‘It’s a Shame, Such an Awful Shame’

The 71-year-old man was fed up with the drug pushers who had crept into his once-quiet neighborhood. On Monday night, he acted. Shotgun in hand, he confronted the pushers. The pushers fled, the police came, and in the confusion that followed, the man was severely wounded by officers. The police defend the shooting, but the neighbors wonder, ‘Why?’

The drug pushers have been peddling their wares on the once-quiet street in Southwest Los Angeles for more than a year now, and, according to his neighbors, 71-year-old Murphy Pierson, “like everyone else who lives here, was getting fed up.”

Monday night, when three young “rockers” started using his neatly tended front lawn to sell drugs, the retired warehouseman walked out onto his front porch with a shotgun and told them to leave.

The drug dealers fled, but Pierson was still standing there with the gun when the police drove up. And in the terrible, confusing, violent moments that followed, two officers cut Murphy Pierson down with a fusillade of shots that severely wounded him in the chest, buttocks, leg and hand.

Police defend the officers’ actions, saying that while Pierson did not fire, he did level his shotgun at them. But neighbors wonder why it all had to happen.

“I don’t think it was necessary to shoot him at all, and certainly not so many times,” said Lois Gray, 49, who lives a couple of houses down in the 2700 block of Cochran Avenue, a cozy street of tidy, 1920s-era California bungalows a few blocks east of the Culver City line.

“It’s a shame,” she said. “It’s such an awful shame.”

Michael Ricks, 25, who lives next door to the Pierson home, said Cochran Avenue had been calm and trouble free--”a real good place to live”--until the drug dealers, most of them men in their late teens and early 20s, invaded the neighborhood early last year.

“They’re around all the time, now,” said Pierson’s 68-year-old wife, Katie. “They walk up and down the street--cut across the lawns--pushing street drugs to people who come by in cars.”

Ricks said that several times in recent months, Pierson had sat out on his porch with the shotgun on his lap, serving silent warning for the drug dealers to move on.

“I guess, by Monday night, he’d just had enough of it,” Gray said. “We’d all had enough.”

This time, when three young pushers started to cut across his lawn to service a curbside customer, Murphy stood up and pointed the recently purchased shotgun into the air, according to Ricks.

“He didn’t point the gun at them, but he told them to leave,” Ricks said. “It was the first time he’d ever spoken to them. He said he was tired of it--tired of them selling drugs in front of his house.”

Ricks said that as the young men fled, he saw a police car--”a black and white”--cruising slowly up the street.

“The cops got out and pulled their revolvers,” Ricks said. “They said, ‘Drop your gun! Drop your gun!’ Two or three times. Then both of them emptied their guns.”

Lt. Charles Higbie, who heads the Los Angeles Police Department’s officer-involved-shooting team, said the two officers--Brent L. Jones, 26, and Jon Pearce, 33, both 2 1/2-year veterans of the force--had been on routine patrol when they spotted Pierson on his porch, pointing the shotgun skyward.

Despite their shouts to drop the weapon, Pierson “failed to comply and then lowered the weapon to a horizontal position, pointing the shotgun in the direction of Officer Pearce,” Higbie said. “Simultaneously, the officers fired 11 rounds from their respective service revolvers at the suspect.”

Pierson’s wife said she was in a back bedroom, reciting her rosary and unaware of what was happening out front, when she heard the gunfire and the sound of bullets shattering her porch window and slamming into the wall that separates the bedroom from the living room.

“I opened the front door and he was lying there, bleeding,” she said. “He didn’t say a word.”

Police said they recovered Pierson’s loaded shotgun, and he was taken by ambulance to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he was reported in stable condition on Tuesday. No charges have been filed in connection with the case.

The commander of the Police Department’s Wilshire Division, Capt. Ernest Curtsinger, confirmed the residents’ complaints that drug trafficking has been “real heavy” on Cochran Street for about a year.

Crackdown to Begin

In a crackdown that Curtsinger said was related to the shooting only by coincidence, a task force of about 30 officers will descend on the area today “to do what has to be done” to eliminate the drug trafficking. Also coincidently, police said, officers arrested several young men a block north of the Pierson home Tuesday in what apparently was an unrelated drug bust.

“In 30 days, we should have the problem there licked,” Curtsinger said.

But Gray remained unconvinced.

“After what happened (to Pierson), all they’re doing now is trying to make themselves look good,” she said. “They just trying to cover their butts.”