Ghettoside (36 page)

There were also gang killings among Hispanics. Overburdened detectives in the Big Years had barely investigated some of them. Skaggs found one case where police took three hours to respond to a shots-fired call. They came at last to find a body and no clues.

But Skaggs was struck most of all by how many cases had strong leads. This was very different from Southeast. In many instances, he saw, Rampart detectives had received “righteous calls” from witnesses, people coming forward to report what they had seen. Even though many of the neighborhood’s residents had entered the country illegally, they appeared more apt to cooperate with police than people in Watts. In all his years in Southeast, Skaggs had never once taken a clue over the phone. He was amazed.

In between, he worked on the Tennelle case. There were jail tapes to listen to, witnesses to track. Skaggs brought his old Southwest partner Corey Farell to the new station to help him with this part of his work.

Farell had just had a second child. He promised his wife he would be home to help in the evening. She rolled her eyes: “You working for Skaggs?” she asked. “Yeah, right.”

Skaggs alone dealt with Jessica. He felt she would be safe so long as she stayed where she was. But she would call him, then disappear. Skaggs would be left desperately trying to reach her, stuffing down his worries. “Probably has some dumb-ass boyfriend,” he would tell himself, dialing again and again.

If she was gone long enough, he would lose a day’s work to check on her. Usually she reappeared soon, claiming illness or some problem with her cell phone, then would tell him her rent was late and she was out of money. Or that she hadn’t eaten and had no food. Skaggs, who had two teenagers already, felt that he had acquired a new daughter, a “nightmare child.”

Yadira Tennelle made regular visits to Holy Cross Cemetery to replace the flowers on her son’s crypt in the cemetery’s mausoleum where Bryant’s cremated remains were inurned. She yearned for Bryant’s physical presence. The mausoleum seemed to bring him closer, yet the visits were always, in the end, achingly unsatisfying.

Still, Yadira would aim her car every Friday after work toward that sunny hilltop, its crest revealing the expanse of the city stretching south and toward the bay. Wearing her turquoise hospital pinafore, white tights, and white sneakers, a basket of red carnations and yellow roses on her arm, she would make her way quickly across the parking lot, sharp white globes of sunlight reflected in the parked cars all around her and sea breezes rattling mini-palms in landscaped beds.

Ignoring the view, she would vanish into the velvety shadows of the big multistory mausoleum. Yadira had a ritual: She bought flowers at the hospital, unwrapped them at the mausoleum, then used a long staff to mount them on Bryant’s high-placed crypt.

Yadira couldn’t stop the habit of cherishing Bryant, of thinking about him constantly in the way a mother does, planning for his future, noticing activities he might like, opportunities that might be good for him, jobs that might suit him. DeeDee was the same way. Going to work at LAX, she would notice the various municipal employees around her—the facilities crews caught her eye—and she would think of the possibilities for Bryant. The crews of men worked outdoors all day in active, hands-on jobs with decent pay and benefits—a good possibility for Bryant, she thought. It didn’t matter that he was gone: such were the folds of maternal concern that had swathed him through life; they could
not be loosened. Yadira Tennelle had to force her mind to conform to this new, hard reality, to accept that Bryant’s life had been lived, that he was now “a sentence with a period,” as she put it.

It was a fact, just a fact. But it was astonishing how painful a fact could be. For Yadira, contending with this enormous, bobbing balloon of agony pushing its way into every instant of her life required exhausting effort. When it first happened, she had not cried much. The hurt was too great for crying—tears belonged to a realm of earthly physics, but the murder of her son had transcended the coordinates of her world.

Only later, when the fact took shape as a dimension of her daily life, did it penetrate her flesh like an illness. Then she cried, and felt it in her whole body; it affected her physical health in bearable but bothersome ways. Being “strong” was a principle important to both Wally and Yadira Tennelle, but Yadira sometimes felt under assault. Bitterness was a temptation that pressed close around her; she had to keep herself ever alert. “Why be mad? Let him rest in peace,” she would tell herself. But then another voice would object: He did not suffer. She did. The dead rested. The ones who stayed behind did all the suffering … But no. Yadira sometimes had to stop her own thoughts. She would not be negative.

She turned to her ritual. In the shade of the big, open mausoleum, the fall sunshine streaming through, she trimmed the carnations and roses with the cutters they provided, jammed their plastic bag back in her basket, and padded across the cement floor, up and around, to where a plaque stood high on a wall with Bryant’s photo. “In Memory of Our Beloved Son, ‘Brownie Boy,’ 1988–2007.”

Yadira raised her eyes to it, leaned on the staff, and wept.

“Motherfuckers!”

Nathan Kouri was soldiering on without Marullo. His new partner was Tom Eiman, the former proprietor of a door and window installation service who had joined the LAPD as a second career.

Eiman had become an effective undercover narcotics officer. He was the perfect Everyman—stout and middle-aged, with wire-rimmed glasses and a watchful bearing.

It had been left to Kouri to shepherd to trial the Laconia double homicide, which Marullo had abandoned midstream. So, with Eiman in tow, Kouri had pulled over this woman, one of several reluctant witnesses, as she was leaving for work. He had reached through her car’s open window and laid a subpoena on her passenger seat. Now, she was screaming. “Motherfuckers! You are harassin’ me!” A crowd gathered.

It had been like this with nearly every witness on the case. Two people involved were so afraid they would be attacked for cooperating with police they started carrying guns. One of them, a juvenile, had been caught with the gun and now faced weapons charges. A third witness had run into an ex-girlfriend of one of the defendants: the woman had “jumped on her” and beaten her up for snitching. A fourth witness, also a teenager, rolled himself into a ball at the preliminary hearing in Compton Courthouse and refused to enter the courtroom. He had to be carried to the stand by two police officers, crying, his legs thrashing.

Next, Daniel Johnson’s grieving mother was threatened by members of the defendant’s gang in the corridor outside the courtroom. It was “in her best interest not to testify,” they said. Finally, the boyfriend of another witness was threatened in the courtroom itself by an older man. The man used the graphic sexual language of gang intimidation: “I’m a real motherfuckin’ Crip with HIV and I fuck a nigger in the ass,” he said. When Eiman leaped out of his seat to confront him, the “real motherfuckin’ Crip” revealed that he was a gang intervention worker paid a salary from public funds. Then he dialed the cell phone number of an LAPD commander and complained that Eiman was harassing him.

Now this woman was accusing Kouri of misconduct for serving her with a subpoena. She appealed to the crowd: “I don’t have anything to do with nothin’!” she shouted.

“Unfortunately, you do,” Kouri retorted. They handcuffed her and bundled her into their sedan.

“Can we
talk
about this?” Kouri pleaded.

Before deciding on police work, Kouri had attended nursing school, and even now his manner on the job was like that of a stern but warm-hearted nurse. He met hostility with disappointment, resistance with dismay. He administered a subpoena like a painful injection, briskly and sympathetically.

At length, he succeeded in calming the woman. They let her go, Kouri saluting her as if there had been no quarrel: “Take care!”

Marullo, meanwhile, was at the Southeast station, back in the Southeast gang-enforcement unit. He arrived for his first watch that fall, grinning. He tugged at his uncomfortably tight blue uniform, observing that it had mysteriously shrunk; a colleague rolled her eyes. His fellow gang detectives—muscles bulging under the short sleeves of their Class C’s—mixed protein powder with bottled water as a sergeant discussed the night’s tasks. Mostly, gang officers were supposed to drive around and make “obs” arrests—catch guys with drugs or guns. Or, as Marullo put it later, taking the wheel of his black-and-white, “that big ol’ gangsuppression line you hear that no one knows the definition of.” At Ninety-eighth and Main, his headlights swept the legs of a group of Main Streeters. He stopped. “Where you been?” one asked. One of the man’s companions answered for Marullo. “He a homicide detective! He turned back over!” They eyed him, frowning. “Why you come back, man?”

The nights were mostly quiet that fall. Marullo got a pursuit or two. But mostly, he spent hours driving, talking up street sources, and revisiting his choices. By November, his grin had faded. He confessed to unease one night, heading back to Southeast through dark streets: “I feel bad sometimes—like I’m not contributing, you know?”

After John Skaggs returned Dovon’s shoes, Barbara Pritchett had placed them in the center of her living room shrine.

It was early 2009, nearly two years after Dovon’s death. But the shrine had, if anything, grown larger. The shoes stood on display between
two teddy bears, surrounded by other tokens and balloons from Dovon’s birthday party, which the family had held without him. Above them, Pritchett had affixed a map of homicides that had been printed in the
Los Angeles Times
.

Pritchett still could not speak of Dovon without weeping. But she was trying to keep it together for her thirteen-year-old brother, Carlos, the one she was raising as a son. She wanted to make sure he graduated. Her family rallied around her. Her children had pooled their resources recently and bought her a new couch and carpet.

Since Dovon’s death, she had extended the motherly concern that came naturally to her to the police and prosecutors who entered her life during the ordeal. She called Skaggs often, and also Sam Marullo, Nathan Kouri, and Joe Porras, whom she had come to know through the case. She called them “family.”

But this made no difference one spring morning at about 5:15
A.M
. when a relative staying with her heard something outside. He looked and saw police surrounding their home.

It was Southeast officers, serving a search warrant. They were seeking another of Pritchett’s five brothers on a robbery warrant. Pritchett was ordered outside. She had no shoes on and was wearing only a robe.

Among those staying in the house that night was a sister-in-law and her six-month-old baby. Pritchett’s daughter emerged carrying the baby, upset because it was cold. The baby had been ill and she didn’t have a blanket. She exchanged sharp words with an officer, who told her to put her hands up. Couldn’t they see she was carrying a baby?

As officers stomped through their house, the family stood shivering next to the garbage can in the alley.

It turned out to have been a mistake. The warrant had named the wrong brother. The one they sought was not close to Pritchett and had a different address. Pritchett’s daughter was furious. But Pritchett was just glad they hadn’t ransacked the house. She resolved not to let the episode affect her newly favorable view of police.

Shortly after, a woman was nicked by gunfire down the street. Pritchett went out to see and spotted Sam Marullo in a blue uniform, no longer
working as a detective. She knew by then that Skaggs had left South Bureau and Joe Porras had left Compton Courthouse
—all the good ones defecting except Kouri
, Pritchett thought.

Some months later, an acquaintance was killed in Nickerson Gardens. Among the mourners was a young black man who knew Pritchett, and who had also known Dovon. The young man confided his doubts that this new case would be solved.

“We need John Skaggs back,” he told Pritchett. She agreed.

But Skaggs was off at Olympic, growing bored.

He had thrown himself into his new job. He made his new young detectives dress immaculately, and he set squad meetings at 7:00
A.M
. to make sure they got up early. He sweated them if they left so much as a paper clip holder on their desks. But for all that, by spring, his whiteboard remained blank. Not a single homicide had occurred in the new division. Skaggs was suffering the unaccustomed discomfort of energy to spare.

The Tennelle case continued to occupy him. Since the preliminary hearing, the two uncooperative witnesses, the man in the wheelchair and the young probationer who had fought Bryant’s neighbors, had disappeared. Farell was searching for them.

And there was new evidence. Jail recordings had caught Starks remonstrating with Davis while the two were housed together. Starks had declared himself out of the business of killing. But he added: “If I were to kill a copper, it’d be Detective Skagg. Tall white boy. Wears only a shirt with a tie and no jacket.” Skaggs seemed pleased—confirmation that he stood out from other cops. But the tape was unlikely to be admitted in court.

Stirling, the prosecutor, continued to fret about the prospects of winning a guilty verdict. Skaggs, like many people, found Stirling hard to take. But he had decided to approve of him and so he humored him.

The pair made a prison visit that spring. They had hoped to interview a prisoner with additional evidence. The prisoner turned out to
have nothing to contribute to the upcoming prosecution. But the long trip was not a waste. It helped Skaggs and Stirling cement their working relationship. Stirling sat in the passenger seat and gave very poor directions. Skaggs drove, displaying perfect confidence in his bearings even after they became thoroughly lost.

Skaggs enjoyed provoking Stirling. He was annoyed at Stirling’s worries and teased him about them. Stirling was not above provoking Skaggs back. When Skaggs stopped to buy a black coffee with a shot of espresso in it—he liked a coffee flavor that Starbucks called “bold”—Stirling ordered a blended caramel Frappuccino with whipped cream. “Holy shit!” Skaggs sputtered when the frilly concoction arrived. He passed it to Stirling with disgust. Stirling smiled serenely.