The March stabbing death of 17-year-old Alex Contreras-Rodriquez was big news because it happened on the campus of Washington High School, but two double homicides committed a few feet from school grounds were not.
One of those happened in May. Two Latino men, each 23, were working on a gutter across the street from Elizabeth Street Elementary School in Cudahy while classes were in session.
It was execution-style, a girl of 9 or 10 explained to me at the police tape. They had tried to run, leaving their ladders in place. One of the men had once been a documented gang member. But the day he died, he was working for hourly wages, wearing long sleeves to cover his tattoos.
Shortly after the killings, schoolchildren watched as the parents of one of the victims were led to the coroner's van to view his body. The father, an elderly Latino man in paint-spattered work boots, made it back to the car, then collapsed. The children behind the police tape stood motionless, their faces blank.
Sheriff's Capt. Mike Ford vented his frustration to me about media coverage of homicide.
"Certain incidents capture the attention," he said. "But how do you value one life over another? You shouldn't."
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Media coverage matters. In September, news broke that a 23-day-old baby had been killed by a stray bullet in the LAPD's Rampart Division. More than twice as many detectives were assigned to work that one case than to the division's 15 other 2007 homicide cases combined. Arrests were quickly made in the baby's killing. But as of January, some three-quarters of those other Rampart cases remained open.
The Homicide Report made no distinction between a celebrity and a transient. Each got the same typeface, the same kind of write-up. If you were the victim of a homicide, you made the blog.
The report included the race of each victim. Newspapers traditionally do not identify homicide victims by race. But failing to include race also served to disguise the disproportionate effect homicide has on blacks and Latinos.
I had met many people -- most of them black -- who had been bereaved not once, but twice -- and, in a couple cases, three times -- by the slaying of an immediate family member. Giving readers anything short of a full and accurate picture of this surfeit of bereavement seemed indecent. Some readers, though, were critical. The practice "just feeds into stereotyping of minorities," one wrote.
