by Jill Leovy
Josh, Walter, and Chris wanted to toughen up Bryant. They threw play punches at him, trying to get him to jab and dodge. They tried to educate him in street codes. Bryant was too kind, raised too well. “He was nowhere near us,” Chris said. So far above them, he meant.
Arielle was so unfamiliar with middle-class mores that she was amazed by the simple fact that Bryant got up early every morning. She knew hardly anyone who did that. “It changed us so much as a group,” Arielle recalled. “We never had anyone like him around.” Before long, she and Bryant were dating.
Bryant’s family was less enthusiastic about his new social life. DeeDee had no patience for Bryant’s “hanging out.” She considered Arielle “a hoodrat” and the rest of the bunch “unsavory.” She was worried. Bryant was a sponge, she observed—easily influenced. “If he doesn’t get his act together, it will drive my parents crazy,” she thought. She began job hunting for him, poring through lists of city openings in the hope of finding something more durable than the hourly, part-time work Bryant was doing.
For his part, Wally Tennelle was on high alert. At work, he increased his detours to check up on Bryant. The cop side of his brain was fully engaged. He studied his son’s clothes and movements and scrutinized his friends. Bryant was too old for his parents to dictate his friendships. But Tennelle watched, all the time. He perceived the rough vibrations around Chris Wilson and Walter Lee Bridges. But he could also tell they were not “hard-core.” He recognized them as that familiar, softer breed of “affiliated” kids. Both young men were intelligent and likable—good guys, there was no doubt about it. They couldn’t help where they’d grown up. Tennelle knew that Bryant was mostly building bicycles with them. He knew that this pursuit meant a lot to Bryant. When he questioned him, Bryant assured him it was bicycles he liked, not gang-banging.
Yadira worried, too. But she never knew how deeply anxious her husband was over Bryant. Wally Tennelle would get up at 2:00 A.M. to check Bryant’s room and make sure he was home. He churned with anxiety every time Bryant left the house. He harped on Bryant’s whereabouts, nagged him about his social activities. Time after time, he gave the same lecture: “You walk like a duck, talk like a duck, and people gonna think you are a gangster.” Despite the strains, the two remained close, collaborating on projects around the house.
Bryant showered in the bathroom off his parents’ room because the main bathroom was kept clean for guests. It afforded Wally an opportunity to covertly examine his bare skin. One day, he caught a glimpse of Bryant’s exposed back and saw what he dreaded: a new tattoo. It was not any symbol he recognized, no gang or neighborhood name. It was simply a logo of the city, the name “Los Angeles” with scrolls and angel wings. Wally confronted Bryant. There was another scene like the earring episode. But Tennelle was up against the fact that his youngest was no longer a child: “What can you do?” he said later. He had no legal right to demand that Bryant wear different clothes or have another girlfriend. “He is eighteen years old. You can’t chain him down. You can’t drive him out of the house.”
At the same time, Wally Tennelle was an astute enough observer of gang life to perceive that his son was not like the gangsters he had spent his career arresting. Bryant held jobs and was obviously committed to them. He got up early, worked hard, and was always on time. He was studying hard to get his final credits to get his diploma. Most of all, Bryant remained the “good boy” his parents had always known him to be. There was no new shift in attitude. Bryant was never sullen. He was always good-natured, obedient even when he didn’t have to be, loving to his mother, bonding with his father over various innocent pursuits—tropical fish and show-quality roosters—although neighbors’ complaints finally forced the family to give up the birds. Wally Tennelle knew these were not the hallmarks of a gang-banging criminal. And when he confronted Bryant, all those years of protective parenting were turned back on him: “Daddy!” Bryant remonstrated. “You raised me better than that!”
All teenagers go through phases. Wally and Yadira hoped they would get Bryant back on track when he got his driver’s license back. June 29 was the date they were waiting for.
By spring Bryant finished his class and at last he had the credits to get his diploma. It was cause for a family celebration. Wally and Yadira were so proud. Bryant told Arielle how happy he was. He told her how long he had been yearning to please his parents.
Yadira accompanied Bryant to pick up his diploma. Reiter and Bryant’s other teachers were planning a party. And there was more good news: with DeeDee’s help, Bryant had a secured a job with the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks working with youths. DeeDee hoped this would turn into a career in public employment. She was now an accountant at LAX, working for the city, just like her father. Her aunt was also a municipal employee. DeeDee dubbed them “a city family.” The parks job would give Bryant a chance to shine in a new arena as a mentor to kids. He would thrive, she thought.
It was Friday, May 11, before Mother’s Day weekend. Bryant was to start his new job Monday. It seemed appropriate, like a Mother’s Day gift to Yadira. She had been hoping for so long for all these pieces to fall in place—the high school diploma, the real job. Bryant was excited to show his parents he knew how much effort they’d poured into him, wanted to show them how much he appreciated it.
He told Arielle to expect him later that evening because he wanted to buy a Mother’s Day basket for Yadira. Arielle was going to give him a lift.
The sun had not yet set. Bryant had some time on his hands. He bought a root beer with Walter and strolled along Eightieth Street pushing his bike.
“IT’S MY SON”
Wally and Yadira Tennelle did not hear the pap-pap of gunfire a short distance away.
As Walter Lee Bridges fled and Bryant collapsed, the couple were at home doing what they always did on Friday evenings—puttering, alone and together, doing their own thing. Yadira was in the shower. Wally was contemplating the cars in the driveway, about to move them.
At the shooting scene, Arielle Walker ran across the intersection to the cluster of screaming teenagers.
She saw Bryant on the ground, paramedics all around. Her eyes fixed on the cap full of blood.
She thought of Bryant’s mother. She grabbed the cap and ran.
Wally Tennelle had begun to move the cars when he saw a young girl coming toward him, weeping. Again, he thought. Now what? He braced himself for his neighbors’ latest drama.
Arielle quavered when she saw him. She was looking for Yadira. To Arielle, Bryant’s mother had always seemed approachable, kind—everyone in the neighborhood loved Yadira. Arielle barely knew Wally. She knew he was a cop and was intimidated. It hadn’t occurred to her that she might see him first. But he fixed her with his gentle eyes. She would remember his first words to her: “I can help you. What’s wrong?”
Then his eyes dropped to her hand, to the blood-filled cap in her fingers.
Tennelle spoke before Arielle had a chance to, his eyes on the cap.
He knew that cap. “It’s my son,” he said.
The instant was all the notification he needed. He had not been a homicide detective all those years for nothing. As soon as he saw the hat, saw how much blood was on the cap, he understood that something irreversible had happened.
Tennelle thought of his wife inside. He called to her. She was still in the shower. He put Arielle in his car and drove over.
Josh, looking up, saw the big sedan zoom up and the door fly open. Tennelle hopped out while it was still rolling, its wheels coming to rest against the curb. He looked around. Bryant was on the grass surrounded by paramedics. The cops were putting up tape.
Tennelle noted his son’s position and scanned the street. Later he would be able to describe the scene using the same tone and terminology as for a hundred other crime scenes. Victim down. Feet facing west.
He turned to one of the cops and motioned toward Arielle. This witness, he said, needs to be secured.
He told the paramedics he would meet them at the hospital. He got back in his sedan and went to face Yadira.
Nearby, the man with the tile cutter was aware that a plainclothes cop with a professional bearing had arrived in a sedan. He assumed he was an LAPD detective sent to investigate. Only later did he learn who the detective was. He never heard him say a word.
“I think Bryant got shot.”
That’s how Yadira Tennelle remembers her husband putting it.
Please no, she had thought. When he got back, she was out of the shower, waiting.
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 peop
le 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.
