A Lady in the ‘Hood

With L.A. as nervous as a turkey three days before Thanksgiving, it’s good to know there are people out there trying to make life work on a one-to-one basis. I’m talking about a cop and a lady.

The story comes to me from Sheriff’s Detective Jerry Beck, who said I ought to go out to South-Central and look in on a woman named Diane Chapman, a light in the darkness of everybody’s worst fears.

He considers her a special person with the kind of grit he hasn’t seen in 26 years on the street. They’re friends despite the circumstance of their meeting. Or maybe because of it. He had to tell Chapman her son was dead.

Beck has five kids of his own and doesn’t believe parents ought to have to bury their children. That’s not the way God intended it.

Something changed in him when he had to face Chapman and say it was her boy--her handsome, laughing Danny--who’d been murdered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s the link that unites them, a bond formed in tears.

But before I get into that, I want to be sure you know what I’m talking about when I say everyone’s nervous. We’re waiting for the outcome of That Trial and wondering if all hell is going to break loose again.

Chapman lives in the middle of where it happened last time. Born in L.A., she’s been in the same house for 23 years and worries that her community will burn if those policemen go free.

She hears it in the market, at swap meets, in the neighborhood and on the street. Mostly young people are saying it. If the cops get sprung, there’s gonna be a thing. They mean a riot.

Chapman prays there won’t be and works with kids every day to keep them off the streets and away from the kinds of influences that precipitate violence.

But if it does happen, even though she could be on Ground Zero again, she knows she’ll have Jerry Beck looking out for her.

Their friendship began in January, 1992, when Beck rang the doorbell of her well-kept stucco home just off Slauson Avenue. He confirmed what she’d already been told, that her son was dead.

“He said it in kind of a gentle way,” Chapman remembers. She repeats it slowly: “‘I want to say how very sorry I am at the death of your boy. . . .’ ”

Danny, 28, and gang leader Keith Thomas, 30, were murdered in a drug deal gone sour.

Beck says Danny, who’d been living in Seattle, was probably hired by Thomas to deliver “primo bud”-- marijuana--from the Northwest to L.A. He was out of work and needed money to support a wife and four kids.

Chapman says her son, never a gang member, never in trouble, was just along for the ride with Thomas and was caught in the cross-fire. Thomas used to live around the corner and raise pigeons. Danny had come to know him because he’d been intrigued by the birds.

Beck grieved with her. Cops do that sometimes. Murder unites people in an odd kind of way, the way tragedy brings families together and old enemies become friends when a war ends.

He came to admire her because she raised four kids on her own and had taught them the kinds of values hardly anyone teaches anymore. He figures desperation may have been what made Danny forget them for awhile.

Beck did what cops never do. He gave Chapman his home telephone number and said if she ever needed anything, to call him.

He checked on her constantly when the riots broke out three months after Danny’s death, but as it turned out, she was doing all right.

When looters threatened an auto parts place across the street, the 52-year-old grandmother stood in the doorway of the store and told them that what they were doing was wrong.

The store was owned by a Japanese family, the Ishimines, who had been in the community for more than two decades. “They’re good people who help others,” Chapman told the looters.

She chased them off at the risk of her own life, one woman and a neighbor unarmed against mobs out looking for something to loot and burn. The two stood out there all night, but despite their vigil, crowds of looters returned after they’d gone and burned the store to the ground.

Beck tells the story with awe in his voice, amazed at the courage it took to stand up to angry mobs for someone else’s right to exist. “She’s really something,” he says.

Chapman thinks about Danny often but hasn’t let it paralyze her. She works full time as a secretary and volunteers five days a week at the Challengers Boys and Girls Club, teaching kids from ages 6 to 17 respect for others, and for themselves.

Beck drops by frequently and promises he’ll keep looking out for her no matter what happens. A sensitive white cop and a caring black lady. If only they could be everybody.