Ghettoside

Detectives continued to leave South Bureau homicide through 2009, leaving La Barbera with a plethora of inexperienced detectives, plus Kouri, about whom “he remained unsure” (255). Kouri, too, was beginning to feel the pinch: caught off-guard one night, he told La Barbera that he’d stick around only if they were allowed to actually work. Still, Kouri was by now the most experienced detective on the roster, and people began to notice him. One hospital-ridden shooting victim “greeted Kouri warmly […] She remembered him from her niece’s murder case” (257).

For Kouri, “[i]nvolvement was the heart of his job. It was what made homicide work different—that intimate involvement with people, with their problems, quarrels, and grievances” (262). Chapter 21 follows Kouri’s investigations into an escalating gang war, presaged by the killing of 13-year-old Da’Quawn Allen, who had been wearing an orange bandana in the “‘old school’ gangster style” (256).The media portrayed Allen as a “known gang member” because of the bandana, but Kouri and La Barbera understood that for South Central kids, wearing that bandana was more like playing cops and robbers (263). Kouri and his trainee, Levant, move from the hospital to the morgue, back to the crime scene, and then to Da’Quawn’s house, to speak with his family. Killings continue to pile up as the two gangs strike back at one another, often killing people like Allen, who have nothing to do with the fight. Kouri continues to follow leads and at one point even intercedes to prevent Children and Family Services workers from taking away the rest of the children related to Da’Quawn: “Nathan Kouri did not have a muddled mission like so many others […] He knew exactly what he was fighting for and for whom. His job was taking sides—always the same side, always without reservation. ‘The victims’ side’” (263). 

In May 2010, the trial of Starks and Davis opened. The first item on the agenda was for the prosecutors to demonstrate that they had done everything they could to find the man in the wheelchair and the probationer, both of whom were still missing. The man in the wheelchair had disappeared entirely; the probationer, as it turned out, was a witness in Tennelle’s case plus one more homicide case. Once his father learned this, he became uncooperative, choosing instead to protect his son.

Following some further matters of admission of evidence, the trial began. Despite the smallness and disorganization of the Rollin’ Hundreds, ADA Stirling presented them and the 8-Trey Gangster Crips as large, organized gangs fueled by nothing but hate for one another. He then brought the jury to the date in question, telling “the jury, incorrectly, that Wally Tennelle was the first officer on the scene” (279). Stirling concluded his opening marks by asking the jury to keep an open mind. The defense followed, telling the jury that they intended to call into question the credibility of the man in the wheelchair and Jessica Midkiff. As there were two juries—one each for Starks and Davis—this was repeated the following day.

Following the opening remarks, witnesses were called. Arielle Walker told the courtroom that she and Bryant had been dating “for four and a half months”; the “absurdly meticulous timekeeping reminded everyone in the courtroom that these were just a bunch of teenagers” (280). Bridges was called to show the court where he was when the shots were fired, then Josh described Bryant’s injuries. Wally Tennelle was called to describe the events of May 11; the defense asked no further questions in order to minimize the effect the grieving Tennelle would have. Throughout the various testimonies, the jurors remained “stone-faced, focused on their job. Skaggs had never found a jury so hard to read” (282). 

Michael Scott was murdered in his apartment in Nickerson Gardens; while a group chanted for change and peace outside, Kouri surveyed the scene inside. Scott had been a gang member, and his murder was likely related to that; however:

there was more to the story, as always. Scott had almost escaped the life. He had fallen in love with a girl. They had fled to Bakersfield, where he got a good job in a glass molding plant and for a while was earning thirty bucks an hour. Then the recession hit. He lost his job. The couple had moved back to Los Angeles. They were just moving into the empty unit when he was killed(287).

Barbara Pritchett was part of the group, and when Kouri emerged to talk to Scott’s mother, “[s]he threw her arms around him—right there, in front of everyone in the projects. She knew people from her neighborhood might look askance at her for embracing a cop. But she didn’t care,” instead expressing gratitude that he was involved in the case (286).

Kouri was coming into his own as a homicide detective; he was convinced “he could never be as natural as his mentor, John Skaggs,” so he made up for it “by working harder than anyone else” (287). His tactic worked. The key was not just his hard work, but “his emotional response to working homicide. He was open and sensitive enough to take in the misery of the people involved in his cases. He allowed their pain and terror to rework his understanding of the work he did” (287). He rejected critiques of the community, arguing that it’s impossible to understand their lives from the outside. Like Skaggs, he believed “that responding [to violence] was better than preventing [it]. It was more true to the spirit of the law—and in the long run, more effective” (288).

Kouri had become a trustworthy detective, an advocate for the people of Watts. His previous Laconia case, the mutual-turned-homicide that had originally ended in a mistrial, had resulted in four convictions the next time around. When asked why she had agreed to cooperate despite the difficulties that befell her as a result, the marijuana dealer simply stated that she trusted Kouri (289). Pritchett, too, sang his praises to friends and acquaintances, asking them to give Kouri a chance to solve the case before moving to communal justice: “She no longer talked of the need for John Skaggs to come back” (289).

As the Tennelle trial continued, Stirling still had little faith in Midkiff, who “remained for him ever a prostitute, a street person, and, after all, the driver of a murderer’s car” (289). However, two years had passed, and “this Jessica Midkiff was not the same chain-smoking, girlish young woman”: “She was twenty-five now, seeing her daughter regularly, and she was within ten points of passing her GED […] Her handsome new boyfriend was kind and decent,” and most impressive to Skaggs, she had taken up kickboxing (290).

Midkiff’s performance was exemplary—she was erudite and confident, and the defense ultimately chose not to dig too deeply into cross-examination: “Good defense attorneys know that if a witness is telling the truth, it can only hurt their case to attack” (292).

On the final day of the trial, against his attorney’s wishes, Starks took the stand. The initial plan for the defense had been to sow reasonable doubt by suggesting an alternate theory: that a man named Bobby Ray Johnson, since deceased, had been responsible for the killing. Starks, however, “had decided his attorney was incompetent” and insisted on taking the stand (294). His argument was essentially that he was indeed a gang member, but that he had been in Charleston, South Carolina, at the time of the killing; he put forth the version of events that Perlo intended to argue regarding Johnson. But, his taking the stand gave Stirling the opportunity to more fully and aggressively challenge that version of events, and under scrutiny, Starks’s story fell apart: he was unable to recall even the smallest details of his trip, and at other points undermined and contradicted himself. The clincher followed the recess: Starks’s story rested in part on his claim that he was out of town, which meant that he and Midkiff had not spent the prior evening at the motel; this, too, fell apart when Stirling produced a receipt with Starks’s driver’s license number and signature.

Like the case’s opening arguments, closing arguments stretched over two days. Davis’s attorney argued that Davis was an incompetent, immature child just trying to survive, not a criminal mastermind; he sought second-degree murder on the basis of intent, rather than murder in the first degree. Perlo’s arguments rested on the credibility of the prosecution’s witnesses; however, he was merely making the best of it, as Starks had already sunk his case. In the end, both defendants were found guilty. 

The jurors in the trial reported being “terrified of retribution […] Despite their appearance of stoicism, several said that they had been churning inside and choking back tears” (303). Some felt that the defense was competent, but others questioned the defense’s tactics, believing it to be passive. Conversely, some felt that the prosecution’s case was “excessive” and “belabored,” and the addition of the hotel receipt, they felt, did not add anything much to the case (303). The defense attorneys had believed the jurors to be too far removed from the case because they were mostly white; however, the Davis foreman had grown up in similar neighborhoods and frequently worked in Compton. As a result, he “proved more perceptive than some of the professional cops who had trailed in and out of the courtroom” (304), recognizing that Starks had pimped out Midkiff and understanding why Bryant had chosen to wear a hat associated with a gang.

The trial of Starks and Davis, according to Leovy, “was not even very suspenseful” (304). The purpose of the book is not suspense, but rather to demonstrate that, contrary to mainstream belief, it is “really not so hard to insert legal authority into the chaos of extralegal violence among the young men of South Central […] But you had to be willing to pay the cost, to put in the effort. You had to be very persistent” (304-05). The Tennelle case, which at first seemed formidable and impenetrable, in the end turned out to be “eminently solvable—once the right kind of pressure was applied” (305). “If all these cases were investigated like Tennelle,” Perlo remarked following the trial, “there’d be no unsolved cases” (306).

Starks and Davis were sentenced to life without parole. Yadira Tennelle, in open court, chose to forgive Davis. After the courtroom had emptied and Wally Tennelle’s tears dried, he sought simply “to return to business” (307). 

Starks and Davis remain imprisoned; both still claim that they were not involved in the killing. Starks believes still that he’ll eventually get out of prison; Davis appears to have resigned himself to his fate: “‘It’s okay,’ he repeated when pressed […] ‘They lost his life, I lost mine. So it’s okay’” (310). Skaggs, at the time of writing, was heading up a new centralized West Bureau homicide squad and nearing retirement; he occasionally still has lunch with Midkiff. Marullo tired of being a gang officer and returned to homicide with Kouri, finally earning the rank of detective. Barbara Pritchett remains in Watts. Wally Tennelle continues to work at RHD and live in the same house in the 77th Division.

The motive for Bryant’s murder remains unclear. It’s possible that the target was actually Bryant’s affiliated friends down the block; alternatively, or even perhaps convergently, there is a grain of possibility in Starks’s accounts regarding Johnson, who had previously punched a powerful gang member while drunk and needed to prove his loyalty.

Homicide rates in LA County continue to fall, a change Leovy argues may have been aided by an increase in public benefits, providing economic autonomy to Los Angeles’s poor, including—and especially—those recently released from prison. Leovy notes, too, that homicide is expensive; therefore, humanitarian arguments aside, the problem needs to be solved. She concludes by calling for more research and more work in the area of law and formal legal institutions to help eradicate the problem.