Burned Body in Street Is Identified as That of Missing Landlord : Crime: The Rancho Palos Verdes resident set out to collect rent from delinquent tenants. He never returned.

Los Angeles police said Wednesday they had found the badly burned body of a Vietnamese-American landlord who disappeared last week as he left his Rancho Palos Verdes home to collect rent from delinquent tenants.

The body of John Long, 53, was discovered Nov. 8 lying in a street near 91st Street and Stanmore Drive in Westchester, about five miles from the 10-unit Hawthorne apartment building he has owned since last year, police said.

LAPD spokesman Lt. Fred Nixon said the body was discovered only eight hours after Long vanished, but that the coroner’s office was unable to positively identify it until Wednesday because it had been “severely and extensively burned.”

Police said they had no suspects and few leads in Long’s death. They could not explain how he died.

Long’s wife, Kimchi, said she last saw her husband at about 1 p.m. on the day he disappeared, when he left for the Hawthorne apartment building in his beige 1980 Mercedes-Benz.

Two days after Long vanished, a passer-by found the car abandoned and ransacked near 53rd Street and Central Avenue in Southeast Los Angeles. Scattered inside the car were Long’s business papers and the rosary beads that Long, a Catholic, always carried.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s homicide investigators, who handled the case while Long was still missing, said he was last seen by his wife headed for one of the two English-style townhouse apartment buildings he owned on Truro Avenue.

According to Kimchi and Long’s friends, the landlord visited the apartments frequently because some of the tenants owed him as much as $3,000.

Despite her concerns for his safety, Kimchi Long said her husband always made sure he collected the rent personally, driving into a dangerous neighborhood where drug dealing and prostitution purportedly was common.

Although the buildings appear to be well-maintained, residents and neighbors said that on most evenings, a host of drug dealers operate in an alley behind the apartments.

“I know that area is not the best area,” Kimchi Long, 40, said in an interview before her husband’s body was discovered. “I did mention it to him. He told me not to worry about it. He said, ‘I’m very nice to them.’ ”

Long’s tenants agreed that their landlord was a likable man who has taken good care of the apartments.

Weldon Young, a 40-year-old school teacher, said he considered Long his friend. “He was a nice guy, but I don’t think he should be collecting rent. It’s dangerous,” Young said.

Still, Young said, some residents had run-ins with the landlord.

“People had differences of opinion with him because of certain things he did,” Young recalled. “He came knocking on the door a lot.”

Young and another renter said that on the afternoon of Long’s disappearance, they saw the landlord arrive and walk toward an alley behind the building. They said Long returned to his car a few minutes later and drove off alone.

Long had been scheduled to visit a third building he owned in Hawthorne to show a vacant apartment to a prospective tenant, said Jerry Callahan, Long’s next-door neighbor and friend. But Callahan said it was not clear whether Long ever arrived for the appointment.

Kimchi Long, who had been living with her husband and 12-year-old son, Michael, in Rancho Palos Verdes, recalled the day of her husband’s disappearance with sadness.

She became concerned when her husband did not return home for dinner, she said, and by midnight she began to telephone police and local hospitals.

“He didn’t call, so I thought maybe he was stuck in traffic,” she said. “After 10, I started worrying and my son started asking me, ‘Where’s daddy?’ ”

After Long’s disappearance, Callahan, an attorney, served eviction notices on two tenants of the Truro Avenue apartment building who, he said, are thousands of dollars behind on their rent. Callahan also said he intends to serve eviction notices on other delinquent tenants.

Callahan described Long as a clever businessman and investor, but not thick-skinned enough to be a good landlord.

“I think he has a very soft heart,” Callahan said. “(The tenants) take advantage of him. They say they don’t have money and he believes them.”

Kimchi Long said that when she asked her husband why the tenants were frequently late with the rent, he answered: “Oh, they are very poor. Just give them a chance.”

Long arrived in the United States from Vietnam in the 1960s and later became a naturalized citizen and received training at De Paul University in Chicago as an electrical engineer. At the time of his disappearance, Long was working as an independent real estate broker out of his home.

It was only in recent years that Long began to invest in apartment buildings.

Sheriff’s deputies said they were preparing to launch a door-to-door search for the missing landlord when they were informed that Long’s body had been identified.

In a strange twist, authorities later announced they had mistakenly identified a second body found near the airport as that of the missing landlord. That body was discovered Wednesday by LAPD officers but it turned out to be that of a 74-year-old resident of an apartment building who had died of natural causes.