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Lala Starr just walked through the door when he saw a masked man holding a gun inside the forest hill.
Starr thought this was part of a game called Water Assassin.
“It’s not uncommon for kids to sneak around our homes with big spurt guns,” she said.
Starr testified at a preliminary hearing in Van Nuis’ court on Wednesday. There, we described a series of strange and disturbing events that began on the afternoon of March 3rd.
She, her son, and husband, pushed them into the closet and was captured by a man who rode the door with plywood. Starr and her spouse testified that the man said he intended to empty his retirement account. If they resisted, he promised that they would be trapped inside and burned down the house.
The man is eventually accused of lure, robbery and blackmail, and her family turns out to be no stranger to the star. However, when she first saw the person standing in the hallway wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, dark pants, balaclava and blue latex gloves, she had no idea who he was.
She thought one of her son’s friends had gone too far with the squirting gun game. She thought she would call him a bluff and she left.
Something hard crashed behind her head. The intruder pushed her against the wall and threw her onto the ground.
“There was blood everywhere,” she said.
The intruder offered several zip ties. “Behave,” he said.
Star slipped the ties around his wrists, and the intruder tightened them tightly.
He limped Starr into her legs and tied her to a chair in a walk-in closet with a zip attached to the master bedroom. She asked what he wanted. Money, he said.
Starr tells him where to find the key to their safe, holding about $3,000 in cash that belongs to her in-laws, avoided by the Palisades fire.
“Please,” she said, “take the cash and go.”
After dragging Star’s son into the closet and tying him to another chair, the intruder offers to place the compression on her head.
He spoke with “a kind of Eastern European accent,” but the star testified, but sometimes expired to “other unidentified accents.” The masked man seduces himself while they waited for her husband to return.
He was smuggled through “Atlanta port” inside a shipping container, he said. Describing himself as a kind of servant of the indentured, he said, “I was forced to work for a criminal enterprise, but if I didn’t, I would be killed.”
“He emphasized that he knows a lot about us,” Starr recalls. The intruder said he was watching the family come and go by hacking into the neighbor’s surveillance system that provided a view of their driveway. He also, oddly enough, knew the names of the people who lived in the house before Starr did.
I crept up for two hours. Star then heard her husband punch the cord at the door and clicking the click of a cycling shoe on the floor.
“You can hear him walking around the house and trying to understand what’s going on,” she testified.
The intruder pointed his gun at the bedroom door and “waiting for him to turn the corner,” Starr said.
Craig Dedden testified that he had met a gun pointed in his face.
“Relax,” said the masked man holding the gun.
The voice sounds familiar, Dedoden recalls his thoughts.
The intruder ordered Didden to email him and his wife’s employer and his son’s school, explaining that they will be gone for the next few days. Dedden testified that he tried his best to zip and type while the man read over his shoulder.
The intruder told his family.
“He said there are many tools to work with us,” Starr testified.
When the suspect brought them snacks – bananas, beef jerky, sparkling water – felt the ordeal was heading towards absurdity. “It seemed very disharmony to tie someone into a closet,” she said.
Remaining in the darkened wardrobe, Starr testified that he heard the sound of an electric drill as the intruder boarded the door with plywood seats. After the house was silent, they ran through the pockets of clothing in their closets, spotting a manicure kit and a ninja star in a box of childhood memorial items. I used these tools and nail files that Star had slipped in her pocket when she used the toilet, cutting the zip ties and making plans.
Looking through the gap in the closet door, Dedden asked for water. He didn’t hear anything, but he kicked out the plywood from the door and was raw. The three climbed through the bathroom window, enlarged the backyard fence and smashed the window of a neighbor called 911.
Starr and Deadden walked around the home with officers from the Los Angeles Police Department. The star testified to her, and her mother’s engagement ring was missing. So was the series of pearls she wore on her wedding and her great grandfather’s pocket watch.
The Doorjeans were closed and food was scattered around the kitchen. In the garbage cans in the kitchen and bathroom, the detective finds bursting blue latex gloves. Atty. Katherine Chung said in court.
Police tested their DNA gloves. After receiving the results, they arrested Rodolfo Christopher Gill – the son of Starr and the neighbour of Dedden’s neighbour.
Star testified that she and Gill’s family were “not very close” but “comfortable neighbors.” She knew Gill for 15 years, when she lived next to his family.
“We share a driveway,” she said.
In his bail claim, Gill’s attorney said his 35-year-old father had no “previous violent criminal history.” According to the tax return attached to the complaint, Gill reported being self-employed and won around $40,000 in 2024.
His attorney, Paul Geller, asked Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Diego Edver to dismiss the charges against Gill, saying they were not supported by the evidence.
“It’s very likely that this was a replica gun,” he told the judge.
Edbur determined that Gill had heard enough testimony to withstand trials of 16 counts of inviting, assault, false imprisonment, robbery, robbery and criminal threats.
The sheriff’s aide handcuffed Gill back into his prison cell, and he nodded to his family in the courtroom audience.
It is unclear if they still live next to Star and Deadden.
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