Ghettoside (18 page)

And there was court to consider. Any special treatment of the case by the police might be exploited by defense attorneys, Gannon thought. More to the point, he was anxious to separate the investigation from the emotions swirling among Tennelle’s coworkers. Leaving the case with South Bureau detectives would ensure some detachment, since few people down there were personally connected to Tennelle. And it would serve another aim of interest to Gannon at that time: the brass had recently decided to recombine the three South Bureau divisional homicide squads into one unit, harking back to the old days of South Bureau Homicide. Success in clearing the Tennelle case would be validation for this new administrative setup, which would have one of the LAPD’s bland new bureaucratic titles—Criminal Gang Homicide Group.

Gannon spoke at some point to Tennelle, but he didn’t remember Tennelle giving any input on the question of who should take the case.

Tennelle recalled it differently. He took pains to show his approval of a divisional investigation. He, too, was worried that assigning the case to his coworkers at RHD might taint it. “I wanted the case to be clean,” he said. But more than that, Wally Tennelle was still, in his heart, a ghettoside man, and he wanted the case to be investigated by ordinary station house homicide detectives down in South Bureau.

All those years in Newton had taught him how important it was to remain close to the street. He knew true craftsmanship in LAPD detective ranks wasn’t represented by test results or departmental assignments. He knew how limited RHD could be—how small the detectives’ caseloads, how rarefied their cases. “Our brass tells us, ‘You’re the best,’ ” he said, with typical frankness. “But I can name a bunch of detectives down there who are much sharper than the guys here.”

He did not disparage his RHD colleagues. He respected them. But he had learned to see the world in a particular way. He had worked the Big Years. He had seen the Monster. And he knew how hard street shootings could be to solve. In Tennelle’s opinion, RHD detectives didn’t have the gang experience of their ghettoside counterparts. They were too far away from it, and they didn’t have to work as hard and as fast. Tennelle included himself in this appraisal. “I am probably not as sharp as when I was in Newton,” he said. So when Gannon made his decision, Tennelle privately rejoiced, even as his RHD colleagues fumed. The case would go to South Bureau. It was for the best, Tennelle thought. They would “have a better sense of it.”

John Skaggs missed the entire drama of the Tennelle murder. He was out of town with his family on one of his desert racing weekends, camping out with the RV in the austere yellow terrain of the Mojave Desert near Ridgecrest. He was watching the sun set over the angular planes of that arid land—a beautiful sight—when Chris Barling buzzed him on the cell phone.

It was just before dinner. The sky was full of color. Skaggs was relaxed and enjoying himself. Barling told him he had just been at a crime scene, then that the victim was the son of Wally Tennelle of RHD.

Skaggs had one question: Who would take the case? Barling said
he was pretty sure it would be the Seventy-seventh—Armando Bernal, perhaps.

A secret thought rose in Skaggs’s mind, as clear as the horizon before his eyes:
They should give us that case. Me and Barling—we could solve it
.

But for Skaggs, it was a passing thought only. The killing of Bryant Tennelle was just a pulse in the din of murders that summer in the south end.

THE KILLING OF DOVON HARRIS

Three days after Bryant Tennelle died, twenty-six-year-old Carl Pickering Jr. was getting into a parked Chevrolet in front of Vertels liquor store near the block where Barbara Pritchett lived in Southeast Division. An assailant walked up and shot a bullet into his chest. Realizing he was dead, a girl stumbled screaming into the street in front of Vertels. Passing cars edged around her and kept going.

Eighteen-year-old Wilbert Mahone died next. He was standing outside in Compton at a relative’s house later that same evening when a pair of drive-by shooters came roaring down the street. Wounded, he made it inside the house. He died holding the hand of his sixteen-year-old brother. Mahone’s parents had moved him from Compton to Georgia in his youth because, they said, “we had sons and we didn’t want them to be killed.” Wilbert had returned to apply for a job.

Four days later, police found Christopher Davenport, thirty-six, lying dead on the sidewalk in San Pedro after neighbors reported hearing gunshots. The next day, LAPD narcotics officers in plain clothes killed Ronald Ball, sixty, in the Newton Division. The officers and their colleagues had detained a group of men they saw dealing drugs. Ball ran
from them and hid under a car. When the officer tried to pull him out, Ball had a gun; the officer shot him.

Wayne McKinney, twenty-four, died a week later, on May 25, shot by a man or youth on the sidewalk while sitting in a car with a friend. Three days after that, eighteen-year-old Jamar Witherspoon was shot and killed by an LAPD officer at Eighty-ninth and Main streets. The officers were responding to a shooting call: Witherspoon, who police said was armed with a handgun, jumped a fence and ran—straight toward another officer, who shot him.

The next day, Carnell Ardoine, nineteen, was found dead in an alley near Eighty-first Street and Avalon Boulevard, shot in the mouth. Marcus Peters, also nineteen, died the next day in Long Beach in a walk-up shooting. Robert Lee, sixty-one, succumbed to wounds from a stabbing that occurred in the Newton Division soon after Peters’s death. Stanley Daniels, thirty-one, argued with someone in the street at Thirty-ninth Street and Western Avenue. He was shot in the chest. No one called the police. Instead, by chance, LAPD officers on patrol found Daniels bleeding in the street. He died on June 2.

Irvin Carter, a disabled man in his sixties, died the following day after being slashed by a man walking with a knife in East Rancho Dominguez. And the next day, thirty-six-year-old Keith Hardy died at St. Francis Hospital after someone shot him many times in Compton. Christopher Rice, twenty-two—also shot in Compton—was also transported to St. Francis. He died four days after Hardy. The next day, June 10, Rodney Love, fifteen, was shot and killed on the street in the Seventy-seventh Street Division a block away from where Bryant Tennelle was shot. His mother ran outside just in time to watch her only child die as she dialed 911 over and over and got a busy signal.

Three days later, Detrick Ford, twenty, was said to have charged LAPD police officers with a knife in Watts, just east of where Barbara Pritchett lived on the same street. Officers shot and killed him. Dion Miles, nineteen, died that same day after being shot by some attacker in nearby Willowbrook. Miles was an art student at Cal State Northridge up in the San Fernando Valley and had no gang ties. He had gotten off
a bus in an unfamiliar neighborhood, unwittingly wearing red in Crip territory.

With Watts’s share of these criminal homicides—and others involving Hispanic victims—Skaggs and his colleagues were busy as ever that spring. Marullo was working with Skaggs as a full-fledged partner, though technically he was still a trainee and did not hold the rank of detective. Marullo had delivered on his early promise. He was passionate, effective, tireless. There was no question that he was the best young apprentice the unit had trained. He and Skaggs were working on a 100 percent clearance rate that year. They solved case after case.

Change was coming, however. Southeast would soon be incorporated into the newly reconstituted South Bureau homicide unit. Skaggs had sought a promotion to D-3, or supervisory detective. He was, as usual, playing the system to find a way to advance in rank yet remain working homicide in South Bureau.

Barling had taken a temporary supervisory nonhomicide job in the Seventy-seventh Street Division. Losing Barling was bad enough; La Barbera was dreading Skaggs’s departure. But Marullo’s performance was compensation.

Skaggs had a regret. He felt he had neglected Marullo’s buddy Nathan Kouri, who had also been assigned to him as a trainee. The amount of time he and Marullo now spent in court left him little time to work with Kouri, the quiet former gang officer from Norwalk with the Lebanese surname whom Marullo had recommended so highly.

Neither La Barbera nor Skaggs had a sense of Kouri’s abilities. Kouri was affable, well liked, and reassuringly square. He had been a Police Explorer in his teens and didn’t drink. “Holy smokes!” he would say. “Geez Louise!” But he was an inept talker. He stumbled over words. No one could understand what he was working on, or follow the thread of his explanations. He avoided office banter. Theirs was a talking profession, but Kouri seemed more comfortable listening. He pestered colleagues and informants with questions, only occasionally interjecting a one-word response: “Inner-restin’!”

That spring, Skaggs renewed his efforts to focus on Kouri. His plan
was to work at least one case from start to finish with Kouri as his partner, keeping Marullo in the background. But then came a lapse in new cases, and court hearings kept intervening. Kouri worked on bits of cases. Skaggs knew this was not the same as handling a whole one. You had to move with a case from start to finish—then follow it through court—to really learn. You had to try it in your head as you worked the street. Skaggs began to worry that Kouri would languish.

Then came Friday afternoon, June 15, graduation day at Centennial High School in Compton.

Barbara Pritchett was thrilled. She had been waiting for this day. Her second child, Dwaina, a senior, would be getting her diploma.

Barbara Pritchett’s children were her life. She herself was the third child of ten; her mother had had her first baby at age fourteen. The mother had difficulties, and Pritchett was raised by her grandmother, who had come west to California from Natchitoches, Louisiana. Once grown, Pritchett had taken on the raising of her younger siblings herself. She brought up four of them, along with her own three children. Among those still living with her was her littlest brother, Carlos, who was several years younger than her youngest child, Dovon.

Their apartment was a rare subsidized unit with four bedrooms. With so many children to raise, Pritchett held on to it for dear life. When Pritchett was younger, her grandmother had helped keep her large household afloat. More recently, her eldest son and daughter both worked at hourly jobs. Pritchett was a home healthcare worker.

The family was close. Together, they made ends meet. Pritchett’s warmth and steady domesticity had made her the keystone of her entire clan. Adult sisters, cousins, and longtime friends whom she called “cousins” constantly passed in and out of her living room, a center for social life and holiday gatherings. Pritchett once spent four days preparing a Thanksgiving feast for a couple dozen people, using smoked turkey instead of salt pork in the greens.

Pritchett had measured her life’s success on getting all her charges
through school and keeping them from gangs. Dovon, fifteen, was also at Centennial. Though only a tenth-grader, he, too, was released early because of the day’s festivities.

He was in front of the school, about to catch a bus, when a fight broke out.

Centennial High School served students from Compton, Willowbrook, and Watts. Some of the most lethal gangs in Los Angeles County crossed paths in its hallways. Fights in and near the school were common. This one began with a fight between some girls. Kids started yelling at each other as they spilled outside, taking sides. A couple of boys yelled gang threats: “Bounty Hunters!” It was taken as a challenge to a rival gang—Westside Piru, another Blood gang sect. Police cleared the campus, hoping to avoid trouble.

Herded across the street, kids loitered in big knots. The argument mushroomed, girls and boys screaming at each other, menace in the air.

Dovon wanted to get away. With a group of other students, including a couple boys “affiliated” with the Bounty Hunters gang near his home, he boarded a Metro bus going north.

By then, news of the fight had spread thanks to girls calling on male protectors. Derrick Washington, the sixteen-year-old brother of one of the fighting girls, had gotten word that his sister was in trouble. He jumped into a Yukon with an older Piru gang member named Jason Keaton. They had a gun. The pair drove by the school just in time to see Dovon’s group boarding the MTA bus headed north and gave chase. When Dovon and his friends got off on the outskirts of Nickerson Gardens in Watts, Bounty Hunter territory, the Yukon pulled up. Derrick fired. Everyone scattered. Dovon fell.

Skaggs got there after the ambulance was gone. Kouri wasn’t with him. He was out of town on another case and due back that night. Skaggs surveyed the crime scene—for what it was worth.

As usual, not much. No body. Just an empty street, and a pair of dusty black tennis shoes strewn on the asphalt.