Man Killed Just Days After Jackson’s Visit to Project

The streaks of wet blood on the kitchen floor of the cramped stucco apartment in Watts bore mute witness Saturday to the fact that life rarely follows a political script.

Only two days after Jesse Jackson’s high-profile visit to the sprawling Nickerson Gardens housing project, where he appealed for an end to gang violence, Billy Joe Wade, 29, was shot and killed. A neighbor blamed the attack on “jackers” who burst into the apartment and shot Wade in the head when he ordered them to leave.

“I happened to be in there when the last breath went out of his body,” said Samuel Brown, 39, an unemployed warehouse worker who lives across the small courtyard from the Wade residence on 114th Street. “There was nothing I could do to save him.”

Jackson met privately with gang members when he stayed at Nickerson Gardens, the city’s largest housing project with more than 1,000 units, but police said they are not sure the Wade shooting was committed by a gang.

“I can’t really say yea or nay,” Los Angeles Police Detective Glen Tapley said. “We don’t have anything to indicate it was (a gang killing), but yet we don’t have anything to indicate they were not gang members either.”

Two doors down from the Wade apartment, blackened walls outside a second-story window showed where, neighbors said, attackers tried to “burn out” a woman they disliked. She moved across the street, but a shot was fired into her new apartment several nights ago, Brown said.

“They work on the weak people,” Brown said bitterly.

Wade was not one of the weak people, by all accounts. Family members and friends said he could take care of himself, that he used a “few bad words” and that he knew how to drink. Uniformly, they said he was a nice man and a good neighbor.

But Saturday morning, they said, there was little he could do to avoid trouble. The neighbors said four or five people broke into his apartment after 1 a.m. Brown said they were “jackers”--after hijackers--people who break into apartments and take control.

There apparently were others in Wade’s apartment, but police said they are not sure how the situation escalated into violence. Wade reportedly ordered the men to leave. Instead, said Wade’s cousin, David Jones, one man put a gun to Wade’s head.

Only one shot was fired, but it was enough. Children sleeping nearby were awakened, and about 50 yards away, Derrick Harper, 33, heard the sound over the television program he was watching. He heard shouting: “Billy Joe got shot.” In the commotion, the intruders escaped, according to neighborhood accounts.

Coming so close on the heels of Jackson’s visit, the killing raised questions about whether Jackson’s highly publicized appearance had, in the end, meant anything.

“I don’t understand why things are like they are,” said Jones, wearily. “People ain’t going to change.”

“These people don’t care, regardless of what Jesse says,” Brown said. “They’re going to keep on doing what they want to do.”

But John Bradford, 23, said Jackson did not fail. “It’s like some people are willing to go along, and some people don’t care, period. Those people should be taken off the streets.”

“No, it does not mean his mission has failed,” tenant activist Claudia Moore said. “It just means we have serious problems.”

Times staff writer Paul Feldman contributed to this story.