Getting Away With Murder in South L.A.'s Killing Zone

That's the tally for the cross streets of San Pedro and 84th dating to the late 1980s. The spot is typical of many in South and Central Los Angeles where extraordinary numbers of people are murdered and the killers are never caught.

Unsolved homicides -- killings for which no suspect is ever arrested -- are stacked up block by block, mile by mile, in this part of Los Angeles.

From San Pedro and 84th streets, they stretch east, west and south -- two on one street, six on another, a massive number of killings which, taken together, create a chilling map of violent lawlessness.

For years, most of the city's homicides have been in Watts, Wilmington, South-Central, Hyde Park and other neighborhoods south of the Santa Monica Freeway and along the Harbor Freeway. Detectives there juggle higher workloads and solve crimes at lower rates.

As a result, the Los Angeles Police Department's South Bureau, which patrols most of this part of the city, has accumulated a backlog of more than 2,400 unsolved homicides over the last 15 years.

Nowhere in the San Fernando Valley or the Westside is there a similar concentration of killings, let alone unsolved ones. South Bureau, for example, has more than three times the number of unsolved homicides as the LAPD's Valley Bureau, even though it covers only one-fourth the area.

In scores of interviews in the hardest-hit neighborhoods, people describe how fear, and the conviction that serious crimes are not solved, makes them reluctant to confront homicide, unwilling to cooperate with authorities or act as witnesses, and disinclined to place their faith in the police. The murders pound home the fact that unpunished killers are on the loose and perhaps nearby.

Mia Wofford, whose son, Brian, was the most recent slaying victim to die near the intersection of 84th and San Pedro, recalled as a child hearing grown-ups in the neighborhood talk about violent crime. " 'Don't say nothin',' " she remembered them saying. "You were afraid if you said something, you would get retaliation

Brian, 21, her only son, was an assistant manager at a Food-4-Less market. He was fatally shot on June 3, 2002. His killer has not been caught. LAPD Det. Eric Holyfield said he knows there were witnesses, "but nobody wants to be the one to step up."