The gunfire was always somewhere else in the city's endless acres of negotiation and compromise. Never here.
On the 2100 block of 5th Avenue, neighbors get after Mitzi Misawa if she leaves her 100-year-old Craftsman without her cane. Lifelong resident Robyn Nogue welcomes newcomers by gathering 'round a tree and holding hands. People walk down the street free and unhurried, as if they are living in another century.
No one will tell you this little slice of Mid-City living is perfection. The ceaseless whoosh of traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway climbs the wall at the end of the block, graffiti turns up now and then and poverty drives some families to double up in tired old houses that need work.
But imagine a place where a saxophone-playing Swedish postal worker lives next door to an Ecuadorean homemaker and across from a Jewish Unitarian couple who run their own public relations firm; and up and down the street, neither race nor class gets in the way of asking a neighbor's children to come up on the porch and tell what they learned in school today.
Imagine a place where an African American kid named Jazz regularly visited his elderly Japanese American neighbor, who always gave him candy for his trouble. She had endured three years of internment during World War II. Jazz called her Grandma.
Death didn't tip its hand on this stretch of 5th Avenue. The Sunday evening gunshots of a week ago came unexpectedly, assaulting the block's very spirit.
On the second floor of her house at the corner, Perla Valdez wheeled around looking for her children, realizing in that instant that peace and security were an apparition. Next door to the shooting, Sydney Weisman and her husband, David Hamlin, who had never felt so comfortable in Los Angeles as they did on this block where they are among only a few white families, hit the floor and waited for the piercing echo of gunshots to clear.
Jamiel Shaw Sr. couldn't wait.
He knew.
Flying out of his house, he saw his son, shot dead a few paces from home. Jamiel Shaw Jr., or Jazz, as he was known, was a 17-year-old football star at Los Angeles High School. Jazz was beginning to receive a stream of letters from colleges trying to recruit him, just as his father had said they would if Jazz stuck to Dad's 18-year plan to steer clear of drugs and gangs and focus on a future.
