Ghettoside (19 page)

At Harbor-UCLA hospital, Barbara Pritchett found her youngest child on a ventilator, his face burned by gunpowder, his body swollen with fluid. Dovon had been shot in the head. His brain was destroyed. He would never awaken. But he remained on life support. Barbara touched his skin, still warm, and waited. Dovon’s father, Duane Harris, had to fly in from out of town.

How long the victim remains alive after a declaration of brain death depends on several factors. In cases where organs are donated, it can take hours or days to arrange the transfer. And sometimes family members are not yet ready to accept the death. In Dovon’s case, two days passed. Living at the hospital, Barbara proudly counted the number of Centennial High School faculty who visited him. The visits were validation of her efforts to raise her children well. Dovon had ADD and some troubles with academic work, but he had no criminal or gang involvement. He was unfailingly good-natured and affectionate, as was Barbara’s whole family. Several of his teachers came and left weeping. Almost every visitor asked Barbara if anything had appeared on the news. It was a painful subject. There had been nothing on TV, nothing in the paper. Barbara kept up a brave face. It didn’t matter, she told visitors. They all knew what Dovon’s life had meant, even if the rest of the world seemed not to notice.

But Pritchett was secretly anxious. She suspected that her son’s race and their circumstances would somehow stigmatize him in the eyes of the authorities. The lack of press coverage underscored this possibility. Dovon was, after all, just another black kid from Watts. Would police think he was just another gang member? Would they take the case seriously? Barbara, like most Watts residents, viewed the LAPD warily.

She sat by Dovon’s still form and waited.

At length a tall white detective with blue eyes showed up at the hospital. Pritchett went out to see him. She made a point of looking him right in his eyes. “I want you to meet him,” she said. “I want you to see his face.”

She brought John Skaggs to Dovon’s bedside. Dovon’s body was still warm, still expanding with breath thanks to the ventilator. Barbara was
hoping the sight would shake Skaggs from the indifference she presumed he harbored. Perhaps Dovon’s physical presence might convince Skaggs that he was not just another young black man, “gunned down like he was nobody,” as she would say later.

Skaggs humored Pritchett in his good-natured way. But he was not especially moved. He had been at many hospital bedsides, seen many swollen bodies. What Pritchett didn’t know was how many scores of times he had already heard her version of the old lament—“just another black man down.” Nor did she know that by this time, for Skaggs, the phrase was a battle cry.

The wider world might not view these homicides as earth-shattering. But to the detectives of the Southeast Division, they deserved every ounce of vigor the state could muster. By now, for Skaggs, this way of thinking was defining.

He and Marullo were already working in high gear. Kouri would join them soon. Skaggs wanted him to take a central role as soon as his plane landed.

By June 17, the doctors had explained the organ donation process to Barbara’s uncomprehending family. Duane Harris, Dovon’s father, could not accept it. He didn’t understand: If organs could be donated, why couldn’t Dovon receive some and then be saved? he asked. He offered his own: “Take my brain!” he begged. “Take my life!” The doctors had to explain it wasn’t possible.

Duane Harris walked Dovon’s gurney down a long hall at Harbor that last day to a pair of double doors. When they swung open automatically, Duane Harris stopped and the gurney rolled on without him. He stood in the hall as the doors closed, straining for a last glimpse of his son.

Within a few days, Skaggs and Kouri had traced the shooting that killed Dovon back to Centennial High. They had identified the players, and they cornered witnesses.

One episode in the investigation stood out. Skaggs interviewed Angela
Washington, the teenage sister of sixteen-year-old suspect Derrick Washington. Skaggs had learned from other witnesses that Derrick had confessed the crime to Angela when he got home. Derrick, it turned out, knew Dovon, and even knew his nickname, “Poo-Poo.” Derrick’s defense attorneys would later argue that Derrick had been appalled to learn he had killed Dovon. Skaggs recognized Angela’s value to the case. But when he and Kouri sat her down in the ice-cold interview room in the Southeast station, with its white walls and cheap wood veneer table, she denied her brother had ever confessed.

Angela, short, round, and with the same overbite as Derrick, spoke rapidly, and was emotional and angry. She was determined to protect her brother. Yes, she said, of course she had heard rumors that day. Everyone in the neighborhood was saying her brother had shot Poo-Poo. But “he looked me dead in the eye and said he didn’t do it!” she insisted.

Skaggs let her ramble. His posture was relaxed, as if this were just a bit of unpleasant business to complete. At last he interrupted, speaking slowly, voice low. He said little. But his enunciation was deliberate, almost stately. His words marched into Angela’s chatter like soldiers in formation.

“You and I,” he said, “are going to be serious and honest.”

Serious and honest
. It wasn’t clear whether it was his manner or his words that wrought the sudden change in Angela. Perhaps it was the set of his face or the dimension of moral comfort in his declaration. In any case, the interview abruptly shifted. With the word “honest” hanging in the air, the girl’s head dropped into her hands. Several seconds passed in silence. When she raised her face, her cheeks were wet with tears.

“He told us to be quiet—” she began. And then she broke.

NOTHING WORSE

It was the strangest thing.

All the years that Wally Tennelle had been a cop, he’d participated in those quiet cop conversations: What would you do if it happened to you? If your worst fear came true, if some criminal raped your wife, killed your kid? When cops talked among themselves, the focus was anger and retribution. Would you wait for courts to exact justice? “I’d do it myself,” the cops would assure each other.

But now that it had happened, Tennelle discovered something that astonished him: No matter how deeply he searched his soul, he felt no anger. And he felt no desire at all for retribution.

Instead, there was only pain. Inescapable pain. Tears ambushed him several times a day. He and Yadira kept Bryant’s room exactly as he had left it: The Lego sculptures in their places. The
Star Wars
toys. The Cat in the Hat Halloween costume. They found solace in their religion, and in their conversations, Bryant’s death became a matter of “God’s will.” This framework clarified the task that lay before them. After all, God’s will was something to be accepted. And if you couldn’t accept, the next best thing was to endure.

So they set about enduring.

DeeDee went back to work. She was pregnant, trying to raise a small son, and her marriage was breaking up. Months later she would admit that she had never really taken time to deal with her brother’s death. It lurked at the edge of her thoughts. She held it at bay. She was angry at Bryant—angry at what she saw as his waywardness in recent years, which had put him at risk. At times, she allowed herself to think about the killers, whoever they were. Why had they done it? What were they thinking? She couldn’t help but see the case in historical, racial dimensions. What did it mean that the civil rights struggle had landed black people here, knee-deep in murder? “After what our ancestors did,” she thought, in silent argument with the perpetrators, “and you are going to go around killing each other?”

Yadira took an interest in Bryant’s burial site at the mausoleum at Holy Cross Cemetery. She visited frequently. She cried freely and talked often to her husband about her grief. She found a television preacher she liked, and she tried to apply his lessons to her life. It helped her keep bitterness at bay.

She was stern with herself and policed her own self-pity. When she found herself thinking that she was the only one in the world suffering, she forcibly countered the thought.
Others also suffer
, she would remind herself.

Unlike many couples, who are thrust apart by grief, Wally and Yadira drew together. They resolved not to let the murder of their son darken their souls.

Yadira spoke of this resolution with passion: “We made up our minds,” she would say, making a fist, “not to be depressed. Not to be angry!” But Yadira couldn’t help wondering what they had done to deserve this. Her thoughts of Bryant were constant. She relived his entire life through memories, relived conversations. She worried that they hadn’t told him enough that they loved him. But then she would check herself: of course Bryant knew.

When she, too, went back to work, she noticed how hard it was for people to know what to say. She sensed that they expected her to fall apart. But she didn’t know how to fall apart.

She knew it was strange—she
looked
the same, despite this massive piece of herself that had gone missing. She acted the same. She went to work, greeted people, went home. Everything normal on the outside, except for occasional muffled crying on the job. At home, she wandered into Bryant’s bedroom, out, then back in, everything in its place, just as it had been when he died. She placed his picture in a locket on a necklace and wore it at all times. She hung a plaque on the living room wall: “If love could have saved you,” it read, “you would have lived forever.”

For Wally Tennelle, the directive to endure fit easily into the internal monologue that had molded his whole life. He told himself to be strong, and to move on. Just keep moving. For Tennelle, there was no problem in life for which this answer did not suffice.

Tennelle’s bosses urged him to take as much time off as possible. But he couldn’t see the point. Work was going to keep him sane. So after three days at home, he went back. He needed to be there. He mounted a picture of Bryant on the dashboard of his detective sedan and dug back into his cases.

For his colleagues, it was not so simple. Tennelle’s wounded presence around the office inflicted what can only be described as agonies of compassion. What could they do? The situation called for pity, in the ancient sense, without its modern patronizing stigma. In mythology, pity such as this would squeeze tears from bare rock. But in the workplace etiquette of Robbery-Homicide in 2007, the only permissible expression of pity was inadequate, mumbled repetitions of the phrase “I’m so sorry” and pointless offers of help that were ignored, as those who offered knew they would be.

It was an impossible state of affairs. Tennelle was so mild and impenetrable—so resolutely professional yet so obviously in anguish—that his friends could neither act normal nor reach out without feeling that they were brutalizing him somehow.

Death was bad enough. The death of a child, unbearable. But the murder of a child? There was nothing worse. Detectives’ response was no different from that of the people in the neighborhoods of South Los Angeles. The killing of a human being anywhere is like a rock thrown in
a pond. Bitter waves emanate outward, washing over an ever-wider circle of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, finally lapping against those distant from the impact point, friends of friends, old classmates, all, to some measure, sickened by the taint of this news—
murder
, so awful, so unbelievable—no degree of separation big enough to neutralize its poison.

Some of Tennelle’s colleagues had children about Bryant’s age. They had dealt with homicide bereavement all their careers. They knew what it meant. Finally, Tennelle had to appeal to Lyle Prideaux, his boss: “I just can’t take any more people coming up to me,” he said. “I just need to be able to work.” Quietly word went around, and they left him alone.

But that doesn’t mean they forgot. It’s possible that Tennelle’s stoic and suppressed form of grieving produced a transference of emotion. There was a great deal of acrimonious murmuring about the case going to “divisional” detectives in the Seventy-seventh. The RHD crew felt they could have solved it. Tennelle, of course, kept his opinions to himself. No one in RHD knew that he had secretly wanted the case to go ghettoside.

Time passed. In his grief, Wally Jr., like his parents, went weeks without giving a thought to his brother’s killers. He was looking for a job, trying to put his UC Irvine degree to work.

Then, one day, he realized the killers were on his mind. He found himself wondering who they were. What they looked like. Whether they would ever be sorry. Whether he could forgive them if they were.

He became fixated on the question of whether the case would be solved. He remembered his father telling him that the first forty-eight hours truly were critical in getting people to talk—just like they said on TV. After a month went by, he began to feel gnawing worry. He imagined, with dread, his whole life going by and never knowing what had happened to his brother. He developed a habit of praying before sleep. Night after night, he closed his eyes with the same simple refrain:
Please solve the case
.