When the Anguish Turns to Anger : Mother of Baby Boy Killed in Drive-By Shooting Wants Justice

The tiny bungalow on Palmer Street in Compton is a house of pain, dark inside and steeped in grief.

Sheila Williams cries uncontrollably, describing the moment last Sunday when she realized her only son had been shot. The 28-year-old mother withdraws into stony silence as friends, family members and neighbors try to console her. Then the anger comes.

“I don’t want to hurt that person, but I want to see him pay for what he’s done,” Williams says suddenly, referring to the person who shouted, “What’s up, cuz?” from the window of a Cadillac Sunday evening and fired a shotgun into a front yard in Watts that was crowded with children.

‘A Right to Be Angry’

“You got a right to be angry,” says Dinetta Walker, a friend who says her teen-age son was killed last year in Lynwood by someone who also shouted “What’s up, cuz?” “You got a right.”

The death of William’s son is especially difficult to understand. The boy, DaLafayette Maurice Polk, was 16 months old.

The boy died from a shotgun pellet that entered the back of his head. Nine other people, including Williams and two other children ages 2 and 12 years, were also hit by shotgun pellets in the incident on 109th Place. They were all treated at hospitals and released.

Doctors at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center removed DaLafayette, known to his family as “Reecy Poo,” from a life-support system the day after the shooting.

As of Friday, there had been no arrests in a case that has outraged even hardened homicide investigators.

The Southeast Division detectives assigned to the investigation, Joseph V. Romant and Rudy Lemos, said they have found no gang links to Williams, members of her family or others who were at the house Sunday for a family birthday party.

Romant discounts any notion that the gunman may have been aiming at one of the adults in the yard and did not see DaLafayette and almost a dozen other children who were playing there, noting that a street light shines down on the yard.

‘Indiscriminate Shooting’

“This has gone beyond gang warfare,” he said. “It’s indiscriminate shooting at innocent people.”

The phones in their office, the detectives said, have been swamped with calls from people all over the Los Angeles area who said they are sickened by the child’s slaying.

Zina Williams, Sheila’s sister, said money to pay for the boy’s funeral has poured in from neighbors and from co-workers and friends of the Williams family, but that no one had had time to count it. The funeral will be Monday at Curry Temple Methodist Church in Compton.

Thursday evening, the home the Williams sisters share with their mother, Maria, and Zina’s two children was full of relatives, neighbors and friends who had come to be with them. It had been like that since Monday, the family said.

Sheila Williams, a custodian for TRW, was walking on crutches with three pellet wounds in her right ankle. She reluctantly decided to talk to a reporter, she said, in hopes that someone would understand what she is going through and turn in the killer.

The boy’s father, Roger Polk of Los Angeles, said that is his hope, as well.

Polk, 28, a laid-off asbestos remover, said he had spent all day Sunday in Compton and did not learn until late that night that his son had been shot. When police located him, he said, they questioned him about whether he owned any guns, apparently worried that he would seek revenge.

“That’s not what I’m about,” Polk said. “I just want to see him (the killer) go to jail for what he did.”

Witnesses to the shooting told police that an old beige or light-brown Cadillac had been cruising the 800 block of 109th Place for several minutes before the shooting. Two males in their late teens were inside, the witnesses said.

Sheila Williams said she never saw the car. She said she had been watching DaLafayette and one of his cousins play on a tricycle and had just turned away when people in the yard, many of whom were preparing to leave the party, started screaming for everyone to get down.

Williams said she heard what sounded like gunshots and scrambled for DaLafayette, only to see him slumping to the ground, already mortally wounded.

One of the people she has leaned on heavily since her son’s death, Williams said, is her friend Walker, a fellow TRW employee. Walker, who is active with a Los Angeles support group called Loved Ones of Homicide Victims, said her 16-year-old son, Duane, was killed last December by a suspected gang member who has not been apprehended.

Ironically, Walker said, Sheila Williams was one of the people she talked with to ease her own grief.