Dispatch: “Where were you?”
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(Arlia Davis, daughter Alanah, and mother Betty Richards, six months after the murder.)
Not long after Tyrone Davis, 23, was shot and killed in Athens last January, Sheriff’s Det. Richard Tomlin went to his house to tell his family the news.
Davis’ mother-in-law answered the door. Tyrone’s wife Arlia came from a back bedroom.
Tomlin told Arlia Davis what he knew: A passerby had seen Tyrone bleeding in the middle of the road a short distance away. He had been shot in the chest and the side. He was still breathing, barely alive. He died later at the hospital.
Arlia’s response was swift and bitter. Blinded by grief, hardly aware of what she was doing, she cursed Tomlin. She shouted. She ordered him to leave her house.
‘Where were you?’ she demanded. ‘You were there for the broken tail light! Where were you for this?’
Tomlin had heard it before. In high-crime neighborhoods of Los Angeles, and especially among blacks, there is a perception that the police are ever-present when it comes to oppressing and harassing young black men but absent when it comes to protecting them. It is a complicated, seemingly paradoxical grievance, Tomlin says. ‘People will say they want more police presence,’ he says. ‘Then, when more patrols saturate their neighborhoods, they say, ‘Now you are pulling over our cars!’
But to Arlia, a widow at 24, there is no paradox. To her, it seems that Tyrone was of concern to the state and a wider society only when he was suspected of being a perpetrator-- a broken tail light was enough to prompt a police officer to pull him over. When he was a victim, the world seemed to turn its back. Where were the police? she asked. Where was the press? Where was the concern?
Tyrone’s case remains unsolved more than seven months later. No media outlet ever covered any aspect of the murder. To the world, ‘it’s just gang members,’ said Arlia’s mother, Betty Richards. ‘It’s not on the priority list.’
Tyrone was not criminally involved. He was the doting father of two children, 4-year-old Tyrone Jr. and 2-year-old Alanah. Before marrying Arlia, he had asked her parents’ permission for her hand.
As Arlia and Richards talked of Davis on a recent afternoon, Alanah watched a video of her father’s last days. In one clip, he appeared holding his son and daughter aloft, one on each shoulder, a broad smile on his face. Alanah kept running up to the screen, pointing excitedly at her father’s image.
Tomlin, the detective, said he sympathizes with the family’s frustration. He is also one of the investigators who investigated actress Lana Clarkson’s death; Phil Spector currently is on trial for murder in the extensively televised case. To go from the Clarkson case to Tyrone Davis’s case ‘is kind of a weird feeling,’ Tomlin said. ‘An empty feeling.’
Arlia later apologized to Tomlin for cursing him when he gave her the news. She now says she believes the detective is doing what he can to solve Tyrone’s case. But she still feels the sting of the world’s indifference. Tyrone’s death ‘was never on TV, but I turn on the news and see a cat stuck in a tree,’ she said.
Tyrone Davis, 23, was shot at 10323 S. Normandie Avenue in Athens at 1:38 a.m. on Jan. 15, 2007, and died at 3 a.m. that Monday morning. He was on foot, and stumbled into the street where he collapsed.
Another victim, Jimmy Galo, 21, a Latino young man, was also shot a short distance away--at 104th and Denker Avenue, before 9 p.m. on Jan. 14, a few hours before Davis was shot.
Investigators suspect the same people may have committed both murders in the course of a crime spree. Anyone with information, including anonymous tips, is asked to call Det. Richard Tomlin of Sheriff’s Homicide at (323) 890-5500.