



On a fall afternoon in 2008, a 12-year-old girl arrived home from school and discovered her father and 9-year-old sister shot to death inside the family’s Hollywood apartment.

Eighteen months later, the girl, now 14, came home to an empty apartment Friday night. She got worried when her mother didn’t come home from work, so the girl walked down to the carport looking for her.

There, she found the body of Karine Hakobyan, 38, slumped in her Honda CRV, with a gunshot wound to the back of the head. On Monday, a team of Los Angeles police detectives were trying to piece together the three killings, which occurred a few blocks from each other in Hollywood’s Little Armenia district.

Detectives believe the killings are connected but declined to provide more details. Det. Michael Whelan stressed that police have no evidence that the victims were involved in criminal activities either in the United States or in Armenia, which they left in 2003. The father, Khachik Safaryan, had worked as a butcher in Hollywood, and the mother worked as a patient care service aid at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles.

Sitting in the family living room Monday next to a shrine of roses and framed family pictures, the girl tried to make sense of what has happened to her family. She told The Times that Friday was a typical day – she and her mother exchanged cellphone calls throughout the day, and she expected her mother home by 8 p.m. What the girl saw when she got to the carport horrified her.

“I just saw blood,” she said. “That’s when I knew something was seriously wrong.”