A Gentle Man’s Life Ends in Gunfire at the Door

After the building next door was sprayed with gunfire in a drive-by shooting last month, 30-year-old Tracy Takahashi was thinking about moving out of the apartment on the once-peaceful residential street in Gardena where he had lived for five years.

But the violence overtook him before he could get away.

In what police say was apparently a case of gang members going to the wrong residence, Takahashi, a field chemist for an environmental cleanup company, was shot and killed when he answered the doorbell at his apartment in the 16900 block of South Dalton Avenue about 12:30 Tuesday morning.

“He was such a gentle guy, he didn’t even like violent Nintendo games,” recalled the slain man’s younger brother, Dean Takahashi, 29, a business writer at the Times Orange County edition. “For this to happen to him . . .”

Dean Takahashi’s voice trailed off. Like so many direct and indirect victims of random gang violence in Los Angeles, he was struggling to explain the unexplainable.

“I guess we should have been extra cautious after that earlier shooting,” said Takahashi’s roommate, Randy Fujimoto, 31. “It concerned us all. But he (Takahashi) was a very trusting type of guy.”

“It’s a shame,” said a woman who lives near the scene of the killing and did not want her name used for fear of retaliation. “They (Takahashi and his roommates) are all hard-working young men, very polite, not partyers. This shouldn’t happen to people like that. What are we paying our taxes for, that this kind of thing should happen?”

According to witnesses, Takahashi had returned to his apartment about midnight after playing volleyball and was watching TV in the ground-floor living room of the two-story apartment. Fujimoto and the other roommate, Brent Mori, were in bedrooms upstairs. Both roommates heard the front doorbell ringing and possibly someone knocking on the door, then a volley of gunshots. Neither roommate saw the assailants.

“It seems like he (Takahashi) just opened the door and then, boom-boom-boom,” Gardena Police Lt. Gary Cherry said.

Gardena police investigators believe that two men, probably gang members, wordlessly fired six or seven shots from handguns, hitting Takahashi once in the head and several times in the midsection, then fled as he lay dying by the open door. He was pronounced dead at Gardena Memorial Hospital.

No one else was injured in the shooting. No suspects have been arrested, police said.

Cherry said it was too early to say if the attack on Takahashi’s home was related to the earlier drive-by shooting of the apartment building next door. In that incident, which occurred about 3:30 a.m. Oct. 19, a flurry of shots from a passing car were fired into the building. No one was injured.

But neighbors say they have no doubt that Takahashi’s killers meant to go back to the same apartment building, which bears a strong resemblance to Takahashi’s building.

“That’s the only place on this whole street we’ve ever had any trouble,” the unnamed neighbor said of the apartment building next door to Takahashi’s. She said the apartment building is a frequent gathering place for large numbers of teen-agers wearing gang attire.

A knock on the front door of that building Wednesday went unanswered.

Cherry said Takahashi’s slaying was the eighth this year in Gardena; 13 were committed last year in the largely middle-class residential community of 50,000.

According to his brother, Tracy Takahashi was an honors student in high school in his hometown of Sacramento, and graduated from UC Berkeley in 1987 with a degree in chemistry. He had worked as a field chemist for the Wilmington branch office of International Technology Corp., an environmental cleanup firm, since 1988.

An avid sports fan, he played basketball and volleyball and was active in the local Japanese-American community. Aside from his brother, he is survived by his parents, Thomas and Hiroko Takahashi of Sacramento. Dean Takahashi said funeral arrangements have not been completed.