Residents Still Coping With Raid’s Effects : Police Gang Sweep Left Families Homeless
Although she has lived in the same apartment on and off for more than a year, Gloria Flowers described it Thursday as her new home. She’s got a new stove, new rugs, new cupboards, new drawers, new rugs, a new washing machine and a new toilet. Even one of the walls is new.
The remodeling job wasn’t her idea; it was done out of necessity.
In August, Los Angeles police officers, responding to a wave of gang shootings, raided her southwestern Los Angeles apartment building and another down the street, allegedly destroying furniture, smashing windows, ripping appliances from the walls, crushing walls and terrorizing residents for two hours.
Their commander has recommended that 18 officers be disciplined for violations ranging from lying to investigators to causing excessive property damage, but Flowers could not care less. She said the raid devastated her life for months.
“I’m never going to forget it,” she said. “It was a horrible time. But I’m trying not to dwell on it. It’s too upsetting.”
Flowers said she was grabbed naked from her bathtub during the raid and separated from her 4-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son. She said she was later forced to sit on her couch while the officers began wrecking her home with sledgehammers. The couch was later slashed with knives. It rests next to the broken appliances stacked in an empty downstairs apartment.
Because of the efforts of her landlord, Edward LaMothe, Flowers and her two children were able to move back into her Dalton Avenue apartment three weeks ago. But the residents of the other apartments were not so lucky. The Red Cross was forced to find emergency housing for many of them and it took months for several to find new housing.
Onie Palmer spent nearly two months staying with friends and relatives before finding another apartment three blocks away. Her old residence, one house down from Flowers’, is still in shambles. Broken windows are boarded. The back stairs were torn away from the house and a piece of one front door is missing. Police investigators are exploring allegations that the more than 70 officers involved in the raid were under orders to render the residences uninhabitable. As of Thursday, no one has been able to live in Palmer’s former apartment building.
“When they finished, there was nothing left,” Palmer said. “They tore up everything. And I mean everything.”
Rhonda Moore, her four children and her sister, Francis Jefferson, lived downstairs from Palmer. They tell a similar story. Jefferson was forced to find refuge with another sister in San Diego. Moore was separated from her children for more than a month before finding a two-bedroom apartment on 35th Street, about four blocks from Dalton Avenue.
“I’m mad, real mad,” Moore said. “My life was screwed up for months. I’ve got four kids to feed. Who’s got time for gang activity?”
Suit Filed
Moore and about 40 other residents of the neighborhood who say they were beaten during the raid have filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, contending that their civil rights were violated. They allege that after police spray-painted anti-gang slogans on the walls, including “LAPD rules,” the officers threatened to come back and burn the buildings down if the residents dared to return.
Police involved in the raid said they were looking for illegal drugs in the apartments, and that the buildings were targeted after a series of gang-related drive-by shootings nearby. But other than the destruction of the apartments and the recovery of one-quarter gram of rock cocaine, the raid has had little effect on the neighborhood. Two self-avowed Crips gang members worked on their car outside Flowers’ apartment, directly across the street from a wall filled with gang graffiti. Landlord LaMothe called it “the way of life” in the neighborhood.
“Sure there are gangs here. There are gangs all over L.A.,” he said. “But none of them ever lived in my building. I don’t know why they decided to single us out, but I sure hope this never happens to anyone else.”
$20,000 in Repairs
LaMothe estimates that by the time he’s finished, it will cost him more than $20,000 to fix up his four-unit apartment building. So far he’s borrowed about half of that from a friend; he said a bank refused to lend him money after he disclosed that the Police Department was involved. LaMothe’s attorney is negotiating with city attorneys to get the city to reimburse him for the damages. But he said the money will not take the sting off the effects of the raid.
“I’ll be glad when it’s all over with,” he said. “This is the first time I ever heard about police telling my tenants that if they moved back into their building, they’d set it on fire. That doesn’t make you feel too secure.”
