Friday, October 15, 2004
October 15, 2004
In City Numbed by Violence, the Death of a Young Boy Stirs AnguishBy CHARLIE LeDUFF
OS ANGELES, Oct. 14 - The recent murder of a 14-year-old boy, who begged on his knees before being killed, has shocked the conscience of a city inured to violence on its troubled south side.
In response to the killing, the police department has begun an intense investigation, though officials say they have few leads despite an anonymous tip line number printed in local newspapers and broadcast on television and radio stations.
Most disturbing, investigators say, is the fact that the boy, Byron Lee Jr., a ninth grader at Fremont High School, appeared to be an innocent victim. At 2:10 p.m. last Saturday, he was riding his bicycle through an alleyway near his home in the South Central section of the city when two men in a dark-colored car shot him.
As the boy fell to the ground, the two men got out of their car and unloaded their weapons into his face and torso. He was struck 19 times.
The murder appeared to be gang-related, though the boy had nothing to do with gangs, Detective Rudy Lemos, an investigator assigned to the 77th Street Division of the police department, said. The boy was "hunted" and shot down like a deer, Detective Lemos said, by two men from outside the neighborhood.
"The kid wasn't a gangster; the people who did it were," he said. "There is a turf war going on in the neighborhood. Some people decided to do what they call 'work.' Hunt someone down. Just to let their rivals know they are still around."
He said: "It's a subculture that's hard to understand in that it has an evil mindset. This was just a 14-year-old boy."
The brutality of the murder has led to more attention than the usual south side shootings receive, and highlights the fact that there are two distinct Los Angeleses existing uneasily side by side.
There is one to the north of the Santa Monica Freeway, replete with convertible sports cars and homes where old trees grow. Then there is the Los Angeles south of the freeway, the one of chronic unemployment and gangs and houses with bars over the windows.
The two cities rarely overlap and the police chief, William Bratton, has said publicly that some citizens of the north are oblivious to the murder rate and economic isolation that cripple those in the south.
Byron's murder is not the only random killing committed by gang members this year in Southern California. In April, a California highway patrolman was shot and killed in Pomona, a city east of Los Angeles, in a drive-by gang initiation rite. In July, an ex-convict who was trying to change his life was gunned down in East Los Angeles while cleaning gang graffiti from a wall.
Chief Bratton made a 20 percent drop in murder the centerpiece of his goals for this year, but instead there has been a nearly 2 percent increase. Byron was the 417th murder victim this year. There were 410 in the same period last year.
Moreover, the number of murders in the 12-square-mile 77th Street Division has shot up precipitously, to 73 from 51 last year, a 43 percent increase. Detective Lemos said that 48 of those homicides were gang-related and that more than 30 gangs operated in the area.
In the South Bureau, a 58-square-mile area south of the freeway that includes the 77th Division and is home to 640,000 residents, the problem is mammoth. Almost 200 people have been killed and 1,000 shot, much of the violence caused by rival factions of the Bloods and Crips gangs.
The Bloods represent themselves with red clothing, the Crips wear blue. As a measure of self-preservation, residents of southern Los Angeles wear neither.
"Byron was wearing black," said his uncle, Dwayne Marshall, 18. "Is it too much to ask that kids should be able to go out and play?"
When Chief Bratton accepted his job two years ago, he referred to gang members as "terrorists," and was roundly criticized by church leaders, academics and politicians as uninformed and counterproductive. But in Byron's neighborhood on Thursday, residents said Chief Bratton was nothing if not correct.
"When the night comes, I lock myself in the house," said Minnie Davis, 80, who lives across the street from the alley where Byron was slain. "I ask myself, Lord, why? Why are young people fighting each other, killing one another? The police, the mayor. They can't fix it. It's beyond that."
Byron will be buried on Saturday at the Inglewood Cemetery.
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