Ghettoside

by Jill Leovy

  Starks responded mostly with silences—one stretched for fifteen seconds—and deep sighs. Skaggs paused periodically to let him talk. When he didn’t, Skaggs fell back on his usual meandering chatter, seeking an angle that might provoke Starks into loquaciousness. At one point, Skaggs unintentionally echoed Wally Tennelle in a revealing way: he told Starks he had always been able to look defendants in the face in court and had no fear of their anger. “Why? ’Cause all’s I do is go in there and say what happened,” Skaggs said. His words were almost identical to those Tennelle used when explaining why he was not afraid to run into people he’d arrested. Both men believed deeply in the straightforwardness of their craft. For all the deception that went into interrogations, they saw their work as a simple effort at truth seeking: they presented the facts as best they could ascertain them, turned them over to a court, and let go of the results. Skaggs was once asked to turn over the records of an investigation to authorities in Mexico who had extradited his suspect. He later described this as one of the worst moments of his career—being forced to cede control of the facts he had gathered to a foreign court that he neither understood nor trusted. For Skaggs, the American system was his safety net.

  He never expressed resentment of Miranda or any other constraint of constitutional due process. He was used to the restraints and drew comfort from the knowledge that once he finished, his work would be painstakingly vetted by the defense, judge, and jury. “Just say what happened” was another of La Barbera’s credos from the old Southeast homicide squad. Skaggs and Tennelle believed so wholeheartedly in this description of their role as law enforcement officers that they did not see how anyone could be mad at them. This was part of the emotional equipment of men capable of scorching earth.

  Skaggs even went so far as to offer Starks a pretty good defense: he suggested that a question remained about whether he knew what Davis planned to do. Did he “just jump out of the car and do his own thing?” he asked.

  Assigning intent to Davis alone would have been a potentially effective legal strategy for Starks, although it went against some evidence in the case. There was, for example, Midkiff’s account of being yanked out of the driver’s seat for the getaway so Starks could take the wheel. But Starks did not take the bait. “I’m overwhelmed. I don’t have nothing to say,” he said.

  Skaggs worked every angle. He exhorted Starks to look him in the eye. “How come you don’t look someone in the eyes when they’re talking to you?”

  “I don’t know,” Starks answered. “My dad—he says the same thing.” It was the only exchange between them that day that revealed anything intimate.

  The rest of the time, Starks spoke in monosyllables or short phrases. He gave no hint of weakening in the way Skaggs wanted him to. Starks suggested he couldn’t be expected to remember events Skaggs mentioned because he had been “jumped” in 2002 and “my memory’s been messed up ever since.” He said people were lying about him. He said, “I weren’t nowhere near it.”

  At last, Skaggs prodded Starks for “your side of the story,” one last time.

  Starks took his time, then answered slowly:

  “I told you my side. There is no side. I wasn’t there. I didn’t do nothing,” he said.

  Skaggs exhaled in a long breath. It was over.

  On February 19, 2008, the Los Angeles district attorney filed charges against Devin Davis and Derrick Starks in the murder of Bryant Tennelle.

  Skaggs had barely spoken to Wally Tennelle through the whole course of these events.

  He had made one mortifying visit to the Tennelle family early on. This was when he was still paired with Bernal. A supervisor from the bureau had come, too. Skaggs couldn’t stand working this way. In Southeast, he had always sought quiet and intimate encounters with grieving families, but this felt like a conference of diplomatic envoys, and the conversation was stiff and formal. “We went three deep!” he exclaimed later in disgust.

  But at some point, as the case broke open and Skaggs became sure it would be solved, he picked up the phone. For the first time, he spoke one-on-one to the RHD colleague he barely knew. He told Tennelle what had happened. Tennelle did not ask any questions. Skaggs said arrests were pending.

  Then, as Skaggs had done so many times before, he fell silent and waited, listening as Tennelle wept at the other end of the line.

  MUTUAL COMBAT

  Sam Marullo stared at Sal La Barbera in disbelief.

  It was the summer of 2008, several months after charges were filed in the Tennelle case. The trial was still more than a year away, and Skaggs’s initial victory was fast fading from view.

  Marullo was in T-shirt and jeans, having returned from a long day’s stakeout. He stood in the new Southeast detectives’ “pod” of cubicles, which was now part of South Bureau Criminal Gang Homicide Group, Gannon’s combined South Bureau detective office at the Seventy-seventh Street station. In the LAPD, “innovation” often meant reverting to previous practice, and this new organizational structure was essentially a reprise of the old South Bureau Homicide unit that had launched Skaggs’s career.

  Marullo adhered to Skaggs’s rule of putting every hour to use, including evenings. He had been about to leave in pursuit of a witness when La Barbera stopped him and told him to go home instead; he could not approve the overtime. La Barbera had just learned his overtime budget was to be cut by 57 percent.

  In any world that made sense, homicide detectives would have been compensated with set salaries like other professional white-collar workers.

  But in the anachronistic world of American policing, they were bluecollar workers paid by the hour, and prohibited by union rules from unpaid work after hours. So Marullo was effectively grounded. With all the other impediments, it seemed one more insult. Marullo was wavering.

  Pat Gannon had hoped Skaggs’s success on the Tennelle case would inspire the many young apprentices in his new consolidated “group.” It had worked to some extent. One detective coined a noun in the aftermath of the arrests—a “John Skaggs Special.” It meant a certain kind of investigation: aggressive, relentless, field-focused.

  But new difficulties had already cropped up.

  In the new office in the Seventy-seventh Street station, one-way windows to the interrogation rooms had been installed backward: suspects could observe police, but not the reverse; the windows had to be covered. The office phones didn’t work. There weren’t enough sedans. Supervisors were secretly hoarding “salvage” cars. One of the office secretaries had gone rogue. She had been ordered to ration office supplies but was secretly handing out pens and notepads anyway.

  Gannon had moved on, and the group’s new commander, Kyle Jackson, formerly of RHD, had never been a detective. His introduction had provoked dismayed murmurs. Jackson was on his last command before retirement and had a persnickety reputation. He believed, he said, in “dotting i’s and crossing t’s.” Tall and thin with a long oval face, Jackson had introduced himself to the detectives by lecturing them on racial and gender bias, a gold bracelet flashing under his sleeve. As he talked, a bright patch of sunlight on the roll call tables faded and the detectives’ faces grew progressively glummer.

  Then word came that John Skaggs was leaving. Skaggs had been transferred to head up the new homicide unit in a new police station under construction north of the Ten.

  Skaggs had been struggling since his promotion to D-3. His slot in Southwest had been temporary. He and Barling had been assigned to train new young Seventy-seventh Street detectives. But Skaggs itched to get back to investigating. The Tennelle case had boosted his visibility, and an ambitious new lieutenant in the new Olympic Division wanted him to head a very small unit by himself. Skaggs sensed an opportunity to take a more hands-on approach to cases. He felt, like Tennelle years before, that he was running out of good ghettoside options.

  It left South Bureau, as always, short of master craftsmen. “That no-good rotten bastard Skaggs,” Prideaux called him jokingly behind his back. He wa
s miffed. Skaggs hadn’t even bothered to tell Prideaux about the transfer. Prideaux tried to enlist Barling in his resentment. But Barling, ever loyal to Skaggs, just stared back at him blankly.

  La Barbera remained in charge of Southeast but now worked under Prideaux. He hated reining in Sam Marullo, who, with Kouri as his partner, had continued to live up to his moniker “Li’l Skaggs.” But the overtime restrictions were no joke. An economic recession had slammed an unprepared nation in late 2008, and local governments were reeling. La Barbera worried he’d use up his allotment for the week, then be swamped with new homicides. Now he told Marullo his interview would have to wait.

  Marullo stared. La Barbera, he realized, was serious.

  Marullo was enough like Skaggs and Tennelle not to appear angry. He had the good detective’s gift of an unflappable demeanor. But he made it clear what he thought. This witness was key to solving the killing of a thirty-two-year-old black man: without him, the case might not be cleared. La Barbera remained firm. “Fine!” Marullo said at length, and spun away.

  With Kouri later, Marullo fumed. What was the department thinking? Why didn’t people care? Marullo was discovering anew, in 2008, what Wally Tennelle, Sal La Barbera, and John Skaggs had discovered years before: that, relative to the challenge, to work ghettoside homicide was to dwell in the weakest outpost of the criminal justice system.

  Overtime reductions were, of course, a pay cut for homicide detectives. But it was the practical difficulties that stung Marullo, who might have earned overtime doing something else.

  For ghettoside homicide detectives, the ability to work odd hours was essential. It was absurd to assume witnesses could be corralled via office-hours appointments made by phone. The whole job was ambushing people who sought to avoid cops—barging in on them, pleading with them, going back to plead again.

  Aware that detectives were looking for her, one witness on a Southeast case left a decoy note on her door: We’ll be right back, we went to pay the gas bill, it said. The note remained for days, growing soggy in the rain. At length, the detectives camped at her door until it opened and she grudgingly confessed to the ruse.

  So when Prideaux had first announced the overtime reductions at the weekly meeting, sheeshes erupted from the benches. “We have seven hundred open cases!” Dave Garrido had protested. Chris Barling had cited the math: based on current caseloads, and assuming court procedures intervening, detectives would be left with only sixteen hours to work each case, he said.

  Ever mindful of morale, La Barbera had tried to soften the blow by making light of the restrictions. One day, he wrote on the whiteboard: “Top Ten OT Reduction Strategies: (1) Drive faster (2) Wear running shoes” et cetera. But Marullo couldn’t laugh.

  Skaggs, Barling, and La Barbera were used to it—they had been tilting at windmills for years. But Marullo was growing increasingly frustrated. Although he had solved many cases, his few unsolveds ate at him.

  In April, a black man named Nye Daniels, a John Skaggs witness in his early years at Southeast, had been murdered. Marullo had been assigned the case but had no leads. He had formed a bond with the mother of Daniels’s two children, who was now raising them alone. The children’s photos were taped to his computer terminal, their small faces gazing at him day after day.

  As Skaggs had taught him, Marullo always gave his personal cell phone number to victims’ family members, and sometimes even to the parents of suspects. For months now, he had been getting calls from the mother of Henry Henderson, an eighteen-year-old killed next to Barbara Pritchett’s house. Pritchett had been startled by the gunshots. Venturing out, she had recoiled at the sight of the teenager’s empty shoes. Henderson’s mother would call Marullo drunk and distraught. In June, the trial of her son’s alleged killer had ended in a hung jury.

  The Los Angeles Superior Court’s Compton satellite was built in 1978, the same year the LAPD broke off part of the Seventy-seventh Street Division to form the new Southeast Division in Watts.

  Every grim and Kafkaesque aspect of the county’s criminal justice system was at its worst at Compton Courthouse. It rose, a blank white tower, from the midst of jumbled squat buildings, the only high-rise in sight.

  Exterior walls were scribbled with faded graffiti alongside the murals of Thurgood Marshall. Junkies and transients wandered the plaza. The lines at the metal detectors were four deep. The elevators were slow and creaky; the stairs were locked because some stabbing or other had occurred there. The courtrooms were a far cry from the posh federal ones in downtown L.A.: notices were posted with Scotch tape, wood veneer fixtures were chipped. Almost nothing that went on in Compton Courthouse ever made the news. Seymour Applebaum, a defense attorney who would soon figure in Skaggs’s story, called it “the most insensitive piece of architecture ever built. It’s a Crusaders’ fort overlooking the Saracen plain.”

  John Skaggs had spent a good portion of his career inside the fort. Now, he made a last trip there before his transfer to the Olympic Division. He came for the trial of Derrick Washington, the sixteen-year-old defendant in the case of Dovon Harris, Barbara Pritchett’s son.

  Pritchett sat behind Skaggs through the trial, wearing a T-shirt with Dovon’s picture inside out because the judge had told her she could not display his image in the courtroom. She had eaten nothing since the previous day, and she sat clasping and unclasping her hands, drawing deep breaths.

  The prosecutor, Joe Porras, stood up. Pritchett began to weep.

  Porras began by announcing that Dovon’s death was “tragic. More so than normal gang violence we are so accustomed to.” It was standard rhetoric to win sympathy for the victim, and Porras knew it was not exactly true—lots of the murders that people had grown “accustomed to” were also tragic—the public just didn’t realize they were.

  Outside the courtroom, Porras was the type of ghettoside worker who saw such nuances clearly. He could speak movingly of what he called “borderline gangsters” and the trauma they endured from watching their friends die. But today was about Dovon, and Porras was giving it his all.

  A photo flashed of the murder scene, Dovon’s black shoes in the foreground. Pritchett pressed a hand over her mouth.

  On the stand, Derrick Washington’s sister denied ever having met John Skaggs. The prosecutors impeached her. She jiggled in her seat as the video ran, then she yawned. Three days later, Pritchett bolted out of the courtroom. Guilty, guilty, guilty. The word echoed in her ears as she fled. The case was a John Skaggs Special. The jury barely deliberated an hour.

  As Skaggs prepared to leave South Bureau, new killings kept pouring in. One night that July, Marullo and his partner, Nathan Kouri, were called to a homicide on a street called West Laconia Boulevard down in the Southeast “strip.” A uniformed officer standing guard offered the sparsest of briefings at the tape. “It’s a black guy,” he said.

  Actually, there were two. Raymond Requeña, twenty-four, moniker “Tigger,” had been found dead in the street by paramedics. Requeña, a Belizean listed as Hispanic in some official reports and black in others, had a slew of arrests that began with taking a knife to school when he was barely entering adolescence and later included assault with a firearm. But of late, police interview cards had recorded him as an unemployed warehouse laborer on disability.

  Several blocks away, at Vermont and 120th, police had also cordoned off a parked Dodge Neon with a “California Police Youth Charity” sticker on it—“Cops helping kids,” read the slogan. The back window had been shot out. Inside, a Tinker Bell backpack spattered with blood lay on the backseat. Police or paramedics had removed a baby seat from the car. It was sitting on the asphalt near the Neon’s rear wheel, flecked with brain matter.

  Fifteen-year-old Daniel Johnson had been in the backseat of that car. He had been riding with two other youths about his age and a mother and her two small children. A bullet had smacked into the car. Daniel had slumped onto the shoulder of the friend next to him, bleeding from a mortal wound, as Raymond Requ
eña was dying a few blocks away on Laconia.

  The killings happened after an argument between two women mushroomed, resulting in a face-off between two youths, both with gang ties. The bigger youth threw a punch at the smaller one. The smaller one left. He returned with his mother and stepfather and a group of friends, loaded in several cars.

  The parents later explained that they had wanted the two youths to have a fistfight to settle the score. Such a response might seem crazy. But in Southeast, cases of parents personally escorting their kids to “catch a fade”—to fight—were not so unusual. Encouraging so-called fair fights was seen as a hedge against homicide: parents sought to ensure that their sons weren’t labeled “punks,” which might increase their risk of getting shot.

  The results were predictable. The caravan rolled up the street—“came in thick,” as one witness later said. The local gang members hollered, “Get outta the ’hood!” The intruders hollered back. More yells. Then gunshots. Both of these hits were tag-alongs; neither had been involved in the earlier fight.

  Even La Barbera, when he first heard the details, thought Laconia was a classic “cleared other—mutual combat.” But Marullo and Kouri were relentless. They worked through the night, the next day, then the next, interviewing fearful witnesses. As they parsed events and talked to traumatized survivors, they came to believe the gunfire was out of proportion to the threat. The smaller youth’s entourage had carried no visible weapons. They had shouted that they sought only a fistfight. The driver of the car in which Daniel Johnson rode had fled to avoid violence. Daniel had never even exited the car. The mothers of both victims were devastated. At Daniel Johnson’s funeral, his hysterical five-year-old sister had to be pulled from the casket; she had tried to yank out his body. Marullo was deeply affected by the families’ grief.