deterrent.

While an unarmed security guard typically earns $6-$8 an hour -- a wage that both causes concern about the caliber of job applicants and explains the industry's high turnover rate -- it costs as much as twice that to hire one. As a result, complexes will employ only a single officer to avoid hiking people's rent.

"I would love to be able to hire 10 people to be on a property 24 hours a day," said Lana Garman, regional vice president for ConAm, noting that her company has patrol officers at most of its 29 complexes in Las Vegas. "But it (security) certainly is an expense, there's no getting around it. It's like any other business: the costs are going to be passed on to someone."

Then there's the question of whether more guards would hamper -- or instead goad -- an experienced criminal, particularly one who appears to stake out his victims for hours or days. Most patrol officers have no police or military training, making them unsuited to ferret out the likes of a serial rapist. As such, the prevailing wisdom holds that, at the very least, one or two guards will scare off more skittish perpetrators without slicing too deeply into company revenues.

Metro Police Lt. Tom Monahan, head of the sexual-assault division that is tracking the rapist, thinks of it another way. "Is one guard sufficient for an apartment with 300 or 400 units? No. But it's no more insufficient than 1,700 police officers for a city of 1.2 million people."

Beyond cost and deterrence, however, lurks another, uniquely '90s rationale that explains property managers' aversion to security: liability.

Wary of potential litigation, landlords opt to get by without security guards, which in effect absolves them of blame while warning tenants to look after themselves. Those who do hire officers tend to avoid the term "security guard," preferring the more nebulous -- and less legally binding -- "courtesy patrol." The reasoning: "security" implies guaranteed safety, something apartments cannot provide and don't dare promote, according to Realty Management Chief Executive Officer Dan Shaw.

In other words, to guarantee safety is to accept responsibility, a burden best left to professionals.

"We don't get into the law-enforcement business," said Mike Reece, security manager for Oasis, which employs its own patrol officers. "We let those folks advise us as to what's the best we can do."

Darryl Cronfeld sees it differently. The owner of Official Security, which provides patrol officers to 90 multi-family housing properties in Las Vegas, said apartment managers gamble that prospective residents won't notice -- or won't care about -- the level of security.

"Why don't companies have security guards? Because they believe they can still maintain resident retention by having a maintenance guy with a two-way radio walking around," he said.

Added Metro Crime Prevention Specialist Ron Corbin: "(Companies) are willing to accept the risk because upper management are business people. Their sole purpose is to watch the bottom line -- do more with less."

Despite an unwillingness to beef up security staffs, property managers insist that, thanks to other preventive measures, occupancy rates at complexes in the city's southeast have stayed constant in the wake of the rapist's attacks.

David Bauman, president of the Nevada Apartment Association, isn't so sure. A district supervisor for Stout, whose territory includes the Flamingo-Pecos area, Bauman said the assaults "most certainly" have dented occupancy rates. To what degree remains difficult to gauge because a city-wide apartment glut also has hurt, but, he said, "I'm definitely concerned that these incidents impact on some people."

That's true even for residents relatively happy with their landlord. Before moving into Flamingo Polo two months ago, Lisa Papalardo and her husband, Owen McGrath, lived at Flamingo West and the Fountains at Flamingo, where the rapist also has struck. Given that grisly trifecta, Papalardo wishes her complex would hire a patrol officer, even if it's only until police apprehend someone.

"I feel safe here," said Papalardo, 31. "But when I walk in and out at night, I would like a security guard there, just for peace of mind."

It's not likely to happen. Bertuccini portrays guards as "an expense not justified" that create "a false sense of security." He contends that responding quickly to residents' concerns and a rigorous tenant screening process weed out most potential safety risks.

"I've had security (guards) before and caught them sleeping in their car," Bertuccini said. "I'm not going to pay for that."

[STORY BREAK HERE] Corbin makes a habit of breaking into apartment complexes.

Well, not quite. As one of the coordinators of Metro's Crime Free Multi-Housing Program, a safety seminar for apartment managers, Corbin frequently drops by properties, including gated communities, to see whether he can crack the perimeter. Only he never breaches security; it's easy enough to just walk in.

Wearing everyday clothes and snapping pictures of entrance gates, shrubbery and walls as he goes, Corbin rarely is asked what he's doing or why he's there. The lack of attention bothers him, though not simply because workers or security personnel often ignore his presence.

"Safety awareness has to be everybody's problem, not just the person who wears the cap or the badge," said Corbin, who shows the photos to managers in his program to make them aware of security hazards. "But I don't get challenged by residents, either."

Which perhaps hardly comes as a revelation. More than once Las Vegas has been described as a city of shut-ins, a place where folks protect their privacy with Howard Hughes-like vigilance. Combine that with Vegas' standing as a three-shift town in which no one seems to work normal hours and everyone comes from somewhere else, and getting tenants to watch out for each other appears nearly impossible.

As ConAm's Garman put it, "It's a difficult town to meet people or to make friends. People close themselves off here. It's not an easy town to adjust to."

In the worst way imaginable, the serial rapist has jarred residents from their cocoons. Besides complexes posting fliers and sending letters about the attacks to tenants, calls to police regarding prowlers and other suspicious types at apartments have increased, according to Capt. Douglas Gillespie, who oversees Metro's southeast command.

The cranking up of public awareness is all the more important because the rapist has entered apartments through open doors or windows in at least five of the assaults, a disheartening pattern for police and apartment officials alike.

"You can make residents aware," Reece said. "You obviously can't make them take the precautions they need to take. A lot of it is up to them."

Yet some tenants contend that no matter what precautions they take, property managers, by virtue of balking at extra patrol officers, have refused to return the favor. For Gonzales, that may mean taking her rent money elsewhere.

"I want to get out of here," she said. "I want to be able let the fresh air in."

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