Suspect in 5-Year-Old’s Slaying Kills Self : Tragedy: When police came to his apartment, 18-year-old Rance Benson put a bullet through his head. One neighbor remarked: ‘At least he did have a conscience.’

It was not the kind of ending we have come to expect.

Over and over, numbing in its repetition, a gang member in a car shoots someone on a street; shoots them dead.

In time, a gang member is arrested. Looking either defiant or hangdog, he is delivered into the slow trammels of the trial courts. By the time he emerges from the other end, often convicted and sentenced, the crime has all but passed from memory.

On Friday night, the ending was different. Swifter. More basic. It had something of the Old Testament about it: eye for eye, young life for young life, Ashley Johnson, killed at age 5, for Rance Benson, a suicide at age 18. The little drive-by shooting victim and the man police suspect of shooting her. Both dead. Both, it seems, by the same hand.

Rance Benson, “Little Popeye,” was on the Los Angeles Police Department’s short list of two suspects in the killing of Ashley, the child shot in the back Nov. 10 as she capered outside at a family birthday party.

One suspect, a 17-year-old gang member whose name is being withheld, was already in custody.

On Friday night, police went to an apartment in South-Central Los Angeles looking for the other one. As they were at the door, Benson shot himself in the head, officers said.

Which image, in the end, was with Benson when he pulled the trigger--the thought of a little girl dead in her party clothes? Or of himself, locked down in a prison cell?

Thedra Cullors lives upstairs from where Benson killed himself. She is as disgusted as anybody about what happened to Ashley. But she will give Benson this: “At least he did have a conscience. It did bother him. He couldn’t rest at all.”

Terrence Hall is 16 and Cullors’ son. He had gotten into the habit of saying hello when he saw Benson coming and going from the apartment downstairs.

“I just seen him (Friday),” said Hall. “I said, ‘What’s up, man?’ He put his head down and shook it and said, ‘Man, I don’t know.’ He was depressed. He was like that all week.”

Why? Hall did not know--until shortly after 10 Friday night.

“We were in there watching a movie, we heard a helicopter going by. I said nothing’s happening, it’s just flying over.”

It did not fly over, it stayed over. Hall looked out the back window and saw police. Then he looked out the front.

“All of the police was just running up with guns and everything and telling us to get back in the house,” he said.

At 10:04 p.m., an anonymous caller had told police where they could find Little Popeye.

The two officers sent to Apartment 4 saw a woman sitting on a sofa and asked her to tell the man inside to come out.

“Hey, Popeye,” she yelled, “the police want to talk to you!”

It was her yelling that name that clued the officers in. They went inside Apartment 4, and Benson, surely knowing their mission, went in farther; into the bedroom.

The police backed off and called for more officers.

Benson’s girlfriend was with him in the bedroom, Hall said, “and he pushed her out of the way and shot himself.” From the bedroom, the police heard a woman call out, “He shot himself! Popeye shot himself!”

Police found the suspect dead on the bedroom floor.

In the wakeful hours, after police and the coroner had left, neighbors in the complex on South Avalon Boulevard stood restlessly in their doorways, talking about the dead child they had all heard about, and the dead man they all knew.

“They told me he was just talking about killing himself earlier,” said Cullors, “walking around talking about it all day.”

“They said he was sad about killing the girl,” Hall said. “He was scared to go to jail, so he just took his own life. Some people said they wouldn’t have killed themselves. But you really can’t say what you’d do, if you’d killed a little girl and you were gonna go to jail and you don’t know for how long.”

It was local gang members who first tipped them to Little Popeye’s identity, police said. His death Friday night was what Southeast Division Sgt. Eric Coulter said is referred to as a “self solver.”

To the suicide downstairs, Cullors reacted like a mother.

“I just hope, I just wish some of these kids would think about it.”

In another upstairs apartment, through it all, Linda Cook and her five children stayed put. Their door remained shut. It usually does. Her children always come in at dusk, and stay in, she said.

Friday night’s incident convinced her she is right, Cook said. Saturday morning, 12 hours later, did not change her mind, either.

“I’ve got gangbangers right now, out in front of the house,” she said. “It’s a tragic thing the boy killed himself. But it shows you it’s not nothing, being in a gang. It’s his conscience. How do you deal, day after day, with knowing you killed a child?”

Cook said she moved to the apartment in July and feels ready to move again.

“But then, I’m saying, where is there to go? I ran all the way to Pomona, and it’s the same thing there. So where can we run to?

“We have to face up and deal with where we are. There’s no more hiding places.”