Ghettoside (17 page)

By then, he had seen the cap full of blood and he had seen their son lying on the ground with his head half blown off. But Bryant still breathed. For Wally Tennelle, this task of telling his wife what had happened was traumatic in its own right. He fell into his old habit of understatement. Had he been someone else, the words he chose might have seemed deceptive. But because he was Wally Tennelle, they were simply of a piece with the calm, measured way he’d lived his whole life. Years later, the story of how he told Yadira remained nearly as painful to recount as the shooting itself. The worst notification he would ever make: how he hated breaking Yadira’s heart. So all he said was that Bryant had been shot in the head, and they had to go to the hospital. He did not say that Bryant had been brutally maimed and was near death.

DeeDee went with them, and she understood even less about her brother’s state than Yadira. She convinced herself that they were just going to the hospital to get some information. They were going to find out what was going on, that was all.

“It’s in God’s hands now,” Wally told them in the car. Somewhere nearby a neighbor was screaming.

Security at the hospital was tight. DeeDee was frustrated.
Stupid paperwork
, she thought. Finally, they were admitted and were standing near the trauma bay. A nurse met them. She talked and talked. DeeDee didn’t understand most of it. But one phrase stopped her short
—brain matter
. DeeDee’s mind kept going back to the words—“brain matter.”
Oh God
. She had a sense something terrible was about to happen but as yet had not admitted to herself what it was. Then she looked at her father’s face.

They were sent to a waiting area. There were so many cops milling around the hospital that DeeDee wondered if there were any on the street. Her thoughts went to her grandmother. She conferred with her parents, then went to hold vigil with Dera Tennelle.

Bryant’s brother was living in Encino. Wally Jr. and his wife, Ivory, were on Sepulveda Boulevard near the Skirball Center when Yadira called. Ivory answered. From the driver’s seat Wally Jr. could hear his
mother screaming into his wife’s ear—heard the substance of what was happening—and made a U-turn in the middle of the big, wide boulevard.
Bryant shot
. Adrenaline exploded through his body as the news took shape in his mind; it had an almost physical impact, like the sensation of falling on pavement. California Hospital was clear across town. Between him and his injured brother stood the gridlocked interchange of the 405 freeway and the clogged midsection of the Ten. Wally Jr. and Ivory sat in traffic for an hour, anxiety consuming them, praying, fuming. Yadira called back once or twice. Then DeeDee. Wally Jr. took a call and heard his mother say the phrase “shot in the head.” He must have misheard her, he thought, hanging up. She probably said “shot in the hand.”

At the hospital, Wally Jr. spent fifteen minutes being cleared by security to enter. It didn’t sit well with the soon-to-be college graduate, who was inclined to wonder whether part of the reason was that he was a young black man. “I just want to see my brother,” he pleaded at one point. The security guard explained that the hospital had problems with gang rivals trying to enter the trauma center “and finish it.” The explanation would stick with him.

Inside, the halls were packed with cops. He saw his dad’s partner, but didn’t immediately see his parents. Then he noticed a surgeon in the crowd, looking around as if searching for someone. His headgear suggested he had just come out of the surgical theater. Wally noticed that his face was tight. It was not the face of good news, he thought.

Brother Jim Reiter of St. Bernard High School had also been stuck in traffic. He had been summoned to the hospital as department chaplain. A murder in the Seventy-seventh, they told him. And the victim was a detective’s son. Reiter knew nothing further. A shadow of an idea crept into his mind.

It’s got to be Bryant
, he thought. But then he chided himself for assuming. Tense and frustrated by the evening traffic crush, Reiter prayed the whole way to the hospital, the same prayer,
Please, don’t let it be Bryant
, over and over. He missed the exit and had to go all the way to Western and double back, and he prayed some more.
Please, not Bryant
.

When he got to the hospital, he told himself his fears were baseless. He was being ridiculous. He told the clerks at the desk he was here for the detective’s son. “Oh!” one said, matter-of-factly. “Tennelle?”

Reiter found the Tennelles sitting together in a small lounge with two other chaplains. All around there were officers, commanders, and various friends. Wally and Yadira sat together in chairs, facing the door. Reiter noticed how Wally kept his arm around Yadira’s shoulders. The room was crowded. Reiter stayed in back, leaning against a cabinet, trying to be unobtrusive. He watched Bryant’s father. Wally Tennelle seemed to be attending to everyone. He was playing caretaker. Did anyone need water? Anyone need to sit down? Reiter was amazed.

A doctor came and launched into what seemed to Wally Jr. to be a long and confusing explanation of Bryant’s injuries.
He is going to say “we stabilized him
,
”
the brother kept thinking. He waited for it. Then he heard the words “brain injury” and “he went into cardiac arrest.” Wally Jr. couldn’t make sense of it. Instead, he stared at the doctor’s face. He was a middle-aged black man with a flat sadness in his gaze. Later, describing how he finally understood that his brother had died, Wally Jr. remembered the expression on the doctor’s face as much as the words he spoke. Yadira was weeping.
“I want Bryant
,
”
she cried.
“I want my son.”

Wally Jr. looked at his father. The elder Tennelle was nodding, calmly acknowledging the doctor’s report. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

The doctor was Bryan Hubbard, a veteran trauma surgeon of the Big Years. Hubbard and his colleagues were the medical equivalent of the Tennelles, Gordons, and Skaggses of the LAPD. They were high-energy perfectionists who had learned their craft in the age of the great homicide epidemic. For a while, the military had sent their medics to train with them.

Hubbard was a veteran of King-Drew Medical Center down in Willowbrook near Watts, closed a few years before. In the 1990s, gang fights outside the operating room there had been a problem. Surgeons could almost predict the timing of new trauma calls by watching friends of victims depart the waiting room, rushing out to take revenge. Soon after, surgeons would be summoned to another “Code Yellow.”

Hubbard would tell family members a loved one was dead and sense they were planning vengeance. “I could see it in their eyes,” he said. One man was more direct. “I’m tired of dealing with it the regular way.” he said after Hubbard informed him his friend had died. “I have my own way of dealing with it.” He pantomimed a gun with his fingers.
Please. Not while I’m on duty
, Hubbard thought.

Things were quieter by this time than they had been at King-Drew. But the nature of Hubbard’s job remained the same. He had made scores of notifications just like the one he made to the Tennelles. It was the worst part of his job. He had to steel himself each time. He had never gotten much training in this aspect of his job. But he had learned from seeing others do it poorly. He knew that every word he said would be imprinted on the minds of his listeners, but that even so, they would find ways to block out the truth. He tried to be as blunt as possible. “Simple harsh truths” was the phrase he used to himself. “He passed,” he tried to say, right away, as clearly as he could. The details could wait.

But people still didn’t hear him. Or they couldn’t comprehend it and remained confused. Or they fainted or fell on the floor, or cried out, as Yadira did. Told later that Wally Jr. understood that his brother was dead as much from Hubbard’s expression as from his words, Hubbard nodded with weary recognition. It was often like that.

The Tennelles waited to view Bryant’s body. The chaplains waited with them in the crowded little lounge. At last someone came. The body was ready.

They were escorted to a small area with curtains. Bryant’s body was covered with blankets. A nurse pulled away enough cloth for them to see the smooth skin of his face. Yadira yearned to touch him, but the medical staff said no. Wally Jr. noted the seam across his brother’s forehead where the wound had been sewn, and he hoped his mother didn’t see it. He could barely look. He made himself gaze for a few seconds, then averted his eyes.

He shifted to observing his parents, worrying, wondering how they would handle this. At the same time, with some part of his mind, he observed himself, realizing that focusing on them was a form of self-protection.

He shed few if any tears. Then he noticed his father. The detective was looking steadily at his youngest son’s still form, studying the exposed portion of his face with an intent gaze.

A chaplain performed the conditional anointing, commending Bryant to God, brushing Bryant’s forehead, hands, and chest with his thumb. They exited. On the way out of the hospital, Reiter was astonished again when Wally Tennelle turned and asked him if he needed a ride. He had assumed Tennelle had barely noted his presence.

At Bryant’s grandmother’s house, DeeDee was keeping vigil with Dera and a few other relatives. By every account, the Tennelle family had remained impressively calm throughout this ordeal, waiting patiently for the medical system to do its work—each member of the family focused on the others. But Dera Tennelle was not going to take it so quietly. When the call from the hospital came, she threw her walker across the living room and collapsed, wailing and rolling about. DeeDee and her cousins sprang up to yank the furniture out of the way. There was something faintly comic about it all, DeeDee found herself thinking as she scrambled around the floor, her grandmother screaming nearby. The next instant, she marveled at life’s paradoxes, the way human nature perceives humor even at the height of disaster.

Wally Jr. had a similar insight: he woke up the next morning surprised to find that he had slept through the night. He was unfamiliar with the way a breathless, suspended state of shock precedes grief.

DeeDee Tennelle was wrong—not every cop in the city was at California Hospital. There was also a whole army on Eightieth Street. Chris Barling was among them, taking some satisfaction in the fact that, for once, he had beaten Sal La Barbera to the scene.

Barling spoke to Greg De La Rosa, got some leads on witnesses, and went to California Hospital to track down Arielle. There, he made his way through the throng of cops and somehow managed to find her. Arielle’s eyes were red from crying and she was talking incoherently. Barling took her back to the police station for an interview. Before leaving
the hospital, he caught a glimpse through the crowd of Tennelle, whom he did not know, and his wife. Barling read Tennelle’s body language by reflex, as cops always do: Tennelle was making an effort to be strong, Barling thought. But you could see something off in his posture. His eyes had a desolate look that Barling recognized.

David Garrido, Sal La Barbera’s counterpart in charge of Southwest Division’s homicide unit, was also at the murder scene. It was already packed with brass, among them Lieutenant Lyle Prideaux of Robbery-Homicide Division, Charlie Beck, the future LAPD chief, and other higher-ups.

The sky was still bright where the setting sun had dropped, but darkness engulfed the street. Yellow lights shone from the houses. Spindly palms and a eucalyptus tree stood black against the sky and its few mottled clouds. Pretty houses, Garrido noted. Trimmed lawns. A bicycle overturned on the sidewalk.

Nearby was a pile of clothes. Garrido was used to that. The paramedics had ripped them off and left them there—blue Dickies, a white T-shirt, a black sweatshirt, and a pile of bloody towels. Patrol cars filled the street. A streetlamp illuminated a red biohazard bag and a white box that contained numbered placards. On the street-side grass median lay a dark Houston Astros baseball cap, a thick patch of red blood on the rim and a hole in the fabric—tiny, half the size of a fingertip. Garrido drew near and noticed something on the ground. A piece of metal. He bent and picked it up. A little smashed projectile.

Pat Gannon, homicide commander in South Bureau, was in a hotel in Chicago, preparing to attend his son’s graduation from Loyola, when his BlackBerry buzzed and he learned that Tennelle’s son had been killed in the Seventy-seventh.

Gannon had known Wally Tennelle for two decades, knew him, as everyone did, as a quiet, unassuming detective who was “all about the work, all about solving the case and getting the job done.” Gannon felt crushed. Tennelle, he thought, was probably one of the most beloved people in the department. Gannon knew he had a decision to make.

Already his phone was ringing and ringing, people giving him updates,
wanting to know what to do. Emotions were running high. Several RHD detectives were arguing they should have the case, not lower-level detectives at the division. Gannon was getting an earful. Tempers were flaring. Some of his colleagues among the brass were fuming about “this arrogant DA”—a skinny guy who had turned up at the hospital and insisted that RHD get the case. Meanwhile, a Seventy-seventh detective supervisor named Matt Mahoney was moving ahead as if the case belonged to his group. They were “task-forcing” it in those first few hours, detectives fanning out all over “the westside.”

Gannon knew that RHD had more expertise and manpower. But he also knew that the case did not exactly meet the criteria for elevation to RHD. Those criteria were, as he described it, “vague and flexible,” but they usually were not stretched to encompass ordinary gang shootings with a single victim. Granted, special circumstances, such as extensive press coverage, could nudge a case into the RHD realm. But Gannon had worked in L.A. long enough to know that the Tennelle case probably wouldn’t rise to that standard. Apart from the fact that the victim’s father worked for the department, there was little to attract the media’s interest. Bryant, after all, was a black male, eighteen years old, killed south of the Ten, and he’d been wearing a hat associated with a gang.