LA TIMES OP-ED - Another Killing in Watts

A frustrated detective tweets a photo of a dead body. For good reason.

October 21, 2011

"Dead in a Zip Code that doesn't matter." — A homicide detective in "The Wire."

Knuckles' wife said it was wrong.

"The detective didn't show respect when he put that picture on Twitter," Maria Rios told me. A cellphone photograph of her just-slain husband covered with a blanket on a Watts street was posted last week on the social media site by a veteran Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective.

It wasn't just Rios who was upset. The photo drew the ire of a local blogger who called it callous, and a story on the LA Weekly blog "The Informer" kept the controversy going, launching follow-ups in newspapers and their blogs as far away as London (the Daily Mail), New York (the Daily News) and Washington (the Post).

Oscar "Knuckles" Arevalo, 32, was killed Oct. 11 as he was standing next to a woman known as the "Tamale Lady" on the southwest corner of 106th Street and Wilmington Avenue in the unruly heart of Watts.

When Sal LaBarbera, supervisor of the criminal gang homicide unit in the LAPD's South Bureau, which covers Watts, arrived on the scene, he took a picture of Arevalo's body covered with a white and red blanket and later posted it on his Twitter account (@LA Murder Cop) with the tag "Guess where I'm at??? It never ends." And the hoopla began.

LaBarbera isn't apologizing. On Sunday, one of his Twitter followers asked: "Did you ever think 1 pic would get such attention?" He replied: "I would have done [it] sooner. Stop the violence." He told me he regretted that posting the photo had become the issue: "The real issue is what is happening in Watts, in our city."

And that's the point. Frustration played a major role in LaBarbera's decision. With all due respect to Rios — who has five children with Arevalo and is brokenhearted — sometimes we need to see what's hard to look at.

Within several blocks of where Knuckles (he got his nickname from his boyhood love of fist-fighting, his wife said with a laugh) died, there have been 19 other homicides this year. How much TV airtime and how many newspaper column inches have been written about those killings? Other than a full-page LA Weekly piece in June about a double on Grape Street, the only coverage has been the posts on The Times' homicide blog.

Can you imagine the response to nearly 20 homicides this year in Hancock Park or Beverly Hills? Delta Force maybe?

It's always been this way. I first met LaBarbera in the mid-1990s, when I covered a triple homicide off Hoover Street in South-Central. I wrote about 25 inches; it was published as a brief, 2 inches tops. I called LaBarbera and told him. I don't remember his exact words, but he was disappointed then, so how would he feel now, after another decade and a half of largely unheralded murders.

Some Angelenos seem to be under the twisted impression that a killing in Watts does not matter as much as one in a more tranquil area. South L.A. communities are used to violence, right? It's not news. But that familiarity with tragedy only makes it all the more tragic.

"People, white people, think that this is normal, that murders are supposed to happen here in Watts," said Elvonzo "Red Mann" Cromwell at Monday's Watts Gang Task Force meeting. Cromwell, who knew Arevalo, grew up in Jordan Downs. "But it's not supposed to happen here the same as it's not supposed to happen anywhere."

But, it does happen here with alarming frequency, which is the prime reason LaBarbera posted the photo. Watts, just one 2.1-square-mile community in the LAPD's Southeast Division, accounted for four times the homicides in the entire 17.2-square-mile Hollywood Division and nine times the number in the even larger West Los Angeles Division as of Oct. 1. And that was before Arevalo was killed.

The families of the multiple homicide victims in Arevalo's neighborhood aren't grieving any less than families in Hollywood and West L.A. Heartbroken is heartbroken on Grape Street in Watts, same as it is on Mapleton Drive in Holmby Hills.

As a fictional LAPD homicide detective, Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch, says, "Everybody counts or nobody counts."

Was it in good taste to post the photo of Knuckles? Certainly not to Maria Rios. But it needed to be done, and it would be a crying shame not to know why it was done. The fuss should not be about LaBarbera's posting the picture; it should be about what's been lost in the ruckus — the killing of Knuckles.

Michael Krikorian, a former Times reporter, does research for the Watts Labor Community Action Committee.

NY Times Magazine "Lives" The Namesake

 Back in 1985, while working at Hughes Aircraft in Long Beach, Calif., I met a fine young woman named Addie. She worked in a different department, but whenever I saw her, I’d flirt with her. Eventually she became my girlfriend. I was a fixture at her mother’s house in the Fruit Town ’hood where Addie lived with her two sons. It was known as Fruit Town because of the names of the streets — Cherry, Peach, Pear — and it was one of the roughest neighborhoods in Compton, home of the Fruit Town Piru gang, one of the original gangs in the confederation known as the Bloods.

It was during this time that the crack epidemic was at its inglorious height. There were dealers up and down Cherry Street, a narrow lane of tattered two-bedroom homes. My girlfriend became hooked on crack. Some nights she wouldn’t come home. But I stayed with her and tried in vain to get her to stop. When you love someone who is on crack, you can’t help trying to get them to quit.

Like the fool I was, I continued to have unprotected sex with her. She became pregnant. I wondered if I was the father. Addie swore tearfully I was. When the baby was born, he didn’t really look like me, but he did have a bit of a hooked nose like mine. I put my trust in that nose.

Addie named the boy Michael Krikorian Jr. For the first two years of his life, I bought almost every sip of Similac, slurp of food and batch of diapers. Finally one day, Addie’s sister Kathy called me an idiot and told me he wasn’t my kid. Something I knew deep down. Eventually Addie admitted it to me. Still, the kid didn’t have a real father, so I continued to help out. (The biological father was a dealer up the street. He died eight years ago from a heart attack.)

Even after Addie and I split, I would still drop in on Li’l Mike. When he saw me walk in the door, he’d get this really big smile on his face, rush over and punch me in the leg. But eventually the visits faded, and the last time I saw Mike he was maybe 6 or 7 years old. Then last summer, Addie called. I hadn’t spoken to her in years. Michael, now 19, had been arrested and charged with a gang-related murder.

One morning a few weeks later, I went over to the notorious Men’s Central Jail, where half a dozen inmates have been killed in the last few years. I got in the dreaded line of visitors who wait outside to see loved ones. You really do have to love the person who’s incarcerated to get in that damn line. It felt as long as a football field.

Michael Jr., I learned from Addie, had joined the Neighborhood Compton Crips. As I waited in line, I wondered where Li’l Mike would be today if I really were his father and had raised him. And I wondered where I would be if it hadn’t been for my own father. Maybe I’d be there, too. I got into trouble twice as an adult, and both times my dad came to my rescue.

After about 90 minutes outside, I was let into the jail’s waiting room — a depressing place with flies and swarms of little kids running around. Finally, after another hour and a half, a deputy called out Michael’s name.

I went to Row F, Seat 14, and there he was, waiting on the other side of a pitted glass partition. He looked good — lean and muscular, like a cornerback or a wide receiver. Li’l Mike is now 6-foot-2, 205 pounds.

He looked at me as if to say: “Why you sitting here? You must have the wrong seat.” I just sat there looking at him. Slowly, the past came back: a lopsided grin, then a smile, then the big smile I remember. That recognition was sweet. It took a minute for the phones to work, so we just kept staring at each other. Then the phones came on.

“Do you know my name?” I asked him.

He just started laughing. “Yeah,” he said. “You got a cool name.”

We talked about his life — his brothers, his schooling, his plans if the case goes his way. He asked me to send him a certain book, but it had to be a paperback. I said I would. I told him I was sorry I didn’t have any cash that day to leave for him. “That’s all right,” he said with a warm, sincere smile. “The visit is greatly appreciated.” I said something stupid like, “Hang in there,” and then put my left fist up to the glass. His fist met mine.

As I walked outside into the fresh air, I thought about him sleeping in that jail. I prayed he wouldn’t be found guilty, though the trial wouldn’t be for months. I figured I’d go back and visit him again. Damn that damn line.