Ghettoside (20 page)

The case had gone to Armando Bernal, one of the most experienced detectives in Seventy-seventh. Hired in 1981, Bernal had started in the mostly Hispanic Hollenbeck Division in the Boyle Heights neighborhood on the city’s east boundary before migrating to the Seventy-seventh and eventually to South Bureau Homicide in 1989, where he learned a doctrine of maintaining a “clean, small” murder book.

Bernal did not describe himself as aggressive. He was deliberate and careful. He sought control. He wanted to prevent his cases from spinning out in “all different directions.”

When the Big Years hit, Bernal experienced them as they all did—three-callout weekends, constant frustration, the indifference of the media a daily slap in the face. Bernal had a brooding demeanor. But he had his admirers in the Seventy-seventh. He was one of the most seasoned detectives in the relatively inexperienced unit, and he was considered a top practitioner.

But from an abundance of early leads from willing eyewitnesses at the scene, the case had quickly stalled. Bernal had a description of a black car and of a dark-skinned young shooter, but also a couple of accounts that contradicted these, and lots of street rumors. There were so many gangs whose territories converged in this part of Los Angeles that the field of potential suspects was very large. It was hard to know which rumors to credit. Bernal canceled his vacation and toiled through weekends to work the case. He was paired with Rocky Sato, another experienced hand, and given help by others in the unit. But after an initial flurry of interviews, Bernal was coming up empty-handed.

It was a familiar pattern. For years, more than half the “gang” homicide cases in the Seventy-seventh had foundered in similar ways, growing cold and ending up in storage. Pat Gannon, the commander, was secretly pained. He made a point of frequently asking for updates on the Tennelle case.

Privately, Gannon felt his position to be difficult. He was inclined to
push, but he also knew that pressure from higher-ups could simply complicate matters further. He was aware of a simmering frustration building. It was bitterest up at RHD. But even in South Bureau, where few people knew Wally Tennelle personally, the case was an open sore. Gannon’s newly consolidated South Bureau homicide group held weekly briefings. Week after week, the Tennelle case was brought up before all the homicide detectives in South Bureau. Week after week, the news was no news: there were no new leads to pursue.

Kelle Baitx, Tennelle’s old partner and now homicide supervisor in the Newton Division, was partitioned off in another bureau. He only knew thirdhand of South Bureau hand-wringing over the Tennelle case. But Baitx couldn’t help noticing as weeks passed. He knew hope was fading.

He was surprised. The killers, he assumed, were still living close by. You seldom went wrong by assuming they were within ten blocks of the crime scene. And the killing of a cop’s son? It should have sent the GIN buzzing; Baitx was surprised that the Seventy-seventh wasn’t hearing more rumors. Baitx had also heard the baleful murmurings emanating from RHD. But he knew how difficult gang cases were. Baitx willed himself not to second-guess Bernal.

Baitx knew Wally Tennelle well enough to be surprised that he had taken even three days off work. Tennelle had always been like that: not shy, not aloof, but just—Baitx would heave a deep sigh trying to describe it later—“just very, very matter-of-fact,” he said.

He would call Tennelle, hoping to offer solace. But Wally maintained a fortresslike normalcy, parrying expertly. “Hey, Kelle!” Tennelle would exclaim, his tone bright, and before Baitx could get a word out, he peppered him with questions, beating back Baitx’s solicitude with a steely wall of cheerful chatter. Baitx would find himself talking of his own life, bested by Tennelle’s friendly interest. He would hang up thinking Tennelle had made him feel better, not the other way around.

Baitx was relegated to feeling protective of his old partner from a distance. One thing bothered him: the loose talk he heard around the department about Tennelle’s choice to live in the Seventy-seventh.
Some cops seemed to think that Tennelle should have expected no better. “I thought it was shitty for them to say that,” Baitx fumed. He piped up in defense of Tennelle. “It could have happened to any of us!” he insisted to colleagues. “I don’t think where he lived was the cause of it.”

Brother Jim Reiter of St. Bernard High School had a similar experience. As chaplain, he went on a ride-along in the Seventy-seventh Division shortly after Bryant’s death. The killing came up at the roll call and elicited some discussion. “Why would anyone live in this neighborhood?” one officer asked the sergeant. The sergeant agreed. Reiter silently protested:
It’s a
nice
neighborhood
, he thought. Why would anyone expect the Tennelles to move?

Reiter was raised in an Irish-German family on the northwest side of Chicago. He remembered people suggesting the family move out when blacks began moving in. And he remembered his father’s reply: “I’ll be damned if I am going to move out of this neighborhood.” Reiter suspected Bryant’s father was the same kind of man, and he was right. But even as his friends defended him, Wally Tennelle secretly questioned his choices. It had begun immediately. His eyes had filled with tears for an instant in front of his boss, Lt. Lyle Prideaux at California Hospital. “I blew it,” he told Prideaux.

Again and again, in the weeks and months after, Wally Tennelle recalculated the impossible homicide odds of raising a black son anywhere in America. He wondered where he could have taken Bryant to keep him safe. He went back over his decisions, his stubbornness about the neighborhood he called home. He reconsidered his notion that kids should have just one house in which to pass their childhood.

Tennelle had remained in the Seventy-seventh for practical reasons, of course—the same ones that kept Baitx in El Sereno. But there was more to it. A secret reason, never voiced. It was a reason rooted in principle, the same one that had prompted him to refuse promotions to RHD for so long.

Wally Tennelle believed people in South Los Angeles deserved good cops. Committed cops.
Cops who were willing to live in their neighborhoods
. He held this belief so close that even his family members did not fully understand
his views. It came out reluctantly, years later, only after he was repeatedly pressed.

Tennelle confessed that he had long been bothered by the way some of his fellow police officers behaved in ghettoside settings. He had concluded, “If you live sixty miles away, it’s easier to disrespect people, to blow them off.” He had not wanted to be that kind of cop. Tennelle was that rare officer who actually lived the philosophy so long advanced by LAPD critics: he had chosen to live in the city he policed out of valor and a sense of responsibility.

“I believe,” he said in his understated way, “in watching over the community I live in.”

Tennelle was the kind of ideal cop the city had long claimed it wanted. And now his son was dead. And the case was just another unsolved ghettoside murder.

THE ASSIGNMENT

June turned to July. Skaggs landed a rare nonsupervisory homicide D-3 spot in the Southwest Division around the University of Southern California, where he would work alongside Rick Gordon. He was preparing to leave Southeast and move to the Southwest station until the new Criminal Gang Homicide Group offices were ready in the Seventy-seventh Division. The three divisional units would then be combined in a large second-floor office in the ziggurat-style station house on Broadway, near Florence Avenue.

Meanwhile, black men kept getting killed south of the Ten. The pace of death was moderate by historic standards, but in the weeks after Dovon Harris’s murder, a black man was killed in the zone about every three days.

Among the dead was Anthony Jenkins, forty-six.

Jenkins was a drug user—a “smoker” in street parlance. He was shot on the sidewalk behind Manual Arts High School in the Seventy-seventh Street Division in the early evening three days after the shooting of Dovon Harris. Jenkins lay bleeding for some time in plain view. Children rolled their skateboards past him. After a long interval, a passerby called 911. When Det. Jim Yoshida of the Seventy-seventh arrived,
there was a crowd of people at the scene. As he and his colleagues began to investigate, “they were laughing at us,” Yoshida reported later. “Laughing at us for going to the effort.”

None of this came as a surprise to Yoshida, one of South Bureau’s practiced hands. But he was in a low mood like lots of South Bureau detectives that benighted summer. Asked about the Jenkins case, Yoshida erupted. “Nobody cares!” he snapped. “
Nobody cares!
Nobody gives a shit!” Then, late at night on July 11 came a break. Southeast officer Francis Coughlin was patrolling Bounty Hunter territory in Nickerson Gardens when he came across a group of young black men drinking.

Coughlin was a ten-year veteran of Southeast then a gang officer, pale as a midday marine layer, with thinning sandy-blond hair. He described his background as stereotypically Irish Catholic Bostonian. His flat Boston accent, like that of Chief William Bratton, had for some reason never dulled despite years in California.

Coughlin was among the more sophisticated breed of Southeast officers. He did not condemn vast swaths of residents as some of his colleagues did. He was fair-minded and discerning enough to put the “knucklehead” percentage in the very low single digits, and he liked many of the people he dealt with on the streets. And, like everyone else in the walled city, Coughlin was baffled and silenced by the bloodshed. “So
surreal
,” he said. To believe it, “you have to see it.”

The spot where Coughlin found the drinkers was “in the Nickersons”—that is, the Nickerson Gardens housing project, near where Dovon Harris had been shot. The drinkers saw Coughlin and ran. He chased them. One was in a wheelchair. He rolled away with short, strong bursts. Coughlin said he saw the wheelchair suspect toss a bag of marijuana. He was hoping to find an illegal gun. Coughlin didn’t care about the marijuana. For him, and many of his colleagues, drugs were just a pretext to stop, search, and arrest gang members suspected of other, unsolved violent crimes.

This was how Coughlin did his job on many a night. Coughlin couldn’t do much about all the shooters in Southeast who got away with it. But he could enforce drug laws, gang injunctions, and parole and
probation terms relatively easily just by driving around and making “good obs”—good observations, cop lingo for catching, at a glance, a bulge under a shirt, a furtive motion of hands. A chase might ensue, and sometimes ended with the cops shutting down whole neighborhoods as the LAPD “airship,” or helicopter, thumped overhead. Coughlin took extra risks to get guns—this was the gold standard.

Coughlin’s methods were guaranteed to look like straight harassment to those on the receiving end. After all, how important was a bag of marijuana in a place where so many people were dying? But Coughlin’s motivation wasn’t to juke stats, boost his department “rating,” or antagonize the neighborhood’s young men. He had seen the Monster, and his conscience demanded that he do something. So he used what discretion he had to compensate for the state’s lack of vigor in response to murder and assault.

This practice of using “
proxy crimes” to substitute for more difficult and expensive investigations was widespread in American law enforcement. The legal scholar William J. Stuntz singled it out as a particularly damaging trend of recent decades. In California, proxy justice had transformed enforcement of parole and probation into a kind of shadow legal system, sparing the state the trouble of expensive prosecutions. State prisons, already saddled with sick and elderly inmates, were all the more crammed as a result.

But in the squad rooms of Southeast station, cops insisted that desperate measures were called for. They would hear the name of a shooter, only to find they couldn’t “put a case” on him because no witnesses would testify. So they would write a narcotics warrant—or catch him dirty. “We can put them in jail for drugs a lot easier than on an assault. No one is going to give us information on an assault,” explained Lou Leiker, who ran the detective table in Southeast in the early aughts. To them, proxy justice represented a principled stand against violence. It was like a personalized imposition of martial law.