Covering injustice to Carmona makes the ending hard to take

I need to write something about Arthur Carmona's death -- it comes with the territory -- but it's taking a while.

Lots of false starts.

My first thought was that if he had to die young, which he did last weekend in Santa Ana, I'm glad it came as he was running away from trouble.

That's how police described it, but they're still investigating. Yes, he was "fleeing the fight on foot," according to a police spokesman, but it was 4:30 in the morning, and the fair questions are: What led to the fight, and what was he doing up at that hour?

But why speculate? What's known so far is that Arthur, who turned 26 this month, was run down by someone in a pickup at a mobile home complex and police are calling it a homicide.

What's also known, at least to me and his family and close friends, is that he was in the fight of his life in recent years. More exactly, it was a fight for his life, as he tried to shelve anger and disillusionment and figure out his place in this society.

Lots of young people deal with that, but very few had Arthur's handicap: Five days after his 16th birthday, while walking down a street in Costa Mesa at 4:30 in the afternoon, he was stopped and questioned as a robbery suspect.

From that afternoon, he spent the next 2 1/2 years behind bars, the last several months at Ironwood State Prison in Blythe. In August 2000, on the eve of a hearing to see if he deserved a new trial, the Orange County district attorney's office asked that charges be dropped. Arthur, then 18 1/2 , was freed from the rest of his 12-year sentence.

Freed, sort of.

He was a young man lost. He had missed his last two years of high school, and his friends had moved on. His junior and senior years were spent trying to survive incarceration and in remaking a personality -- widely described as shy and occasionally goofy -- into one that was harder and tougher so he wouldn't be vulnerable to what prison takes from you.

With Arthur (L.A. Times style is to call him Carmona, but that feels too impersonal for me today), a lot of it for me is echoes and remembrances. His story gets me emotional.

I stepped into his world in 1999, several months after his conviction but while he was trying to get a new trial. I threw myself into the case and came to believe his conviction was wrong. I wrote a dozen or so columns over the next 18 months and raised questions about the strength of the eyewitness identifications and the utter lack of physical evidence connecting him to the crime.