Noir

On Tuesday evening, November 12, 2019, at approximately 11PM, Los Angeles Police Department patrol officers were dispatched, code three, to a report of a kidnapping in the Leimert Park area of Los Angeles.

At approximately the same time, residents in the 3800 block of Third Avenue heard a woman screaming “Help me! Somebody help me!” and a male voice responding “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”  These voices were captured on a doorbell camera along with the image of a white, 2003-2008 Toyota Matrix or Prius fleeing the scene toward 39^th Street.

Southwest Division officers could not locate a suspect or victim.  In a subsequent investigation, no missing persons reports were filed and there was no conclusive evidence that a crime had been committed.

Living in Los Angeles, one becomes used to the macabre and bloody. Seared into memory are the names:

Charles Manson, Kenneth Bianchi, Angelo Buono, Richard Ramirez.

Unsolved mysterious deaths only add to Los Angeles lore:  Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia; George Reeves, the murdered Superman; Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett, possible lovers and participants in the Teapot Dome Scandal; Bugsy Seigel, the gangster; Biggie Smalls, rap star.

The locations of murders also continue to attract, public attention:  that vacant lot on Norton Avenue in Leimert Park where Elizabeth Short was found; the condo on Bundy Drive where Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman met their untimely end; the house in Los Feliz where cardiologist Harold Perelson murdered his wife and attempted to kill his daughter before taking an overdose of drugs causing his own death by suicide—his mansion remained vacant for sixty years, and in all that time, the Christmas decorations were still up from the night of the murder; the Ambassador Hotel, now demolished, where Robert Kennedy was shot on that June evening in 1968.

The most infamous crime scenes:  the house on Cielo Drive where the followers of Charles Manson shot and stabbed five people to death and the house on Waverly Drive in Los Feliz where more of Manson’s group murdered supermarket owner Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary.

Strange but true: the Cielo Drive house was later rented by Trent Reznor of the band Nine Inch Nails who recorded much of the band’s album, The Downward Spiral (1994) there.

There are also no shortage of people who believe they have solved cold cases.  Steve Hodel, a former LAPD homicide detective, believes he has solved the Black Dahlia murder case when he put a name to the unknown killer:  George Hodel, his father.  The macabre pose of the victim’s exsanguinated and dismembered body, according to Hodel, was inspired by a Man Ray photograph he found in his father’s belongings.

And writer James Ellroy fictionalized her case in his novel, and believes that he, too, has solved her murder:  she was another victim of the same serial killer who murdered his mother when he was just a young boy.

All of this—murder, mayhem, clues, crime scenes—it is all circular in Los Angeles.  It all comes back to the detective, that student of human psychology and degradation, who runs the case down like the soles of his leather shoes.  Veteran homicide detectives will tell you a case is solved with shoe leather, not some moment of divine realization.  No bolt of lightning; just endless shadowy darkness and the relentless detective, doggedly pursuing the illusive murderer.

So the LAPD could use some help finding out what really happened last month in Leimert Park, yet another mystery in a city full up of the strange and surreal.  A month on, and no reports of a missing person.  From analysis of the doorbell camera and other security videos, they know that the Matrix or Prius had a broken front passenger window covered in opaque plastic.  The victim heard screaming was a black female, and her hair was being pulled from behind while she sat in the passenger seat.  A male black was driving, and the hatch on the vehicle was open.

The Case of the Red Shoe Intruder

One Friday night, we went to our friend Art’s apartment to help him bid farewell to the place he has called home for 26 years.  The thing is, we once lived in the same building for eleven years.  We had actually moved in first and when another apartment became vacant, we gave Art and our friend Sharon a shout and they wound up taking it as roommates, so we all lived on the same top floor of a building filled with middle-aged or elderly people.  We were the youngest tenants.  Together, we had weathered a major Los Angeles earthquake that left several of our neighboring buildings red-tagged.  Ours still stood proud the day after.

This year when Art decided to move out, we were already on our second apartment since that building and Sharon had relocated up north out of Los Angeles.  Art was the only one left from the original tenants who occupied the place when we first moved in.  In effect, we were now the middle-aged people.  Everyone else was dead or gone.  The management was different, the building was more run down, but the owner was the same.  He was the one who took offense to one sentence in an essay I wrote about apartment living in the Los Angeles Times in 2003 where I labeled him “an absentee landlord.”  I actually wrote I liked living in the apartment, but I guess he didn’t read that part.

And so it was that we came to our old stomping grounds to help Art give it a fond farewell.  We planned to take him to dinner to celebrate both his birthday and his exit from the old place, and when we arrived, we noticed that the entire building was surrounded with scaffolding.  It was a mess with debris and tools and dust everywhere.  They were repainting the building and putting in new windows, something that “absentee” owner promised a long time ago and never got around to doing.  Someone else was moving in or out—it was difficult to tell—and the workers had propped open the security door.  We rode the elevator to the third floor and walked into Art’s apartment.  He was standing in the living room looking perplexed.

“This is weird,” he said.  “I took the last few boxes to my new place and when I returned, someone had been in the apartment.  They smoked a cigarette, opened all the cupboards, and they left a pill bottle in the bathroom.  I left the door unlocked because there’s nothing left, but I wonder if they were already showing the place.”

“Well, don’t worry about it,” my wife said.  “You don’t live here anymore.”

“Yeah,” he said a bit wistful.  We walked through the empty rooms looking out the windows at the scaffolding with bits of plastic blowing in the breeze.  From his second bedroom I could see the pool, which was dirty probably from the sandblasting and painting.

“Twenty-six years,” we all took turns saying.  “Twenty-six years.”

“Do you think one of the painters climbed through a window to use the bathroom?” he asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” we responded.  “You don’t live here anymore!”

We walked down the hallway to the elevator.  On the way, we passed our old apartment.  “I can’t believe we used to live here,” my wife said.

After we had moved out well over a decade ago, Art kept us up on building gossip.  We also could read all about it in the newspaper.  Two or three guys moved in to our old place, young twenty-somethings who did not seem to have steady, regular employment or steady, regular hours.  Art started noticing strangers riding up the elevator.  Sullen.  Not friendly.  Rough around the edges.  They would go to our old door, knock and mumble something and then be quickly admitted.  One day, I was surfing the L.A. Times website and their crime statistics and saw our old address listed as the site of an assault with a deadly weapon, possession with intent to sell, burglary, and kidnapping.  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I literally shouted to my wife in the other room.

It seems those gents who occupied the place after us were dealing out of the apartment.  One evening, some gun-toting ruffians knocked on the door and shoved their way in.  Everyone got proned out on the floor while the dudes ransacked the place threatening to blast anyone who moved.  The occupants got tied up and left on the bathroom floor while the thieves fled with cash and drugs.  We wondered if the tight-ass owner even painted the place or changed the locks before he rented it out again.  (If he didn’t like the Times essay, he won’t like this one either.)

Once we were in the elevator, Art told us he would meet us in the lobby as he wanted to drop off his keys and garage door remote with the manager.  Once out on the street, my wife and I looked up at the building with all the scaffolding and construction mess, both of us lost in memory.  Since we had been gone, there had been two major fires in different units, more drug dealers, and rumors of ghosts in one particular apartment.  It was at that point that something distracted me.  It was a guy with red shoes.  Red tennis shoes, to be exact.  It was weird because he looked to be middle aged but he was wearing a high school student’s shoes, dark pants and a red shirt.  He looked like a punk but greying at the temples.  He definitely did not seem to belong, yet he was walking all over the place outside the building, first on one side of the street and then the other, crossing over to the grass median and back.  He did plant himself on the next building’s front stoop, but he was there only momentarily before he was on the move again.

Two guys came out of our old building and went to the moving truck.  One looked us up and down and made me a little uncomfortable, so we decided to wait for Art in the car.  I forgot about the red shoe guy.  Later, at the restaurant, Art told us he asked the manager if he had shown the apartment already, but the manager said no, so Art told him that someone had been in the apartment and that he should tell the painters not to go into the building to use the facilities even if the apartment is vacant.

“YOU DON’T LIVE THERE ANYMORE!” we pretty much shouted at him.

A few days later, my wife talked to Art on the phone.  He said the manager called him to tell him there had been someone in the apartment.  He did a check on the third floor and as he was walking down the long hallway to Art’s former place, he saw a guy come out and duck into the stairwell.  He followed him all the way down to the lobby and out of the building.  It was clear the guy was not part of the work crew and also that he was not staying with anyone in the building.  The manager followed him down the street snapping pictures and calling 911.  The cops got him a block away.

Once he was handcuffed and in the back seat of the patrol car, the cops told the manager that the guy was on parole for robbery.  He had climbed the scaffolding and kicked in a screen on one of Art’s open windows since the door was now locked.  He had been squatting in the apartment until he saw the manager and ran.  In the pictures, which the manager sent to Art, and Art forwarded to us, I immediately identified the guy in cuffs as the red shoe intruder.  Only, now he was wearing the same style of tennis shoe but in black.  Somewhere, maybe in the apartment, there were hidden red shoes.  Evidence, to be sure.

“Can you believe that?” Art asked.  “I wasn’t even out of the building yet and someone was trying to squat in my apartment.”

“That’s so dangerous,” my wife told him.  “What if you had walked in and he was there?”

“Good thing HE DOESN’T LIVE THERE ANYMORE!” I shouted from my reading chair across the room.

Split-Second

Hot summer night.  I was coming back from a walk through the darkened streets of my neighborhood when I stopped to water the plants on my patio.  Out of the darkness, four or five LAPD officers came down the street on foot, shining flashlights into backyards, side yards, driveways, windows, cars.  One hopped the fence across the street and I could see his flashlight beam slinging around in the tree-shadowed darkness.  Several beams lit me up and in the blinding glare I heard a man’s voice:  “Hey, did you see anybody come walking this way?”  I told him no.  “Well if you see a guy, maybe five-eight, 140 pounds, white with scraggy blond hair, dial 911, will you?”

The cop did not wait for an answer.  The group dematerialized back into the shadows, moving off down the street and soon disappearing without a trace.  Then, as I finished the watering and turned off the hose, a guy, white, five-eight, 140 pounds with scraggy hair rounded the corner and calmly walked down the street in the direction the cops went.  If he kept going, he was sure to catch up with them.  Should I call 911?  Should I get involved?

I started walking after him.  I really had no plan.  I would follow the guy who was following the cops and see what would happen.  Stupid on my part.  The guy walked faster and began to pull ahead of me.  I’d see him pass through a puddle of light from the street lamps, then disappear into the darkness only to emerge again in the next puddle.  I picked up the pace and began a light jog.  I took out my cell phone and dialed 911.

“911 emergency.”

“Yeah, the guy you’re chasing, he’s heading east bound from the boulevard.”

The operator quizzed me about cross streets, what the guy was wearing, if I saw any officers in the vicinity. “Are you following him, sir?” she wanted to know.

“Yes, yes I am, but he is getting away.”

You need to stay back,” she cautioned.  Truer words and all that, but I kept increasing my speed.

I watched the guy pass through a lit area and then into the darkness beyond.  He did not re-emerge.

From all around the neighborhood, I heard revved engines and screeching tires.  Police cars careened out of the darkness.  One slid to the curb and I pointed down the street where I last saw the suspect.  The cops did not even say anything to me but sped away toward where I was pointing.  I could see there was a driveway there and a house, but I did not think the guy went inside.  He had to be somewhere in that area hiding.  And almost as soon as I had the thought, I saw a figure explode out of the bushes and sprint down the street.  One of the cops ran after him while the other jumped back into his cruiser and accelerated after his partner.  The night came alive with sirens and chaos.  Police cars from every direction.  Officers running.  One police vehicle, lights and sirens blazing, came down the street with two officers inside and two sitting on the trunk lid with one holding a shotgun.

My wife caught up with me at this point and told me to get back to our house before I got hurt.  We had turned to go back when a police car rounded the corner and nearly clipped us.  We jumped over the curb onto the sidewalk to avoid the vehicle.  I realized I was breathing heavily and needed a moment to recover.  A police car pulled to the curb across the street from us and we heard the broadcast.  The units up the street had the suspect in custody, but now, the other officers were to fan out and look for the gun and the drugs he threw into the bushes as he was being chased.  The guy had a gun??!!!  What was I thinking??!!

We made a beeline back to our apartment and locked the door.  I suddenly was not so keen on being a witness to an armed suspect running through our neighborhood.

I was helping a student this week with her paper on the Los Angeles Police Department’s use of force and officer involved shooting policies.  Specifically, she was analyzing how the department’s incidents have been impacted by the wearing of body cameras.  The LAPD now releases carefully edited incidents where officers used deadly force or were subjected to assaults requiring a lethal, or a non-lethal response in the field.  We watched in spellbound, rapt attention as we literally went on calls with the officers in the field and saw exactly what they were experiencing and the confusion and chaos that they often walked into.

One incident was catalogued as NRF046-18, and occurred when officers began chasing a domestic violence suspect who had already shot his grandmother seven times and wounded his girlfriend.  The suspect, Gene Evins Atkins, led police on a high speed chase from south central Los Angeles to Silver Lake where he crashed into a light pole outside a Trader Joe’s Market.  He ran from his vehicle while firing at pursuing officers, who returned fire.  He went inside the market, took hostages, and engaged in a standoff with police.  During the shootout, a police officer’s bullet struck and killed the manager of the Trader Joe’s.  Eventually, Atkins was taken into custody and the hostages were released. (View the video below)

What becomes apparent immediately when we watched it was that the cops were crazy for firing at the suspect on a crowded street with other cars, pedestrians, shoppers, and people in nearby businesses.  It is a miracle no one else was hit.  The suspect needed to be stopped, and if the officers did not fire their weapons, Atkins would have continued to fire his.  But what makes these videos so valuable is that they demonstrate how officers often have to make split-second decisions that involve life and death.  We sat in my office watching and analyzing the cops' and the suspect’s actions for over an hour.  It is very easy, in retrospect with plenty of time, to say this or that should not have happened.  When officers have only seconds to decide, it is sheer luck that things go well, and most of the time, they don’t, leading people to be injured or killed.

We hear the cliches:  the camera never lies.  Truth is subjective.  Each witness has a slightly different, or sometimes radically different view of an incident.  When watching a number of these videos, it is interesting how there is, of course, a truth about what happened.  However, the camera does not always catch the entire incident, even when it is pointed right at the action.  In several of these videos, the crime is just out of sight, or the perp is not in frame or the film is jerky and blurry.  In the Trader Joe’s incident, the camera from the officer who was driving captures the steering wheel through most of the chase, although we can hear the dialogue between the two officers and the radio traffic.

Then, what must also be counted in, is the adrenaline.  Life and death, bullets flying, cars, people—sheer panic and cacophony.  Can one be trained to shut all of that out and operate in a way that results in a positive outcome?  There are too many variables, too many outcomes.  One trains, but then there is the wildcard that must be taken into account.  The unpredictability of human behavior, especially in the flight or fight moment.

On television and in film, we see things unfold in violence that is cinematic and, maybe not during the incident itself, but in its outcome, clear.  The bad guys are bad and the good guys are good.  When people are shot, they drop.  Or worse, if people are shot, they are shot repeatedly and keep running and running and running.  In real life, on these videos, some people get shot and seem to have little reaction.  Very few drop dead unless they are hit in the head.  Even if someone takes a bullet to the heart, he or she can keep going and still be dangerous.  My father used to tell me that a dying rattlesnake is sometimes more dangerous than a live one.  Why?  Because a live one wants to avoid humans and get away; a dying snake has reflexes and nothing to lose.  If the snake is going down, he will take as many of these human creatures as he can with him.

In the street, the cops do not know who is good or who is bad at a scene.  When those officers nearly ran us down, my first thought was, they do not know if I am the suspect or is he hiding in the dark waiting to pick them off.  In short, it is easy to quarterback the situation on film with plenty of time for analysis; it is quite another thing to enter a situation where literally everyone may be an enemy.  This is why officers who confront shooters in crowded schools and malls do an incredible job:  they must save people and eliminate the shooter without knowing, exactly, who is who.  If they kill the right guy, we cheer them on and hail them as heroes.  If they accidentally kill the wrong people, or, god forbid, hesitate, we excoriate them, maybe even prosecute them for their decisions made under extreme duress and in combat situations.  Policing an American city is no different these days from being in combat—weapons, tactics, ammunition, friendlies and enemies—it is the same.  So here in an urban city in 21^st century America, we must prepare for urban warfare.  That is not a comfortable thought.

Earlier this year, the story broke in our local press about the military and Homeland Security conducting drills in downtown Los Angeles to prepare for such urban warfare.  Helicopters would sweep over the downtown area and soldiers would repel from the aircraft down to the tops of buildings.  It is not an understatement to say I was terrified and saw only the malevolence and the threat in this “simulated action.”  What was my country preparing to do to its citizens?

I was frightened and disturbed but conflicted as well.  If my loved ones were at school, or the mall, or taking a walk in their neighborhood, I would want them to be protected.  I would want officers to confront the danger within seconds.  Therein lies the problem:  we can give police officers tanks and AR-15s, we can scan people and thoroughly search them at sporting events and airports; I would want them to be safe, even if that meant locking them up in a secure area or depriving them of their civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, but it is never that simple.  It is never that clear.  It is never, in short, safe.  It all boils down to a split-second decision—pull the trigger, don’t pull the trigger.  Life and death.  All in a moment.