Tim and Bob would spend hours interrogating each until someone broke. They would use that confession to get the others to admit their involvement. Tim and Bob handled numerous homicides this way over the years. There was something about a gang member seeing other gang members he’d done a crime with all being brought in at the same time, but kept separate from one another. None of them had any idea what the others were saying. Panic would set in over whether someone was confessing and implicating the rest. If that happened, there was no chance of any kind of leniency for the ones who didn’t talk. The weakest link was usually the one who was most afraid or was trying to get a deal for less time and was willing to give up the details to get it.
***
At around 8:20 p.m. on March 18, 1994, Tim and Bob were working when they heard a call come in over the radio about a murder on Compton Boulevard.
There’d been a lead-up to the incident. It involved a recent feud between two sets of Compton Pirus, which was unusual as Piru sets were pretty tight, sticking together against the Crips, who greatly outnumbered them. There had been minor beef here and there between Pirus sets - mainly over women and drugs - but they were quickly quashed. This particular feud between the Tree Top Pirus and the Neighborhood Pirus (NHP) was different. It hadn’t been resolved. Things had escalated.
The Tree Top Pirus were centrally-located in Compton, south of Rosecrans Avenue between Willowbrook and Aranbe. The streets in their neighborhood were named after trees. Elm. Spruce. Cedar. Hence the name of their set. The Neighborhood Pirus were on the west side of Compton, by Central Avenue, south of Rosecrans.
The feud began when the Tree Top Pirus and a clique within the Fruit Town Pirus got into a dispute over drugs. The Fruit Town Pirus were a much larger set, deriving their name from the streets in their neighborhood - Peach, Cherry, Pear, and other fruits. The sets were separated by one street, Rosecrans. The conflict about the drugs became more intense, and worsened when the Neighborhood Pirus joined in and aligned with Fruit Town.
For the first time, conflict between Compton Pirus had resulted in murder. Weeks earlier, Sean Ford - the younger brother of a high-ranking member of the Tree Top Pirus named Derrick Ford, aka “Pot” - had been killed.
Tim and Bob knew Pot very well. He was smart, well-spoken, and always had a good sense of humor when they encountered him. They genuinely liked Pot. There was a mutual respect between them.
They had talked with him after Sean’s death. Pot didn’t have much to say, even though he most likely knew who’d killed his brother.
Tim and Bob knew he wouldn’t let the crime go unavenged. He would eventually try to retaliate. That was street code. If someone hurt a gang member’s family or close friend, it was on that gang member to lead the charge in serving street justice. Pot was a shot caller in his set and was well-respected on the streets. He had to get payback. All Tim and Bob could do was wait, stay on alert, and do their best to get Sean’s suspected killer in custody before his clock ran out.
Pot (standing) and Eight Ball
Pot did admit one thing to them. He said a Neighborhood Piru was responsible. He was sure of it.
***
Tim and Bob didn’t have to wait long. The voice of Bob’s old training officer, J.J. Jackson, came over the radio the night of March 18 around 8:20 p.m. saying he was being flagged down on Compton Boulevard, just east of Central Avenue. J.J.’s deep voice was calm as he spoke.
“I’ve got two gunshot victims,” he said. “One deceased and the other one talking and in stable condition.”
Tim and Bob weren’t sure if this was the retaliation they’d been expecting from Pot, so they headed to the crime scene. Before they arrived, J.J.’s voice came over the radio again.
“The victim is a Neighborhood Piru and says the suspects are from Tree Top.”
Tim and Bob whipped their car around and headed for the Tree Top Piru's turf.
They would later learn that four guns were involved. Several spent .45 caliber, 9mm, and .380 caliber casings were found at the crime scene, and the victim said one of the suspects had a revolver. A .380 caliber handgun with blood on it was found at the scene. The right plastic grip on the weapon was broken and there was scoring on the metal, possibly from a bullet striking it.
Murder scene on the night of March 18, 1994
The surviving victim had described a large, four-door yellow vehicle with a white door pulling up in front of their vehicle. Three Black men jumped out and ran toward them. When the victims saw the men, they jumped out of their car and started to run. All three of the suspects were armed with handguns and began firing at them. The driver was killed immediately, falling dead in the street. The surviving victim was shot in the leg, but managed to escape the barrage of bullets aimed his way. The suspects ran back to their vehicle, hopped inside, and sped away.
Several days prior to this, Tim and Bob had contacted one of their informants who told them that Pot was living at a new house at 433 West Spruce Street and was selling drugs from there. This house was the new hangout for the Tree Top Pirus. The informant also told them he had personally seen Tree Tops with 9mm and .45 caliber handguns.
Based on that informant’s prior intel and J.J. now saying over the radio that the surviving victim was a Neighborhood Piru and the shooters were Tree Tops, Tim and Bob headed to Spruce Street. They didn’t see the yellow car parked anywhere, so they drove right in front of the house. Pot was standing in the doorway with the door wide open. Tim and Bob could see several other Tree Tops inside. Pot immediately turned and went back in, leaving the door wide open.
Tim and Bob jumped out of their car and ran toward the front door. Not this drill again. There were possible gang members inside, maybe ones who had just done a drive-by murder. The detectives charged ahead, both feeling the adrenaline rush that came with this kind of chase. As they approached the door, Bob used his handset to radio for backup. When they got closer to the house, they heard loud noises coming from the rear yard.
Several gang members, three or four, ran out the back door and were hopping the fence which led into an apartment complex at 433 West Rosecrans. Backup units began showing up. Tim and Bob told them to head to Rosecrans. A containment area was quickly set up.
Tim and Bob cleared the house. There was no one inside, although they saw evidence of drugs. Assisting officers held it as Tim and Bob ran out the back door after the suspects.
Tim and Bob ran into the building across Rosecrans, a two-story with four units on each floor. A woman was screaming in an apartment on the second floor. They ran in the direction of the screaming.
When they got to the unit, a pregnant Latina woman in her twenties holding a baby screamed, “They’re in the closet! They’re in the closet!”
As Tim and Bob entered the apartment with their guns drawn, they heard a loud crash in the bedroom and they went inside. The window had been smashed out. Cops could be heard yelling downstairs as Tim and Bob trained their focus on the closet. The men were hiding inside. The detectives recognized them at once. It was TK and Q-Ball, both known Tree Tops. Tim and Bob pulled them out and placed them under arrest. Then, they looked out the smashed window; Pot had jumped through the glass and had broken his leg when he hit the ground.
This was bigger than just busting a drug house. Pot wouldn’t jump out of a second-story window unless he’d done something bad. Something really bad, like maybe murder. Gangsters didn’t risk that level of injury over drugs and gun busts. They didn’t give a shit about catching those kinds of cases. They’d do them and be back on the streets. But here these guys were now, desperate enough to break into a pregnant woman’s apartment. They were trying to dodge getting caught for something very serious.
Tim and Bob had Pot, TK, and Q-Ball in custody for, at the very least, burglary for breaking into the woman’s house, but they knew these Tree Tops were involved in the murder. That’s when the case began to come together.
***
Tim and Bob went back to the h
ouse at 433 West Spruce to go through the evidence. They found cocaine, cash, and ammunition for a .45 caliber gun -- the same kind of bullets as some of the spent casings found at the murder scene. This was Tim and Bob’s first real link to the crime. They searched the rear yard and discovered a
.38 caliber revolver with five spent casings still in the chamber. This was mostly likely one of the murder weapons. Back inside, there were fresh drippings of blood in the living room leading to the kitchen. The trail of blood led to the street, then stopped.
At the murder scene over on Compton Boulevard there was a trail of blood from the .380 caliber handgun that went back toward where the suspect vehicle had stopped. It appeared that one of murder suspects had been shot during the incident, perhaps by one of the other suspects. Based on the .380 caliber gun that was left at the scene that had a broken handle and the scoring on the metal, the suspect had probably been shot in the hand.
While Tim and Bob were still at the house, dispatch informed them that a gunshot victim had shown up at St. Francis Hospital in Lynwood. The man had a gunshot wound in his right hand. Tim and Bob knew this was one of their suspects. They had their partners, Eddie Aguirre and Edward Mason, go to the hospital to find out the identity of the victim.
***
Aguirre hit them back with an update. The gunshot victim was Cleophis Bealy, a known member of the Tree Top Pirus who went by the nickname “Nookie.” Nookie had given Aguirre some bullshit story about some unknown person shooting him while he was in the 500 block of West Rosecrans. Based on the evidence at the murder scene and at the house on Spruce, they had enough to book Nookie for murder.
***
The detectives worked through the night putting the case together. They did interviews, wrote reports, got a few hours of sleep, and the next day were right back at it. There was a lot of work to do in order to find out who else had been involved in the murder.
They contacted their informant, and although they couldn’t use him court, he painted a picture for them, including who did the shooting. It was an informant who helped them as it always was. The people in the community were afraid to get involved as witnesses or to give information. Doing so could cost them their lives. Their informant laid everything out. Pot, Nookie, a Tree Top nicknamed “Slug,” and Q-Ball had committed the murder. The .380 caliber handgun belonged to Nookie. He’d been accidentally shot in the hand by Q-Ball during the incident on Compton Boulevard. The 9mm and .45 caliber handguns that were used in the murder had been given to a Tree Top Piru nicknamed “Pooh” afterwards. The murder vehicle belonged to a Tree Top who went by the nickname “8-Ball.” It was a four-door yellow Plymouth with one white door. Thanks to their confidential informant, Tim and Bob now had the names of all the players involved.
Now they had to prove it.
***
They prepared two search warrants for Pooh’s locations and served them the next day. Cocaine that was intended to be sold in the streets was seized, but no guns were recovered, just a 9mm magazine with bullets.
Tim and Bob were hoping to squeeze Pooh for information about the murder, banking on him not wanting to go back to jail for the drugs they’d found. Their instincts were right. Pooh was willing to talk.
Over the next couple of days they saw 8-Ball driving around the city in the yellow Plymouth with the white door, but they left him alone. They had a bigger plan that including hitting his house with a search warrant.
On the 23rd, five days after the murder, Tim and Bob received information that Compton hip-hop star DJ Quik would be doing a concert at Centennial High School. Quik was a Tree Top Piru, so they knew all the Tree Top Pirus would be there to represent.
Around nine that night, Tim and Bob went to Centennial High. As expected, the place was packed. They located 8-Ball’s yellow Plymouth in the parking lot. They snuck up to the car and looked inside, hoping to spot blood from Nookie’s injured hand. Sure enough, it was there. Blood was in several places - on the driver’s headrest, the rear left door handle, the armrest, and the window.
The information Pooh had given them about the murder was enough to write a thirteen-location search warrant on Tree Top Piru members. Within two weeks, they prepared it and served it.
Multi-location warrants were how Tim and Bob were often able to slow down gang activity or stop it altogether, at least for a while. With the help of other officers, they would hit all the locations at once, in the early morning hours, cart the gang members off to jail for being in illegal possession of guns and drugs, then try to get them to roll over on themselves. This was a proven method, one that consistently worked. Catching them off guard this way - dirty, before they had a chance to hide whatever drugs and weapons they had on hand - was often the only way to get them to talk. It put them in an unfortunate position, and they would be more open to bargaining their way out.
They netted a cache of assault weapons and drugs from the multi-location hit on the Tree Tops, and recovered 8-Ball’s yellow Plymouth with the blood inside. They also recovered the 9mm and .45 caliber handguns used in the murder. It was a big blow to the Tree Top Pirus. It would be a while before the gang recovered.
***
Tim and Bob were able to get several Tree Top gang members who were present the night of the murder to tell what happened. They gathered enough statements and evidence to file charges on all four Tree Top Piru gang members - Pot, Q-Ball, Slug, and Nookie. The detectives even testified in court using information told to them by the Tree Top members who’d talked.
Pot, Q-Ball, Slug, and Nookie were ultimately convicted of murder. Several other Tree Top Pirus were charged with accessory after the fact and pleaded guilty. These convictions nearly destroyed the gang, with things worsened by several of their members being seen as snitches.
Pot, the shot caller, had been put away. Tim and Bob felt bad about that because they liked him so much, but these convictions had been a huge success for the gang unit and Compton P.D.’s reputation. Such was the fine line Tim and Bob walked with the relationships they developed in the streets. Despite their feelings, they had to do their job. Pot understood that, just as they’d understood that he felt he had to avenge his brother’s death.
Pot was at peace with the way everything had gone down. He understood that negative repercussions for his actions were a strong possibility, but he’d been willing to pay the price.
Both sides - law enforcement and a grief-stricken gang member with retaliation on his mind - had been determined to see their brand of justice served. In this case, they each did just that.
***
The gang unit had two more officers assigned to the unit now - Eddie Aguirre and Ray Richardson - which was a tremendous help to Tim and Bob. With their assistance, the Compton gang unit was doing incredible work, solving one murder after another. They were able to take down more gangs, major ones, with their multi-location search warrant technique. The caches of weapons seized from these search warrants proved newsworthy almost every time they did one.
Their informants were well-planted, spread out over Compton. There was hardly a shooting or murder that happened in the city where the gang unit didn’t know who did it. Knowing who committed the crime and proving it were two different things, but they were aware of who the shooters were and the players calling the shots and did their best to get them off the streets.
Their boss, Reggie gave them the wiggle room to gain informants that most agencies probably wouldn’t have allowed. They would arrest less powerful gang members for guns and drugs, then let them back onto the streets. Those gang members would then owe them favors. Sometimes this didn’t work, but the ones who did return the favor and provide information were often very reliable. If an informant didn’t come through with good information, they would take the informant’s original case to the D.A.’s office, get a warrant, and arrest that informant at a later time.
Word spread on the streets about how the gang unit treated gang members. If they were treated poorly, when i
t came time to interview them or get information, they wouldn’t cooperate. After years of working with so many gang members, they knew Tim and Bob were fair. They knew the detectives would put them in jail if they had to, but they would also give gang members a break. That went a long way when it came to interviewing hardcore gang members. They were often willing to cooperate because they knew Tim and Bob’s reputation.
***
Tim and Bob were often asked to come up with plans to deal with gang-related problems in the city. One of the biggest that affected Compton’s crime rate and the quality of life for the citizens was the sale of drugs.
One of the ways Tim and Bob combatted this ongoing problem was through reverse stings. Reverse stings were conducted on both the gangs and the buyers.
One day, they took the undercover van to take down members of the Tortilla Flats gang who were out on the streets selling drugs. The gang’s main hangout were apartments on the north side of Magnolia Street, just west of Acacia. The plan was to sit in the van, watch them sell, then arrest the buyers as they drove away. A videocamera inside the van recorded these transactions. There were four marked units nearby to take down the buyers after they purchased.
Inside the van, as one of them filmed, the other broadcast descriptions of the buyers’ vehicles and the directions they were traveling to the marked units. The van was backed in a driveway on Acacia and Magnolia with a clear view of the drug transactions. Usually four or five Tortilla Flats gang members hung out in front of the apartment complex.
That day, a small tan vehicle driving south on Acacia stopped at the intersection at Magnolia. The car stopped directly behind the van, blocking its view. Two Latino males who looked to be gang members were inside. Tim and Bob were looking out of the rear windows and Tim put the camera down.
“What the fuck are these guys doing?” he said. “I can’t see shit.”
Once Upon A Time in Compton Page 15
