Ghettoside

by Jill Leovy

  Tennelle had remained in the Seventy-seventh for practical reasons, of course—the same ones that kept Baitx in El Sereno. But there was more to it. A secret reason, never voiced. It was a reason rooted in principle, the same one that had prompted him to refuse promotions to RHD for so long.

  Wally Tennelle believed people in South Los Angeles deserved good cops. Committed cops. Cops who were willing to live in their neighborhoods. He held this belief so close that even his family members did not fully understand his views. It came out reluctantly, years later, only after he was repeatedly pressed.

  Tennelle confessed that he had long been bothered by the way some of his fellow police officers behaved in ghettoside settings. He had concluded, “If you live sixty miles away, it’s easier to disrespect people, to blow them off.” He had not wanted to be that kind of cop. Tennelle was that rare officer who actually lived the philosophy so long advanced by LAPD critics: he had chosen to live in the city he policed out of valor and a sense of responsibility.

  “I believe,” he said in his understated way, “in watching over the community I live in.”

  Tennelle was the kind of ideal cop the city had long claimed it wanted. And now his son was dead. And the case was just another unsolved ghettoside murder.

  THE ASSIGNMENT

  June turned to July. Skaggs landed a rare nonsupervisory homicide D-3 spot in the Southwest Division around the University of Southern California, where he would work alongside Rick Gordon. He was preparing to leave Southeast and move to the Southwest station until the new Criminal Gang Homicide Group offices were ready in the Seventy-seventh Division. The three divisional units would then be combined in a large second-floor office in the ziggurat-style station house on Broadway, near Florence Avenue.

  Meanwhile, black men kept getting killed south of the Ten. The pace of death was moderate by historic standards, but in the weeks after Dovon Harris’s murder, a black man was killed in the zone about every three days.

  Among the dead was Anthony Jenkins, forty-six.

  Jenkins was a drug user—a “smoker” in street parlance. He was shot on the sidewalk behind Manual Arts High School in the Seventy-seventh Street Division in the early evening three days after the shooting of Dovon Harris. Jenkins lay bleeding for some time in plain view. Children rolled their skateboards past him. After a long interval, a passerby called 911. When Det. Jim Yoshida of the Seventy-seventh arrived, there was a crowd of people at the scene. As he and his colleagues began to investigate, “they were laughing at us,” Yoshida reported later. “Laughing at us for going to the effort.”

  None of this came as a surprise to Yoshida, one of South Bureau’s practiced hands. But he was in a low mood like lots of South Bureau detectives that benighted summer. Asked about the Jenkins case, Yoshida erupted. “Nobody cares!” he snapped. “Nobody cares! Nobody gives a shit!” Then, late at night on July 11 came a break. Southeast officer Francis Coughlin was patrolling Bounty Hunter territory in Nickerson Gardens when he came across a group of young black men drinking.

  Coughlin was a ten-year veteran of Southeast then a gang officer, pale as a midday marine layer, with thinning sandy-blond hair. He described his background as stereotypically Irish Catholic Bostonian. His flat Boston accent, like that of Chief William Bratton, had for some reason never dulled despite years in California.

  Coughlin was among the more sophisticated breed of Southeast officers. He did not condemn vast swaths of residents as some of his colleagues did. He was fair-minded and discerning enough to put the “knucklehead” percentage in the very low single digits, and he liked many of the people he dealt with on the streets. And, like everyone else in the walled city, Coughlin was baffled and silenced by the bloodshed. “So surreal,” he said. To believe it, “you have to see it.”

  The spot where Coughlin found the drinkers was “in the Nickersons”—that is, the Nickerson Gardens housing project, near where Dovon Harris had been shot. The drinkers saw Coughlin and ran. He chased them. One was in a wheelchair. He rolled away with short, strong bursts. Coughlin said he saw the wheelchair suspect toss a bag of marijuana. He was hoping to find an illegal gun. Coughlin didn’t care about the marijuana. For him, and many of his colleagues, drugs were just a pretext to stop, search, and arrest gang members suspected of other, unsolved violent crimes.

  This was how Coughlin did his job on many a night. Coughlin couldn’t do much about all the shooters in Southeast who got away with it. But he could enforce drug laws, gang injunctions, and parole and probation terms relatively easily just by driving around and making “good obs”—good observations, cop lingo for catching, at a glance, a bulge under a shirt, a furtive motion of hands. A chase might ensue, and sometimes ended with the cops shutting down whole neighborhoods as the LAPD “airship,” or helicopter, thumped overhead. Coughlin took extra risks to get guns—this was the gold standard.

  Coughlin’s methods were guaranteed to look like straight harassment to those on the receiving end. After all, how important was a bag of marijuana in a place where so many people were dying? But Coughlin’s motivation wasn’t to juke stats, boost his department “rating,” or antagonize the neighborhood’s young men. He had seen the Monster, and his conscience demanded that he do something. So he used what discretion he had to compensate for the state’s lack of vigor in response to murder and assault.

  This practice of using “proxy crimes” to substitute for more difficult and expensive investigations was widespread in American law enforcement. The legal scholar William J. Stuntz singled it out as a particularly damaging trend of recent decades. In California, proxy justice had transformed enforcement of parole and probation into a kind of shadow legal system, sparing the state the trouble of expensive prosecutions. State prisons, already saddled with sick and elderly inmates, were all the more crammed as a result.

  But in the squad rooms of Southeast station, cops insisted that desperate measures were called for. They would hear the name of a shooter, only to find they couldn’t “put a case” on him because no witnesses would testify. So they would write a narcotics warrant—or catch him dirty. “We can put them in jail for drugs a lot easier than on an assault. No one is going to give us information on an assault,” explained Lou Leiker, who ran the detective table in Southeast in the early aughts. To them, proxy justice represented a principled stand against violence. It was like a personalized imposition of martial law.

  That’s why Coughlin went in hot pursuit of that pot dealer in a wheelchair. Coughlin caught and searched the man. He found a faded old revolver.

  Coughlin understood why the man was carrying that gun. Black men who lived in Watts were in constant danger. Those who sold drugs were in more danger. And those who couldn’t run away? One could almost say it was a matter of time before serious violence visited a drug dealer in a wheelchair. In fact, a man in a wheelchair from a gunshot injury had been murdered in the Nickersons near the very spot just a few years before.

  Anywhere else, being struck by gunfire not once but twice would have seemed like extraordinarily unlikely chance. But at the coroner’s office, medical examiners were used to seeing old scars from bullets alongside the new and fatal wound. It was like such men had been used for target practice, one coroner’s examiner remarked. Like they were dying in slow motion. The first shots maimed or paralyzed them. The next ones, months or years later, finished them off.

  This man carried that gun to defend himself. He wanted to survive. His legs had already been paralyzed by gunfire. If someone attacked him again, he wanted to be ready.

  Coughlin sent him to jail. He sent his gun to the firearms lab.

  Speedy, high-quality firearms analysis was the one kind of scientific investigation that mattered in solving street homicides. But in the LAPD, the firearms laboratory was drowning in backed-up work. It was overshadowed by the DNA lab, which got more media and public attention. Firearms analysts sometimes had to explain to their own colleagues what they did; journalists frequently confus
ed firearms analysis with the science of ballistics, which deals with the angle and direction of projectiles, not which guns they come from.

  The lab was run by a civilian named Doreen Hudson. Much of her job, like La Barbera’s, consisted of devising schemes to compensate for lack of resources. Black-on-black violence south of the Ten swelled the lab’s caseload. Detectives had to wait weeks for results. Hudson did what she could. She expedited work on certain cases, for example, based on detectives’ discretion rather than political or bureaucratic priorities. Other battles she lost. Police agencies went on melting down seized firearms over her objection that they might constitute evidence. And she had to learn to live with the computerized federal imaging system the LAPD had adopted six years before, despite its limitations.

  The National Integrated Ballistic Information database (NIBIN) catalogued digitized images of bullets and cartridge casings from crime scenes and seized guns. The database could be searched by an algorithm. This allowed fast, cheap searches, matching ammunition used in crimes to individual weapons. But Hudson knew the computer system was not as discerning as trained humans. It relied on simplified digital renderings of microscopic images produced through standardized procedures—a process that eliminated many telling nuances and contours.

  Before, skilled technicians had taped Polaroid photos of bullets and cartridge casings to the wall and examined every microscopic dent and groove with the naked eye to match them to ammunition test-fired from individual firearms. This low-tech method was not efficient, but it yielded good results. The high-tech NIBIN system was a blunt instrument by comparison, and had one especially troubling limitation. Although the LAPD and many other agencies had dutifully entered test-fired bullets from hundreds of revolvers into its database for years, by the summer of 2007, the system had never successfully matched a bullet used in an L.A. crime to a revolver. Not once.

  The gun used to kill Bryant was a revolver. Revolver matches are more difficult than other types of firearm analysis. They are performed by matching striations on bullets to tool marks inside the gun barrel, not cartridge casings to firing pins. Bullets are cylindrical, and the grooves and scratches they bear after being fired wrap around a curved surface. By contrast, breech face markings on the flat part of a cartridge case are relatively easy for a computer to read. So while the NIBIN system was adept at matching casings to semiautomatic pistols, it had proven useless at matching bullets to revolvers. It was an area in which humans remained superior to machines, but the lab was not staffed for such time-consuming expert labor.

  Here again, the criminal justice system seemed to be doing its job when it wasn’t. The NIBIN system appeared progressive and technologically advanced. But in this important area—about one-third of the LAPD’s seized firearms were revolvers—it was just going through the motions.

  Hudson had known Tennelle for years and was heartsick. She was sick of all of it, she reflected—young men shot, cases unsolved, her technicians hampered by cheap, mechanical substitutes for craftsmanship. “I’ve seen way too much of this for way too long,” she thought.

  Rick Gordon was also familiar with the department’s revolver problem. He was pushing for a different approach. So Hudson made a decision: They would bypass NIBIN. Her workers would continue submitting images to the database as required. But they also would quietly assemble their own duplicate database of test-fire exemplars from seized revolvers. This secret trove would be analyzed the old-fashioned way, with the human eye.

  The eye belonged to criminalist Daniel Rubin, who had been trained as a chemist and whose accent betrayed his New York City upbringing. Rubin studied the bullet fragment that Garrido had found at the crime scene, and another recovered by the coroner from Bryant’s head. They were most likely from a Ruger or Charter Arms weapon, he thought. It takes years for criminalists to be able to do this—determine a gun’s manufacturer by the look of a fired bullet. But Rubin, too, had been trained by the Big Years, and he knew the telltale subtleties. He set up systems for diverting the guns that met his criteria, taking care to establish a reliable chain of custody for exemplar bullets. When the test-fires came in, he engraved each bullet with an identification number.

  Presently, Rubin realized the standard copper-jacketed test-fire bullets required for NIBIN produced subtly different patterns than the discontinued, aluminum-jacketed ones used to kill Bryant. A colleague located a stockpile of the defunct ammunition at a local store. It was of a type that Rubin knew might fragment in the recovery tank. To avoid this, criminalists sometimes used paper clips to stuff putty in the hollow points, but that wouldn’t work with these, Rubin thought—the aluminum jackets were too brittle. He inserted a tiny screw in each test-fire bullet to keep it intact—a method he’d learned from another analyst. He gripped the bullets with a piece of bicycle inner tube in place of pliers to avoid leaving marks.

  It was all terribly time-consuming. Soon, Rubin was doing little else. LAPD officers seized more than twenty guns a day. Revolvers were starting to pile up. Rubin eliminated one, then another. By then, he had studied the two Tennelle bullet fragments side-by-side many times, memorizing the microscopic topography he was looking for. Eventually, Coughlin’s seizure—revolver number 22—joined the backlog. But when Rubin looked up the file, he realized the weapon had never reached the crime lab; couriers had somehow neglected to pick it up. He reordered it, and eliminated more revolvers in the meantime.

  Rubin had no hope. He would be searching for this needle in a haystack the rest of his career, he thought—engraving tiny numbers and screwing tiny screws until his last hour on the job. He told himself it could be worse. At least he was still paying his mortgage.

  Then, on August 20, he picked up yet another three-by-five envelope. It contained the test-fire exemplars from revolver 22, an old Charter Arms Undercover, which had finally arrived by courier from the Southeast property room. Rubin sat down at the comparison ’scope. He tilted his favorite fluorescent light at an oblique angle and looked.

  When the first set of grooves lined up, Rubin told himself it didn’t mean anything. He’d been close before. He rotated the little thirty-eights and looked again, rotated and looked. Then he shut his eyes, drew a breath and exhaled.

  A short while later, Rubin got out of his chair and left his workstation. He stood, hands on his hips, gazing into the distance. No, he told himself firmly, it can’t be. He shook his head and went back to the scope. He spun the thirty-eights out of phase and began again, rotating them the other way this time.

  Later that day, Rubin was outside, toiling in the hot sun near LAX. He’d been called out of the office to help process evidence from an officer-involved shooting. Hudson was there too. For more than an hour, Rubin had been trying to tell her something, but they were both busy working different parts of the scene. At last they crossed paths. Rubin spoke hurriedly.

  Hudson listened, frowning. It might seem strange that she did not rejoice upon learning that Coughlin’s seized revolver was the murder weapon. But hunting for a killer is frightening, the more so as a case advances. Enforcing criminal law against violent offenders is one of the most dangerous tasks a state can perform, and for frontline workers, the danger is visceral. Skaggs speculated that some of his underperforming colleagues were held back by subconscious fear. Each step toward an arrest increased the pressure; not catching a killer could feel safer. When Hudson learned of Rubin’s match, she felt not triumph but dread and anxiety.

  There were other reasons to view Rubin’s success with caution. Street guns got passed around, especially “dirty” ones. Firearms analysts viewed a week or two as the maximum time lapse for valuable clues to be gleaned from a match. Much longer than that, and too many people would have handled the gun, making it too difficult to reconstruct the chain of possession.

  It was a little like trying to track down the source of counterfeit bills. The guns used on the streets of South Los Angeles were, almost uniformly, unregistered illegal weapons, obtained from a s
wirling ocean of cheap black market firearms. Many of these guns were pretty old, and so far from point of purchase that it was impossible to trace their history. Investigators in South L.A. were astonished when a gun used in a murder turned out to be legally owned; years would go by without such a gun turning up. Despite California’s relatively strict gun control laws, the illegal market for street guns had persisted for decades. Older gang members from the 1960s would recall buying guns in exactly the same manner and for roughly the same prices as their counterparts fifty years later. You could buy many street guns illegally for a hundred bucks, people said. Gangs usually had a stash.

  This match did not mean the man in the wheelchair was a suspect. Too much time had gone by for that to be likely. But it did mean he was in a chain of people that led back to the shooter. It meant hope.

  Or it seemed to. But the man in the wheelchair offered no helpful information about the gun, and no other clues surfaced. Up at the firearms lab, Doreen Hudson was in a state of suspense, hoping the lab’s findings would lead to a quick arrest. “Instead, we had to accept it,” she said. “It was the usual—another South Bureau homicide that would never be solved.”

  For his part, Tennelle was determined not to ask about the case. He never even looked up the case number on the computer. He didn’t want to taint anything, and he didn’t want the detectives to feel any pressure. But privately, the elation he had felt upon hearing they got a match on the gun faded into disappointment. He went on with his work. He thought about Bryant’s case all the time.

  Skaggs knew about the Tennelle case thirdhand—heard the briefings, noted the anguish it provoked among his colleagues. Skaggs had never spoken to Tennelle. But he knew him by sight. One day, he pulled up to the gas pumps at the Seventy-seventh Division and saw him there.