Other cases have involved misplaced grievances.Įd Smith, 83, upset about a burglary at his South-Central Los Angeles home, grabbed a handgun after an argument with his wife and began shooting at people in his path.
Welder Ricardo Reyes, 26, of Huntington Park was shot and killed in Compton by an armed robber who rode to the crime scene on the handlebars of a bicycle driven by an accomplice. Tustin church elder David Eugene Thompson, for example, was shot in the head by thieves who took $30 from him when he stopped at a public phone booth near the Los Angeles Coliseum to summon help for a disabled church bus. In some cases, the deaths centered around robberies. “We’re seeing more cold homicides, where someone happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said UCLA lecturer Nancy Allen, who researches murders and counsels victims’ families. Los Angeles has also been replete with other examples of totally tragic and meaningless bloodletting. In Los Angeles, police say, a majority of gang-related homicides this year have involved bystanders, robbery victims or others who do not belong to gangs. They don’t consider or care about the end result,” Sgt. “One of the things bothering us is the people firing the bullets have no regard for where they will end up.
Juventia Uriarte, 11, slain by stray gunfire in her Highland Park home as she looked out the window at a confrontation in which four unidentified men shot at her cousins. Pauline Moore, a 53-year-old Compton grandmother known as the “Prayer Warrior” by fellow parishioners at her Lynwood church, whose home was riddled by bullets that police theorized were meant for a nearby house known as a drug-dealing haven. Mabelle Elam, 66, a housemother for abused children who was struck in the back by a stray rifle bullet from a street gang gunfight as she sat at a desk inside her Compton home. In another November case, a 17-year-old gang member was inadvertently killed by a friend’s gunfire as he and two other friends were shooting to death a member of a rival gang in front of a liquor store near the Imperial Courts housing project.Īll too often, however, innocent victims die from stray bullets.īesides Brown and Allen, who were killed in a playground and in a church, respectively, other senseless deaths included those of: On Thanksgiving weekend alone, nine gang members were killed on the streets of South Los Angeles, Compton and Lynwood. It’s an excitant, an irritant so that people who use cocaine are much less placid than somebody who uses another type of drug,” he said. “Coke is not what you’d call a peacemaking drug. Genelin, head of the district attorney’s hard-core gang division, blames a large part of the violence on the physical effects of cocaine. You think of the blazing guns, but since when in Chicago did they have such figures?” said Deputy Dist. If you compared it to Chicago in the 1920s, we certainly have much much grosser conduct. LAPD officials, meanwhile, reported 179 gang-related deaths through November, an increase of four over the same period last year. In sheriff’s jurisdictions, 77 gang-related killings had taken place through Dec. In Compton, where a majority of murders this year have been attributed to drug or gang activities, the total stood at 79 in mid-December, compared to 60 for all of 1986. Through mid-December in Inglewood, of 35 homicides recorded, 13 were gang-related and nine were drug-related. In the drug-related cases, people generally kill because “they need more drugs or they owe money to a drug dealer and get killed,” said investigator John Swanson, the head of Compton’s homicide division. Others are straight retaliation of acts of vengeance by rival gangs.”Ĭontinuing a trend of several years, most gang-related homicides occurred in drive-by shootings in which heavily armed youths spray bullets at anyone and everyone standing in the vicinity of a rival gang’s hangout. A lot of it is territorial disputes over the distribution and sale of narcotics. “A gang attack and a retaliation and a retaliation to the retaliation and it just goes back and forth. Robert Snowden of Inglewood’s homicide division. “Starting in the latter part of 1986, we noted a tremendous increase in violent gang assaults,” said Sgt. In particular, experts say, Los Angeles has been afflicted this year by a wholesale wave of gang- and drug-related murders, particularly in black neighborhoods of South-Central Los Angeles. “Now you’re getting more murders that are quite impersonal and involving random targets.” “But murder by strangers is an increasing development,” Glaser said.
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