Ghettoside (38 page)

A short while later, Nathan Kouri, colored pens jutting from his pocket, stood on the street next to small, discarded shoes. Nearby, La Barbera waved his arms to stop an approaching police sedan: a pair of gang detectives were driving right through the crime scene.
“Hey!”
La Barbera yelled, incredulous.

On the other side of the yellow tape, a small knot of people gathered. “They gonna clean the blood up?” said a young woman to no one in particular, wrinkling her nose. “They always leave it, and it smells.”

The victim was a thirteen-year-old named Da’Quawn Allen. More than two years had passed since Bryant Tennelle’s death, but the trial was still months away. In the intervening period,
545 black men and boys had been killed in Los Angeles County; Da’Quawn was the 546th.

Eiman was on vacation, and Kouri had been assigned to train the Southeast squad’s newest recruit, a former gang officer with a master’s degree in environmental science named Mike Levant. Kouri was still inexperienced. But La Barbera had no choice. Almost everyone else in the squad by this time had even less time in homicide.

Kouri and Levant jumped in their sedan, Kouri balancing his black folder on the dashboard. “Last few nights, Hoovers and Main Street been goin’ at it!” he said into the phone, then snapped it shut. “A lotta movin’ parts, buddy,” he said to Levant. “Holy smokes.”

They were on their way to Harbor-UCLA hospital, where Da’Quawn had been pronounced dead. Another shooting victim had come in to the trauma center at about the same time. Kouri thought the two shootings might be connected. He headed into the blinding late afternoon sun to the hospital, hoping to interview this survivor.

It turned out to be a false lead. The survivor was a young woman. She had been shot in the leg during an unrelated fight, which, by coincidence had unfolded at the same time as Kouri’s case, just a few blocks away. The fight had involved a man’s girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend, a baseball bat, and a stolen cell phone—what Skaggs would have summed up
as “some drama.” It was the sort of case that could easily have been a homicide had the bullet’s angle been slightly different.

The woman greeted Kouri warmly from her hospital bed. She remembered him from her niece’s murder case. The visit was not a waste. Standing in the trauma bay—among beeping machines and very young doctors darting in New Balance running shoes—Kouri and Levant were approached by a stocky patrol officer with sideburns.

Officer John Tumino had been looking for them. A witness had left a note with her phone number on the ground for the police guarding the crime scene. But the officers there had failed to pick it up. Tumino, who had come to the scene later, had somehow learned about this and tracked the woman down. He now handed Kouri her number. Kouri stared, astonished. “You know, thank you!
Thank you!
” he exclaimed. He glanced away, laughing, with a small shake of his head. A patrol officer providing a lead. So simple. So rare.

Kouri and Levant took an elevator from the trauma bay and exited into a hall painted turquoise blue and decorated with illustrations of penguins and storks.

At the desk, a nurse shook her head. “He didn’t even make it up here,” she said. She sent Kouri and Levant back the way they came, past the painted storks and penguins—the children’s intensive care unit that thirteen-year-old Da’Quawn had not lived long enough to see.

They found the doctor who had treated the boy, who gave the time of death: 2:14
P.M
. Da’Quawn had been shot five times.

Next was the morgue. At the front desk, the attendant’s eyes went from Kouri to Levant, then back. “I pity y’all,” she said. She led them to a pair of double doors. Levant made a weak joke about not going in, then followed Kouri inside.

The morgue was cold, with little white and gray tiles on the floor like a locker room. Five enormous stainless steel doors lined the wall, each with a number at the top. “He on the bottom,” the attendant said. Kouri plucked a pair of plastic gloves from a box on the wall, opened one of the doors, and pulled on the handle of a bottom drawer.

It rolled out, a zippered white bag, the lump of a small figure within. Kouri bent down, stepping gingerly around the drawer to pull down the zipper. Levant drew back, a wincing hesitation in his eyes.

Da’Quawn’s body was wrapped in a sheet soaked with light pink blood. Kouri plucked at the sheet, and a corner fell away. The mask of the ventilator still covered the lower half of his face, its tubes twisted around his limp frame. Kouri worked quickly, touching only the sheet, searching for tattoos. He tugged a fold, and the sheet slid fully off the head.

On the back of Da’Quawn’s head, soft fine curls tapered into light brown skin at the base of the neck. Kouri flipped another fold and exposed the thirteen-year-old’s arms and chest, padded with a childish layer of fat. Last came the legs, skinny and coltish. No tattoos. Levant watched silently. Kouri replaced the sheet, pushed the drawer back in, and locked it.

They went outside. The sun was setting into a gray sea mist at the horizon, fading instead of flaring down, throwing the palm trees into silhouette. The air had a peculiar chill. They talked about other cases. Kouri brought up a witness on another of his cases, a woman nicknamed “Chocolate” who had run into the killer while waiting in line for county benefits. They praised Tumino. “That cop’s pretty good,” Kouri said. He had fallen into the homicide detectives’ habit of referring to uniformed officers as “cops,” as if they were a species apart.

Neither detective spoke of Da’Quawn. But when Levant’s wife rang his cell phone, he told her he’d be late and explained, using delicate, uncoplike phrasing, that “a young man passed away.”

They interviewed witnesses. They walked from house to house, past chain-link fences, graffitied couches. A gleam of orangey twilight played over the parked cars. Levant, with no flashlight, delivered painful bare-knuckled knocks on the screens of steel security doors.

Darkness fell, and they returned to the crime scene. A cluster of candles threw a white glow on the feet of about twenty mourners, stunned teenagers with their hands jammed in their pockets. A gray-haired man who described himself as a gang intervention worker carried
a poster with Da’Quawn’s photo—a sweet picture taken perhaps a few years before. He asked Kouri for masking tape. Only in South Bureau do people know that police carry tape. Kouri gave him some.

Back in the office much later, Kouri flipped through a stack of photos of recent graffiti, coded boasts, declarations of grief, and avowals of revenge. “We got a war here!” he exclaimed. His phone went off. A shooting in the Seventy-seventh Street Division. Retaliation for Da’Quawn, already.

Kouri took Levant back out to the sedan. They drove through dark streets under the pale gray sky: night is never black in L.A. Kouri leaned out the window into the cold air, talking casually to passersby. To a father in a front yard with children, Kouri called out, “You guys doing all right?” and the father grinned and pointed at his sons: “They don’t gang-bang or nothin’! I don’t let ’em get into anything!”

They knocked on more doors, Kouri calling out “It’s the
po
-lice,” using the ghettoside pronunciation without affectation.

They found Da’Quawn’s house. The living room was a mess. A Lakers clock on the wall, a lampshade teetering on a shelf, a stack of
Ebony
magazines sliding across the coffee table, children’s bicycles on the floor.

The boy’s grandmother sat in the midst of the clutter, gap-toothed with a spray of curly brown hair framing a tired face, dressed in a shift. She sat with bare feet splayed in front of her. Near her, Da’Quawn’s little brother, ten years old, leaned in the arms of an aunt, tears streaming down his face.

Kouri gave his condolences and talked about the case. A ceiling fan rattled overhead. On the couch, the little brother kept sobbing. It wasn’t childish crying. It was convulsive, involuntary, uninhibited anguish. The boy wept as though he were being turned inside out. He stared with unseeing eyes.

As Kouri talked, Levant’s gaze returned again and again to this boy. At last, the boy’s aunt wrapped the child in her arms, lifted him like an infant, and carried him outside.

Da’Quawn’s mother was incarcerated, so his grandmother had been caring for him. She confided that she had been worried about
Da’Quawn’s joining a gang. She had “been trying to get the hell out of here.”

She was unusually frank about gangs. A cousin interjected: “But an adult killed a
kid
!” she snapped, looking hard at Kouri. She was annoyed. Uniformed officers had been jamming up young men on their block all evening, part of the LAPD’s “saturation” response to the homicide. Fifteen young men were spread-eagled against a wall down the street as she spoke. The cousin dangled her keys and was caustic: Were they going to look for the killers, or just harass the victims?

Kouri and Levant bade her goodbye and walked out. The aunt was sitting on the front porch, cradling the brother, as they walked past. The boy turned his brimming eyes toward the detectives and, as if yielding to a reflex, Levant reached out. He laid a hand on the boy’s head. Then he hurried after Kouri.

Police would later piece together that Da’Quawn Allen’s killing was part of a tit-for-tat retaliation cycle. When it finally quieted a week later, the spasm of reciprocal violence had cost the lives of three black men and two black teenage boys and had left three people wounded. Two gangs were involved—a clique on Main Street in the Southeast Division and the 8-Trey Hoover Criminals in the Seventy-seventh Street Division.

Several other unrelated homicides happened in South Bureau the same week, and two officer-involved shootings. Homicide detectives were so swamped that one of the murder cases was assigned to a pair of trainees with only a couple of months’ experience between them.

The cycle had begun with a Saturday night house party on the Eastside. Hoovers and Main Street gang members were socializing together. Then a brawl had broken out among the women there. Several hours later, the argument spilled over into the street. A car drove by. There was “chipping” between its occupants and some pedestrians. The car left and returned. Then shots. A young woman on foot was struck in the leg. She was Main Street. It was
on
.

Early that Sunday, Main Street assailants hit back at the Hoover neighborhood, shooting into a car where a couple sat at Eighty-ninth
and Broadway. They missed. Main Street struck again that afternoon, this time hitting and killing Da’Quawn, with his orange bandana—Hoover gang attire.

That night, Hoover suspects struck back, killing twenty-one-year-old Christopher Lattier, who happened to be walking on Eighty-fourth and Main. Lattier was a school district employee with no criminal record. He had nothing to do with it. He was simply a convenient target because he was young, black, and male.

Shortly after that, Hoover suspects threw a glass beer bottle with a wick full of gasoline through the window of a home in their own neighborhood. An older Main Street gang member had been living there on a “pass.” The “pass” had been revoked.

Nathan Kouri worked continuously through Sunday night and Monday. He had good leads, thanks in part to “friendlies” who had fed information to John Skaggs. Then Kouri got lucky. Cruising down dark alleys where homeless men lurked with ice picks, he came across a rental Pontiac driven by a man “on disability” because of injuries from a previous shooting. A clerk at the employment office had told him disability was “the best thing going.” It turned out to be the suspect car, though the driver was not a suspect. The car had been passed around.

In the midst of this, Kouri got a call. An officer alerted him that county Children and Family Services workers were on their way to Da’Quawn’s grandmother’s house to take the remaining children into foster care. There had been no report of abuse, the officer said, just questions about Da’Quawn’s death.

“DCFS,” Kouri muttered, hanging up the phone.
“Oh my fucking God.”

An image rose before his eyes: social workers yanking Da’Quawn’s sobbing brother from the arms of his aunt. Kouri turned the sedan around and intercepted the caseworker—a harried man in a polo shirt and dress shoes—on a dark street. Kouri planted himself on the sidewalk, stared at the sky for a moment, then spoke: “I know you are just doin’ your job—”

The caseworker thought he knew what Kouri was going to say: “I know you don’t want to be involved,” he interrupted.

But Kouri shook his head and corrected him. “No, no!” he said. “We
are
involved.”

Nothing could be more obvious to Kouri. Involvement was the heart of his job. It was what made homicide work different—that intimate
involvement
with people, with their problems, quarrels, and grievances.

Up at headquarters, where crime was all maps, numbers, and abstractions—“policing by the dots,” one detective said—the enforcement of law was essentially about prejudgment. But down around Eighty-ninth and Broadway, where Nathan Kouri plied his trade, crime was what happened to individuals—real people—who were now his own. Kouri was not, like the LAPD airship, an instrument of law that hovered at such heights that those below were rendered an indistinguishable blur, victims and perpetrators blended into one mass of “at risk” inner-city blackness. Kouri had learned to wade among the inhabitants of the “desperately helpless community” and look into their faces, to choose a side and throw his weight behind it. He made individual injuries his own. His job was to anchor the law in the suffering of real human beings, to bring it down from on high and straight into the living rooms of Watts.

Nathan Kouri did not have a muddled mission like so many others in the police force. He knew exactly what he was fighting for, and for whom. His job was taking sides—always the same side, always without reservation. “The victims’ side,” Camus had written. “In every predicament, the victims’ side.” Now one of his victims’ families faced calamity. Kouri
was
involved. Profoundly.