Tears in the City

She remembers with the clarity of grief every word the policeman spoke.

He said, “We’re very sorry to inform you there’s been a homicide. Your daughter, Melissa, has been killed.”

It was early on a Sunday morning in the autumn of the year.

Geraldine Kennon stared at the telephone as though it were a weapon of the devil and replied in desperation, “Maybe she can live. Keep her in the hospital.”

“We’re terribly sorry,” the policeman said. “She’s no longer living.”

Later, she would recall his gentleness, but at the moment, swept up in a vortex of emotions, she could only scream, “No, no, no! Take it back! Please no! Don’t tell me that!”

And then she cried.

As I spoke to her the other day, the tears returned. I had taken her back to that terrible moment five years ago when Melissa, then 21, was raped and stabbed 27 times.

Her killer was caught, quite literally, with blood on his hands and is in state prison.

But the punishment will never obliterate Kennon’s pain. “I have been given a life sentence,” she says, “and there’s no time off for good behavior. My heart is ashes.”

Geraldine Kennon will never be the energetic, optimistic person she was before Oct. 4, 1987. That day, like a Sunday made in hell, will never end. The memory will never set.

Something inside her died that autumn. . . .

Her story was one of many that have come to me in the wake of last week’s column on violence in Los Angeles.

Kennon lives in Topanga. Others talked about their murdered children from other parts of the city. Ophelia Gasca wept for her dead son--her baby--in Arleta. Missy Zeitsoff cried for her child in Malibu.

The calls and letters came from Beverly Hills and Whittier, from Encino and Pomona, from Hollywood and East L.A.

Never have I received such response on the basis of one column.

I talked to relatives of victims, frightened and angry citizens, policemen and, in one case, to a young man named Edain Velasquez, a straight-A student, who walks the streets today with a bullet still lodged in his head.

Velasquez was playing tennis with a friend in Boyle Heights across the street from his home when he was shot for no reason by a passerby. The bullet severed an optic nerve and blinded his left eye.

Now he needs almost $40,000 the family doesn’t have for surgery to remove the bullet.

This is no gangbanger, but a kid with more plaques and scrolls for outstanding achievement than most students gather in a lifetime. He was challenging no one, threatening no one. He was playing tennis.

“I don’t know what it will take to stop the violence that is tearing this city apart,” one letter-writer said. “Maybe we ought to call in a U.N. Peace Keeping Force. . . .”

“If there ever was a time for vigilantism,” a woman said over the phone, “now may be it. Forget the old west. This is the new west and it’s every bit as deadly.”

“We live,” the critic Henry Beston once wrote with exquisite irony, “in the neon glow of comfort and violence.”

“Oddly,” a police captain says, “people become apathetic when crime becomes too overwhelming to deal with. When a cop shoots someone by accident, it’s a major, major event. But there’s no uproar at all when 263 people are murdered in a month.”

I asked in that column last week, what the hell are we going to do about it? Lie there and die? Stain every street in L.A. red with our blood?

No one seems to know, not really. The callers didn’t know. The letter-writers didn’t know. The police captain didn’t know. I called the mayor’s office to ask.

His press representative said the mayor was horrified. She said he’s working hard to pass measures that would increase the size of the Police Department and improve communications.

If Tom Bradley is outraged, it didn’t come through.

“Terrible and frightening acts have made their way into my nice community,” a woman wrote from Hacienda Heights. “Just two weeks ago there was a killing a few blocks from my home.” Her rage did come through: “I WANT SOMEONE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!”

Years ago I wrote a book called “Rising Voices.” I said that society changes only when people shout. Voices must rise. They begin with a whisper and build to a crescendo. Maybe it’s beginning in L.A. I hear whispers.

But only when a roar of protest reaches the chambers of municipal government will something, anything, be done. Only then will it mute the sobbing of those who cry for murdered children.

Only then will Geraldine Kennon begin to heal.