COLUMN ONE : Comfort at the Scene of a Crime : After a murder, grieving loved ones say, police can be insensitive to their anguish. In South-Central L.A., Norma Johnson arrives with detectives, giving families strength and sympathy.
As soon as the woman opens the door and studies the two men in suits on her front porch, she knows the news is bad. She slumps against the wall and says softly: “No, Jesus, no.”
The two homicide detectives confirm that a 15-year-old boy just killed in a drive-by was the woman’s nephew. They get the information they need and are ready to move on.
But Norma Johnson’s job is just beginning. She is a city victim assistance coordinator who counsels and consoles families in the anguished hours after a killing.
As the slain boy’s aunt falls to the floor and begins sobbing, Johnson drops to her knees, holds the woman and rocks her. “I’ve had too many deaths, Lord!” the aunt shouts. “Too many deaths. He’s been with me since he was 3 . . . and now he’s gone.”
For years, Johnson assisted grieving families in a more sedate setting. She usually met them in her office a few days after the slayings, after they had a chance to absorb the immediate shock.
But Johnson came to realize that the survivors’ needs were not being met. As the toll of murder victims rose, so did the dissatisfaction among their families.
Johnson kept hearing the same refrain from the families of South-Central murder victims. “The police just don’t care.” In some cases the police were simply rude. But she learned that in many other instances it was not insensitivity that created the ill will, but misunderstanding.
Johnson decided that the best way to ensure that victims’ families are treated sensitively is to arrive at the same time as the detectives. So last fall she became one of the first victims’ advocates in the state to work with police at murder scenes.
Now, when detectives determine that Johnson’s special skills are needed, they beep her, often in the middle of the night. She crawls out of bed and within minutes is soothing wailing relatives at their homes, explaining police procedures to families at murder sites or waiting with grieving parents at police stations.
Johnson is a familiar figure at murder scenes in South-Central Los Angeles, a small woman in a pink jogging suit who scurries in the dark past the hissing flares and yellow crime-scene tape in search of distraught relatives.
Detectives say they appreciate Johnson’s work because it frees them to spend more time interviewing witnesses and studying evidence. Victims’ families are grateful for the measure of comfort Johnson can provide.
“Norma came to us at a time of great distress,” says Paulette Williams, whose sister-in-law was killed in December, a bystander in a gang shooting. “We were waiting at the murder scene, just out of it. Norma was beautiful when she showed up. She told us what was going on and how we could get some help. But the main thing was the compassion she showed us. We truly felt that she cared.”
At the home of the nephew who has just been killed, Johnson coaxes the aunt onto a sofa. She listens as the woman describes how she inadvertently drove by the murder scene earlier that night. She smoothes the woman’s hair as the aunt talks about how well the boy did in junior high school. She offers advice in a soft, soothing voice when the woman wails: “What am I going to say to his father?”
When the woman’s family feels ready to take over, Johnson leaves her business card and heads out with detectives on their next call of the night--the boy’s father.
Johnson climbs into the back seat of the car and sighs heavily. The boy was not a gangbanger, she says, and he was a conscientious student. She saw his homework assignments, which detectives had pulled from his back pocket. All were painstakingly completed, the handwriting very neat. He’d received an “excellent” on his study skills paper and a B on an algebra assignment.
He had been walking to a bus stop near 52nd Street and Vermont Avenue after spending the afternoon at the Boys Club. A group of gang members in a van asked him where he was from, the traditional gang challenge. He answered: “You don’t know me.” One of the boys in the van pulled out a pistol and shot him.
“You send your child to school, to the store, to the Boys Club . . . and they never come back,” Johnson says, shaking her head. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
*
The body of a 16-year-old is sprawled on a street corner just 100 yards from the apartment where he lived with his aunt and grandmother. It is cool and misty, about 1 a.m.; the intersection of 85th Street and Avalon Boulevard is dimly lit by flashing lights atop the patrol cars.
Behind the crime scene tape is the boy’s family. Behind them is Johnson.
“He was almost home,” the grandmother says, tears streaming down her face. “Almost home.”
The grandmother, who tells Johnson that the boy’s mother lives in Mississippi, wants to know why she can’t see her grandson one final time. She wants to know why he is still on the street, hours after the shooting. Johnson places her hands on the woman’s shoulders and tells her that the police must preserve the crime scene; she explains that the grandson cannot be moved until the coroner’s investigator arrives.
When the boy’s uncle shows up, Johnson takes him aside, gives him her card and tells him to call when the family is ready to talk. She tells him she can help obtain counseling and money for the funeral.
Before Johnson leaves, the grandmother stares off into the distance and says, “I talked to him and talked to him about being late. But,” she shrugs weakly, “he was just a baby.”
Johnson returns to her home a few miles from the shooting, a neat stucco house decorated with African American folk art and filled with pictures of her two children and grandson. She makes herself coffee and stares into the cup. “Poor little thing,” she says, “laying out there like that.” He was a skinny kid in a T-shirt, she says, very young-looking, more boy than man.
Johnson, 48, knows what to say at life’s most difficult moments, and people in South-Central listen. She has lived there for 25 years.
She has been a single mother on welfare. She has lost members of her own family, three young cousins, to random violence.
While struggling to raise her children, she attended college and obtained a degree in political science. About 10 years ago, she started working with the city attorney’s office as a victim advocate in the Los Angeles Police Department’s 77th Street Division.
Johnson is one of about 60 coordinators of the state’s Victim-Witness Assistance Program in the county. They work full time as advocates who provide people with funds--collected through fines assessed against criminals--for counseling, medical bills and funerals.
About six months ago, she persuaded Lt. Sergio Robleto, who heads the LAPD’s South Bureau Homicide Division, to let her join detectives on the scene.
“We have to remain neutral and remain at a distance a lot of times,” Robleto says. “Norma can totally commit to the families. She has great concern for the people she works with. For families devastated by a homicide . . . having Norma there can help them begin the healing process much faster.”
At the end of this month, Johnson will begin training victim assistance coordinators at two other South-Central Los Angeles police stations to work murder scenes. She hopes she can get the practice established throughout the county.
Many of Johnson’s friends are mystified as to how she can bear the work, how she can endure being around such profound grief. But to Johnson, working with victims’ families is not a job. It is a calling. This is her ministry, she says, a mission that she does not want to entrust to anyone else.
“There are moments when it’s simply too much for me,” she says. “I’ll just break down with the families and cry with them. This work has made me cynical about a lot of things. But this is my home and I have to keep struggling to make it a better place.”
During a recent month, she assisted the families of 14 young murder victims, two of them only 11, in addition to her regular workload of rape and assault cases.
When she returns home from a call, she usually flips on the television and searches for an old movie, preferably a romance, to help her forget the bodies and the despair. If the call has been particularly grim, she will slip in a tape of one of her favorite classics, “An Affair to Remember.” The movie helps Johnson forget the brutality of her work, for a few hours, and lose herself in a world where people’s motives are always good, romance always prevails and the ending always is uplifting.
*
Shirley Simmons’ 17-year-old son was shot to death while standing in front of a restaurant with his girlfriend. Johnson is spending the morning with Simmons at a Downtown courtroom, offering moral support as they wait for the accused killer’s preliminary hearing.
Simmons’ son was killed in a neighborhood outside South-Central, so the detectives that Johnson usually works with did not investigate the case. But when Johnson learned of Simmons’ plight, and discovered that she lived in South-Central, she offered to help.
Simmons is angry about how she was treated by police. She says she spent more than five hours at the murder scene and had difficulty obtaining any information from officers. For months, she repeatedly called the detectives investigating the case, she says, but they did not return her calls. Until Johnson told her, Simmons did not know a suspect had been arrested.
“The police acted like my son’s life was worth nothing,” says Simmons, an administrative assistant for a nonprofit organization in Santa Monica. “I go to work every day and I pay taxes. I just wanted to be treated like a human being. And I wasn’t, until Norma began helping me.”
Johnson had her own differences with law enforcement during her days as a community activist in the 1970s, when she occasionally picketed against police brutality in front of the station where she now works. She has matured, she says, and realizes that she can get more done through cooperation than confrontation.
She attends the weekly meetings with detectives at the South Bureau Homicide Division, which investigates all murders in South-Central Los Angeles. She schmoozes with them after the meetings and talks about the cases, the suspects, the surviving families. She also pores over police and coroner’s reports and sometimes attends autopsies, studying each case so that she can answer the questions of relatives who often feel they have nowhere else to turn.
Johnson’s greatest satisfaction comes when she runs into someone she has assisted months later. People often tell her that she helped them through their greatest trauma, helped them survive pain they did not think they could endure. That, she says, gives her the strength to go on.
The most frustrating cases are the ones in which a relative cannot let go. One woman, after seeing the murder of her teen-age son, began carrying a photo album that chronicled his life.
“Every time I saw her she was carrying that album. And she’d say to me: ‘Miss Johnson, this is my baby when he started walking. . . . This is my baby when he first went to school. . . .’
“She was so deeply, deeply hurt that she could not come to grips with the reality that he was gone.” Johnson pauses and shakes her head. “I could never really reach her.”
*
Hours after another murder, after a 27-year-old mother of six was shot to death, Johnson is sitting with the slain woman’s mother at the 77th Street police station. The shooting occurred just a few blocks away, when the woman was caught in the cross-fire of a gang shooting.
The station is quiet this early morning. The only sound is a suspect in another case telling a detective across the room: “All I saw was a Chevy Nova.”
Johnson lightly touches the woman’s shoulder and explains the various services available to her. But the woman just sits rigidly in her chair, in shock, staring straight ahead.
A few days later Johnson stops by the house. A banner is taped to the front window with a large picture of the slain woman, a picture of Jesus and the words: “I Love You My Baby--Mom.” The house is filled with flowers and sympathy cards, many from co-workers of the victim, who had worked as a security guard.
The woman’s mother, who is taking care of her six young children, and relatives are preparing to go to the funeral parlor in Inglewood to view the body. They are taking the oldest child, an 11-year-old girl. Johnson rides with the family, wanting to make sure that the girl gets enough attention.
“I was looking at my caseload and I’ve got more than 50 kids right now who are growing up without a parent because some fool decided to pull the trigger,” she says later as she waits with the family in the lobby of the funeral parlor. “We’ve got six right here.”
When the family is allowed to view the body, the girl, who is wearing a green velvet dress trimmed with lace, stares into the coffin for 15 minutes, elbows on the edge, without saying a word. Finally, she looks up at Johnson and says defiantly: “That’s not my mom. It’s just fake. Everything is fake.”
While the others stand by the coffin, crying and sniffling, Johnson takes the girl for a walk to show her where her mother will be buried. When they return, the girl hovers over the body for a few more minutes, then suddenly runs into the hallway. Johnson follows and embraces her. The girl bursts into tears. Johnson begins to cry.
“This just breaks my heart,” Johnson says, dabbing her eyes with a tissue, after saying goodby to the girl outside the funeral parlor. “Now we’ve got another little kid who’ll be growing up without a mother.
“You know,” she says, grabbing another tissue from her purse, “these bullets tear through more than just bodies. They destroy whole families.”