Ghettoside (41 page)

Even Skaggs was showing the pressure. His small frown was pulled a little tighter than usual. He sat stock-still.

After the judge delivered his instructions to the jury at agonizing length, Stirling rose. A pause, and the room held its breath. Stirling played with his sleeve. Colello grinned nervously and took a sip from his red plastic cup. Then, as if on cue, the two prosecutors inhaled, and Stirling began.

He started by noting the disappointment on the faces of the jurors when they had been chosen for this trial, and he urged them to make the experience worthwhile. Then he launched into his statement, and it was suddenly clear why Stirling had his job. Gone were the neurotic tics, the
Laurel and Hardy bumblings. His presentation was disciplined and exhaustively thorough, as if he were reading the table of contents of an academic treatise. Perhaps this was why Stirling laughed at himself so easily. There was at least one arena in which he excelled, and he knew it.

He told the jurors they needed a “historical backdrop” to the crime. “You have all heard of the Crips and the Bloods,” he said. He launched into the oversimplified version of gang life in L.A. favored by the media and prosecutors. He talked of gangs as though they were rival governments, highly organized and bent on warfare.

By many accounts, the so-called Rollin’ Hundreds were a relatively small, inconsequential, disorganized gang whose members were largely blood relations from a single family. But Stirling called it “a conglomerate.” Kicking a chair aside to get to the overhead projector, he displayed a map with gang territories blocked out in lavender. It looked like an L.A. version of the board game Risk. The Rollin’ Hundreds and the 8-Trey Gangster Crips “are mortal enemies, they hate each other,” he said.

Privately, John Skaggs could have done without the gang enhancement legislation and the courtroom gymnastics it required. He thought that if appropriate sentences had been handed down all along for murder the system wouldn’t need gang statutes. He wasn’t even a big fan of life sentences. Forty years in prison for the killing of another human being—whatever the motive—and be done with it. The sentence wasn’t as important as the fact that the killer was caught.

Stirling flipped through one transparency after another like a schoolteacher, his red laser pointer dancing over the screen. Then he introduced the victim, Bryant Tennelle. “He wasn’t one to pay much attention to the politics of gang violence,” he said. He flashed Bryant’s graduation photograph on the screen. The soft smile. The curls. The jacket thrown over his shoulder. Tennelle, who had been sitting with his head down, raised his eyes and stared. A juror noticed and pressed a finger to his lips.

Stirling moved on to the next slide: graffiti, tattoos—Starks’s arm
tats, the name “Rollin’ 100’s” and hands forming the letters
b
and
c
for Blocc Crip.

Then Stirling said: “Friday, May 11.” Behind him, Wally Tennelle’s dress shoes began to tap the vinyl floor. Stirling picked up a paper bag and drew from it a faded black Houston Astros hat, a dry pinkish tint on it. He told the jury, incorrectly, that Wally Tennelle was the first officer on the scene. “The paramedics came, and”—Stirling paused for a long moment, took a sip of water—“he dies.”

The prosecutor hadn’t told the jurors which of the somber, suit-clad detectives crowding the courtroom was the victim’s father. But some seemed to have guessed. They kept glancing toward Tennelle. Bryant’s likeness to his father was most plain in the smile. But Detective Tennelle had not smiled. More likely, the jurors were tipped off by the tender grief that clung to him like a cloud.

Stirling talked and talked, methodically chronicling the seizure of the gun and its identification. Derrick watched him closely. Perlo made occasional pro forma objections. But for the most part, the trial seemed to unfold on cruise control. Stirling concluded with a terse admonition: “Keep an open mind, everybody.”

Zeke Perlo rose. He spoke softly, plainly, extemporaneously, barely glancing at his notes. Unlike Stirling, Perlo was the same in front of a jury as he was on the street. He struck a reasonable, confidential tone that conveyed to jurors that he wouldn’t try to put anything over on them. He didn’t speak for long. He didn’t need to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, as Stirling did. He had only to show the weaknesses in Stirling’s case. He told the jurors that the defense would concede much of the evidence but would call into question the credibility of the man in the wheelchair, who he said was pressured by police, and of Jessica Midkiff. He pointed out that she hadn’t come forward on her own, and she had reason to be angry at Starks. Starks sat with arms folded as his lawyer talked, looking over the jury. The judge rose; the day in court was over. As they exited the courthouse, a cold hard wind hit the jurors.

By the second day of the trial, the wind had died and the first orange
California poppies were blooming on roadway medians. Devin Davis’s mother appeared in a gray suit, and one of his sisters also came. Davis, at the defendant’s table in tie and slightly rumpled white shirt, smiled at them.

It was time for the second jury to hear the opener. Throughout the trial, the dance of the two juries would make life complex for bailiff Dontae Hardy. Both juries were present for some testimony, but were separated for other portions. When both were in court, a section of the audience benches was marked off with police tape to accommodate them all. It made for close quarters. One day, Wally Tennelle sat elbow to elbow with Starks’s mother, Olitha.

Stirling gave the Davis jury the same treatment the Starks jury had received the previous day.

This time he left Bryant’s picture—the soft lips, the jacket thrown over the shoulder—up for a while. Wally Tennelle pulled his eyes away with effort, then kept glancing back at the photo.

Arielle Walker, as pretty and fluttery as ever, was a swirl of blond extensions and big swingy earrings on the witness stand. She declared that she had been dating Bryant for four and a half months. This absurdly meticulous timekeeping reminded everyone in the courtroom that these were just a bunch of teenagers, after all.

Arielle pursed her lips and began to cry when Stirling showed her Bryant’s senior picture, and she cried through the rest of her testimony, sniffling and squeaking and wiping a tissue theatrically across her face, long orange fingernails flashing.

Arielle’s testimony had the feel of a performance that, though entwined with authentic grief, was so saturated with adolescent self-regard that it negated all emotion. The jury seemed unmoved.

Bryant’s friend Walter Lee Bridges was next, looking right at Phil Stirling with his solemn dark brown eyes, the tattoo on his neck plainly visible. Stirling asked him to step down from the witness stand to show where he was when the shots were fired. Walter, with a bearing far beyond
eighteen, detached the microphone and raised it to his lips mechanically to answer Stirling’s questions.

Stirling was finding his rhythm. He was a blur of horizontal and, strangely, vertical motion. He questioned and pointed, bobbing up and down and tugging his jacket. His movements were part of the courtroom atmosphere by then. At a couple of points, he even knelt on the floor. But because it seemed such a natural extension of all his other absurd tics, no one batted an eye.

Walter’s testimony describing the shots was the third time that Bryant’s death had played out in court that afternoon. Wally Tennelle kneaded his hands.

Next on the stand was Josh, describing Bryant’s injuries in detail, as Wally Tennelle covered his mouth. Josh was the fourth of the teenagers who had been at the scene to testify that day. All of them spoke as if they still saw an image hovering somewhere just beyond their vision—that image of Bryant, his head blown open, dying on the grass before their eyes. The submerged horror in their faces made their testimony crushingly credible. As Josh walked out of the courtroom, Skaggs laid an approving hand on his shoulder.

The night before the third day of the trial, Skaggs was out on a homicide that had “broken open” in the middle of the night. A car had been found. Leads were suddenly pouring in. The suspect was the son of a Superior Court judge.

But Skaggs did not look tired when he arrived in court in his dapper gray suit. He sat down in his usual spot in the first row behind Starks and Davis, chewing gum, and studied his black leather notebooks filled with little jottings in black ink.

Starks was in one of the two pullover sweaters he wore each day of the trial. Davis, in his tie, was sitting nervously with a fist over his mouth, the proceedings suddenly real.

Tennelle appeared, smiling and relaxed. His brother had come up from San Diego for the trial, and the whole family had gone to supper at a super-trendy downtown restaurant called Palm the night before.

Tennelle had eaten nearly nothing and was still grousing about the high prices, drawing good-natured ribbing from his mother and sister.

Judge Bowers entered and Stirling stood. “The people call Wallace Tennelle,” he said.

Tennelle rose with a frozen, intent look on his face, walked to the witness stand, and sat.

Stirling asked him to spell his name.

Tennelle began crisply. “W-a-l-l-a-c-e.” But then he faltered. “T-e,” he said, and broke off. A pause. No one seemed to breathe.

“T-e,” Tennelle began again. But tears flowed and he could not continue. Jurors, attorneys—everyone froze. The seconds ticked by. Tennelle sat, in the dark blue RHD suit he had clearly chosen for the occasion, fighting for composure. In the jury box, hands clenched and lips tightened.

He wept. Then he recovered, straightened, and broke down again, conducting an excruciating battle with himself in front of a room full of people, unable to spell his own last name. “T-e-n-n-e-l-l-e,” he fought out at last in a broken voice, barely audible.

Skaggs, his face impassive, knotted his fingers together. Tennelle’s effort at self-control was wrenching, more thunderous than any of Arielle’s histrionics. Having finally spelled his name, he dabbed his eyes with a tissue and returned Stirling’s gaze with effort.

“How many children do you have?”

“Three,” Tennelle said. “Well—” He caught himself. “Two, now.”

He looked shrunken in the chair. In the jury box, no one moved.

“Did you have a son named Bryant?”

Tennelle emitted a tiny gasp. “Yes—yeah. Yes.”

Stirling asked him what he did for a living. Tennelle raised his chin.

This time, his voice came clear and strong: “I am a detective for the City of Los Angeles.”

Stirling walked the witness through the events of May 11. Tennelle gave weary answers in his quick-paced Alabama lilt. But as the narrative drew closer to the actual bullets—and the image of his son on the
ground—he began to rock back and forth. He sighed deeply between phrases and pressed on, soldiering past the baseball cap, the blood—speaking, despite the rough emotion in his voice, with a detective’s precision in that strange cop language of street numbers, picayune detail, and direction, easts and wests. He told of parking the car, securing the witness, and proceeding eastbound on Eightieth to reach “my boy.”

Tennelle got through all of this. Then Stirling asked why he didn’t go with Bryant in the ambulance. Tennelle said it was because—and here was the part that always blasted him—because, he said, choking with sobs, he had to go back home and “tell my wife.”

The defense attorneys had no desire to prolong this. They asked no questions. Tennelle reeled from the witness stand.

Most of the spectators were teary-eyed. Stirling, who never seemed to make any effort to hide his emotions, retreated to the back of the courtroom to blow his nose.

But the jurors were not crying. They were stone-faced, focused on their job. Skaggs had never found a jury so hard to read.

Slides of the crime scene flashed by on the screen. Palm trees against the sky. Blood on the ground.

At the defense table, Davis’s mother fussed over her son’s attire, frequently appealing to Applebaum about some detail of his appearance. Almost every day, sheriff’s deputies would deliver a coat hanger with a dress shirt on it for Devin. Inevitably, they carried the hanger carelessly, and the shirt arrived askew and wrinkled. Their indifference must have felt like the sharpest contempt to the always proper and neatly dressed Sandra James.

On the fifth day of the trial, Yadira Tennelle appeared in the courtroom, a heart-shaped locket at her throat.

Yadira remained stock still as the recorded sound of Davis’s sniffling voice flooded the courtroom: “I didn’t want to hurt nobody! I was just trying to fit in!” Davis shook his head violently as the tape rolled. A juror placed a hand on his forehead. Yadira kept her head up, arms folded, the sadness in her face so deep it seemed ancient.

Skaggs’s turn on the stand came that day, too.

The chair seemed too small for his knees and elbows, an effect heightened by the giant blue binder he gripped in his hands. He half turned toward the jurors so they could see his face, fixing them with the blue eyes under the blond eyebrows, and he used a pointer and map as a teacher would. He was in command, calm and pleasant. Only once did Applebaum succeed in rattling him.

Applebaum was trying to make the case that Skaggs had overpowered the vulnerable and confused teenager Devin Davis. Under his questioning, Skaggs acknowledged that he sometimes lied to suspects to extract the truth. And, yes, he sought to manipulate them.

“You are a very persistent investigator, aren’t you?” Applebaum demanded. Skaggs hesitated. But his confusion quickly passed. A half smile flickered across his face and his features resolved into their usual self-assurance. He returned Applebaum’s gaze with conviction. “Yes!” he said.

There was no room for false modesty in Skaggs’s world. He was, in truth, a very persistent investigator.