UPDATE at 4:08 p.m., Monday, July 6, 2015: Police have identified the victim, below. See more details about the attack, and about the woman, at the bottom.

Bizarre, grisly crimes happen in Hollywood. All the time.

But this one seems to have even seen-it-all Los Angeles Police Department cops flummoxed.

Investigators say a 31 30-year-old woman was walking with a companion down McCadden Place toward Sunset Boulevard when she was gunned down by a man on foot about 10:12 last night.

Los Angeles Fire Department paramedics responded and declared her dead at the scene, police said. No one else was injured.

The shooter used a shotgun to blast the woman in the head, police told us. Although he was originally on foot, the suspect got into a black sedan that headed north on McCadden toward a busy Hollywood Boulevard, LAPD said in a statement today.

It happened only half a block from Hollywood High School, and a few blocks from Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue and a few blocks more from LAPD's Hollywood Division station at Wilcox and DeLongpre avenues.

Earlier this year, real estate mogul Kameron Segal was shot in the face as he sat in his parked Rolls Royce off Sunset Boulevard and Sierra Bonita Avenue. The suspect was on a bicycle, police said. Segal survived. The crime has yet to be solved.



A police official told us investigators have no motive or suspects in the Sunday night slaying.

The victim's identity was being withheld until her family could be notified, a coroner's official told us this afternoon.

Anyone with fresh info on the attack was asked to call West Bureau Homicide detectives at 213-382-9470.

UPDATE at 3:25 p.m., Monday, July 6, 2015: Police this afternoon identified the victim as 30-year-old Carrie Jean Melvin of Hollywood.

UPDATE at 4:08 p.m., Monday, July 6, 2015: Melvin is from Morro Bay and attended UC Santa Cruz, according to her Facebook page.

LAPD homicide Det. John Skaggs confirmed to us that the page was the victim's.

He said the shooter approached on foot from the rear before opening fire. The victim and her “boyfriend,” Skaggs told us, were walking from her nearby residence, en route to a neighborhood restaurant to the south, when she was gunned down,

While the evidence points to a random attack, the investigator didn't have a qualm with the observation that the shooting appeared on the surface to be a targeted “hit.” “You're correct,” he said.

“You just can't tell.”

Her Facebook page says that Melvin studied film and digital media production at UC Santa Cruz. It says she has worked at Haven Gastropub Brewery in Pasadena and Steingarten in West L.A.

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