Ghettoside (5 page)

Wally Tennelle would later say his decision in 1980 to become a police officer was just to earn a living. But Yadira remembers it differently. While she was still in Costa Rica, she said, Wally warned her that he wanted to be a police officer. He was giving her a chance to object. Yadira knew nothing of murder, nothing of the black asphalt war zone of South Central Los Angeles. But she probably wouldn’t have objected anyway. Years later, their eldest daughter would observe that Wally and Yadira’s mutual respect and independence were hallmarks of their very successful marriage. At home, they passed companionable hours, he more often outside, she within, each immersed in their separate occupations.

Wally and Yadira’s first house in South Los Angeles was like their marriage: orderly and idyllic. In Costa Rica, Yadira saw young women courted by charming men who revealed a domineering side after marriage. Not Wally. Many people who knew him would remark on his consistency of character: he was the same person no matter the situation. Their house was pleasant and uncluttered. They never fought. Their daughter, named Dera for Wally’s mother but known as DeeDee, knew how unlikely this sounded. But it was the truth: never had she seen her parents quarrel.

There were three children in all. After DeeDee came a son, Wallace, Jr., and then Bryant, born in September 1988. Yadira took a job in the kitchen at a Kaiser Permanente Hospital, working from 5:00
A.M
. to 1:30
P.M
. She remained there year after year, rising in the dark to put on her kitchen aide’s smock. To her friends, it seemed a start-up job. They urged her to get her nursing degree. But Yadira loved the work, loved cooking, loved keeping busy.

The kids teased their parents for being boring. Privately, though, DeeDee had another word for them—
wholesome
. The word made her cringe. But
it fit. They were like the Brady Bunch. Or, no, DeeDee corrected herself with a laugh: like “the Cosbys.” After all, they were black. Sort of.

Racial identity was rarely discussed in the house. Wally Tennelle had somehow managed to grow up in South Central without ever having had a brush with violence or a negative encounter with police. He had been prevented by his mother from even wearing an Afro—and almost never talked of race. His conservative views on personal responsibility and self-improvement were typical of LAPD officers. To hear Wally Tennelle talk of the African American U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, a frequent LAPD critic, was to hear the same frustrated grievances aired by just about every other cop in the city. In this respect, Wally Tennelle was blue before black.

In appearance, all three children bore strong resemblances to both their parents. But they looked different from one another. DeeDee was porcelain-skinned, with a dusting of light brown freckles over her nose, huge brown eyes, full lips, and wavy brown hair. She looked so white that, alone among the family members, she deliberately mispronounced her last name as “Te-NELL” instead of “Te-NELL-ee.” That way, people would not assume she was of Italian descent.

Wally Jr. was darker-skinned, “copper tan” like his father, with clear dark eyes and dark brown hair. He spoke Spanish well and considered himself half Latino. “But if I’m in a hurry, I just say I’m black,” he said.

Bryant was lighter than his brother, not as light as DeeDee. He was tall and slim, and his smooth complexion was the envy of his brother, who battled acne. But like Wally Jr., Bryant generally identified as black on the fly. In the end, because of where they grew up, because of some unspoken comprehension of a complex racial history, and because most of the biracial kids they knew did the same, all the children considered themselves black.

After a brief LAPD apprenticeship in Southeast, Wally Tennelle “wheeled” to jail division, then to narcotics, spending less time in patrol
than is typical for new officers. He ended up in the Central Bureau CRASH unit in the early eighties. CRASH stood for “community resources against street hoodlums,” a name that belonged to a bygone era of the LAPD, before reform efforts attempted to scrub out hints of wildness and bravado. The progression of gang squad names charted this evolution: an early special team of this type in the Seventy-seventh had been called PATRIOT. Then came the citywide units dubbed CRASH. Then, after a federal civil rights consent decree, they were relabeled with the anodyne GIT—“gang impact teams.”

Tennelle’s stint as a gang officer came in the midst of the great American homicide wave of the early eighties. It was the era of crack cocaine and rock houses and open-air drug markets. The young Marine veteran was in heaven. There could be nothing better than wearing that dark blue uniform, driving fast cars, and chasing gangsters around all night. He didn’t want to do anything else—certainly not detective work. Everyone knew detectives were “a bunch of slugs,” Tennelle recalled. He and his peers had a motto: “P-2 forever,” for Police Officer II—that is, the die-hard street cops.

Then, in 1984, Tennelle was among a group of gang officers loaned out to the homicide unit to handle the high murder caseload, and he got his first homicide.

The qualities that make great homicide detectives are different from the qualities that make great patrol cops. But they are related. Wally Tennelle had a baseline of attributes that steer many young people toward police work. Although he was not college-educated, he was smart and energetic. Police work can be a haven for brainy, action-oriented people who do not, for some reason, gravitate toward formal education—the type afflicted with what DeeDee Tennelle diagnosed in her whole family as “a touch of ADD.”

It made them uniquely suited for a job that was carried out almost entirely out of doors and involved sleepless nights, relentless bursts of activity, and the ability to move from one situation to the next quickly without leaving too much behind. A great cop—or a great detective—needed to be smart and quick, but not necessarily bookish or terribly
analytical. A good memory, a talent for improvisation, a keen interest in people, and a buoyancy of spirit—one had to like “capering”—ensured that the hyperactive flourished in a job that left others wilting with stress.

Wally Tennelle had all these traits. But he had a few others that gave him an edge on even the better class of south-of-the-Ten cops. They were the same qualities that his mother had once noted: the preternatural neatness, the ability to control himself and the space around him, and the quiet certainty of his whole mien. Tennelle was an orderly thinker; he loved detail and was almost pathologically hardworking. He was also happy and had few if any personal demons. This latter trait was especially important. It gave him steadiness of purpose and stamina. Not surprisingly, when he worked that first homicide case, he was swept with the sense of certainty people experience when they discover what they were meant for in life.
Yeah
, he thought.
This is what I want to do
.

Tennelle worked as a homicide detective for Central Bureau CRASH until the late 1980s, and then he transferred to a divisional detective job in Newton. He worked as they all worked in those days—hammered by new cases, trying to slam together investigations that would stand up in court before the next one overwhelmed them, hoping they wouldn’t founder in plea deals, which were much more common then. One weekend in the late 1980s, Tennelle was called to four murder scenes. Only at the fifth, he recalled, did the brass agree to summon a fresh team.

Along the way, Tennelle learned the homicide detective’s creed from an early partner standing over the body of a murdered prostitute. “She ain’t a whore no more,” he said. “She’s some daddy’s baby.” Wally Tennelle loved that philosophy. Whatever the wider world’s response, the homicide detective’s call was to treat each victim, no matter how deep their criminal involvement, as the purest angel. The murdered were inviolate. They all deserved the same justice. They were all
some daddy’s baby
.

The city was entering what veteran detectives would thereafter refer to as “the Big Years.” Homicides hit a high point in 1980, waned, then
surged to a second peak in the early 1990s. In raw numbers, nothing like it had ever been seen before (though per capita rates of homicide were actually higher during the previous decade). In 1992, the homicide death rate for all Americans
exceeded nine hundred per hundred thousand people. That is higher than in almost any other developed country. Among blacks, the picture was even starker: they died at about six times the rate of whites—just as they had in earlier eras and as they would after the Big Years. At the peak, the rate for the highest-risk blacks was off the charts. In 1993, black men in their early twenties in Los Angeles County died by homicide at a rate of 368 per 100,000 population,
similar to the per capita rate of death for U.S. soldiers deployed to Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion.

Wally Tennelle earned the detective rank in 1990, right on the shoulder of the great wave. To “work homicide” in South Central L.A. in those days was to dwell in a demimonde the outside world could not comprehend.

It’s one matter to contemplate what the scholar Randall Kennedy calls the “dismal statistics” related to black homicide—war zone death rates ten minutes from peaceful suburbs. It was another to watch the catastrophe unfold firsthand, as Tennelle would over the ensuing decade.

South Central then felt like another city, enclosed in invisible walls. The very air bore a tincture of grief. “Indescribable” was a word people used a lot: “So hard to describe, and even then, you can’t smell it,” a Watts detective said.

Choked silence, accompanied by that flat gaze one police chaplain called “homicide eyes,” was perhaps the signature response people offered when asked to describe their experiences with violence. Eyes would stray midway through an explanation of a father’s sudden obliteration, or a husband’s slow, excruciating demise. An apologetic shake of the head would cut short an account of a son’s maiming. Survivors who escaped gunfire trailed off into vanquished silence when talking of the friends who didn’t. “There are no words,” people often said.

Karen Hamilton, a bookkeeper from Jefferson Park, had still not spoken of her son’s murder seven years after his death. She tried, drawing deep breaths, her hands shaking, but no voice came. Homicide grief may be a kind of living death. Survivors slog on, diminished, disfigured by loss and incomprehension.

For many family members, the nightmare begins with experiences most Americans associate only with war: the sudden, violent death of a loved one on the street outside your home. Parents and siblings are often first on the scene.

When eighteen-year-old Jamaal Nelson was shot, his mother ran outside, fell on her knees, and lifted his shirt to see his torso riddled with bullet holes. He rasped loudly and died in her arms.

Bobby Hamilton found his teenage son unconscious on the ground in a nearby park. The boy was breathing heavily, a bullet in the back of his head. Hamilton scooped him up like a baby and drove him to a fire station, where he died.

Other loved ones learned of the deaths from phone calls, or visits from police. A friend called Wanda Bickham to tell her that her nineteen-year-old son, Tyronn, had been shot and killed. Bickham slammed down the receiver, unable to hear it. Lewis Wright learned of his son’s murder when an official at the coroner’s office slid a photo across the table to him facedown. Heart pounding, he flipped it over to see his son’s face. Sharon Brown spent the last moments of her thirteen-year-old son’s life sitting still on a park bench outside the recreation center where he’d been shot, staying out of the paramedics’ way. Later, she regretted it.

Immediately after the murders, many of the bereaved describe feeling mechanical and numb, their minds spinning, reflexively pushing agony away. At a funeral, one mother walked from her pew to her son’s open casket like a robot, lifting each foot as if it carried a hundred-pound weight.

Realization comes slowly. Some people describe their worst spells of grief two, or five, or twenty years after the murder. “It’s after. It’s after.
It’s after,” Barbara Pritchett said, clenching her fists with anguish two years after Dovon’s murder. Many people report being consumed by anger. “The whys,” one bereaved father called it.

Some give in to despair. In the months after forty-two-year-old Charles Yarbrough was murdered, his mother, Anita McKiry, spent entire nights lying facedown, spread-eagled, on his grave. A Compton woman who had lost not one but two sons to homicide described herself as just “waiting to die.” Carlton Mitchell, whose brother Paul was killed, took to walking dangerous streets hoping that he would be struck by gunfire like his brother.

Homicide could make pariahs of the bereaved. Family members described being shunned, as if their misfortune were catching. Sometimes it seemed that the closer people were to the problem, the more potent their distancing mechanisms. This distance could be heard in the evasive and often callous language used in black South Central to describe the phenomenon. One almost never heard the word “murder” on the streets. Euphemisms served instead: “puttin’ in work,” to “serve” someone, to “smoke” him, to “lay him out,” to “light him up,” to “take care of business”—the list went on. Bloods, Crips, and Hoovers had their own trademark verbs for attacking and hurting other human beings—“swoopin’,” “movin’,” “groovin’.” The ubiquitous “whoopdee-woo-woo” and its many variations were all-purpose ellipses equally applicable to a minor spat or a massacre, depending on the context.

Chaotic public scenes of grief on streets and sidewalks were common. Mothers and grandmothers tried to bust through police tape. They threw themselves on victims’ bodies, pummeling officers who held them back. Mini-riots sometimes broke out at crime scenes. Use-of-force cases erupted when police officers tussled with hysterical family members. In one case in Watts, a woman’s son and relatives pressed around the car where she lay dying from a gunshot wound; officers pushed the mourners back by force,
striking several with batons.

Outside the walled city, there prevailed a blander yet even more virulent form of callousness. It permeated officialdom, the media, the public rhetoric surrounding homicide. Very few of the bereaved were spared
the sense that a wider world viewed their loss indifferently. “Nobody cares” was a universal lament south of the Ten during the Big Years, and for many years after. A threadbare, dismal, bureaucratic sense of routine surrounded the handling of homicides and related crimes. Officials were rushed and overburdened. One mother described learning of her son’s death from a clerk in the hospital’s property room who wordlessly handed her his shoes.