Dispatch: ‘Like he didn’t even exist’

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‘When does this stop hurting?’ Althea Mizell wailed.

She had begun sobbing while recounting her son’s murder.

It has been almost a year since Marcellus D’Angello Mizell, 36, was shot at 57th and Western Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles.

D’Angello, as his family called him, was ‘not an angel,’ his mother said. She recalled the day she learned he’d joined the gang: He was standing silhouetted against the light of the kitchen, and she saw a large bump on the back of his head. He had been hit--jumped into the gang without her knowledge.

They knocked out a couple of teeth too.

After that, he was in and out of jail. No arguments swayed him. ‘You are not my mom. The Crips are my mom!’ he had snapped at her during one quarrel. But when he went to jail, she was the one he called.

His long rap sheet included trespassing, drug sales and drug possession. He was never home from prison longer than a year, she said. ‘Every one of these white hairs is D’Angello,’ his mother said, plucking at gray strands in her brown hair.

She was alone. After two tours in Vietnam, D’Angello’s father had ended up on the streets. In the early 1980s, he became a homicide victim in Inglewood.

D’Angello eventually reached the age when she could no longer influence him. So Althea Mizell would unplug her phone at night. It was a small measure of control over the constant dread she felt. ‘If he was dead at eleven he would still be dead at five,’ she reasoned.

In the end, the news came by a knock at the door.

He was still alive at the hospital when she got there. He had been shot, execution-style, through the eye, exposing his brains.

When she saw his mangled head, she could go no further than the end of his bed. Her legs wouldn’t carry her. An orderly was holding her up. She touched his feet and retreated.

Two days passed. He remained on life support so that his organs could be donated.

Althea Mizell treasures the organ-donor certificate they gave her--a piece of crisp parchment paper in a blue paper cover. ‘It is the proudest thing I have from him,’ she said. ‘Three people’s lives were saved.’

Since then, she has been, as she puts it, ‘a mess.’ The pain seems to get worse, not better, she said.

Over and over, she mulls the details of his death, the way his head was blown open, the way he lay for so long on the street.

She is preoccupied with the fact that the case is unsolved. She talks of not caring whether she dies, and of going to hell so she can find his murderer. ‘This is killing me,’ she said, between gasps.

She has a sense that people see him as having had little value, she said. No one has come forward to help solve the case. Even well-meaning friends tell her she should have expected it.

‘It’s like he didn’t even exist,’ she said. ‘I don’t want anyone to think he didn’t matter. He did matter! He was a human being! ... I want people to know that someone cares about Marcellus D’Angello Mizell.’

Marcellus D’Angello Mizell was killed early on Nov. 19, 2006, at W. 57th Street and Western Avenue. There is a $50,000 reward for information on this homicide. LAPD 77th Street Division detectives are at (213) 485-1383. Photos, Althea Mizell, D’Angello, and D’Angello’s bedroom, last week, which his mother has left untouched since his funeral. His shoes are still lined up against one wall, as they were the day he died.