Police have arrested a suspect in the shooting of two worshipers at a Southern California synagogue.
Christopher Littlejohn, 37, was taken into custody April 15 in connection with the early morning shooting last October in the underground garage of the Adat Yeshurun Valley Sephardic Synagogue in North Hollywood.
A lone gunman shot Maor Ben-Nissan and Allen Lasry in the knees as they arrived for the early minyan.
Littlejohn, of Northridge, had been arrested last July for pointing a gun at a person in Beverly Hills. He is being held in lieu of a $2 million bond.
Police quickly ruled out that the shooting was a hate crime, as initially feared.
“The shooting resembled a targeted surgical strike,” L.A. Deputy Police Chief Michael Downing said in the Jerusalem Post. Downing, who heads the LAPD’s Counter-Terrorism and Criminal Intell-igence Bureau, also told the Post that “the two men were targeted as part of a stern warning linked to a criminal organization.”
Downing later qualified the statement, however, saying that he had been quoted out of context and had no evidence that organized crime was involved.
Organized crime by Israelis in such areas as real estate, fraud, money laundering and narcotics is of growing concern in the L.A. area, according to Downing and Capt. Greg Hall, heads of major crimes.
“Israeli criminals in this city are very sophisticated,” Hall said. “We have to ask ourselves what else is going on that we don’t know about.”
Adat Yeshurun Valley Sephardic Synagogue has a membership of some 150 families, primarily North African Jews, with a sprinkling of Latino, American and Israeli Jews. — jta