A Death in Mid-City
by Gary Phillips
Writing fiction about crime and violence is an abstract undertaking when that’s the sort of writing you do regularly. Now usually the sort of violence I write about is up close and personal. I’m not generally writing scenes where the Death Star unlimbers its massive killer ray machine to obliterate a planet or even have my protagonist ferrying a homemade nuclear device in a sputtering Piper Cub out over the Pacific in an effort to save Los Angeles. It’s not like every damn day, almost a media din backdrop to our daily lives, we hear or see on TV or as text on our iPhone, the latest horrific double digit body count from a car bomb driven by a suicide driver slaughtering people in Iraq or Afghanistan, or retaliatory strikes by al-Qaeda for the assassination of bin Laden in Pakistan. We are almost inured to these reports. But when death by violence happens closer to home or near your block, that has a much different impact.
Such was the murder of a young man named Gabriel Ben-Meir on Packard near Spaulding in my Mid-City neighborhood of Wilshire Vista on Sunday, May 8, around 1:30 a.m. Steps away from his apartment building, Ben-Meir was shotgunned in the back of the head. His body lay on the sidewalk until someone walking their dog came upon him later that morning at 6:30 a.m. This happened just a few blocks around the corner from my house. At the time of the incident, me and my wife Gilda and our grown son Miles were asleep and the sound of the blast didn’t wake us.
The L.A. Times piece that followed on Friday, May 12, about the arrest of two suspects (a third would eventually be arrested) by Richard Winton and Andrew Blankstein, reported some neighbors had heard the shot but didn’t call the police or, apparently peer outside and see anything. My wife, who gave her beat van to our daughter now living in Portland, walks to and from the bus or bikes down Packard routinely—though not that late. The same street I used to smoke a cigar and take our dog Mitzy for a walk until old age did her in.
The first I heard about the killing was Miles coming back into the house that Sunday morning after walking to the store and telling me about the yellow “Do Not Cross” tape strung up around the crime scene. He also said several residents were gathered there and discussing at that point what they heard about what happened.
Subsequently, the president of our neighborhood association kept us abreast of the progress on the case via emails, particularly one when LAPD Chief Charlie Beck held a press conference to announce the arrest of suspects in the Ben-Meir incident and another murder, that of Marcelo Aragon, shotgunned to death on April 30th around 3:45 a.m. in the Pico-Union area. To be precise, two of the suspects, Jabaar Vincent Thomas, 26,, and Destiny Young, 29, were initially arrested the Wednesday after the Ben-Meir slaying on robbery charges. They were alleged to have perpetrated at least nine armed robberies in which a shotgun was used. Richard Edward Anderson, 33, was also arrested, charged with six counts of robbery. Subsequently, post a search of a home, Thomas and Young were booked in the Ben-Meir and Aragon slayings. I exchanged an email with Captain Eric Davis of Wilshire Division, but as this is still an ongoing investigation, he could not tell me what, if any, was Anderson’s connection to the other two at this time.
A makeshift memorial of candles and flowers was erected and the blood scrubbed off the sidewalk. Our association president also kept us informed of sympathy cards and such to the Ben-Meir family, when his memorial service was and that in lieu of flowers, the family asked folks to make a donation to his favorite charity, TreePeople.
I do take umbrage at comments Jennifer Ferro made in her recent commentary on the Zócalo blog, “Shot Heard ’Round the Block.” She talks about last month hearing a shotgun blast, checking on her sleeping kids, and looking out her window to see a man walking down the street holding a shotgun past her neighbors’ houses. The police were called and they told her the man had attempted to rub someone, who’d run, and he shot at them but missed fortunately. Harrowing stuff. Ferro also wrote about her neighborhood and its evolution, knowing your neighbors and what have you, and ends her piece with:
Later, I learned that the man I saw walking purposefully down my street had murdered a young MTV executive just two days earlier with the same shotgun. That young victim had lain dead outside his home for five hours. None of his neighbors had heard the gunfire or noticed a bleeding man on the sidewalk. I wonder if the same thing could have happened that night on my street.
I suppose I’m not much of a die-hard Wilshire Visterite, and it’s not like I played amateur sleuth and went in search of Ben-Meir’s killers, but the foregoing makes me and my fellow residents sound like how folks were portrayed as callous cowards in the infamous 1964 incident in Kew Gardens in Queens, New York. The incident involved Kitty Genovese being stabbed in the back and killed as she ran from a man outside her home. That incident was recounted in headlines (headlines being a big thing then) and articles around the world—and a TV movie— as heartless New Yorkers hearing her screams and doing nothing. But as it turned out, the facts were much more nuanced, including the fact a neighbor did look out, yelled, and the attacker fled and was later caught and convicted.
A decade ago I wrote in the then incarnation of the L.A. Times magazine a piece entitled “Uncertain Territory” about raising a young black man in this city. In part I talked about waiting with Miles at the bus stop each morning on Pico at Hauser for the school bus that took him to his magnet middle school in the Valley. I did this because at that bus stop, a teenager three years older than he was at that time had been shot in a drive-by shooting in October of 1996. On one of the bench backs at that stop, the slain young man was eulogized in written testimony: “In Loving memory of Laish Inreb Green, Who Loved Life and Made Sound Choices.” I stated I couldn’t stop a bullet but it made me feel more useful there with him.
I hope the suspects the police have in custody are the killers of Ben-Meir and Aragon. I hope too, as the saying goes, they get what they deserve. In a mystery story you have the luxury of getting inside the killer’s mind. That even if they’re just greedy sociopaths, you can craft dimension and depth to the character. I suppose if I had the interest, I could email the lead detective who worked this case, Frank Carrillo, and keep track of the court appearances and such of the three suspects—maybe even try and interview one of them to find out what made them tick. But it turns out way too often the taking of a life doesn’t have major import for career felons. That killing someone has a banality to it for them and it does lead back to messed-up childhoods.
But really, I have no interest in knowing more about the ones who did the killings. I only have an interest in justice.
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Powerful piece, and right on.
2011-06-9 by john Shannon