The blog's readership slowly grew. The death of "Sinister" drew more than 100 emotional posts at the end of the year as readers segued from grief and anger into an impassioned debate about race and murder.
Police agencies gradually grew more cooperative. A sheriff's deputy who throughout the year had been exceptionally helpful sent an e-mail in December praising the effort. He closed: "My younger brother was murdered . . ."
In December, The Times asked me to turn the blog over to a colleague, Ruben Vives, and move on to other things. The Homicide Report has been a humbling experience. None of the more ambitious stories I'd previously done for the paper seemed quite as effective as simply listing victims, one by one by one. The Homicide Report did not seek to distill its subject into a digestible shape or explore some angle of an issue to help people understand it.
It was just about facts, about reporting homicides -- 845 of them recorded so far for 2007 -- in a straightforward, comprehensive way. One reader complained that the project had provided no depth, no explanation, of the problem it revealed. So many slayings documented, yet still "I don't understand it," he wrote.
Maybe, in sum, the report has merely skimmed a problem whose true depths couldn't be conveyed. And in an intimate sense, too, the coverage nearly always felt inadequate.
The same month as the Anthony Jenkins vigil, I congratulated myself for finding time to look for the family of 21-year-old Richard Mitchell, a black man who died on the operating table 10 days after he was shot. The family had left town to bury him. A neighbor answered questions with a strange weariness.
At last, she explained: "My son was killed too." He was 15 and black. It was an unrelated homicide, a year prior. A pause as she regarded me, reproach in her eyes. She was surprised to see me, she said. No reporter had come to ask about her son.
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jill.leovy@latimes.com
Times researcher Jacci Cenacveira contributed to this report.
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From the Homicide Report
These killings were among those posted on the Los Angeles Times' website during November and December 2007.
