A Proud Father’s Senseless Death

It was Friday night and the sun had gone down, taking with it some of the strain of the long workweek, and John Deamichis was hunting for prostitutes on Sepulveda Boulevard.

The search was abruptly interrupted. Over the static of the radio in Officer Deamichis’ police car came an urgent call for help that made busting hookers the least of his priorities.

A man had shot his neighbor, who lay dying on the gray pavement of a Van Nuys apartment courtyard.

It was the 31st homicide of the year in the Van Nuys precinct, one more killing that would barely rate a mention in local news reports because of the prevalence of violent crime in the city. To the thrill-seekers who clamored for a look at the body, and the police officers and other officials who dealt with it efficiently but dispassionately, it was just another numbing statistic in their crime-saturated lives.

Most of them didn’t know it, but the body on the cement was that of a man who had dedicated the last months of his swiftly vanishing life to preventing youngsters from becoming criminals.

Deamichis, getting the radio call, showed no horror at another death, but could not conceal excitement at the prospect of hunting down the killer. “How many other people have a license to hunt men?” he commented later.

The patrol car leapt forward under his right foot.

An unsmiling Vietnam veteran with more than 20 years in the Los Angeles Police Department, Deamichis said searching for a murderer beat his alternate assignment--fruitlessly busting the same prostitute six times and cruising the streets looking for used-up women walking against the traffic, casting lingering glances at lone men in cars.

Deamichis pulled up before a two-story apartment building in the 7000 block of Lennox Avenue. Excitement-hungry neighbors gathered eagerly on the walk, wolfish faces lit by the bright, swirling lights of police cars.

A bewildered businessman who had been on a ride-along with officers in one of the cars climbed out of a black-and-white double-parked on the narrow street.

“I can’t believe this, I just can’t believe it,” the balding man said, hurrying inside to get a good view.

Behind the black iron apartment gates, it was strangely quiet, as if the residents were collectively holding their breath. Tenants clasping babies leaned over the balcony. Others peered from doorways. A fat, red-haired woman, blood smearing her legs, sat on the steps to the second floor, holding the hand of the victim’s wife, a copper-skinned woman with proud Aztec features.

Even the children were silent.

Max Luna, 41, youth counselor and father of a 6-year-old son and month-old twins, lay on the pavement of the tiny courtyard, at least two silver-dollar-sized holes in his chest.

The only noise was the thumping sound baby-faced paramedics made as they methodically pumped Luna’s chest in a vain attempt to restart his heart.

Only minutes before, residents of the apartment complex had been unwinding from the week’s work, their doors open to the balmy night.

They were particularly happy because their landlord had begun making long-awaited repairs after failing to evict a resident who had withheld his rent to protest the building’s deterioration.

Witnesses said Luna’s 6-year-old son Maxie reported to his father that an adult neighbor, the father of one of his playmates, had called him stupid.

Luna was the director of a youth center at the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in Tujunga. A recovered alcoholic, he took the job so he could try to dissuade youngsters from leading the lawless life he had taken up as a young man and regretted as an older one.

But he was also a proud father who felt protective toward his children, noted the Rev. Wendy Watson, the church’s pastor.

And it was the insulted father, not the reformed peacemaker, who strode into the courtyard to confront a 39-year-old neighbor, Vicente Israel Jovel.

They shouted at each other. According to witnesses, Jovel threw the first punch.

Luna decked him.

Jovel, screaming that he had a gun and would kill Luna, went to his apartment and returned. And according to the story the neighbors told police, he did indeed have a pistol.

Luna, putting into practice the advice he probably gave his hotheaded youths, tried to defuse the situation by turning his back and walking away.

He was shot in the back.

And then Jovel stood over his body and emptied the gun into him, according to the police reports.

Jovel later turned himself in and is being held without bail on a charge of murder.

The red-haired woman and other neighbors tried to revive Luna but couldn’t.

The paramedics were equally unsuccessful.

A sheet appeared from somewhere, draping Luna’s body, now a lifeless white mound.

Luna’s wife, Lupe, was sitting on the stairs in a white dress, silently clutching her bare arms. She wailed and rushed toward her husband’s body. Uniformed police cut off her display of emotion and herded her upstairs.

The body lay in the courtyard, inches from a near-empty flower bed, for five hours before someone from the coroner’s office finally arrived to take it away.

When the official came, Luna’s neighbors said, for some reason he burst out laughing, the sound echoing in the deserted courtyard.