by Jill Leovy
After a brief LAPD apprenticeship in Southeast, Wally Tennelle “wheeled” to jail division, then to narcotics, spending less time in patrol than is typical for new officers. He ended up in the Central Bureau CRASH unit in the early eighties. CRASH stood for “community resources against street hoodlums,” a name that belonged to a bygone era of the LAPD, before reform efforts attempted to scrub out hints of wildness and bravado. The progression of gang squad names charted this evolution: an early special team of this type in the Seventy-seventh had been called PATRIOT. Then came the citywide units dubbed CRASH. Then, after a federal civil rights consent decree, they were relabeled with the anodyne GIT—“gang impact teams.”
Tennelle’s stint as a gang officer came in the midst of the great American homicide wave of the early eighties. It was the era of crack cocaine and rock houses and open-air drug markets. The young Marine veteran was in heaven. There could be nothing better than wearing that dark blue uniform, driving fast cars, and chasing gangsters around all night. He didn’t want to do anything else—certainly not detective work. Everyone knew detectives were “a bunch of slugs,” Tennelle recalled. He and his peers had a motto: “P-2 forever,” for Police Officer II—that is, the die-hard street cops.
Then, in 1984, Tennelle was among a group of gang officers loaned out to the homicide unit to handle the high murder caseload, and he got his first homicide.
The qualities that make great homicide detectives are different from the qualities that make great patrol cops. But they are related. Wally Tennelle had a baseline of attributes that steer many young people toward police work. Although he was not college-educated, he was smart and energetic. Police work can be a haven for brainy, action-oriented people who do not, for some reason, gravitate toward formal education—the type afflicted with what DeeDee Tennelle diagnosed in her whole family as “a touch of ADD.”
It made them uniquely suited for a job that was carried out almost entirely out of doors and involved sleepless nights, relentless bursts of activity, and the ability to move from one situation to the next quickly without leaving too much behind. A great cop—or a great detective—needed to be smart and quick, but not necessarily bookish or terribly analytical. A good memory, a talent for improvisation, a keen interest in people, and a buoyancy of spirit—one had to like “capering”—ensured that the hyperactive flourished in a job that left others wilting with stress.
Wally Tennelle had all these traits. But he had a few others that gave him an edge on even the better class of south-of-the-Ten cops. They were the same qualities that his mother had once noted: the preternatural neatness, the ability to control himself and the space around him, and the quiet certainty of his whole mien. Tennelle was an orderly thinker; he loved detail and was almost pathologically hardworking. He was also happy and had few if any personal demons. This latter trait was especially important. It gave him steadiness of purpose and stamina. Not surprisingly, when he worked that first homicide case, he was swept with the sense of certainty people experience when they discover what they were meant for in life. Yeah, he thought. This is what I want to do.
Tennelle worked as a homicide detective for Central Bureau CRASH until the late 1980s, and then he transferred to a divisional detective job in Newton. He worked as they all worked in those days—hammered by new cases, trying to slam together investigations that would stand up in court before the next one overwhelmed them, hoping they wouldn’t founder in plea deals, which were much more common then. One weekend in the late 1980s, Tennelle was called to four murder scenes. Only at the fifth, he recalled, did the brass agree to summon a fresh team.
Along the way, Tennelle learned the homicide detective’s creed from an early partner standing over the body of a murdered prostitute. “She ain’t a whore no more,” he said. “She’s some daddy’s baby.” Wally Tennelle loved that philosophy. Whatever the wider world’s response, the homicide detective’s call was to treat each victim, no matter how deep their criminal involvement, as the purest angel. The murdered were inviolate. They all deserved the same justice. They were all some daddy’s baby.
The city was entering what veteran detectives would thereafter refer to as “the Big Years.” Homicides hit a high point in 1980, waned, then surged to a second peak in the early 1990s. In raw numbers, nothing like it had ever been seen before (though per capita rates of homicide were actually higher during the previous decade). In 1992, the homicide death rate for all Americans exceeded nine hundred per hundred thousand people. That is higher than in almost any other developed country. Among blacks, the picture was even starker: they died at about six times the rate of whites—just as they had in earlier eras and as they would after the Big Years. At the peak, the rate for the highest-risk blacks was off the charts. In 1993, black men in their early twenties in Los Angeles County died by homicide at a rate of 368 per 100,000 population, similar to the per capita rate of death for U.S. soldiers deployed to Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion.
Wally Tennelle earned the detective rank in 1990, right on the shoulder of the great wave. To “work homicide” in South Central L.A. in those days was to dwell in a demimonde the outside world could not comprehend.
It’s one matter to contemplate what the scholar Randall Kennedy calls the “dismal statistics” related to black homicide—war zone death rates ten minutes from peaceful suburbs. It was another to watch the catastrophe unfold firsthand, as Tennelle would over the ensuing decade.
South Central then felt like another city, enclosed in invisible walls. The very air bore a tincture of grief. “Indescribable” was a word people used a lot: “So hard to describe, and even then, you can’t smell it,” a Watts detective said.
Choked silence, accompanied by that flat gaze one police chaplain called “homicide eyes,” was perhaps the signature response people offered when asked to describe their experiences with violence. Eyes would stray midway through an explanation of a father’s sudden obliteration, or a husband’s slow, excruciating demise. An apologetic shake of the head would cut short an account of a son’s maiming. Survivors who escaped gunfire trailed off into vanquished silence when talking of the friends who didn’t. “There are no words,” people often said.
Karen Hamilton, a bookkeeper from Jefferson Park, had still not spoken of her son’s murder seven years after his death. She tried, drawing deep breaths, her hands shaking, but no voice came. Homicide grief may be a kind of living death. Survivors slog on, diminished, disfigured by loss and incomprehension.
For many family members, the nightmare begins with experiences most Americans associate only with war: the sudden, violent death of a loved one on the street outside your home. Parents and siblings are often first on the scene.
When eighteen-year-old Jamaal Nelson was shot, his mother ran outside, fell on her knees, and lifted his shirt to see his torso riddled with bullet holes. He rasped loudly and died in her arms.
Bobby Hamilton found his teenage son unconscious on the ground in a nearby park. The boy was breathing heavily, a bullet in the back of his head. Hamilton scooped him up like a baby and drove him to a fire station, where he died.
Other loved ones learned of the deaths from phone calls, or visits from police. A friend called Wanda Bickham to tell her that her nineteen-year-old son, Tyronn, had been shot and killed. Bickham slammed down the receiver, unable to hear it. Lewis Wright learned of his son’s murder when an official at the coroner’s office slid a photo across the table to him facedown. Heart pounding, he flipped it over to see his son’s face. Sharon Brown spent the last moments of her thirteen-year-old son’s life sitting still on a park bench outside the recreation center where he’d been shot, staying out of the paramedics’ way. Later, she regretted it.
Immediately after the murders, many of the bereaved describe feeling mechanical and numb, their minds spinning, reflexively pushing agony away. At a funeral, one mother walked from her pew to her son’s open casket like a robot, lifting each foot as if it carried a hundred-pound
weight.
Realization comes slowly. Some people describe their worst spells of grief two, or five, or twenty years after the murder. “It’s after. It’s after. It’s after,” Barbara Pritchett said, clenching her fists with anguish two years after Dovon’s murder. Many people report being consumed by anger. “The whys,” one bereaved father called it.
Some give in to despair. In the months after forty-two-year-old Charles Yarbrough was murdered, his mother, Anita McKiry, spent entire nights lying facedown, spread-eagled, on his grave. A Compton woman who had lost not one but two sons to homicide described herself as just “waiting to die.” Carlton Mitchell, whose brother Paul was killed, took to walking dangerous streets hoping that he would be struck by gunfire like his brother.
Homicide could make pariahs of the bereaved. Family members described being shunned, as if their misfortune were catching. Sometimes it seemed that the closer people were to the problem, the more potent their distancing mechanisms. This distance could be heard in the evasive and often callous language used in black South Central to describe the phenomenon. One almost never heard the word “murder” on the streets. Euphemisms served instead: “puttin’ in work,” to “serve” someone, to “smoke” him, to “lay him out,” to “light him up,” to “take care of business”—the list went on. Bloods, Crips, and Hoovers had their own trademark verbs for attacking and hurting other human beings—“swoopin’,” “movin’,” “groovin’.” The ubiquitous “whoopdee-woo-woo” and its many variations were all-purpose ellipses equally applicable to a minor spat or a massacre, depending on the context.
Chaotic public scenes of grief on streets and sidewalks were common. Mothers and grandmothers tried to bust through police tape. They threw themselves on victims’ bodies, pummeling officers who held them back. Mini-riots sometimes broke out at crime scenes. Use-of-force cases erupted when police officers tussled with hysterical family members. In one case in Watts, a woman’s son and relatives pressed around the car where she lay dying from a gunshot wound; officers pushed the mourners back by force, striking several with batons.
Outside the walled city, there prevailed a blander yet even more virulent form of callousness. It permeated officialdom, the media, the public rhetoric surrounding homicide. Very few of the bereaved were spared the sense that a wider world viewed their loss indifferently. “Nobody cares” was a universal lament south of the Ten during the Big Years, and for many years after. A threadbare, dismal, bureaucratic sense of routine surrounded the handling of homicides and related crimes. Officials were rushed and overburdened. One mother described learning of her son’s death from a clerk in the hospital’s property room who wordlessly handed her his shoes.
Very few murders were covered in the media. Television stations covered more than the papers, but without any particular consistency, and many, many deaths received no mention by any media outlet, especially if the victims were black. It rankled deeply. The lack of media coverage seemed to convey that black-on-black homicide was “small potatoes” in the eyes of the world, said a father who lost a daughter. “Nothing on the news!” a mother cried, weeping, at the sight of a journalist the day after her son was murdered. “Please write about it! Please!”
Even when cases got some public attention, the tilt often seemed off. Gangs were a big topic, but atrocity, trauma, and lifelong sorrow were not part of the public’s vocabulary about black-on-black violence. Somehow, mainstream America had managed to make a fetish of South Central murders yet still ignore them. The principal aspect of the plague—agony—was constantly underrated.
Here, too, language was a battleground. More than one bereaved parent objected to terms such as “gang violence” as euphemistic, its purpose being to label their loved ones as throwaway people or otherwise diminish their standing as “innocent victims.” Homicide activist LaWanda Hawkins, whose son was killed, summed up the objection: “ ‘Gang member’ is the new N-word,” she said. Phrases such as “at risk” were worse, rolling victims and perpetrators into one indistinguishable mass. Vicky Lindsay grew so tired of palliating terms that she had a sticker made for her rear windshield: “My son was murdered,” it declared.
Det. Brent Josephson, who worked in the Seventy-seventh Street station through the Big Years of the late 1980s and early 1990s, gave a name to the syndrome that ravaged the lives of many residents of South Bureau: he called it “the Monster.” The name supplied a shorthand for the whole mess—not just the pileup of homicides among a small group of people, mostly black, and the unseen savagery of these crimes, but also the indifference with which the world seemed to view them.
LAPD detectives had probably never been staffed adequately to handle the high levels of violence south of the Ten. But during the Big Years, caseloads swelled to the point of ridiculousness, with so few detectives handling so many cases that the job came to resemble battlefield surgery. Caseloads were at least twice what experts recommended for many of those years, and ten times what RHD detectives would be assigned a decade and a half later. What detectives such as Tennelle did during those years would never be repeated; his generation of homicide detectives remains, to this day, unique in their exposure to the Monster.
They toiled ceaselessly, racking up overtime and divorces. Strokes and heart attacks proliferated in their ranks. One detective in South Bureau in the 1990s collapsed in the office. Yet the mountain of backlogged cases kept growing. “New cases piled on, and new cases piled on,” a detective named Jerry Pirro recalled a decade after the Big Years peaked. “It got to the point where we were pretty much living at the station. The phone would ring, and you’d cringe.”
It was hard not to take it personally. Detectives felt they were fighting an invisible war. By then, the notion of a lot of black and Latino drug dealers and gangsters shooting each other down in the ’hood had become normal. It was often not news. “I remember a banner headline in the Los Angeles Times one weekend,” recalled a detective named Paul Mize. “A bomb in Beirut had killed six people. We had nine murders that weekend, and not a one of them made the paper. Not one.” It was aggravating, crazy-making. “You were dealing with problems and people that the majority of society doesn’t want to think about—doesn’t want to deal with their tragedy and grief,” a detective named John Garcia recalled in the early 2000s, talking of his years in the Newton Division and South Bureau. “They are not the ones who have to knock on that front door at two A.M. and say, ‘Your loved one has been killed.’ ”
No one seemed to care. Mize recalled writing “poison-pen activities reports” to superiors, begging for more resources. “I used to fly off the handle and throw stuff around the room,” he said. “I couldn’t believe the decisions being made in Parker Center” by top police officials.
But to brass, detective work was “strictly reactive,” as one high-ranking officer called it, dismissing the whole function. Crime prevention was seen as more progressive, and so competing priorities always seemed to win out over investigations: preventive patrol projects, gang sweeps. “Just all upside down,” said a Newton homicide detective named Johnny Villa.
Law, of course, isn’t like hygiene, and crime “prevention” inevitably leads to stereotyping people as potential threats. But “proactive” patrol work sounded better. Prevention carried an added bonus, as legal scholar Carol Steiker has noted: it gave police wide latitude, since the Constitution places many constraints on legal procedure after a crime, far fewer before it.
Despite the obstacles, many detectives brought battlefield dedication to the job in those years. But it was inevitable that the work would suffer. Cases were butchered; investigations were rushed, cursory, abandoned midway through. “You could have cases with viable leads, but you didn’t have time to work them because fresh stuff was coming in,” said a detective named Rick Marks, whose career spanned more than 160 cases.
The only thing that can be said for the crush was that it created a few unrivaled experts. Only a select number of homicide detectives in the c
ountry could claim the familiarity with homicide that the LAPD’s South Bureau and Central Bureau “homicide experts” could. There were perhaps such detectives in New York, Detroit, Washington, D.C.—people who had learned their trade over years and scores of murders. Such detectives were experts less because of the variety of cases they worked than their sameness.
High-homicide environments are alike. The setting is usually a minority enclave or disputed territory where people distrust legal authority, as in South Los Angeles, where law had broken down in the Big Years and murder flourished. The killings typically arise from arguments. A large share of them can be described in two words: Men fighting. The fights might be spontaneous, part of some long-running feud, or the culmination of “some drama,” as Skaggs would put it. These male “dramas,” he observed, were not so different from those among quarreling women of the projects. In fact, they were often extensions of them. “Women work through men by agitating them to homicide,” observed an anthropologist studying Mayan villages in Mexico. The observation fit scores of killings in L.A. that cops chalked up to “female problems.”
The smallest ghettoside spat seemed to escalate to violence, as if absent law, people were left with no other means of bringing a dispute to a close. Debts and competition over goods and women—especially women—drove many killings. But insults, snitching, drunken antics, and the classic—unwanted party guests—also were common homicide motives. Small conflicts divided people into hostile camps and triggered lasting feuds. Every grudge seemed to harbor explosive potential. It would ignite when antagonists met by chance, gunfire erupting in streets or liquor stores. Vengeance was a staple motive. In some circles, retaliation for murder was considered all but mandatory. It was striking how openly people discussed it, even debating the merits from the pulpit at funerals.
