Within South L.A.'s killing zone, a haven from violence
A mile-wide area bounded by Hoover Street, Halldale Avenue, 73rd Street and 85th Street in Vermont Knolls has had no homicides in the last three years while 28 slayings have occurred nearby.
By Joel Rubin and Anthony Pesce
Los Angeles Times
January 26, 2010
In the
deadliest swath of Los Angeles County, where
scores of
people die
at the hands of others each year, there is a haven that for years has known no
murder.
For the last three years, no homicides have occurred in a remarkable patch of
South Los Angeles. Measuring a mile wide from Hoover Street to Halldale Avenue
and stretching from 73rd to 85th Street, it is an island encircled by the harsh
realities of life in the urban core: One cannot walk a block outside its borders
without coming across the site of
a killing from
the last three years.
The odd calm of the area is more striking when compared with a same-sized tract
a mile directly to the south. There, on the grid of streets between 101st and
112th streets, 28 people were slain in the same time period. It is one of the
deadliest neighborhoods in the county.
These two starkly disparate realities were detected as part of The Times'
ongoing effort to
chronicle every
homicide victim in Los Angeles County
each year. On its website, the newspaper today launched a new version of the
Homicide Report, which now allows readers to view the locations of homicides on
maps, as well as analyze killings by various demographic factors. It is based on
coroner's data and Times' reporting from the start of 2007 to the present.
The visual cues in the area that has been spared bloodshed, which is situated
within the
Vermont Knolls
neighborhood, speak volumes. Most streets are lined with modest but appealing
single-family houses. Front yards often have no fences, the lawns are green and
well-maintained. On recent days, a man meticulously swept the grass clippings
off the sidewalk and young children rode scooters and bicycles without a parent
to be seen.
There are some obvious reasons why this slice of Vermont Knolls is different.
Over the last decade, an effort by the city and private investors has
jump-started a rehabilitation of the commercial corridor along Vermont Avenue.
Derelict buildings have slowly found tenants, pushing out people who once
loitered and caused trouble, said Marqueece Harris-Dawson, president and chief
executive of the Community Coalition, an influential advocacy group in the area.
Also, in the heart of the area is the Crenshaw Christian Center, a mega-church
that occupies the old Pepperdine University campus stretching from Vermont to
Normandie Avenue. The center dominates the landscape and serves as a hub for
social activities and community outreach programs.
But other factors further separate the neighborhood from its more violent
surroundings -- advantages that Harris-Dawson and others said cannot be easily
repeated elsewhere.
The area is home, he said, to a generally older group of residents. The
predominance of single-family homes instead of apartments means a less densely
packed population and less turnover. And many in the neighborhood own their
homes and have had roots in the area for generations.
The result is a place where people know each other, have an emotional and
financial investment and don't take kindly to anything that might disturb the
peace.
"We gently urge people to get the outside of their homes together. And if they
don't keep them nice we'll send them a little note," said Lawrence Koonce Sr.,
who has lived on 81st Street for 43 years and is president of the local
neighborhood watch group.
"People keep an eye out," he added, saying that residents have built close ties
to the Los Angeles Police Department officers who patrol the area. Koonce, 64,
recalled a neighbor who watched a suspicious-looking stranger knocking on doors
a few weeks ago and called police when the person tried to break into a house.
And, for years, police have targeted the Hoover gang, the predominant criminal
group in the area. Most recently, in July 2007, a yearlong LAPD investigation
resulted in the arrest of 18 Hoover members suspected in an array of violent
crimes. The clique had been using as a base the home of one member's grandmother
in Vermont Knolls.
"Sometimes we fall asleep with the doors unlocked because it's so comfortable,"
said resident Marlene Turner.
A mile to the south, in the section of the Westmont neighborhood where
28 killings
have occurred,
residents live with no such sense of safety.
Densely packed, dreary apartment buildings catering to renters with Section 8
government subsidy vouchers are squeezed next to rundown houses that often have
additional apartments added on. Real estate signs in front of boarded-up homes
advertise foreclosure sales by banks. Street corners are dotted with liquor
stores, coin-op laundries or small churches. The area, in many ways, is a cliché
of urban blight.
On a recent day, two mothers sat perched on a cinder block wall keeping close
watch over their children as they played on the sidewalk below. It was the same
corner where Keith Orange, a 45-year-old black man, was shot to death a year
ago, and a block away from seven other recent killings. Nearby, a group of
several young black men sat on a stoop drinking from bottles of malt liquor. It
is the type of place where a well-meaning resident greeted a reporter with the
warning, "You shouldn't be here."
The level of violence is far less today than in the early 1990s, when the crack
cocaine epidemic pushed homicide rates to more than double current numbers. The
area, however, is still deadly.
"Walk outside at night? Oh, no, no, no," said Evette Robinson, a waitress who
has lived in the area with her two teenage daughters for nine years.
As many as 15 different gangs vie for control of the streets in the
three-quarter's of a square mile, and nearly all of the killings in the area are
either known or suspected to be gang-related, said Chris Bergner, a sergeant in
the Los Angeles County Sheriff's anti-gang unit, which struggles to control the
neighborhood's streets. Gang territory can change from one block to the next
and, unlike some neighborhoods where gangs fight to control drug sales on street
corners, in this neighborhood there is relatively little drug dealing and blood
is spilled over the smallest slights, whether real or perceived, Bergner and
residents say.
"You've got these kids who just want to get a reputation, who kill just to be
able to say they did it," said former gang member Ken Cunningham, who now owns a
small plumbing company and ministers at a local church. "There's a mentality of
'When in Rome, we do as the Romans do.' "
The victims in 21 of the 28 homicides were black men and women. Five were
Latinos.
Too often, said Bergner and other law enforcement officials, witnesses to
killings and other violent crimes refuse to cooperate with police out of fear of
retaliation from gangs. "You can know exactly who committed a murder, and it
doesn't mean a thing because no one will say it aloud," Bergner said.
In interviews, several residents were largely supportive of gang injunctions in
the area and other efforts by the Sheriff's Department, saying they wish for a
greater police presence. But cops alone, many were quick to say, are not the
solution. It is, they said, a neighborhood without any viable options to counter
the pull of gangs. Unemployment is high and job training scarce. For youths,
there is a dismal local high school, no parks, few after-school programs and
little to do during the long summer months.
The killing of Joseph Watson stands as a sad reminder of such truths. The tall,
quiet Washington Preparatory High School football player had tried to stay
invisible to the gangs and follow the path of his stepfather, Jessie Adams, a
retired cop. Whenever gang members shot at the boy or jumped him, Adams
encouraged Watson to hang on. "I'd tell him, 'Keep it up, just keep it up.' "
Watson, 17, died on the sidewalk on Budlong Street from multiple gunshot wounds
on a January night in 2007. Police suspect he was killed by a local gang member
as punishment for his refusal to join.