Slaying a Sign of Area’s Drift to Violence

Some central Long Beach residents went to a funeral Thursday.

After laying their neighbor to rest at a cemetery across town, the mourners gathered at a modest home in the 1100 block of East 15th Street to eat lunch and remember the man they’d left behind.

His name was Magnus Johnson, but most of the neighbors called him “Shorty.” A resident of 15th Street for 18 years who was unemployed and living on social security, Johnson, 57, was a familiar figure in the neighborhood where he often sauntered down the street chatting with homeowners about their gardens or otherwise passing the time.

“He used to come by here and check on us every day and we’d check on him every day,” a next-door neighbor said. “He was a nice old guy.”

Last Wednesday, while Johnson was watching television in his living room about 10:30 a.m., somebody walked in through his open front door and pumped a shotgun blast through the back of his chair.

Police say the slaying fits the pattern of a drug-related crime.

Neighbors say they never knew Shorty to use drugs and have no idea why he was killed.

Whatever the case, the murderer is still at large and a pall has come over the neighborhood.

“This used to be a quiet place,” said Margarett Poole, a retired county employee who has lived in the same house for seven years. “Now I don’t feel safe in the yard.”

That insecurity is not without cause.

Murders in Long Beach rose 46% from 1988 to 1989, according to police statistics. And of the 34 homicides committed so far in 1990, Detective Mack Lyman said, more than half have occurred in a 17-by-25-block area around 15th Street.

The result in this modest neighborhood, largely occupied by working-class minority families, is an atmosphere of depression and fear. Where once people left their doors open during the day, now they bolt them shut. Women who once felt comfortable staying home alone during daylight hours now make sure they have company. And people used to communing with neighbors now keep their curtains closed and their sidewalks bare.

“It’s degraded the quality of my life,” said one resident several blocks to the west, speaking of the general atmosphere of violence, which he said regularly includes the sound of gunshots in his neighborhood.

“I don’t stand near my windows after 10 p.m.,” said the neighbor, who said he feared repercussions if his name appeared in the newspaper.

Back on Shorty’s street, meanwhile, the neighbors are remembering him with fondness while they worry about what may be in store for them.

“It was shocking,” Poole said. “A terrible thing. It makes me feel more scared than I’ve ever felt.”

Said Michael Mackey, who lives next door to where Shorty was killed: “You never know when anything is going to happen. You just have to take it day by day. It’s like living in a war zone.”