Jill Leovy - Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

Ghettoside is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

Copyright 2015 by Jill Leovy

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

S PIEGEL & G RAU and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Leovy, Jill.
Ghettoside : a true story of murder in America / Jill Leovy.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-385-52998-3
eBook ISBN 978-0-385-53000-2
1. MurderUnited States. 2. HomicideUnited States.
3. MurderCaliforniaLos AngelesCase studies. I. Title.
HV6529.L46 2014
364.15230973dc23 2013046367

www.spiegelandgrau.com

Jacket design: Greg Mollica
Jacket photograph: Ken Schles/GalleryStock

v3.1

When you see the suffering and pain that it brings, youd have to be blind, mad, or a coward to resign yourself to the plague.

A LBERT C AMUS , The Plague

Los Angeles Police Det. John Skaggs carried the shoebox aloft like a waiter bearing a platter.

The box contained a pair of high-top sneakers that once belonged to a black teenage boy named Dovon Harris. Dovon, fifteen, had been murdered the previous June, and the shoes had been sitting in an evidence locker for nearly a year.

Skaggs, forty-four, was the lead investigator on the case about to go to trial.

At six foot four, he was a conspicuous sight in Watts, the southeast corner of the vast city of Los Angeles, a big blondish man with a loping stride in an expensive light-colored suit.

He stepped out of the bright morning light, turned down a narrow walkway along a wall topped with a coil of razor wire, and approached a heavy-duty steel ghetto doora security door with a perforated metal screen of the kind that, along with stucco walls and barred windows, represented one of L.A.s most distinctive architectural features. He knocked and, without waiting for an answer, pushed the door open.

On the other side of the threshold stood a stout, dark-skinned woman. Skaggs walked in and placed the open shoebox in her hands.

The woman stared at the shoes, choked and speechless. Skaggss eyes caught her stricken face as he walked past her. Hi, Barbara, he said. Having a bad day today?

This was Skaggss way, disdaining preliminaries, getting right to the point.

His every move was infused with energy and purpose. In conversation, he jingled his keys, swung his arms, or bounced on the balls of his feet. The movements were not fidgety so much as rhythmic and relaxed, like those of a runner warming up. Forced to hold still in a court proceeding or a meeting, Skaggs would freeze in the posture of a man enduring an ordeal, a knuckle pressed to his lips, a pose that conveyed his bunched-up vigor more than any restless tic.

Now, having deposited the shoes in Barbara Pritchetts handsand having received no answer to his questionhe came to a halt in the middle of the living room carpet. Pritchett remained silent, head bowed, eyes fixed on the contents of the shoebox.

She was forty-two, in poor health. She had recently been diagnosed with diabetes, and her doctor had urged her to get out and walk more. But her son had been shot to death a few blocks away, and Pritchett was too frightened to venture out. She spent days lying in the dark, unable to will herself to move or speak. That morning, as always, she was wearing a big loose T-shirt with Dovons picture on it. All around her, in the tiny living room, were mementos of her murdered son. Sports trophies, photos, sympathy cards, certificates, stuffed animals.

With great care, Pritchett perched the shoebox on the arm of a vinyl armchair by the door and slowly lifted one shoe. It was worn, black, dusted with red Watts dirt. It was not quite big enough to be a mans shoe, not small enough to be a childs. She leaned against the wall, pressed the open top of the shoe against her mouth and nose, and inhaled its scent with a long, deep breath. Then she closed her eyes and wept.

Skaggs stood back. Pritchetts knees gave out. Skaggs watched her slide down the wall in slow motion, her face still pressed into the shoe. She landed with a thump on the green carpet. One of her orange slippers came off. On the TV across the room, the Fox 11 morning anchors pattered brightly over the sound of her sobs.

Skaggs had been a homicide detective for twenty years. In that time, he had been in a thousand living rooms like this oneeach with its large TV, Afrocentric knickknacks, and imponderable grief.

They made a strange picture, the two of them: the tall white cop and the weeping black woman. Skaggs, like most LAPD cops, was a Republican. He would vote for John McCain for president that year. His annual pay was in the six figures, and he lived in a suburban house with a pool. It might be said of him that he was not just white, but a Caucasian archetype with his blond-and-pink coloring and Scots-Irish features. Watts had twice risen in revolt against such an iconthe white occupier-cum-police-officerand so Skaggss presence in this neighborhood was all the more conspicuous for the historical associations it evoked.

Pritchett had a background typical of Watts residents. She was the granddaughter of a Louisiana cotton picker. Her mother had followed the path of tens of thousands of black Louisianans who migrated west in the 1960s, and Pritchett was born in L.A. a few months after the Watts riots. She lived in a federally subsidized rental apartment, and she was a Democrat who would weep in front of CNN later that fall when Barack Obama won the presidential election, wishing her mother were still alive to see it.

Despite their differences, they were kin of a sortmembers of a small circle of Americans whose lives, in different ways, had been molded by a bizarre phenomenon: a plague of murders among black men.

Homicide had ravaged the countrys black population for a century or more. But it was at best a curiosity to the mainstream. The raw agony it visited on thousands of ordinary people was mostly invisible. The consequences were only superficially discussed, the costs seldom tallied.

Societys efforts to combat this mostly black-on-black murder epidemic were inept, fragmented, underfunded, contorted by a variety of ideological, political, and racial sensitivities. When homicide did get attention, the focus seemed to be on spectaclesmass shootings, celebrity murdersa step removed from the people who were doing most of the dying: black men.

They were the nations number one crime victims. They were the people hurt most badly and most often, just 6 percent of the countrys population but nearly 40 percent of those murdered. People talked a lot about crime in America, but they tended to gloss over this aspectthat a plurality of those killed were not women, children, infants, elders, nor victims of workplace or school shootings. Rather, they were legions of Americas black men, many of them unemployed and criminally involved. They were murdered every day, in every city, their bodies stacking up by the thousands, year after year.