Ghettoside (32 page)

The Los Angeles Superior Court’s Compton satellite was built in 1978, the same year the LAPD broke off part of the Seventy-seventh Street Division to form the new Southeast Division in Watts.

Every grim and Kafkaesque aspect of the county’s criminal justice system was at its worst at Compton Courthouse. It rose, a blank white tower, from the midst of jumbled squat buildings, the only high-rise in sight.

Exterior walls were scribbled with faded graffiti alongside the murals of Thurgood Marshall. Junkies and transients wandered the plaza. The lines at the metal detectors were four deep. The elevators were slow and creaky; the stairs were locked because some stabbing or other had occurred there. The courtrooms were a far cry from the posh federal ones in downtown L.A.: notices were posted with Scotch tape, wood veneer fixtures were chipped. Almost nothing that went on in Compton Courthouse ever made the news. Seymour Applebaum, a defense attorney who would soon figure in Skaggs’s story, called it “the most insensitive piece of architecture ever built. It’s a Crusaders’ fort overlooking the Saracen plain.”

John Skaggs had spent a good portion of his career inside the fort. Now, he made a last trip there before his transfer to the Olympic Division. He came for the trial of Derrick Washington, the sixteen-year-old defendant in the case of Dovon Harris, Barbara Pritchett’s son.

Pritchett sat behind Skaggs through the trial, wearing a T-shirt with Dovon’s picture inside out because the judge had told her she could not display his image in the courtroom. She had eaten nothing since the previous day, and she sat clasping and unclasping her hands, drawing deep breaths.

The prosecutor, Joe Porras, stood up. Pritchett began to weep.

Porras began by announcing that Dovon’s death was “tragic. More so than normal gang violence we are so accustomed to.” It was standard rhetoric to win sympathy for the victim, and Porras knew it was not exactly true—lots of the murders that people had grown “accustomed to” were also tragic—the public just didn’t realize they were.

Outside the courtroom, Porras was the type of ghettoside worker who saw such nuances clearly. He could speak movingly of what he called “borderline gangsters” and the trauma they endured from watching their friends die. But today was about Dovon, and Porras was giving it his all.

A photo flashed of the murder scene, Dovon’s black shoes in the foreground. Pritchett pressed a hand over her mouth.

On the stand, Derrick Washington’s sister denied ever having met John Skaggs. The prosecutors impeached her. She jiggled in her seat as the video ran, then she yawned. Three days later, Pritchett bolted out of the courtroom.
Guilty, guilty, guilty
. The word echoed in her ears as she fled. The case was a John Skaggs Special. The jury barely deliberated an hour.

As Skaggs prepared to leave South Bureau, new killings kept pouring in. One night that July, Marullo and his partner, Nathan Kouri, were called to a homicide on a street called West Laconia Boulevard down in the Southeast “strip.” A uniformed officer standing guard offered the sparsest of briefings at the tape. “It’s a black guy,” he said.

Actually, there were two. Raymond Requeña, twenty-four, moniker “Tigger,” had been found dead in the street by paramedics. Requeña, a Belizean listed as Hispanic in some official reports and black in others, had a slew of arrests that began with taking a knife to school when he was barely entering adolescence and later included assault with a firearm. But of late, police interview cards had recorded him as an unemployed warehouse laborer on disability.

Several blocks away, at Vermont and 120th, police had also cordoned off a parked Dodge Neon with a “California Police Youth Charity” sticker on it—“Cops helping kids,” read the slogan. The back window had been shot out. Inside, a Tinker Bell backpack spattered with blood lay on the backseat. Police or paramedics had removed a baby seat from the car. It was sitting on the asphalt near the Neon’s rear wheel, flecked with brain matter.

Fifteen-year-old Daniel Johnson had been in the backseat of that car. He had been riding with two other youths about his age and a mother and her two small children. A bullet had smacked into the car. Daniel had slumped onto the shoulder of the friend next to him, bleeding from
a mortal wound, as Raymond Requeña was dying a few blocks away on Laconia.

The killings happened after an argument between two women mushroomed, resulting in a face-off between two youths, both with gang ties. The bigger youth threw a punch at the smaller one. The smaller one left. He returned with his mother and stepfather and a group of friends, loaded in several cars.

The parents later explained that they had wanted the two youths to have a fistfight to settle the score. Such a response might seem crazy. But in Southeast, cases of parents personally escorting their kids to “catch a fade”—to fight—were not so unusual. Encouraging so-called fair fights was seen as a hedge against homicide: parents sought to ensure that their sons weren’t labeled “punks,” which might increase their risk of getting shot.

The results were predictable. The caravan rolled up the street—“came in thick,” as one witness later said. The local gang members hollered, “Get outta the ’hood!” The intruders hollered back. More yells. Then gunshots. Both of these hits were tag-alongs; neither had been involved in the earlier fight.

Even La Barbera, when he first heard the details, thought Laconia was a classic “cleared other—mutual combat.” But Marullo and Kouri were relentless. They worked through the night, the next day, then the next, interviewing fearful witnesses. As they parsed events and talked to traumatized survivors, they came to believe the gunfire was out of proportion to the threat. The smaller youth’s entourage had carried no visible weapons. They had shouted that they sought only a fistfight. The driver of the car in which Daniel Johnson rode had fled to avoid violence. Daniel had never even exited the car. The mothers of both victims were devastated. At Daniel Johnson’s funeral, his hysterical five-year-old sister had to be pulled from the casket; she had tried to yank out his body. Marullo was deeply affected by the families’ grief.

The chief witness to the episode was a sad-faced mother of two in her late thirties who was also a small-time marijuana dealer. The shooters were her neighbors and sometime friends. She knew them well. She had received a threatening phone call within hours of the killings, and she fled
to a motel in terror. She told the detectives she would not testify. She had elderly relatives in the neighborhood. “They gonna kill me,” she said. She was actually shaking, her extremities trembling as if with cold.

“Just
please
,” said Marullo, reduced to artless entreaty. “You gotta help us.
You’re the one
.” In the end, Marullo and Kouri convinced her of the importance of giving evidence. Then they persuaded prosecutors to file murder charges on four Raymond Avenue gang members.

It was an impressive clearance of a case that, though it was a double homicide with a teenage victim, had received no media coverage. But Marullo felt exhausted and depressed afterward. The marijuana dealer was repeatedly threatened. She would end up being relocated several times. Daniel Johnson’s young friends were terrified of testifying. Their parents were furious at the cops, convinced they would not be protected.

La Barbera redoubled his efforts to inspire Marullo and the rest of his squad. He devised corny morale-building activities—a squad barbecue, drinks out. He arranged a breakfast with a motivational speaker at the Police Academy in Elysian Park.

The speaker was an auburn-haired woman in a flowing pantsuit and pearl earrings. Shannell McMillan’s business card read “Pursuit of Purpose, individual and team training.” She brandished a felt-tip pen and flipped over pages on an easel, reading aloud such statements as “Values are our strength in a team setting.” The detectives shifted around in the cramped space, jostling each other, chuckling, pouring cups of coffee.

McMillan told them that people fell into four personality types: Wind, Fire, Water, and Earth.
Winds
sought attention and liked to talk.
Fires
liked results and risk.
Waters
were sensitive, compassionate, and open with their feelings.
Earths
were steady, quiet, and detail-oriented. “There are no Earths in jail,” McMillan offered.

The detectives warmed to the exercise, especially after breakfast was served. They laughed and shouted their answers to McMillan’s questions. Silverware clanged. Condiments were passed around—ketchup for the detectives from the East Coast and Midwest,
tapatio
for those from California. Marullo, a ketchup man, was in party mode, cutting up and laughing loudly. Only Nathan Kouri was quiet.

McMillan administered a personality test. Despite its New Age cheesiness, the exercise seemed to tap into something genuine. All the detectives fit into one of the categories, and no one quibbled with the results. Marullo was quickly determined to be a Fire. Skaggs, who was not present, was also classified as a Fire in absentia—everyone agreed.

McMillan offered that Fires are best when paired with Waters or Earths, who balance their shortcomings. The detectives nodded knowingly, remarking that this was why Skaggs and Barling—who all agreed was a Water—had worked so well together. Nathan Kouri was an Earth. La Barbera, not surprisingly, was the only person in the group whose personality type was indeterminate.

In the midst of the session, Kouri spilled a pitcher of coffee. He mopped frantically with napkins, turning bright red in the neck and sending his colleagues into transports of delight. “What happened there, Nate? Let’s analyze it!” they cried. Kouri couldn’t help playing into their hands. He embarked on some overly technical explanation of how the spill happened—how the coffee was coming out too slowly, how he had tried to adjust the lid, and so on, blushing and mopping as his friends laughed.

Kouri remained in Marullo’s shadow. His methodical style balanced his partner’s blazing energy. But deep down, Kouri considered his own skills inferior. He worried that he lacked the necessary gifts. Skaggs overwhelmed people with confidence, Marullo with charm. But Kouri was neither confident nor charming. His thoughts formed no thread; they skipped around in vast matrices of detail. Nor was Kouri intuitive. He could not “catch the feel of a case or a person” as Skaggs and Marullo did, nor anticipate people’s reactions.

Kouri reproached himself frequently as he worked. In interviews, he would forget to ask questions and have to go back. He had concluded that he was “kind of a slow thinker,” just the opposite of his mentor Skaggs. Privately, he resolved to compensate.

He would just have to work harder, he thought.

WITNESS WELFARE

Chances were a jury would find both Derrick Starks and Devin Davis guilty, Skaggs thought. But it was not a sure thing.
Felony conviction rates in California were much higher by this time than they had been in the 1970s, when Skaggs’s father was a detective and fewer than half of all felony arrests resulted in convictions. Conviction rates had risen over the same period that clearance rates had declined, so whether prosecutors failed to convict or investigators failed to win charges, the net result was the same. The system remained weak in terms of outcomes against killers. Cases were more likely to fall apart at a different point in the process, but that didn’t change the overall result.

Skaggs professed confidence. But Phil Stirling, the assistant district attorney assigned the case, was worried.

Stirling was the “arrogant DA” from California Hospital. He was lean, with a touch of Ichabod Crane about him. He had a hook nose, a slight overbite, and a shock of straight dark hair. His hooded eyes were encircled by purple discoloration, as if he were in a perpetual state of exhaustion. His physique was like the balsawood frame of a kite: it curved and snapped with the constant motions of his limbs. His suit
jackets always pulled askew, his collars loose. This was partly because he was skinny, but mostly because he never held still.

Stirling’s unit dealt with crimes against police officers, an area that Wally Tennelle had specialized in as an investigator, and Stirling knew Tennelle from previous cases. Stirling had a reputation for being abrasive. But he was disarmingly open with his feelings and his saving grace was a healthy sense of humor about himself; he basically knew that he was a skinny guy who fidgeted all the time and could irritate people, and he was self-effacing about it.