by Jill Leovy
Officers bird-dogged Da’Quawn’s sidewalk shrine, at one point “hemming up” four young mourners in their early twenties. They put them against the wall next to the balloons, candles, and white teddy bears. Uncuffed at length, the young men turned around to argue with the officers. One officer was scolding and contemptuous. But the other, in a reasoning voice, told the four to “be careful … There’s been a lot of shooting.” The young men seemed to hear only the contemptuous officer.
A watching crowd was angry. Why weren’t police out catching the killers? “People are being shot, and what are they doing? Just jacking people up!” one woman said. “Their priorities are mixed-up,” said a man nearby. “You should be out looking for them!” a woman yelled at the departing officers. A young man rejoined that this wasn’t likely. Police wouldn’t bother to solve the murder: “They put less effort on gang members than on others,” he said. “It’s like we are second-class citizens.”
Later that night, when only a few mourners lingered, a car pulled up, and a youth in dark clothes jumped out with an AK-47. He opened fire, swinging the weapon around. A man at the shrine was grazed, and a young woman was hit in the leg. By Tuesday night, between fifty and seventy-five additional officers had been redeployed from other areas of the city to the twelve blocks, which commanders called “the box.”
LAPD brass used a vocabulary their underlings did not. They spoke of “victimology,” and of “biasing” and “stacking” resources, of responding “surgically.” Mostly it meant deploying lots of cops to stop and search people and to conduct parole and probation searches. The surge brought in everyone from elite Metro platoons to Harbor Division traffic cops—the latter none too pleased to have been pulled from their regular duties.
South Bureau commanders were sensitive to the impact of this onslaught and genuinely concerned about the toll of the violence. But they had no other ideas, and in this as in everything else, they were compelled to adhere to civilian oversight, honor public expectations, and respond to political direction, which meant that “proactive” policing and crime “suppression” ruled the day. “I don’t want to be perceived as an invading force,” said Capt. Thomas McDonald, of Southeast patrol. “But at the end of the day, we just want it to stop.”
La Barbera, like many homicide detectives in the south end, was skeptical. In October 2003, six-year-old D’Angelo Beck was killed by a bullet intended for someone else near Avalon and Eighty-seventh Place, after a patrol car had passed the scene seconds before. Skaggs, monitoring the retaliations by phone from Olympic, agreed: “If they don’t see the black-and-white, they’ll do it,” he said.
But what really bothered La Barbera was that the saturation did not include detectives. Fresh officers in uniforms adorned every corner. But every member of his squad was exhausted, and they’d busted through overtime limits. Nathan Kouri had been living out of his sedan for days; the unit had lost the “salvage” cars they’d hoarded, so two detectives were bumming rides from colleagues to help out.
Still, if the saturation produced clues, La Barbera could get behind it. The brass had promised “task forces.” There was always the possibility all those searches could produce a gun or a rumor. “You want to talk to people!” La Barbera said. “Use the laws to get into their cars—then talk. I tell these cops all the time: Be a salesperson. We don’t need the Gestapo stuff.”
But several days of the surge had produced not a single report to homicide detectives. Despite numerous arrests and citations, not one witness had been identified. Not one rumor. Not one gun. There was always this disconnect between so-called proactive policing and detective work.
It was late the following week when La Barbera finally got a report of the arrests made by a special narcotics buy team that was part of the surge. He scanned it, appalled.
The team was supposed to advance the investigations. Instead, it had gone to a parking lot where crack addicts camped in plain sight and picked up some sickly middle-aged addicts including several women on minor possession charges involving twenty- and thirty-dollar rocks of crack cocaine. La Barbera’s crew knew that parking lot well: they had recently recruited a homicide witness from there, a homeless man who burst into tears when they tried to interview him. It turned out his daughter had been murdered.
The addicts had no part in the youthful violence; they weren’t even in the territory of either suspect gang. “You gotta be kidding me,” La Barbera muttered as he read. “The fucking parking lot!”
The surge had occasioned a modified tactical alert requiring the detectives to don their ill-fitting blue uniforms. Even mild Rick Gordon rebelled. Murders were happening, and “the department’s reaction is to put detectives in uniform!” he exclaimed.
Detectives disliked looking like patrol officers, since people were then less likely to talk to them. The uniforms added to the sense that the neighborhood was under siege, but did nothing to insert justice into it. The spectacle of Rick Gordon, one of the city’s most effective investigators, compelled to play the role of blue scarecrow at the very moment when his craft mattered most was a microcosm of how police had long functioned in the United States: preoccupied with control and prevention, obsessed with nuisance crime, and lax when it came to answering for black lives.
The following Tuesday, despite the massive deployment, two more black people were killed in a double homicide related to the retaliation. They were Drayvon James, twenty-nine—a gang member who had tried to escape the life but had returned to visit with family—and his cousin, Robert Lee Nelson, Jr., sixteen, a student with no criminal record.
To La Barbera, this meant the saturation hadn’t worked. To those above him, it could be argued that things would have been worse without it. At a “crime control” meeting after the double homicide, commanders talked of “decoy” vehicles and personal theft statistics.
South Bureau chief Kirk Albanese praised the surge: “We put a stop to some issues that had a chance to be more explosive.” When one supervisor cited his division’s success in clearing backlogged cases, allowing detectives to attack new ones more aggressively, Albanese interrupted him with an old canard: “So you have a faster response from detectives!” he said. “But that doesn’t lower crime!”
The LAPD called a press conference on the killing cycle. Nathan Kouri was ordered to speak, since his investigation was the most advanced. The other cases had stalled. Keep it short, he was told.
Kouri was miserable. Waiting for the press conference to start, stripes of sunshine cutting through the vertical blinds in the Seventy-seventh Street Division community room, he sat in a corner, ignoring the press release someone had placed in his hands.
As the cameras rolled, Kouri found a hiding place behind Albanese, a tall man. Albanese talked of “senseless violence” and remarked that when a suspect is sent to prison “nobody wins—we have to find another way.” When it was Kouri’s turn, Kyle Jackson had to push him forward with a hand on his back.
Kouri changed color twice, looked sick, then fell silent before the microphone. Sweat glistened on his upper lip. At last, prompted by a reporter, he spoke in a barely audible voice. He credited everybody else for things he had done almost entirely alone over his days of skipping sleep and living on Nutri-Grain bars. “We used numerous resources throughout the department,” Kouri intoned, staring at the back wall. “Surveillance. ATF task force. Parole Probation. Various uniform entities.”
Afterward, La Barbera was beside himself. Kouri had recently canceled his vacation to compensate for the overtime restrictions. Seeing Kouri, of all people—possibly the hardest-working cop in South Bureau—praise a useless and mostly theoretical “task force” for his own work was almost too much for La Barbera. But Kouri was just relieved to get through it. Fifteen minutes later, the press had packed up their cameras and his complexion had returned to normal.
During the press conference, Kouri had discovered that one of the reporters, Leo Stallworth, had grown up in Nickerson Gardens. Kouri s
at down with Stallworth as the rest departed, relaxed, hands clasped on his head, quizzing the reporter about growing up in the Nickersons. “I fought every day! I remember that. I lived in total fear!” Stallworth told Kouri. It was the early seventies, and the gangs were thick there—“You join or you die,” Stallworth said. Kouri was delighted—how he loved getting information from a good source. “How’d you get out?” he asked. “Football, man!” Stallworth said.
The five victims of retaliation that week in August fell across a spectrum. Their profiles exposed the falseness of the public’s conception of “innocent victims.” A thirteen-year-old boy with no tattoos. A twenty-one-year-old working man, clean-cut and decent. A forty-nine-year-old hustler with an old bank robbery rap living off girlfriends. A twenty-nine-year-old gang member trying to get out of the life. His sixteen-year-old cousin, full of promise.
“All those innocent people,” Skaggs had once said. In this case, they all were, in a sense. Da’Quawn was the most likely of the five to have been killed for more than his skin color, since he was wearing the bandanna. The others, like Bryant Tennelle, were just unlucky.
And there was no difference in the grief left behind.
Thaddeus Risher’s daughter frankly admitted her father’s flaws and addictions—“He was a professional hobo!” she said. Even so, she sobbed talking of his murder. She had visions of his body slumped in the car. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She was astonished by the pain. “Does it ever stop?” she pleaded.
At Da’Quawn Allen’s funeral, men in double-breasted suits, sunglasses, and earrings sat up front and wept. There was talk of the gang members who had recruited Da’Quawn. One rose to speak: “For him to look up to us—it ain’t the way to be,” he said. “We gotta give these babies a chance to live.”
After the service, teenagers streamed by Da’Quawn’s open casket—kissing his corpse, shaking their heads with eyes full of rage, then jamming on caps and stalking away.
At the double funeral for Robert Nelson and Drayvon James, a relative held James’s toddler son so that his mother could view James. The mother wept over the open casket. The toddler, held high behind her, stared at his murdered father over her shoulder. His eyes were wide and confused. At last they bore him away. But the toddler twisted and looked back, eyes still fixed on his father’s face.
At Christopher Lattier’s funeral, a young black man took the podium. “This hurts me and scares me,” he rambled, speaking quickly while staring at a point in space. “I’m afraid I’m gonna die.”
Outside, the sky was brown from wildfires and the smell of smoke filled the chapel. A second young man rose. “I’m trying to live,” he said. “At least to see twenty-one. That’s a lot.” A stir went through the crowd. A youth pastor sprang to his feet and called the young men back. He placed his hands on their shoulders. “We want better for you than just twenty-one! Understand?” His voice was thick. “It is possible in our community to live on for a full life!”
The pastor then called on all the young people present to stand. He told the crowd to place hands on them. “Protect them from the evil thing that lurks in our community!” he cried. “Amen! Amen!” the crowd shouted. The young men for whom they prayed wept like children.
Hordes of cops patrolled “the box” for a week or so. Eventually, Metro officers barged into a Hoover party, arrested several people, and seized some guns. Sal La Barbera considered it the only “good caper” of the surge. But it generated no leads on any homicides.
By fall, his squad had exceeded the overtime allotment and he was sending detectives home to take unplanned days off. La Barbera was feeling moody and pessimistic. His squad too inexperienced. Resources still scarce. Two years since they’d moved to this office, yet the phones still didn’t work. His personal problems were mounting. Cases were going unsolved or falling apart.
The suspect in Marullo’s case from in front of Barbara Pritchett’s house—the killing of Henry Henderson—had been tried unsuccessfully three times without being convicted. The suspect was back in Pritchett’s neighborhood. She’d heard rumors he’d been involved in more shootings.
But Pritchett had her own worries. Carlos, her thirteen-year-old brother, had been “hit up” by men down the block. The men belonged to the same gang as the suspects in La’Mere Cook’s killing, which remained unsolved. After the hit-up, Dovon’s older brother had confronted the men, telling them to leave Carlos alone. Pritchett, learning of this later, was cold with fear. What if her surviving son were also killed? She would lose her mind, she thought. She might even retaliate.
That fall, after all the months of hard work, a mistrial had also been declared in the double-murder case on Laconia. This had been a complete surprise. After seemingly endless relocations, Kouri and Eiman had succeeded in forcing, coaxing, and physically carrying all of the terrified Laconia witnesses into the courtroom. One teenager had pulled the hood of his sweatshirt entirely over his face as he testified, but the marijuana dealer had been impressive on the stand—though she shook so violently that the hem of her T-shirt flapped against her chest.
In the end, however, jurors said they couldn’t continue. Four of them said the defendants had mad-dogged them in the courtroom and corridor outside it. A fifth wrote a note saying he’d seen a defendant’s relative at his local grocery store and felt menaced.
For the first time, Tom Eiman, Kouri’s partner, still new to homicide, felt bad about being a police officer. He felt protective of the marijuana dealer. She was the sort of person he might have arrested in his old narcotics cop job. Now Eiman considered her principled and brave.
She and the other witnesses would have to testify again. “This is asking way too much of them,” Eiman seethed. “How can you allow an environment like that and do a mistrial? You leave those jurors in the hallway …?”
To La Barbera, things were not much better than in his early days at Southeast. He had a sense of disintegration: Skaggs bored in Olympic, Marullo bored in his uniform, his own grand project thwarted. Retirement was inching up on him, but La Barbera had no legacy.
He had one consolation. Shortly after Da’Quawn Allen’s murder, La Barbera had noticed Kouri at his desk, bent over the case file. La Barbera had given up communicating with Kouri, Marullo’s introverted sidekick. But this time, Kouri glanced up and read his mind.
“I got this,” he said.
THE OPENING
It was cold and sunny the day the Bryant Tennelle murder trial opened.
The decor of Department 105 at the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center reflected the modern era of public sector economy. Harsh strips of fluorescents overhead threw a dull oatmeal sheen over the courtroom and bounced a metallic glint off the judge’s microphone. Slippery blue seat cushions were too short to cover the length of the wooden benches. Oily dark blotches left by weary jurors’ heads stained the wall behind the jury box. On the witness stand, a box of tissues stood ready.
There was no one in the courtroom except lawyers and cops. The lawyers looked nervous—no matter how many years in, they never got over the pretrial butterflies. Stirling was flying around the room, tripping over things. His suit jacket was crooked, his hair askew. Colello paced, then sat, hunched. His eyes were red and watery, his skin pale and blotchy. He’d come down with the flu, and the combination of illness and anxiety had reduced him to a ball of misery.
The defense attorneys, Zeke Perlo and Seymour Applebaum, were better at playing it cool. Perlo, who would retire from trial work after this case, ending a forty-six-year career, was wearing a stylish pin-striped suit. Applebaum—not one to overlook such a transgression—flipped over the lapel to expose an Armani label. Perlo protested weakly: “It was on sale!”
But even Perlo and Applebaum’s usual enjoyment of the courtroom scene was muted. Applebaum tightened his tie more than was necessary. Perlo jiggled. Only Skaggs seemed unperturbed. He was in a smart gray suit, watching Stirling’s antics and shaking his head. His cheekbones were bur
ned from a weekend in the sun; lifelong fair-skinned Californians get sunburned once a year, on the first hot weekend in March, caught slipping after a winter without sunscreen. Balanced in Skaggs’s lap was the big blue binder, divided by neat yellow tabs.
Skaggs had faith in Stirling, though the two men were forged from different elements. Once Skaggs had described to Stirling a scene he loved from Steinbeck’s Cannery Row in which Mack and the boys, “healthy and curiously clean,” in Doc’s description, keep their backs turned to the Fourth of July parade. The scene appealed to Skaggs—the image of men so immune to popular taste that they were not tempted by the spectacle. But Steinbeck’s lyricism, so resonant to Skaggs, was lost on Stirling, who wrinkled his face and asked such obtuse and literal questions (“Well, why were they there, then?”) that Skaggs grew irritated and cut the conversation short. “You don’t get it!” he said. Skaggs and Stirling did not quite interact on the same plane. But Skaggs respected Stirling and they worked well together.
A door on one side of the courtroom opened and all four attorneys subsided into silence, taut and ready, as if awaiting the starter’s gun. Devin Davis’s round eyes wheeled around the room in a futile search for his mother as he was led in, handcuffed in blue fatigues. His body had finally grown in proportion to his large head; he looked like a man now. But his eyes were as childlike as ever. Derrick Starks entered next, massive shoulders stretching the yoke of an orange jumpsuit.
Judge Bob S. Bowers was tall and lean, with deep furrows on each side of his mouth. His dour expression was lightened only by an occasional glimmer of humor. Everyone stood. Court was in session.
There were some issues to be decided outside the jury’s presence.
The testimony of the two witnesses who had disappeared—the man in the wheelchair and the young probationer who had told Skaggs, “Everybody know”—would be read into the record. But first prosecutors had to prove they had done everything possible to find them. In Los Angeles Superior Court, AWOL witnesses were as much a part of the culture as Scotch tape and mismatched furnishings.