by Edward Humes
“God,” Peggy said, running over a checklist with the cops on what they had to do before busting Hugh. “Let’s get this guy.”
But then the police stumbled on Hugh when they went to search his home, and he was arrested before Peggy had given the okay and before the checklist had been completed. Immediately, the case began to seem less substantial than she had been led to believe. The prosecutor assigned to try it, Kevin Yorn, from the DA’s hard-core unit, which handles major gang crimes, felt confident, but Peggy began harboring doubts. She found out that one reason the Inglewood detectives were in such a rush to make an arrest—in addition to the enormous pressure from the chief and the public chafing under a citywide curfew and crackdown—had to do with vacation plans. One of them had reservations to go abroad, and didn’t want to lose his airfare.
When Greg Humphries looked at the police reports, he saw more reasons for doubts.
He saw the police had first heard the name “Hugh” several days after the killings from a kid named Marcus. Marcus was positive Hugh had done the shooting, he told the police. He didn’t actually see anything, but his good friend Martell saw it all, and had told him crazy Hugh was the shooter.
The police then went to see fourteen-year-old Martell, who was absolutely positive that Hugh was the killer. Martell wasn’t actually there, of course, but he had heard all about it. Hugh was a gang member and crazy and always high on drugs, Martell told the police. (This comment, uncorroborated and, it turns out, untrue, was what led the detectives to assure Peggy Beckstrand that Hugh was a hard-core Rolling Sixties member.) Martell knew all this, he told the police, because his friends Donte and Steve saw it all and told him Hugh did it. The word was all over school.
So the police followed the chain of schoolyard rumor to Donte and Steve. Donte assured the police he knew nothing. Steve, a convicted armed robber at age fifteen, had been on the street corner and was questioned right after the shooting by officers. (He was the boy Peggy would later rush to keep apart from Hugh in the courthouse holding tank.) At that time, Steve said he had ducked behind a car at the first gunshot, and had seen only the killer’s feet. Days later, Steve said he believed the killer of Tila French had been his schoolmate Hugh because he recognized the shooter’s distinctive haircut. Under intense prodding by detectives. Steve later amended this new story by saying he had seen Hugh’s face, too.
Steve’s girlfriend then came forward and said she had been present at the shooting as well, and that she, too, had recognized Hugh as one of the killers.
Though the police represented these witnesses as convincing, Humphries saw from the police reports just how the story had been passed from one kid to the next, a rumor about Hugh that spread throughout the school and the neighborhood until, finally, two witnesses suddenly came forward who had previously known nothing. As the lawyer investigated further, he learned that the two kids who first pointed the police toward Hugh, Martell and Marcus, had had several clashes with Hugh in the past. And the two new witnesses who identified Hugh as the shooter turned out to be their friends, and to have had their own run-in with Hugh, accusing him of stealing an electronic pager from them two days before the shooting. The lawyer saw in this a ready motive on the part of the two witnesses to assume the worst about Hugh, if not to lie outright.
Humphries also learned that, contrary to the detectives’ assurances to Peggy Beckstrand, the mother of two-year-old Kyiara Nicole could not identify Hugh as the shooter. She never was able to identify anyone as the killer of her daughter, and so Hugh was charged only with the killing of Tila French and the wounding of two other kids on the corner that night.
And as for Hugh being “crazy”—which the police had interpreted as meaning violent and cruel—it turned out kids at school had teased him for being “crazy” because of his odd behavior a year earlier. A year before his arrest for murder, he had developed uncontrollable urges to smash windows—at home, at businesses, and at school. Hugh had been on probation at the time for graffiti, and when the window-breaking started, his mother kept calling his probation officer for help. But she could never get through. One day, Sharon Stegall picked up the phone instead of Hugh’s regular PO, heard the desperation in the woman’s voice, and agreed to go help. He had just broken twenty-five windows in the space of an hour, his mother said. When Sharon went to his house to talk to him, Hugh pleaded, “Miss Stegall, please help me.”
She got him into a program that helped him control his behavior and changed his life. He returned to school and got a steady job in the evenings. Later, he called Sharon up and said, “I just wanted to thank you, Miss Stegall. You saved my life.”
“I’ll tell you this,” Sharon said after she heard Hugh had been arrested in the Inglewood murder case, “that boy’s no hardcase gangbanger, and he’s no killer.”
The final blow to the police case came when attorney Humphries traveled seventy miles north to the city of Oxnard, where Hugh had sworn he was selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door at the time of the murders. Hugh and his family had told the police this after his arrest, but they had not checked it out. Had they done so, they would have learned, as Humphries did, that not only did Hugh’s boss verify his alibi, but there were also receipts from his door-to-door sales, and three new customers, who had met him for the first time that night, and who swore Hugh had been there at the time of the shootings. One of these witnesses who bought a subscription from Hugh was a respected employee of the California Youth Authority facility in nearby Ventura. These people were unbiased and unimpeachable, with no reason to lie.
At this point, Humphries tells prosecutors what he has learned, turning over the names and addresses of these witnesses so detectives could question them. By then, the trial prosecutor, Kevin Yorn, has joined Peggy Beckstrand in expressing doubts about the case, but the police resist unsolving the worst murder spree in Inglewood history, insisting that Hugh was their man and that his alibi witnesses had to be part of a conspiracy. When they grudgingly go to check the story out, they accuse the boy’s employer of being a lying pedophile, then approach the alibi witnesses in Oxnard by asking whether Hugh had offered them a bribe to lie on his behalf.
“It’s such a high-pressure case, they won’t back down,” Humphries complains to Deputy DA Yorn. “But he’s a genuinely innocent kid who could be convicted of a terrible crime while the real murderers remain free. It’s scary.”
With a hearing imminent on shipping Hugh to adult court, Humphries demands the prosecution first demonstrate it had probable cause to keep him in custody. Yorn could easily prevail—only the state has the right to put on evidence at such hearings—but the prosecutor agrees to let Humphries put sworn affidavits on the record from his three alibi witnesses. When Judge Scarlett compares the prosecution case with what the defense lawyer has assembled, he says there is no contest—and no case. He finds no probable cause to believe Hugh a murderer, orders him released, and sends him home with his jubilant mother, aunt, brothers, and sisters. A detective on the case sits in the old jury box in Scarlett’s courtroom, watching them celebrate, then bitterly denounces the juvenile justice system as insane, predicting Hugh will end up killing someone else within the week. “Wait and see. More people are going to die.”
Instead, about a week later, the two witnesses who had accused Hugh begin to waffle. Steve is doing time in camp for a probation violation by this time, and has had more time to think about his testimony. Maybe they had been mistaken after all, he and his girlfriend admit. Then the police concede that Hugh has nothing to do with the Rolling Sixties Crips, either, and that EWF is just a band of geeky graffiti artists that Hugh rarely sees anymore, now that he is so busy trying to make money with his door-to-door sales. In the end, the police have to admit they were wrong about Hugh, that they had tried to send an innocent boy to adult court to face a life sentence in prison. He really had been selling magazine subscriptions when Tila French and Kyiara Nicole died, they say. Peggy Beckstrand orders the charges dismissed aga
inst Hugh.
The Inglewood Police Department, which had announced Hugh’s arrest in the sensational case with such fanfare, makes no press releases about Hugh’s release a month later, or the fact that the case remains unsolved to this day.
“Hugh’s case is a classic example of how the cops put in less energy working cases for Juvenile Court. They did a rotten job,” Peggy Beckstrand says after dropping the case. “But that wasn’t immediately clear. If he had had a less able defense attorney, we might never have learned the truth. Hugh would have landed in adult court, and he probably would have been convicted. It’s that simple. In a way, though, this case is an example of the system working. The checks and balances did what they were supposed to. Justice was done, right here in Juvenile Court.”
She thinks about it a moment, then adds, “Thank God.”
· · ·
Incredibly, in the same month that murder charges were disproved against Hugh and Leon, the same thing happens in yet another murder case, another client of Sherry Gold’s, another boy charged with a murder he did not commit.
This time at stake is the life of a fourteen-year-old neophyte gang member whose apt nickname is Shy Boy. He is a quiet, dark-haired kid with large eyes who does well in school, who has never been in trouble before, but who desperately wants to emulate the older gangsters he admires, the homeboy heroes who have respect in his eyes. Unlike Leon, with his agonizing history as a foster child, Shy Boy comes from a solid home and family; his mother, as soon as she learned her son had secretly joined a gang, put him on a strict curfew and began taking special parenting classes offered at the local police station to help steer her boy clear of trouble.
But Shy Boy had attached himself to a particularly violent Hispanic gang in a neighborhood miles from his own home, the Venice 13. And just when Shy Boy joined, Venice 13 had gone to war with an equally violent African-American gang, the Shoreline Crips. Both gangs claimed the same turf, the scarred and bedraggled Oakwood section of the beach-side community of Venice—along with exclusive rights to the lucrative Venice street drug trade. This gang war soon escalated into a vicious racial struggle that spilled over into the community at large, claiming innocent victims. Drive-bys, firebombings, and other armed assaults between the two gangs had taken twelve lives in the space of three months. Six others were wounded, a home had been torched, countless lives endangered and threatened. Seven other Oakwood residents, with no gang membership and no reason to be attacked except for the color of their skin and the fact that they were ready targets on the sidewalk, had been shot at in Oakwood by one faction or another. In an even more ominous turn, so had four LAPD officers, though none had as yet been hit. But computer-generated flyers had been found posted around Oakwood, urging residents to provide safe havens in their homes to any gangsters heroic enough to kill a cop. Oakwood had become a shooting gallery, and Shy Boy was in the middle of it, prized by the Venice 13 because his age conferred upon him a certain invulnerability. Fourteen-year-olds in California still stayed in Juvenile Court, even for murder. Desperate to please, Shy Boy was a valuable tool to the older gangbangers.
The twelfth murder in the Venice gang war happened on a Sunday night, vicious and random like all the rest, a retaliation against the Shoreline Crips for the murder of a Venice 13 member a few weeks before. A stolen Jeep Cherokee with three Venice 13 gangsters inside drove slowly by someone they believed was a Shoreline Crip, a teenager standing on the sidewalk arguing with his girlfriend and the girlfriend’s sister. The car turned around, came back, and stopped. Without uttering a word, the driver produced an assault rifle and pulled the trigger. Eleven shots later, the Crip was dead, the girlfriend was shot in the stomach and buttocks (she recovered), and the sister was weeping, screaming, and flagging down a patrol car.
A few minutes later, a woman who had seen the shooting and who had followed the Jeep in her own car, told another police patrol what she had seen. A short time after that, the police spotted the Jeep, now with only two people inside. After a high-speed chase, the car stopped. Shy Boy got out and was arrested, but the other person in the Jeep managed to get the car moving and escaped. Meanwhile, a few blocks away, the original driver of the car, an adult gang member who had tried to escape on foot earlier, was found and arrested. The sister of the wounded woman identified that man as the shooter with the assault rifle. She could not identify the others in the car, nor could the wounded woman.
Nevertheless, when it came time to file the case, police reports prepared by the LAPD detective leading the case identified Shy Boy as a shooter, claiming he had been in the car at the time of the murder, and that he had confessed on tape to murder. Based on these assertions, Peggy Beckstrand’s office charged him in Juvenile Court with first-degree murder and multiple counts of attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and discharging a firearm at a person from a moving vehicle—charges that would put him in CYA until age twenty-five.
The evidence seemed so convincing that Sherry Gold seriously considered taking an early manslaughter plea in exchange for his testimony against the other suspects in the shooting. But Shy Boy told her no, he would not rat on his homeboys, that he would stand up for them and take the blame for the killing. Sherry tried to explain to him that older gang members exploit young kids all the time, hoping they’ll take the heat in Juvenile Court so the older criminals can avoid adult trials and possible life or death sentences. But neither she nor Shy Boy’s mother could get through to him.
“You think that’ll prove what a man you are?” Sherry said. “It proves how stupid you are. They’re using you.” But Shy Boy just turned away. He finally told her that even if he wanted to talk, he wouldn’t. “They’d kill me,” he whispered.
So, back against the wall, Sherry launched her own investigation and found, once again, that the evidence was not what it initially appeared to be in a juvenile murder case. Contrary to the police reports, there was nothing to show Shy Boy had been in the car at the time of the murder. He could have gotten in the car when the driver—the man with the assault rifle—got out after speeding away from the murder scene. Shy Boy was, in fact, behind the wheel when the police stopped the Jeep, but he definitely had not been driving when the murder occurred. And none of the witnesses to the murder recognized him as being in the car.
As for his supposedly taped confession, when Sherry got it transcribed—something neither the police nor the DA on the case had done—she found Shy Boy had not admitted to killing anyone after all, but merely said he had fired a pistol from inside the car. And there were no pistols used in the murder—just the adult gang member’s assault rifle. However, Sherry found out that police dispatch records for that night showed someone else had reported being shot at with a pistol in a separate incident close by the murder scene. Perhaps that was the shooting Shy Boy had been referring to. This didn’t exactly make him out to be a model citizen, Sherry Gold decided, but neither did it make him a murderer.
Had there been hard evidence that Shy Boy was in the car at the time of the fatal shooting, Peggy Beckstrand probably would have insisted he be tried for murder. Being in the car, armed with a pistol, with a fellow gang member firing fatal shots from an assault rifle, was more than enough to sustain a conviction against Shy Boy as an “aider and abettor”—a fully culpable accomplice. There were plenty of juveniles in CYA and state prison right now for doing little more than riding in a car with a killer—Scrappy, for instance, and Elias Elizondo.
But prosecutors can’t put Shy Boy in the car at the right moment, and that saves him from eleven years in CYA. Given Shy Boy’s youth and otherwise clean record, Peggy agrees with Sherry Gold that the evidence isn’t there. Once again, she drops a murder charge. Shy Boy agrees to plead guilty to a single count of firing a gun from a car at another person, and Judge Dorn sentences him to camp for at least a year.
Instead of going to CYA or—had new laws lowering the fitness age been in place—to state prison, Shy Boy enters a camp with intensive school
and counseling programs designed to lure kids away from street gangs. Whether this program will work for Shy Boy, no one can say. But afterward, when the court session ends, Shy Boy’s parents cry and embrace in the hallway and promise Sherry they will hold their son’s feet to the fire and keep him away from the gangsters. Then Sherry walks down to the lockup to say good-bye to her young client—he had made her promise to come down after the sentencing.
“I just wanted to thank you,” he tells her. “You never gave up on me.”
The lawyer tells him that the best thanks would be never to make work for her again. He smiles and nods and seems to agree. At least, that’s what Sherry tells herself.
“It looked so bleak there for a while, but it’s a classic example of the prosecution not being able to prove its case,” Sherry Gold says later, parked in her usual seat at the luncheonette across the street, already at work on still another murder. “Yet justice was done in this case. If they had been able to prove their case, justice would not have been done. He would have spent eleven years in CYA, which is just prison by another name, and he would be gone, destroyed.”
When Sherry Gold finishes her cup of brackish diner coffee and crosses back to court, she meets her latest client, one of two juveniles accused of the cold-blooded murder of an elderly woman who had been sitting at a bus stop after doing volunteer work at an institute for the blind. The killing has aroused considerable outrage in the community. Around the courthouse, they’re already calling it “The Angel of Mercy Murder.” At first blush, Sherry almost wishes she could prosecute this kid instead of defend him, but then she reminds herself how wrong first impressions can be in Juvenile Court.
“My name is Sherry Gold. I’ve been appointed to represent you,” she whispers to the fifteen-year-old, as he stands handcuffed next to his crime partner, waiting for his arraignment before Commissioner Polinsky.