Gunfire at Night--Haunting Questions the Morning After

Above the battered desks at Hollywood’s Homicide Division hangs a wooden sign: “Our day begins when your day ends.”

This time, the detectives’ day began just before midnight when the sound of a gunshot rattled my bedroom window. I looked out. Silhouetted in the fire of a second shot, I saw the figure of a man crouched over the sidewalk across the street. A third muzzle flash--an orange disk with a white-hot core--burned into the ground.

The man rose. Purposeful but unhurried, he moved off into the shadows down the darkened street. Behind him on the sidewalk lay the dim, slack shape of a body.

I ran down the staircase two steps at a time, around the tall hedge and out past the security fence. In the lighted bedroom window, I could see my wife crying into the telephone; the street was empty. Ahead in the moonlight, I could make out the slumped form. Blood welled over the curbstone into a darkening pool.

In less than a minute, a police car rounded the corner and drew up at an angle, blocking the street. Two more police cruisers, lights flashing, closed off the block. An officer fed out a roll of yellow tape between utility poles and directed me to a strip of grass beneath a burned-out street lamp.

The detectives arrived. Neighbors in their nightclothes began to gather. Paramedics worked on the victim--a young man, we saw now. All useless.

An officer filled out a white field report and told me to get my things. I was an eyewitness.

At the Hollywood station, beneath the “Our day begins” sign, eight or nine of us were seated, most street people from an abandoned parking lot across from where the shots were fired. It was after 1 a.m. Someone made a pot of coffee, and we waited in silence for the detectives to arrive.

About 3 a.m., I gave my statement. I was, it turned out, a poor eyewitness. The shooter, was he large or small? Young or old? Black or white? With shock, I found that I didn’t have the faintest idea. The nature of the killing--its cool, deliberate, almost ritual brutality--was what I had retained. The facts, like the gunman himself, had faded without a trace.

The next day was warm and sunny. The street was quiet. People with shopping bags walked down toward the traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard. Across the street, a narrow dark stain remained on the sidewalk. A few scraps of yellow police ribbon hung from a lamp post. Otherwise, all trace of the night’s calamity seemed to have evaporated in the sunlight.

But as I watched, a woman passing by leaned down and lightly touched the dark spot on the sidewalk. A few minutes later another crossed herself, her lips moving with a silent prayer, and went on. A group of children, running toward their school, paused and fell silent. A teen-age girl shook her fists at the ground and pinched away angry tears.

All day long, people--some I recognized from the neighborhood and some I didn’t--passed the spot where the boy had fallen. It had the quality of ceremony.

That evening, someone laid out an offering--two votive candles and a glass of water--in the narrow strip of grass beside the street. Through the night the tiny pools of light flickered on a silent train of mourners.

The visitations continued the next day, and then the next. I noticed unfamiliar trucks parked on the block, and singing and guitar music from behind the fences. More candles appeared on the grass. Then there were flowers and a painted wooden crucifix. Families came by, and one day at noon a church group stood with Bibles in their hands and held a meeting by the sidewalk.

Toward the evening of the third day, I saw my downstairs neighbor walk across the street with his daughter. She had just turned 9. At the spot in the grass, they stood together. He talked quietly while she looked solemnly up at him. For some minutes they stood together, hand in hand, before they walked back across the street.

A neighbor who knew the slain boy told that me he was only 17. It was said he had decided to take a walk down the street for pizza that night. He was not a gang member, people said, but his brother was. And he was wearing homeboy colors, they said, so that was how and why it all had happened the way it did. We didn’t know. The case remained unsolved.

Other visitors came. Curious onlookers cruised the street, and once a brightly painted pickup with three young men in the cab and the stereo booming crept past. At the end of the block the men yelled, shook their fists in the air and sped away.

One day, I came home in the middle of the afternoon to find a crowd of young men, with headbands and tattoos, drunk and singing, kicking at the grass by the candles. I heard someone shout, “Es todo!” (“That’s all!”)

Then the street was full of police cars, and two men in handcuffs were spread-eagle on the ground. The candles and crucifix were scattered in the gutter. The next morning a street-cleaning truck swept them away.

The death of Jose Quadalupe Medina is believed to be gang-related and is still unsolved because of a lack of positive identification from witnesses, police say.