In a 1984 encounter, Butler man did his part to help hunt down the 'Night Stalker'
When Donny Eozzo left for sunny California a few years after graduating from Butler High School in 1979 to pursue his dream of becoming a rock star, he had no idea his many wild experiences would include physical contact with the gruesome serial killer known as the Night Stalker.
Eozzo, of Butler, said that on Dec. 11, 1984, when he was a 23-year-old singer in the band Pleazer, he and the band's lead guitarist headed to a rock concert at Long Beach Arena in the Los Angeles area.
The guitarist, Jim, was worried during the entire concert that the band equipment in the back of his pickup truck in the arena's parking lot would be stolen, as the young men had come to the show directly from rehearsal.
During the performances of W.A.S.P. and Krokus, local college football players acting as security threw the duo out of the concert for standing in the aisle.
The friends went outside to a balcony overlooking the parking lot and ran into two young teenagers who worked as roadies for Pleazer.
“Jim said, 'Hey, did I leave my dome light on in the truck?'” Eozzo recalled. “One of the roadies said, 'Dude, there's someone in the front seat!”So, the four took off running for the truck to confront the would-be thief, who was trying to hotwire the Toyota pickup, and the thief's lookout person.Eozzo grabbed the lookout man and slammed him against the back of the truck as the man said he didn't speak English. The man feverishly pointed to the man inside the truck, who was now running full speed for the Pacific Coast Highway.The four chased the thief, and when they caught up to him, Jim issued a hard blow to his face.Knocked to the ground, Eozzo grabbed him by the shirt to pull him back up for another blast.“I remember buttons popping off of his shirt and he fell back down to the ground,” Eozzo said.Just then, all five heard a man's voice say, “The dog doesn't know who the bad guy is.”Eozzo looked up to see a police officer and his K-9 sprinting toward the fracas.“I put my hands up, and all four of us were pointing down to the guy on the ground, telling the officer that we just caught him trying to steal our truck,” Eozzo recalled.The officer quickly cuffed the suspect and deposited him into the back of the squad car. Only a flashlight was found on the criminal.“I never heard him say a word,” Eozzo recalled. “I just remember the dark eyes.”Little did the rockers know that they had run down Richard Ramirez, who was in the midst of a killing spree and would soon be dubbed the “Night Stalker” by the local press.
The police dusted the Toyota's steering wheel for finger prints, charged Ramirez with auto theft and placed him in jail.According to news reports from Dec. 12, 1984, Ramirez spent six weeks in jail before being released.By the time Eozzo and his friends encountered Ramirez, he had brutally assaulted and stabbed to death 9-year-old Mei Leung, a Chinese-American girl, in San Francisco and nearly decapitated Jennie Vincow, 79, in her Los Angeles apartment.Because none of Ramirez's victims had survived up to that time, police had no sketches of him and had no way of knowing he was the serial killer they were searching for when the incident with Eozzo and his band mate occurred.Ramirez would go on to brutally murder 13 more people in the Los Angeles area and one in San Francisco before being chased, caught and severely beaten on Aug. 30, 1985 by a group of citizens who recognized him as the Night Stalker after he attempted to car-jack a woman in Los Angeles.According to online information, Ramirez was always very careful to remove fingerprints from his crime scenes, but left a fingerprint on a window screen and another on a rearview mirror during his brutal crime spree.Those prints were matched with the ones taken from Jim's truck in the arena parking lot, and Ramirez's mug shot from the incident was beamed to TV stations all over the world and used in L.A. and San Francisco newspapers.The mug shot was seen by everyone in Southern California except Ramirez, apparently, as he fled from a Los Angeles store after a group of women shouted “La matador!” (the killer) while pointing at him.On Aug. 25, 1985, Ramirez was identified by police as the Night Stalker, who terrorized Southern California during a murder, rape and kidnapping spree that lasted from June 28, 1984 to Aug. 25, 1985.Eozzo didn't realize he and his band mate had attacked Ramirez until Monday, when his son, Shaun, texted his father from his home in Orange County, Calif., to suggest he watch the new Netflix documentary on the Night Stalker.Shaun had recalled Eozzo telling the story of the concert incident and noticed that the mug shot used in the documentary was of a man with a small wound on his nose and no buttons on his shirt.Shaun then sent his father the mug shot and, after checking the date, Eozzo realized he and his band mate had chased down the Night Stalker.Eozzo said he called Jim in 1985 when police announced they had arrested the Night Stalker.“We said, 'Hey, he has the same name as that dude who tried to steal the truck. I wonder if it's the same guy,'” Eozzo said.The pair largely forgot about the possible connection until Monday, when Eozzo realized the would-be truck thief was indeed Richard Ramirez.“I called Jim and he was like, 'Wow, that's crazy,'” Eozzo said. “That mug shot was the only picture they had of him.”Eozzo said like thousands of other Southern California residents, he was concerned during Ramirez's reign of terror.He recalled making a trip back home to visit Butler in 1985, right before police made their arrest.“When I got back (to California), I had a dream that the Night Stalker was breaking into my window,” Eozzo said.Ramirez received multiple life sentences and died in June 2013 of cancer at age 52 while in custody.“I'd love to say I punched the Night Stalker,” Eozzo said, “but that was Jim. I ripped the buttons off his shirt.”He said he still can't believe the dangerous criminal was apprehended partly because of the mug shot and fingerprints that resulted from an incident in which he was involved.“I'm still pumped up,” Eozzo said.
