The Los Angeles Police Department announced this morning the arrest of 50-year-old Charlie Samuel, a parolee with a history of violence, for the shocking, daylight carjacking murder of 17-year-old Lily Burk.

Detectives learned on Saturday that latent fingerprints collected from Lily's car were ex-con Samuel's. Bizarrely, about 30 minutes after he allegedly killed Lily in broad daylight, Samuel was

picked up by LAPD's Metropolitan Division Mounted Unit — cops on horses — on a street downtown for drinking beer in public and possessing a

crack pipe.

It appears, from a riveting scoop quoting unnamed sources and published by the Los Angeles Times at

10:18 a.m., that Samuel is a failure of drug treatment programs and recently

violated his parole. It is unknown why he was allowed to remain on the

streets.

Lily's body was found by a passerby slumped in the passenger seat of her black Volvo around 6:30 a.m. Saturday near downtown's Skid Row, in an increasingly tony loft district several miles east of where she was abducted near Southwestern University School of Law.

The murder of the teenager, who according to some

reports was planning on working with the homeless this summer, has

devastated the kids and families at her private school, Oakwood

School in North Hollywood, which founded on a philosophy of humane education that focuses on the arts, sciences and humanities.

Her parents are well-known Los Angeles music writer Greg Burk, and law professor Deborah Drooz. The figure who has emerged as the family spokesman is Nick Goldberg, a top editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times

Lily, who was entering her senior year at Oakwood

School, left her home in Los Feliz about 2 p.m. Friday to run an errand

for her mother, Deborah Drooz, who is a law professor at Southwestern Law in the Westlake area, one of the poorest immigrant areas of the city.

She called each of her parents

hours later, asking how she could get cash using a credit card at an

ATM. According to early reports, her parents were bothered by her strange phone calls and told her to return home.

Police, who believe she was murdered later that day, said that there

were signs of struggle found in the Volvo. Detectives said Lily suffered

head trauma, and the windshield of her car was broken — though it had not been in an accident.

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