A Journey of Sorrow : Back Home in Indiana, Family Bids Farewell to Victim of L.A. Gang Violence
The reunion was nothing like Myrtle Hailey had planned. As members of the Hailey family gathered from near and far, their kisses turned to hugs. Hugs turned to tears.
Hailey was returning home to bury one of her three daughters.
Last spring--three years after moving to South-Central Los Angeles--she decided to get away from the drugs and violence, away from the gang warfare, and return to the home of her childhood. But she left too late.
Less than a month before her planned departure, her 7-year-old daughter, Kanita, was playing at the Imperial Courts Housing Project when a bullet intended for someone else fatally wounded her, making the child another innocent victim of the gang-related drive-by shootings that plague the area.
The Aug. 2 shooting, just five days shy of Kanita’s 8th birthday, turned Hailey’s homecoming into a bittersweet reunion with old friends and relatives in a place where gangs are not a problem. In Evansville, a city of about 130,000, children play without fear in the streets. Red and blue--the traditional gang colors of Los Angeles--are nothing more than that, red and blue.
“I’m happy, I wanted to get away,” the 26-year-old Hailey said quietly.
On Aug. 12, she and her three remaining children--daughters, Sharelle and Patricia, and son, Willie--left behind their worn, four-bedroom apartment in Watts and began the 2 1/2-day bus trip to Evansville. Also on the bus were Hailey’s mother, who had come from Indiana to accompany them, and a cousin, who was leaving Los Angeles with her own two children.
Their belongings were scant, just a few boxes. Certain memories were intentionally left behind as Hailey’s journey to lay her daughter to rest and to start over began.
Hailey was born in Paducah, Ky., but Evansville was where she was reared by an aunt and lived until she was 15, at which time she was reunited with her mother. Then despite her age, the responsibilities of adulthood descended on her.
At age 16, Hailey was a mother herself, giving birth to daughter Sharelle. Eventually, she moved to Sacramento, where she spent a year working with disabled children before returning to Evansville in 1980. Kanita was born a year later.
After marrying factory worker Willie Murray in June, 1983, she moved to Greenville, Miss., where they had a son, Willie Jr. Less than two years later, the family returned to Evansville, where Patricia was born. Hailey separated from her husband soon after.
In 1986, Hailey moved to Los Angeles where she had friends and envisioned better opportunities. Although as a young mother she had dropped out of school, she completed a high school equivalency program and later attended Compton College. But there was a down side as well to her new home.
“When I left for Los Angeles, I didn’t know the extent of the violence,” Hailey said. “I would not have gone had I known about it.”
As the bus left Los Angeles and headed toward the California desert, Hailey seemed relieved. She recalled how at one apartment in Los Angeles, near 94th and Figueroa streets, the family heard gunfire every night. She was pleased when she obtained a unit in Imperial Courts, she said, because she thought it would be safer. The gunfire was less frequent.
Hailey passed much of the trip playing with her children or looking out the window as they traveled through the mountains of Arizona, then the plains of New Mexico and Texas. During a pounding storm in Oklahoma City, she began to talk about her daughter.
“I miss my baby,” she said. “She loved the rain.”
Hailey described Kanita as an “All-American child, someone where everything was a challenge and who wanted to help other people when she grew up.”
About to enter the third grade, Kanita attended Bible school and loved to sing, teaching songs to her brother and sisters.
The bus reached a deserted Evansville depot at 4 a.m. Tuesday.
That afternoon, different memories returned to Hailey. She met with relatives, then borrowed a car to drive through Evansville.
Some faces looked familiar. There was George, standing outside the Indian Summer Vinegar factory where she once worked. There was Bobby Young, working at a downtown hotel. Charlene Moore lived in the same neighborhood. It had been four years since they had last seen each other.
Joe Kelly, Hailey’s 15-year-old cousin who had returned with her, said he will not feel the same pressures at his new Indiana home as he did on South-Central Los Angeles streets. He said he had been asked to join a gang there but resisted. “I like it better,” he said of Evansville. “There is no violence. You can play in the street, but all you have to watch out for are the cars.”
At the wake Tuesday night, Kanita’s body was viewed by more than 100 family members and friends, many of them children her age and younger. Hailey kept her composure throughout the gathering, frequently comforting others.
At the funeral Wednesday, however, it was her mother offering comfort to Hailey, as tears streaked the woman’s face.
Kanita was buried Thursday. Hailey had never been able to save much money in Los Angeles, where she held various jobs but was often on welfare, so the cemetery plot was paid for by the state of Indiana.
Friday, Hailey dropped her children off at a roller-skating rink, the same one where she used to skate as a child.
The family is staying with relatives in a housing project, but Hailey intends to go to Indianapolis, where her mother lives. One night over the the weekend, Hailey made a call from a pay phone in the middle of the housing project--a simple action that would have been dangerous in her former Los Angeles home, she noted.
“It’s a shame that it takes this to pull us together,” she said of her family. “This . . . will make us want to stick together, be closer, build a stronger bond of love than we had in the past. When I left Evansville, I never wanted to come back, I got tired of it. Now, I’m just glad to be here.”
