Grief Has No Resolution

On March 28, 2003, Sharon Lewis' 28-year-old son Devron, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus mechanic, was driving home to Inglewood on Jefferson Boulevard after working a late shift. At the intersection of Sycamore Avenue, a slight young man in a hooded sweatshirt stepped into the street and fired a gun at the car as it approached. Devron's car was a restored 1992 Chevrolet Caprice, mostly red, which happened to be the color of the Black P-Stones gang. But unbeknownst to Devron, this turf belonged to the rival 18th Street gang.

The man kept firing as the Caprice passed, and Devron Lewis took a bullet in the back of his head. The car knocked over a light standard and broke an axle as it slammed to a stop against the curb. Devron was dead.

Two months later, on May 26, Bernice "Bunny" Douglas' 22-year-old granddaughter Joi Douglas, a seasonal worker at Dodger Stadium and the mother of two small children, descended the staircase of her apartment to answer the door around 1:30 a.m. Having bathed and put on clean pajamas and immaculate white socks, she was in for the night, anticipating going to a picnic the next day.

Moments after opening the door, she lay sprawled back against the steps, bleeding from several bullet wounds to the chest. Other tenants of the building heard the gunshots but didn't open their doors to investigate -- gunfire being commonplace at night in the neighborhood of West Vernon and Western avenues. So Joi lay there and bled to death. Her body wasn't found until about six hours later.

Neither slaying has been solved, which is why Sharon Lewis and Bunny Douglas were among victims' family members who appeared at a recent news conference arranged by detectives of the Los Angeles Police Department's Southwest Division. It was a congress of grief as seven families, all of whom were bereaved in 2003, described their suffering and implored anyone with information to come forward.

At first, Lewis couldn't bear what she saw there, "all those families piling up."

"I thought, 'Oh, my God, this is horrifying,' " she said.

The families of victims of unsolved killings are important engines in the mechanism that keeps older cases from being buried beneath the new, according to LAPD investigators.

For the families, however, the price is high. They must not allow their pain to recede. They have to keep after sympathetic but overburdened investigators. They must keep their nerves taut -- though it means being continually pierced by the pitying looks of acquaintances and jumping whenever the phone rings -- in the hope there has been at long last a break in the case.