Murder of Woman, 93, Shatters Tranquility of Seniors Complex : Crime: Residents of the El Sereno apartments recall a friendly neighbor whose manner bridged a language gap. Police say the victim was assaulted and suffocated.

To most of her neighbors, 93-year-old Soohoo Quon was “the woman in the window.”

“Since she spoke only Chinese I couldn’t say a word to her, so we communicated mostly with a wave and a smile,” said Nora Rogers, 67, a resident of the El Sereno apartment complex for senior citizens where the elderly woman was murdered.

Police said Saturday that Quon, a frail widow who nevertheless fiercely guarded her independence, was sexually assaulted, beaten and suffocated by an intruder sometime Thursday or early Friday.

“In my 29 years on the department, I’ve never seen anything as brutal,” Los Angeles Police Detective Robert Suter said. “Whoever did this is a depraved sicko who needs to be swept from the streets.”

Authorities said Quon was found dead on her bedroom floor early Friday by a home service worker who came to deliver breakfast. Several residents of the well-kept apartment complex in the 2400 block of North Eastern Avenue said they saw and heard nothing unusual between 3 p.m. Thursday, when the victim was last seen by a relative, and 7:30 a.m. Friday, when her body was discovered.

The small, one-bedroom apartment that she rented for $450 a month had been ransacked, but police said robbery did not appear to be a motive. “There was little to steal,” Suter said. “Just the simple things older people tend to keep: pictures of the grandchildren, personal mementos. Nothing you’d kill anyone for.”

Investigators said her attacker apparently entered through the same living room window that served as the disabled woman’s window on the world.

“She was such a gentle woman, only an animal would do something like this,” said Josefina Castanon, 71, the victim’s next-door neighbor, who said she often checked on Quon and sometimes took burritos to her.

“Even though we didn’t speak each other’s language, I loved her very much,” Castanon said in Spanish.

Family and friends said that Quon moved to the apartment five years ago, and had lived alone for the last six months after her 88-year-old sister, who had moved in with her last year, was placed in a convalescent home.

The victim’s grandson said his parents had tried for several months to persuade his grandmother to move back into their home a few blocks away, but that she preferred to keep her own house.

“She was very independent,” said Lonny Quon, 40, who added that his grandmother insisted on moving to the apartment complex, across the street from the El Sereno Senior Citizens Center, as soon as the complex was built in 1986.

Soohoo Quon moved to Los Angeles from Canton Province in 1950, he said, “but never really got away from her roots.”

“She was a very mild woman who didn’t own a TV because she preferred to talk on the phone to many of her Chinese friends,” Lonny Quon said.

As a young girl in China, she met Guey Quon, a teen-ager who had moved back to Canton after surviving the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. In 1912 their families arranged for them to be married.

In 1947, Guey Quon came to Los Angeles, where the couple’s only son and daughter-in-law had already settled, and three years later, he sent for his wife, the grandson said.

“My grandmother raised the five of us kids while my parents struggled to make it with the little market they opened on the Westside,” Lonny Quon said. “If someone was sick in the community, she was the first one there. And if someone was having a baby, she’s the one they’d always call.”

When her husband, who had retired as a maintenance worker at The Times, died in 1978, Soohoo Quon moved into the El Sereno home where her son and daughter-in-law live.

But when the new apartment complex opened a few blocks up on Eastern Avenue and began advertising as a place for seniors only, “she decided that’s the place she wanted to be,” Lonny Quon said. “We worried about her living alone, but she wouldn’t have it any other way.”

In the courtyard of the 100-unit apartment complex, where residents regularly gather at tables near a fountain to exchange small talk, the murder dominated conversations Saturday.

“You’d never dream anything like this would happen here,” said Antonia Hardeman, 79, who has lived there four years. “Now, everyone is talking about trying to get management to install security doors and windows.”

As she spoke, two police officers made the rounds, in what one of them said was an “an effort to provide a little reassurance.”