An odyssey, a love story, and tragedy

A young Thai woman answered the door at the Angelino Heights house with the bullet hole in the front window. I asked if she was the mother of the little girl who was shot there just before Christmas, but she didn’t understand me. She motioned for me to wait on the porch and then disappeared behind the closed door.

Moments later she returned, assisting a middle-aged man. He let me in and explained that the young woman was Charupha Wongwisetsiri’s aunt, not her mother.

The girl’s mother, he told me, was staying in a hotel with family from Thailand at her side.

“She can’t sleep in this house,” he said, looking into the kitchen. “As you might imagine.”

I asked the man what his relationship to the family was.

“I’m Charupha’s stepfather,” he said.

Allan Maxwell is pushing 60 and suffering from Parkinson’s disease. He is hunched over and unsteady, and his labored voice sounds like it’s being forced through a box of tissues. He was eager to talk, nonetheless.

“If it was a normal 9-year-old, it would be tragic,” Maxwell said. “But she was a special child.”

She knew the whole block, he said, and walked around like the mayor. She even warmed up a not-so-friendly neighbor by knocking on the door now and again, asking to play with her dog.

I wondered how Maxwell, who said he’s of Cornish descent, ended up with a Thai stepdaughter. About four years ago, he said, he was stiff from the early effects of Parkinson’s and went to a masseuse near 2nd and Rampart. Her name was Kamaonphorn, and Maxwell -- a Harvard MBA who attended graduate school with future president George W. Bush -- admired both her technique and her business sense.

Kamaonphorn had worked her way through college in Thailand. Maxwell, who works in industrial real estate, was impressed by that, and by her resolve to start a business in the United States. In the meantime, her extended family cared for her two daughters back home in Thailand.

“Around the world, it’s everyone’s goal,” said Maxwell. “In Asia, in Africa, people are looking for a way to come to America.” The house next door, he said, once served as a landing point for Thai immigrants.

Three years ago, he married Kamaonphorn. A year and a half ago, they sent for her two children to live with them in their new Craftsman-style condo in Angelino Heights, near Echo Park. Kamaonphorn was thrilled that her daughters would have better schools and more opportunities than they might have in Thailand. The elder daughter is a high school student in Silver Lake, and Charupha’s trophy for a third-place finish in a relay race at her elementary school sits on the mantel.

“It was a full-blown family,” says Maxwell’s son Matthew, a San Diego resident who said his father felt lucky to have found such happiness after two failed marriages and the Parkinson’s diagnosis.

Maxwell himself said that taking in his new wife’s two girls made for “a most excellent time.”

Then came the stray bullet that changed everything.

Maxwell’s sister-in-law helped him over to the dining room table, where he supported himself on the back of a chair just a few feet from a nickel-sized bullet hole.

The bullet, fired during a gang shootout directly across the street, passed through an interior wall and into the kitchen, where Charupha was playing while her mother washed dishes.

There had been other shootings in the neighborhood recently, and the family knew to hit the floor, but Charupha hadn’t moved quickly enough.

“You couldn’t have planned it,” Maxwell said, looking at the spot on the floor where she fell. “A 9-year-old child gets a bullet through the head. It destroyed her brain.”

His sister-in-law braced him and I looked into the kitchen, trying to imagine how, in the comfort of their tidy home, an innocent moment in a family’s life could turn into something so tragic.

The blood pumped out of Charupha “like nobody’s business,” Maxwell said, and her mother scooped her up and rushed her to the hospital with a neighbor’s help. Maxwell was in the living room, 10 feet away. Had he been seated at his computer in the dining room, where he spends many hours, he’d have been in the line of fire and Charupha would be alive.

She died a week after being shot.

“I’m a believer in L.A.,” Maxwell said, as if anticipating a question about whether the murder of his stepdaughter had shaken his faith in a rare Los Angeles neighborhood that is mixed, both ethnically and economically. Angelino Heights has both million-dollar houses and aging apartments. It has large, close-knit families and young urban professionals. It also has a few gang-bangers.

“It’s a wonderful neighborhood,” he said between sobs that broke him in half. He recovered and added that his wife is “committed to America” despite this turn.

As I left the house, I saw Charupha’s flip-flops and sneakers on the front porch. She was not the first innocent child cut down by gang madness that respects no life, and I’m not proud to say this one got to me a little more, simply because it was closer to my part of town.

I remember LAPD Chief William J. Bratton saying, early in his tenure, that it would be hard to get on top of the gang problem until the victims were valued equally, no matter where the bodies fall.

Last night on my way home I stopped by a candlelight vigil for Charupha.

Several dozen residents gathered at a firehouse on Edgeware Road as light rain fell.

Allan Maxwell made his way slowly up the street in a walker.

On the firehouse door, someone had posted a message: “In Charupha’s memory, let us walk to keep our neighborhood optimistic, positive, hopeful and good for all residents.”