Ghettoside (3 page)

He put away the phone. He turned Bryant over. He administered CPR. All around him, teenagers were screaming. Someone thrust a towel at him. He tried to blot it against Bryant’s shattered head, wondering what he was supposed to do. Bryant vomited. His mouth was filled with blood. The man with the tile cutter, too, found himself staring at the brain matter—flecks of gray and yellow. Yellow? With one
part of his mind he recorded his own bewilderment: Why was it yellow? With another part, he fought to stay calm.

One thought kept crowding out the others:
Please don’t let this kid die
.

“Ambulance shooting.”

Officer Greg De La Rosa, P-3, LAPD Seventy-seventh Street Division, was cruising around Fifty-fourth Street at the north end of the station area when his radio buzzed.

“Ambulance shooting” was the generic way most South L.A. murders and attempted murders came to the attention of police over their radios. In the three station areas that encompassed most of South Los Angeles—Seventy-seventh Street Division, Southwest Division, and Southeast Division—
such calls, at least in this year, came more than once a day, on average.

The location of the shooting was almost thirty blocks south from where he was. De La Rosa went “Code 3,” lights flashing, down Western Avenue, and got there first. It was warm, and still light.

He took in the scene. A chrome BMX bike down on the sidewalk. A baseball cap. A victim on the lawn. Male black. Late teens. Medium complexion. De La Rosa was on autopilot, filling out the police report in his head. He had been called to so many shootings just like this one. So many “male black,” he could barely distinguish one from another. De La Rosa pondered the bike, cap, and victim, arranged in a straight line on the sidewalk and grass. The young man must have dropped the bike and run for the shelter of a porch, De La Rosa thought. A few more steps and he would have made it.

De La Rosa had grown up in an English-speaking family of Mexican descent in mostly Hispanic Panorama City, a rough patch of the San Fernando Valley, and was Los Angeles to the core: his great-grandfather had been evicted from Chavez Ravine when they built Dodger Stadium. He was also an Army veteran. He was still unprepared for what he found when he was assigned to the Seventy-seventh a dozen years before. The station area lay between Watts and Inglewood and spanned
the heart of what many locals still called South Central, though the name was officially changed to South Los Angeles in 2003 to erase its supposed stigma. But people on the streets didn’t use the new name much, nor the polite new city designations for its various sections—“Vermont Knolls,” for instance. Instead, people said “eastside” and “westside” to denote the old race-restrictive covenant boundary along Main Street, and retained South Central for the whole. Florence and Normandie, the intersection where the 1992 riots broke out, was in the Seventy-seventh Street Division, near where De La Rosa now stood.

Over time, De La Rosa had grown used to the texture of life here, but it still baffled him. In the Seventy-seventh, everyone seemed to be related somehow. Rumors traveled at lightning speed. Sometimes it seemed that you couldn’t slap handcuffs on anyone in the division without their relatives instantly pouring out of their houses, hollering at the police. De La Rosa’s old home of Panorama City was also poor, but it didn’t have the same homicide problem, the same resentment of police. He found that he avoided talking to outsiders about his job. He didn’t want to waste his breath on people who didn’t know what the Seventy-seventh was like and wouldn’t understand even if he tried to explain it.

The tasks he walked through that evening were so familiar they were almost muscle memory: Secure the perimeter. Secure witnesses. Hold the scene for detectives. Get out the field interview cards. And get ready: onlookers would soon swarm them, asking questions.

De La Rosa remembered these “ambulance shootings” only if something exceptional occurred. Like the time he had been called to Florence and Broadway, right in front of Louisiana Fried Chicken. The victim, an older black man, had a small hole in his skin, the kind that often hides severe internal bleeding. “Get the fuck away from me!” the wounded man had snarled. De La Rosa tried to help him anyway. The man fought. In the end, De La Rosa and his fellow officers tackled him, four cops piling on, a team takedown of a possibly mortally wounded shooting victim. Even in the midst of the chaos, De La Rosa registered the absurdity, the black humor, so typical of life in the Seventy-seventh.

Black humor helped. But it still got to him—the attitude of black
residents down here. They were shooting each other but still seemed to think the police were the problem.
“Po-Po
,
”
they sneered. Once, De La Rosa had to stand guard over the body of a black man until paramedics arrived. An angry crowd closed in on him, accusing him of disrespecting the murdered man’s body. Some of them tried to drag the corpse away. The police used an official term for this occasional hazard: “lynching.” Some felt uncomfortable saying it. They associated the word with the noose, not the mobs that once yanked people from police to kill or rescue them. De La Rosa held back the crowd. “You don’t care because he’s a black man!” someone yelled. De La Rosa was stunned. Why did they think race was a part of this? Sometimes, in the Seventy-seventh, De La Rosa had the sense that he was no longer in America. As if he had pulled off the freeway into another world.

That May night unfolded in the midst of an unexceptional period of violence in the traditionally black neighborhoods of South Los Angeles County. All across the ten square miles that stretched from Slauson Avenue to the north end of Long Beach, black men were shot and stabbed every few days.

About a month before Bryant Tennelle was shot on May 11, 2007, Fabian Cooper, twenty-one, was shot to death leaving a party in Athens. With him was his neighbor and lifelong friend Salvador Arredondo, nineteen, a young Hispanic man, who was also killed.

A week later, on April 15, twenty-two-year-old Mark Webster walked out of a biker club on Fifty-fourth Street near Second Avenue and was fatally shot by someone who opened fire from a distance. It seems unlikely that the attacker knew who he was.

That same night, some black men caught up with Marquise Alexander, also twenty-two, at a Shell gas station at the nearby intersection of Crenshaw and Slauson avenues and shot him dead. Four days later, on April 19, forty-one-year-old Maurice Hill was hanging out in his usual spot in front of a liquor store at Sixty-fourth and Vermont Avenue at about 10:30
P.M
. when a gunman killed him; Hill, who had lived in the
area all his life, spent most of his time sitting on a grassy median on Vermont Avenue drinking beer. The same day Hill died, Isaac Tobias, twenty-three, succumbed to his wounds at St. Francis Hospital in Lynwood, several days after being shot during an argument with two other black men near 120th Street and Willowbrook Avenue.

Three days later, in Long Beach, Eric Mandeville, twenty, was shot and killed while walking outside, almost certainly targeted by black gang members because he was young, black, male, and looked like one of their rivals. Mandeville was a McDonald’s employee, clean-cut and well liked, a former foster child who had overcome a difficult childhood. Hours after his death, Alfred Henderson, forty-seven, was killed nearby. The next day, on April 23, eighteen-year-old Kenneth Frison died at California Hospital after lingering on life support for three weeks. He had been shot in the head at the corner of Ninety-fourth Street and Gramercy on April 1. Four days after Frison’s death, Wilbert Jackson, sixteen, was sprayed by a lethal volley of bullets from a passing car as he stood in front of a fish store on Figueroa Avenue south of Fifty-first Street. Early the next day, April 28, thirty-four-year-old Robert Hunter was attending the funeral at Missionary Baptist Church on Adams Boulevard for his cousin—Isaac Tobias, one of the young murder victims mentioned above. An argument broke out at the church; Hunter was shot dead and two other mourners were wounded. Later that same day, Ralph Hope, twenty-eight, was shot and killed in Inglewood.

The next day, April 29, Aubrey Gibson, twenty-three, was found dead in his apartment at Sixty-fourth Street and Brynhurst. Three days later, some black men burst into an apartment at Third Avenue and Forty-second Street and shot fifty-four-year-old Melvin James in the chest. The same day, two other black men were killed: Donald Stevens, forty-four, died in a shooting in Willowbrook, and Larry Scott, twenty-five, was stabbed in the chest by a neighbor in a fight on Western Avenue at 100th Street.

Three days after that, on May 5, Mario Jackson, forty-five, and Tierney Yates, thirty-six, were shot to death at a motorcycle club on 109th Street and Broadway in Watts during a fight that broke out during a
viewing of a televised boxing match. Jackson had moved away from his native Watts and done well in the entertainment industry, but some of his old friends from the neighborhood resented it. Responding police officers briefly detained some twenty people who had been present for the fight, crowded together inside the motorcycle club; every single one of them claimed to have seen nothing. Marco Smith, forty-one, was shot next, killed in Hawthorne the day after.

Carl Dixon, thirty-four, was shot and killed in Florence three days later, on May 9. That shooting also seriously wounded three other people; it is the only one of the attacks described here in which the suspects were Hispanic, not black. Bernard McGee, thirty-seven, was sitting next to Dixon when the shots rang out. He described watching his friend die, and how the red fabric of Dixon’s shirt whipped as the bullets struck him as if yanked by a strong breeze.

Two days later, a gunman fired on Bryant Tennelle on Eightieth Street.

As De La Rosa looked closer at the victim, he realized that the young man before him was dying. Something about his breathing. De La Rosa also had seen this many times before. He had no medical training. He had simply gained an intuitive understanding of the stages of death from so much exposure. He was familiar with that deep unconsciousness that stole over dying men, that stillness, the way their breath came very slow. An ambulance arrived.

De La Rosa worked the shooting scene all through that night, under black palm trees against a red sky, porch lights glowing up and down the street. At some point, someone passed along a rumor—that the victim was the son of an LAPD homicide detective. De La Rosa wondered idly if he had also been a gang member.

The rumor was true. Bryant Tennelle was the son of an LAPD homicide detective. Wallace Tennelle, “Wally” to his peers, was a dozen years older than John Skaggs.

The two men were not acquainted. Tennelle worked downtown in
the Robbery-Homicide Division. The LAPD’s personnel are scattered across 470 square miles and scores of functions. Its social life is so balkanized that people working in separate cubicles in the same squad room sometimes do not know one another’s names, and Skaggs and Tennelle had never even worked in the same bureau. Nevertheless, they were linked by a shared dark legacy and a battle to put things right. Long before they met, a malignant wave, generations in the making, had swept both of them up in its path, carrying them forward to the moment when the son of one would be shot at the corner of Eightieth and St. Andrews and the other would be called on to find the killer.

GHETTOSIDE

John Skaggs had been a redhead in his youth.

He was born in 1964 and was raised in a modest 1950s home in a Long Beach, California, subdivision that resembled those he would patrol as a cop later in Watts—one-story houses with single-car garages along streets lined with sycamores. His father was a Long Beach homicide detective, but his parents split when he was in elementary school. Skaggs was raised mostly by his mother.

Janice Skaggs was a coal miner’s daughter from Nebraska, affectionate but stern. She placed great emphasis on fortitude and self-control in public. She had three other children to raise, and not much money. All four worked from an early age to help with family expenses. Without being asked, Skaggs paid rent for his bedroom as soon as he turned eighteen.

He was the youngest child and the only boy. He had been extremely competitive even as a child, a fervent athlete, especially in baseball. Winning had always been important to John Skaggs. His mother did not discourage this. But she had made it clear that the Skaggs children were always to appear mild, sportsmanlike, and well behaved. No matter how determined they were to prevail, they were to appear easygoing and civil.

He went to California State University at Long Beach but dropped out after one year. He found sitting in a classroom unbearable. Eventually, he followed his father’s path into the police force. As Skaggs grew older, his mother’s admonition stayed with him; he remained outwardly placid and inwardly exacting. Beneath his amiable grin lurked a perfectionist of the first order. He knew what would serve and what wouldn’t. He didn’t subject his insights to much examination. He didn’t argue. He simply acted casual and bulldozed ahead.