There was Manuel Perez, 17, whose homicide I chanced to hear mentioned in a detectives' staff meeting. As soon as I put his name on the site, a comment was posted: "I miss you so much, Manuel."
There was Fernando Tello, 15, Latino, stabbed, who took a week to die at a hospital. Isaac Tobias, 23, black, had no DMV record. Valdine Brown, 28, also black, seemed to have disappeared altogether: The coroner had a record of his death in a hospital, but the detectives had never heard of him. Eventually it was revealed that Brown's killing was filed under one of his many aliases.
At a crime scene in the Los Angeles Police Department's Newton Division, lifelong friends of a victim said they knew him only by a nickname. At another scene, a family had no recent photographs of their 19-year-old son. For some of those victims, a police mug shot was the only record of their presence in the world. A detective in Watts once asked me to run a photo of an elaborate norteno-style belt buckle, the only clue to the identity of a victim whose body had been burned.
Detectives routinely admitted that the names and ages they had recorded for victims were, at best, conjecture: Many victims, including illegal immigrants or career criminals, had lived entirely underground.
Sweeping characterizations about homicides, so prevalent in media coverage and public discourse, fell apart. A term such as "gang-related" had a dozen meanings.
Once, three police officers, all working in the same division and all claiming personal knowledge, gave me three assessments of the same young man. One described him as a violent gang member; the second said he was a gang member who had committed no serious crimes; the third said he wasn't a gang member at all.
Each death, however, limned ruined lives and ravaged communities.
"This is killing me," a slight woman named Althea Mizell sobbed during an interview in October. Her son, D'Angello Mizell, 36, had been killed a year before in the LAPD's 77th Street Division. He was a textbook unsympathetic victim, a gang member who had never been out of prison more than a year in his adult life.
Since the slaying, his mother talks to almost no one and rarely leaves her tiny apartment. She eats, sleeps and agonizes. Though a religious woman, she has reconciled herself to going to hell because she harbors so much anger, so much lust for revenge. It's worth it, she said.
