Mother asks for help; LAPD Southwest Station, Aug. 8

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‘I‘m here on behalf of my awesome, incredible son,’ announced Ora Smith, mother of shooting victim Aric Lexing. It was the opening of a speech she delivered in a clear voice in front of a phalanx of cameras at a news conference Wednesday. Police held the event to elicit the public’s help in solving two cases, the double homicide of Lexing and Scott Grant, below, and the shooting death of Michael Lynn Presley II (see previous dispatch, below).

Smith, an ordained minister, put her skills behind the pulpit to use for her son, delivering a call to arms and exhortation rather than a plea. She called upon witnesses to exercise their duty as American citizens and give police the information to arrest whoever killed her son and Grant, an Inglewood Unified School District security worker.

The slaying of Smith’s only son, Aric Lexing, came shortly after he had earned his master’s degree in criminal justice, Smith told the media. It was ironic, she said, since she had raised him to counter the very forces that took his life. ‘I would not be responsible for bringing up another young man to bring terror on the community,’ she said. Then she talked obliquely of homicide as a bitter coda to the black civil rights struggle: ‘My parents were afraid to come outside because of the color of their skin. Now we are afraid of our own kids?’ she said.

A $50,000 reward has been offered in the Presley case, and a similar reward is pending in the Lexing-Grant case. Detectives can be reached at (213) 485-2417.

(Strangers before this, the mothers of victims Michael Presley, killed in LAPD Southwest precint July 15, and Aric Lexing, killed in the same precinct July 20, embrace at the end of the press conference. Photo by Annie Wells/LAT)

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