Ghettoside (21 page)

That’s why Coughlin went in hot pursuit of that pot dealer in a wheelchair. Coughlin caught and searched the man. He found a faded old revolver.

Coughlin understood why the man was carrying that gun. Black men who lived in Watts were in constant danger. Those who sold drugs were in more danger. And those who couldn’t run away? One could almost say it was a matter of time before serious violence visited a drug dealer in a wheelchair. In fact,
a man in a wheelchair from a gunshot injury had been murdered in the Nickersons near the very spot just a few years before.

Anywhere else, being struck by gunfire not once but twice would have seemed like extraordinarily unlikely chance. But at the coroner’s office, medical examiners were used to seeing old scars from bullets alongside the new and fatal wound. It was like such men had been used for target practice, one coroner’s examiner remarked. Like they were dying in slow motion. The first shots maimed or paralyzed them. The next ones, months or years later, finished them off.

This man carried that gun to defend himself. He wanted to survive. His legs had already been paralyzed by gunfire. If someone attacked him again, he wanted to be ready.

Coughlin sent him to jail. He sent his gun to the firearms lab.

Speedy, high-quality firearms analysis was the one kind of scientific investigation that mattered in solving street homicides. But in the LAPD, the firearms laboratory was drowning in backed-up work. It was overshadowed by the DNA lab, which got more media and public attention. Firearms analysts sometimes had to explain to their own colleagues what they did; journalists frequently confused firearms analysis with the science of ballistics, which deals with the angle and direction of projectiles, not which guns they come from.

The lab was run by a civilian named Doreen Hudson. Much of her job, like La Barbera’s, consisted of devising schemes to compensate for lack of resources. Black-on-black violence south of the Ten swelled the lab’s caseload. Detectives had to wait weeks for results. Hudson did what she could. She expedited work on certain cases, for example, based on detectives’ discretion rather than political or bureaucratic priorities. Other battles she lost. Police agencies went on melting down seized firearms over her objection that they might constitute evidence. And she
had to learn to live with the computerized federal imaging system the LAPD had adopted six years before, despite its limitations.

The National Integrated Ballistic Information database (NIBIN) catalogued digitized images of bullets and cartridge casings from crime scenes and seized guns. The database could be searched by an algorithm. This allowed fast, cheap searches, matching ammunition used in crimes to individual weapons. But Hudson knew the computer system was not as discerning as trained humans. It relied on simplified digital renderings of microscopic images produced through standardized procedures—a process that eliminated many telling nuances and contours.

Before, skilled technicians had taped Polaroid photos of bullets and cartridge casings to the wall and examined every microscopic dent and groove with the naked eye to match them to ammunition test-fired from individual firearms. This low-tech method was not efficient, but it yielded good results.
The high-tech NIBIN system was a blunt instrument by comparison, and had one especially troubling limitation. Although the LAPD and many other agencies had dutifully entered test-fired bullets from hundreds of revolvers into its database for years, by the summer of 2007, the system had never successfully matched a bullet used in an L.A. crime to a revolver. Not once.

The gun used to kill Bryant was a revolver. Revolver matches are more difficult than other types of firearm analysis. They are performed by matching striations on bullets to tool marks inside the gun barrel, not cartridge casings to firing pins. Bullets are cylindrical, and the grooves and scratches they bear after being fired wrap around a curved surface. By contrast, breech face markings on the flat part of a cartridge case are relatively easy for a computer to read. So while the NIBIN system was adept at matching casings to semiautomatic pistols, it had proven useless at matching bullets to revolvers. It was an area in which humans remained superior to machines, but the lab was not staffed for such time-consuming expert labor.

Here again, the criminal justice system seemed to be doing its job when it wasn’t. The NIBIN system appeared progressive and technologically advanced. But in this important area—about one-third of the
LAPD’s seized firearms were revolvers—it was just going through the motions.

Hudson had known Tennelle for years and was heartsick. She was sick of all of it, she reflected—young men shot, cases unsolved, her technicians hampered by cheap, mechanical substitutes for craftsmanship. “I’ve seen way too much of this for way too long,” she thought.

Rick Gordon was also familiar with the department’s revolver problem. He was pushing for a different approach. So Hudson made a decision: They would bypass NIBIN. Her workers would continue submitting images to the database as required. But they also would quietly assemble their own duplicate database of test-fire exemplars from seized revolvers. This secret trove would be analyzed the old-fashioned way, with the human eye.

The eye belonged to criminalist Daniel Rubin, who had been trained as a chemist and whose accent betrayed his New York City upbringing. Rubin studied the bullet fragment that Garrido had found at the crime scene, and another recovered by the coroner from Bryant’s head. They were most likely from a Ruger or Charter Arms weapon, he thought. It takes years for criminalists to be able to do this—determine a gun’s manufacturer by the look of a fired bullet. But Rubin, too, had been trained by the Big Years, and he knew the telltale subtleties. He set up systems for diverting the guns that met his criteria, taking care to establish a reliable chain of custody for exemplar bullets. When the test-fires came in, he engraved each bullet with an identification number.

Presently, Rubin realized the standard copper-jacketed test-fire bullets required for NIBIN produced subtly different patterns than the discontinued, aluminum-jacketed ones used to kill Bryant. A colleague located a stockpile of the defunct ammunition at a local store. It was of a type that Rubin knew might fragment in the recovery tank. To avoid this, criminalists sometimes used paper clips to stuff putty in the hollow points, but that wouldn’t work with these, Rubin thought—the aluminum jackets were too brittle. He inserted a tiny screw in each test-fire bullet to keep it intact—a method he’d learned from another analyst. He gripped the bullets with a piece of bicycle inner tube in place of pliers to avoid leaving marks.

It was all terribly time-consuming. Soon, Rubin was doing little else. LAPD officers seized more than twenty guns a day. Revolvers were starting to pile up. Rubin eliminated one, then another. By then, he had studied the two Tennelle bullet fragments side-by-side many times, memorizing the microscopic topography he was looking for. Eventually, Coughlin’s seizure—revolver number 22—joined the backlog. But when Rubin looked up the file, he realized the weapon had never reached the crime lab; couriers had somehow neglected to pick it up. He reordered it, and eliminated more revolvers in the meantime.

Rubin had no hope. He would be searching for this needle in a haystack the rest of his career, he thought—engraving tiny numbers and screwing tiny screws until his last hour on the job. He told himself it could be worse. At least he was still paying his mortgage.

Then, on August 20, he picked up yet another three-by-five envelope. It contained the test-fire exemplars from revolver 22, an old Charter Arms Undercover, which had finally arrived by courier from the Southeast property room. Rubin sat down at the comparison ’scope. He tilted his favorite fluorescent light at an oblique angle and looked.

When the first set of grooves lined up, Rubin told himself it didn’t mean anything. He’d been close before. He rotated the little thirty-eights and looked again, rotated and looked. Then he shut his eyes, drew a breath and exhaled.

A short while later, Rubin got out of his chair and left his workstation. He stood, hands on his hips, gazing into the distance.
No
, he told himself firmly,
it can’t be
. He shook his head and went back to the scope. He spun the thirty-eights out of phase and began again, rotating them the other way this time.

Later that day, Rubin was outside, toiling in the hot sun near LAX. He’d been called out of the office to help process evidence from an officer-involved shooting. Hudson was there too. For more than an hour, Rubin had been trying to tell her something, but they were both busy working different parts of the scene. At last they crossed paths. Rubin spoke hurriedly.

Hudson listened, frowning. It might seem strange that she did not
rejoice upon learning that Coughlin’s seized revolver was the murder weapon. But hunting for a killer is frightening, the more so as a case advances. Enforcing criminal law against violent offenders is
one of the most dangerous tasks a state can perform, and for frontline workers, the danger is visceral. Skaggs speculated that some of his underperforming colleagues were held back by subconscious fear. Each step toward an arrest increased the pressure; not catching a killer could feel safer. When Hudson learned of Rubin’s match, she felt not triumph but dread and anxiety.

There were other reasons to view Rubin’s success with caution. Street guns got passed around, especially “dirty” ones. Firearms analysts viewed a week or two as the maximum time lapse for valuable clues to be gleaned from a match. Much longer than that, and too many people would have handled the gun, making it too difficult to reconstruct the chain of possession.

It was a little like trying to track down the source of counterfeit bills. The guns used on the streets of South Los Angeles were, almost uniformly, unregistered illegal weapons, obtained from a swirling ocean of cheap black market firearms. Many of these guns were pretty old, and so far from point of purchase that it was impossible to trace their history. Investigators in South L.A. were astonished when a gun used in a murder turned out to be legally owned; years would go by without such a gun turning up. Despite California’s relatively strict gun control laws, the illegal market for street guns had persisted for decades. Older gang members from the 1960s would recall buying guns in exactly the same manner and for roughly the same prices as their counterparts fifty years later. You could buy many street guns illegally for a hundred bucks, people said. Gangs usually had a stash.

This match did not mean the man in the wheelchair was a suspect. Too much time had gone by for that to be likely. But it did mean he was in a chain of people that led back to the shooter. It meant hope.

Or it seemed to. But the man in the wheelchair offered no helpful information about the gun, and no other clues surfaced. Up at the firearms lab, Doreen Hudson was in a state of suspense, hoping the lab’s
findings would lead to a quick arrest. “Instead, we had to accept it,” she said. “It was the usual—another South Bureau homicide that would never be solved.”

For his part, Tennelle was determined not to ask about the case. He never even looked up the case number on the computer. He didn’t want to taint anything, and he didn’t want the detectives to feel any pressure. But privately, the elation he had felt upon hearing they got a match on the gun faded into disappointment. He went on with his work. He thought about Bryant’s case all the time.

Skaggs knew about the Tennelle case thirdhand—heard the briefings, noted the anguish it provoked among his colleagues. Skaggs had never spoken to Tennelle. But he knew him by sight. One day, he pulled up to the gas pumps at the Seventy-seventh Division and saw him there.

It was the first time Skaggs had seen Tennelle since Bryant’s murder. He felt he should say something, but couldn’t muster the courage. He suffered a failure of nerve, something that never afflicted him when he was working. But this was
personal
. A cop’s kid had been killed and the case was still open. Skaggs hung back, feeling ashamed. He waited until Tennelle drove away. “I couldn’t even look at him,” he recalled bitterly later. “I felt bad about the frickin’ case being open … I couldn’t even fucking go up to him.”

The collective shame probably did not extend much beyond the detective ranks. To officers such as De La Rosa, for example, the fact that an RHD detective’s son had been killed over in the Eighties was of passing interest. But for homicide detectives, to whom clearance meant everything—or should have—the Tennelle case was a worm in the gut, hollowing out what remained of ghettoside morale.

Of course, they all understood the problem. The suspects probably thought they were targeting an enemy and got it wrong, as so often happened. No one who knew them was coming forward. It was all so numbingly routine. The whole maddening, familiar package: it was exactly what had been going on south of the Ten for a generation. Bryant Tennelle’s murder was not much different from the murders of a score of black men in the surrounding area in the month before he died. It was
similar to the murder of Charles Williams, targeted for wearing the wrong athletic gear, and of Dovon Harris, targeted because he was with a group of other teenagers branded as enemy gang members by his assailant. It was no wonder the media covered so few of these cases.

But this time it was one of their own.

The sickening culpability afflicted even young detectives such as Corey Farell, Skaggs’s new partner in the Southwest Division. Farell had never met Tennelle and had only recently joined the new bureau. Silent with the rest of the young detectives in the weekly homicide briefings, Farell sat in the back, listening to bleak updates on the case. He thought about how little the so-called black community trusted the cops already. “What does it say when we can’t offer justice to one of our own?” he wondered.

Lieutenant Lyle Prideaux was slim, with strawberry-blond hair going gray.

He was one of the few people in the homicide detective ranks who actually looked the part on days he was required to wear the blue uniform. The others teased him for this. Except for Skaggs and a few others, most detectives looked frumpy and uncomfortable in their old blues.