G Sharp

pt 3

A Long Drawer in the Wall



Young black men in a passing car shot Jhana Leah Wilson in front of her mother's house in South-Central. The bullet tore through her lungs. She was 20, and had a baby girl.

"It doesn't seem real," says Jerome Wilson of the death of his daughter 18 months ago.

Black women in Los Angeles are far less likely to be murdered than black men. But like black men, their murder rate outstrips those of women in any other group. A black woman Jhana's age was seven times more likely to be killed than a young white woman, county statistics for 2000 show.

Jhana was light-skinned, her father says, with eyebrows that grew together. She loved to sing--and had no ear for it, says Wilson, a truck driver from Michigan. She wanted to be a beautician.

When Wilson arrived at the packed waiting room of King/Drew Medical Center, no one seemed to know anything about Jhana.

King/Drew's trauma waiting room is low-ceilinged and painted sky blue. There are rows of padded seats connected by metal bars, a loud TV and a guard outside the door.

Wilson waited for hours. "Just sitting there. Being real quiet," he says. He prayed.

Doctors finally took him down a hall and into a room with a drawer in the wall.

Why a drawer? he wondered.

When they pulled out Jhana, she was so pale, looked so strange, that he wanted to tell them it wasn't her. He made no sound. He felt weakness sweep through his body, but kept his feet.

Is this your daughter? they asked.

"Yeah." he said. "That's my daughter."

'Homicide Is Not Normal'



The Rev. Ferroll Robins, a Los Angeles Police Department chaplain, has brown eyes and light brown freckles across the bridge of her nose.

Her brother, Joseph Ray Paul II, 31, was returning a video to a store on South Western Avenue a year ago when a robber shot him. Joe was quiet, and had a cleft chin. He was an aspiring police officer and Robins' junior by 14 years -- the little brother she took to school.

Homicide looks different close up, Robins said. There are people who are forced to see it and there are those with the luxury of looking away.

People think it just happens "over in the 'hood," she said -- like it is the norm for black communities. "But I beg to differ," she said. "Homicide is not normal."

Robins describes a barrier that has risen between her and other people: the limits of understanding, of empathy.

After Joe was killed, friends dropped away, she said, finding her grief "too heavy."

There was her brother's birthday, six months after his murder. She was alone that night and called friends in desperation. They were squeamish -- changed the subject.

She crumpled in the center of her bedroom. She stayed there, on the floor, for hours, praying: "Please, God, deliver me from this pain."

Living With 'the Monster'

Los Angeles Police Department homicide Det. Brent Josephson calls it "the Monster." The homicide problem. The routine. The invisibility. The indifference. The overwhelmed institutions. An entire system which, in his view, leaves little room for compassion.

"There lies a body. There's the family behind the yellow tape," Josephson said. "We have three minutes for them. Then they're left with all the pain and all the loss."

Of the LAPD's four bureaus, one has 41% of the city's homicides -- the South Bureau, which spans precincts in South-Central, Southwest and Southeast Los Angeles. One South Bureau precinct, the 77th Street Division, consistently leads the city in homicides, most of them black-on-black.

The caseloads of South Los Angeles detectives are about 40% higher than those of their counterparts in the San Fernando Valley. High caseloads are tied to poor rates of solving murders. Homicide detectives in the 77th Street Division hit a low point in 2001, closing only 17% of their cases with arrests.

To retiring LAPD South Bureau Deputy Chief Willie L. Pannell, the pattern is disturbingly familiar.

Pannell is 55, a tall, black, freckled LAPD veteran of 33 years. His Southern accent is so thick that he can be hard to understand. He grew up a sharecropper in rural Georgia. Back then, in Jim Crow's South, black people lived in an atmosphere thick with fear. The law was made to protect whites.

A black man who killed a white man could expect to feel its full weight -- and then some. But a black man who killed a black man acted with impunity. As a young black man, you lived without the protection of law, Pannell said, and you knew that "nobody cared about what happened to you."

High murder rates among black men go back decades. As far back as 1950, black men nationally were 12 times more likely than white men to be killed at the hands of another. Pannell lost an uncle and a cousin to homicides by the time he was 19, and a friend was maimed by an ice pick. All three were assaulted in drunken brawls.

As in many black-on-black murders today, Pannell's relatives died at the hands of neighbors who got away with it. Nobody expected a trial. Black people were left to live alongside killers.

Then, as now, a few violent people in black communities caused great harm and suffered few consequences. Back before black men shot each other in drive-bys -- back when there was little in the way of effective law enforcement for blacks, or swift, fair prosecution of criminals in their communities -- black men killed each other, but with knives instead of guns.

Today, ask black people in South Los Angeles whether responsibility should be assigned to political leaders, or to the rest of the city, and you sometimes get blank looks.

"Why should they be asked to care?" asked Capt. Cecil Rhambo, who grew up in South-Central and now runs the sheriff's station in Compton. "Should I blame you because you're white?

"Oh, I know, people will call me an Uncle Tom. But people don't see it. We can go to school now. We can get jobs. So blame us.... Now the enemy is us."

But anger at a complacent white society also is commonly voiced.

Pannell said people living north of the Santa Monica Freeway fail to have sympathy for young black men. "People are dying like crazy down here and there ain't anyone sayin' anything," he said.

It's easy for people to see women and children as vulnerable, he said, but they don't see black men as the ones who need protection.

Pannell told of the recent murder of a "16-year-old kid, killed with a gun in his hand."

"Now, was this kid pristine?" he asked. "My preliminary view is that he was not pristine. I mean, this don't look like a nice clean thing! But he was 16. Sixteen."

The homicide problem is baffling to many African Americans, a demoralizing coda to the black struggle against oppression. "We are committing suicide," said Carlton Mitchell, an Inglewood carpenter whose brother, Paul, was gunned down outside a South-Central hamburger stand. "We don't have to worry about other races doing it to us. We are self-destructing."

Older black L.A. residents are especially likely to express such feelings. Many fled segregation in the South, battled discrimination, broke barriers in education and politics, only to see their children or grandchildren die in what detectives call blood-spot-on-the-street murders.

To Josephson, who works in the LAPD's 77th Street Division, it is "one of life's most unfair situations." He is white, ruddy, stiff and official, with a conservative, cop-style mustache.