What Goes Up Must Come Down : New Year’s Celebrations--Annual Hail of Bullets

The rural community of Cherryville, N.C., and the metropolis of Southern California will celebrate New Year’s Eve the same way this week--with loud bursts of gunfire.

The only difference is that in Cherryville the folks have enough sense to stage the centuries-old custom of “shooting in” the new year, a tradition they inherited from the town’s German settlers. A ceremonial musket-toting procession will go door to door all night, firing powder-filled caps into the air.

Here, by contrast, Rule No. 1 is that there are no rules. The firing will be spontaneous, continuous and uninhibited, as though it were 1888 rather than 1988 and millions of people weren’t densely clustered.

And the darndest thing will happen: the same bullets that go up in the air will come down.

They’ll come down from as high as 10,000 feet with enormous force, enough to easily penetrate the skin and sometimes to shatter bones, even after smashing through a roof.

If recent history is any guide, a dozen or more people in Los Angeles and Orange counties will be wounded by the random fallout of thousands of shots from pistols, shotguns and automatic weapons that turn the night into a war zone for about half an hour each year, starting at around 11:45 p.m.

Law enforcement agencies will ground their helicopters. Last year, even that didn’t help. Somebody who started celebrating early hit a flying Los Angeles police chopper around 10 p.m.

Police will be very wary about responding to calls of “shots fired,” in many cases refusing to do so unless there is proof of injury. Last year in Santa Ana the sheer volume of calls paralyzed police. So many calls came in that the department’s switchboard went into what officials called “electronic gridlock.”

Dreaded Assignment

Firefighters and ambulance drivers unlucky enough to be on duty will cringe at each assignment. Last year, rowdy crowds fired shots at firefighters answering calls in South-Central Los Angeles and the northeast San Fernando Valley. This year, for the first time, Police Department patrol cars will accompany some fire engines in those communities, as well as in East Los Angeles and Venice.

“There is no way you want to step outside,” said Jerry Greenelsh, a captain at a Los Angeles County Fire Department station on the Eastside. Last year Greenelsh scraped together a collection of three dozen bullets that landed around the station.

“They start around 11 and keep on till about 4:30 in the morning. I wouldn’t even stick my head out the window,” said James Thomas, who lives on 42nd Place in southwest Los Angeles, a block from where New Year’s Eve gunfire killed a boy two years ago.

“I feel like I ought to wear a tin hat,” groused Penny McCracken, who moved to the city of Paramount in southeastern Los Angeles County three years ago from Long Beach and said she was shocked by the holiday gunfire.

“I’ve come to the point where I don’t even flinch any more when I hear it. My place hasn’t been hit, but that’s just luck. I can identify Uzis, .45s, .38s, .22s. “I’ve got a new roof and I have to spend every holiday worrying whether I’ll have to repair it.”

Mothers will beg their teen-agers to stay indoors and guys who served in Vietnam will swear that this is what fire-fights sounded like. And residents of comfortable outlying suburbs, where the noise is faint, will scratch their heads and wonder why people fall prey to such insanity.

The answer, uttered with much exasperation, is that nobody knows.

Inner-City Problem

Much of the New Year’s Eve shooting goes on in the Central City, which has the largest black population, and in heavily Latino communities. This gives amateur sociologists a field day; cultural explanations fly as randomly as New Year’s bullets. For example, non-Latino residents whose neighborhoods are plagued with random gunfire are quick to suggest that they are victims of the traditions of rural Mexico.

“Maybe some of the behavior does carry over,” said Dr. Marvin Southard, clinical director of El Centro Community Health Services in East Los Angeles.

“In Mexico big holidays are celebrated by loud displays of fireworks and shooting guns off, and since there are not, or have not been, regulations, it becomes something of a regular way of celebrating fiestas. But another thing to remember is that across all cultures the use of alcohol will lead people to do things just because they feel like doing them.”

Another Reason

However, the sheer density of population in many of these communities and the higher percentages of people who own weapons for protection against crime may be as much a reason for the prevalence of gunfire.

“The problem is we just have many, many more guns in our society,” said San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara. “There have been massive marketing campaigns to sell firearms and a lot of people have gone out and bought them without knowing how to take care of them. I think people just watch TV and they don’t have any idea how dangerous firearms are, that if they fire that weapon on a trajectory it could kill someone even a mile and a half away.”

Beyond these stereotypes, something else, something troubling, is at work:

Regardless of the public-service warnings issued each year that it is illegal and dangerous to fire guns into the air, the notion simply persists among otherwise decent gun-owning citizens that New Year’s Eve represents some kind of free pass.

Burglary Victim

Dave Grabelski, a Police Department homicide detective, remembers going to the home of a middle-aged woman in South Los Angeles who had been burglarized. The woman owned a handgun. It looked practically new.

She told me, ‘The only time I use it is New Year’s Eve, when it’s legal to do it,’ ” Grabelski said. (In fact, it is a misdemeanor that can be elevated to felony assault with a deadly weapon.)

The impulse to savor a burst of loud craziness when the year changes, with little regard to the consequences, is deeply embedded in the human psyche. It is believed to have originated in Babylonian and Indian New Year’s observances, when the need was felt to frighten away spirits believed wandering the Earth at the year’s change. In northern and central Europe, ancient folk beliefs hold that prowling devils must be decisively routed on the last night of the year with mummery and noise.

Calls for Violence

Violence is implicit. In Scotland a dummy called the Auld Wife is ignited. In remote parts of the British Isles huge bonfires are lit to “burn out” the old year. In Austria, a straw figure known as The Death is drowned.

Last year, a British visitor to the Philippines, where New Year’s Eve revelry killed 24 people and injured nearly 1,700--including an 8-month-old-girl struck by a stray bullet as she slept in her home--muttered: “It was like the whole country was on a suicide mission.”

An adviser to President Corazon Aquino threw up his hands. The celebrating was simply too ingrained. “Not all the laws in the world could stop it,” he said.

“One of the things a collective celebration does is temporarily give you permission to act out a lot of behavior you wouldn’t necessarily do,” said Edward Stainbrook, professor emeritus of psychiatry at USC. “The super ego (the part of the mind which, according to Freud, dictates moralistic prohibitions) takes a rest, abdicates for a while.”

That, as much as anything, explains why Dean Morgan, who ought to have been enjoying Christmas vacation from high school this week, is dead.

Standing in a Crowd

Two years ago, the 13-year-old boy was standing with a crowd of sisters, brothers and cousins in a parking lot behind his family’s apartment on West 42nd Place, watching his relatives shoot in the new year. Across an alley, perhaps 50 yards away, another family, unknown to the Morgans, was doing the same thing.

One of the bullets fired by the other family came down and hit the boy in the head. He died after three days on life-support machines. Police recovered a gun that they believed had fired the bullet and asked the district attorney’s office to file a manslaughter charge, but inconclusive ballistic tests made prosecution impossible.

Dean wasn’t the only one to die in Los Angeles that night. Two miles away, on Central Avenue, Albert Bigsby, a 35-year-old mortician, was leaving work with his wife and daughter at about 9:30 p.m. Outside a group of men had already begun shooting into the air. One of them shot out a street light and then turned his shotgun on Bigsby and fired twice.

Bigsby was pronounced dead half an hour later. Whether the record-keepers ought to count that as a celebration-related shooting or another of the hundreds of cold-hearted acts that stain South Los Angeles every year remains a matter of conjecture.

Deaths During Celebrations

In the United States last year at least three people were killed in shootings that were linked to celebrations.

In San Antonio a 16-year-old boy was hit by a stray bullet believed fired by a high-powered rifle. In Shreveport, La., a 26-year-old woman was killed on her front lawn after a friend fired a bullet that ricocheted off the woman’s house and struck her in the head. And in Detroit a 12-year-old boy was shot by an older friend who mishandled a weapon.

There were no New Year’s Eve deaths locally last year, but there was plenty of tragedy. Gunfire wounded at least 11 people in Los Angeles County and another seven in Orange County. Among them: A pregnant woman, walking with her husband, was felled by a spent slug that struck her in the back of the neck, critically wounding her.

A 9-year-old girl was hit as she stood on the sidewalk. A 55-year-old woman was wounded while attending a patio party. A mother and her 1-year-old son were wounded when their upstairs apartment neighbor fired a gun into his floor. (The neighbor escaped when police arrived, but while they were there they arrested another neighbor who stepped onto his balcony and began firing a gun into the air.)

Action Sought

Within days, County Supervisor Mike Antonovich vowed to ask Sheriff Sherman Block for recommendations about how to solve the problem.

Answered Block: “I wish that I could work that miracle. The officers can’t contain it.”

Block noted that the Sheriff’s Department received no calls of shooting in the more distant areas such as Malibu, the Santa Clarita Valley or West Hollywood.

But anyone in the suburbs who thinks he is completely safe might want to talk to Brenda Agnew, who lives in the pricey suburb of Overland Park, Kan., on the outskirts of Kansas City. Last New Year’s Eve a bullet tore through the house and landed next to Agnew’s 5-year-old son, who was sleeping. Police traced the bullet to an old farmhouse even farther outside Kansas City.

It was determined that the bullet, fired from a high-powered rifle, had traveled about 2 1/2 miles.

“Now I worry about it because it doesn’t matter that we live in a nice neighborhood,” said Agnew, who once lived in Orange County. “A jerk miles away can kill us.”

Danger Warnings Issued

In recent years, police chiefs of various communities have called pre-New Year’s Eve press conferences to warn of the dangers of shooting, without much success. But this year two grass-roots attempts to get the point across seem to have succeeded.

The campaigns, in Santa Ana and the San Fernando Valley community of Pacoima, were aimed at Fourth of July shooting, which tends to be spread over a larger number of hours than the New Year’s Eve celebrating and is often harder to distinguish because of noise from fireworks--unless you’re someone like Harold Morel, a resident of a Pacoima mobile home park who collected 87 bullets around the complex after the Fourth of July in 1986.

Residents of the mobile home park and police believed much of the shooting was coming from residents of two nearby public-housing projects.

More Patrol Units

With a $70,000 grant from Councilman Ernani Bernardi’s office, police increased their patrolling of the neighborhood this Fourth of July and--perhaps more crucially--distributed about 7,000 flyers titled “It’s a Deadly Celebration.” The flyer recounted the death of Dean Morgan.

This year on the Fourth, said Laurette Bineau, another resident of the mobile home park, only two bullets were fired into the park.

“Everybody was delirious,” Bineau said. ‘We think getting the information out was the thing that caused people to quit doing it,” Police Capt. Arthur Sjoquist said. “We also told them we were going to prosecute if we catch them.”

Keeping Pressure On

Santa Ana city officials, bolstered by the success of similar tactics, have kept up the pressure, distributing more than 10,000 posters and 300,000 English-Spanish booklets through the city in anticipation of New Year’s Eve. In addition, police in patrol cars will use public address systems to remind citizens of the dangers of shooting.

“I feel very happy and much more comforted,” said one Santa Ana woman, who has lived in her home for 43 years and has had bullets come through her roof three times on New Year’s Eve.

“One year I was so frightened I got underneath the dining room table and hid there,” said the woman, who asked that her name not be disclosed. “But this year, on the Fourth, it was better.”

That, of course, is not the last word. In this case, Penny McCracken, the woman who lives in Paramount, would like the last word.

“I’d like every newspaper to print this suggestion for all the men who shoot off guns,” she said, her voice dripping with disgust. “If you have to fire a penile substitute into the air to express your macho , why not fire blanks? “