Judging the Worth of Lost Lives

I should have come to grips with it by now.

I learned early in my journalism career that in death, some people just mean more than others. My lesson came only days into my first job as a reporter for a now-defunct evening daily in Memphis, my hometown. Like most rookies, I was assigned to cops and courts. I covered crimes, arrests and court hearings.

In Memphis, most murders were usually big local stories, which meant that they often made the front page, and if not that page, most assuredly a splash on the front of the Metro section.

That is, if the victim was white.

It was a different story for black murder victims. Those were routinely handled as small items in the back of the newspaper. Black lives, apparently, were deemed to be of less value.

It was a sore point for most reporters. Bill Bain, my competitor on the morning paper, complained about it incessantly, and even coined a sarcastic acronym to rub his editors’ faces in their decisions. He called the incidents “LBMs”--Little Black Murders.

Over the years, I’ve seen similar scenarios played out in communities across the country, as reporters and editors make determinations about which deaths they record, and certain deaths strike a chord within certain communities. Sometimes it is about race, sometimes it is about class.

I’ve actually sat in the chair and made the call as to whose death was worthy of recording and whose wasn’t. There are some news guidelines, of course-- prominence, impact, human interest. But beyond that, it’s a judgment call. It is one of the things about the news business with which I have never been comfortable.

That’s why I’m sitting here, trying to figure out how we come to view some lives/deaths as less important--in particular why the deaths of Tanya Marie Jones and Jeremy Gabriel Mancilla as less worthy of our concern than the two Japanese college students killed in a San Pedro carjacking last week.

*

Tanya and Jeremy’s bodies were found Sunday morning in an asphalt alley that runs behind the homes and apartment buildings in the 1100 block of 105th Street. It was the same morning the deaths of Takuma Ito and Go Matsuura began to dominate the news and the vast resources of the Los Angeles Police Department.

It certainly wasn’t because their deaths were more heinous or brutal than those of Jeremy and Tanya, a 14-year-old Latino boy and an 18-year-old white girl shot in the head the previous night and left stretched out in an alley more than a hundred miles from their homes in San Marcos. Residents found Tanya nude. Police say she was possibly raped.

It was an ugly, nasty place to die, amid months-old litter, discarded diapers ground into mud and stagnant water. I nudged the trash with my toe and tried to imagine the terror that gripped their hearts in those last moments when death seemed certain. Did they think about their mother, sisters, brothers, friends, school?

I shuddered.

I couldn’t find anything about their deaths in the local newspapers. Other than a brief mention on one of the television stations, nothing. There has been no barrage of calls to the Sheriff’s Department’s press office.

“Five calls,” the deputy said, “and two of those were from you.”

No massive strike team is on the case, just two sheriff’s deputies. There will be no press conferences if they find the killers.

“It comes down to the economics,” said Steve Blanchard, 36, a postal worker who was shooting hoops in the back yard with his girlfriend’s son just yards away from where the bodies were found. “Over here in South-Central, what are we worth? People think everybody down here is on the county, so, they don’t care. But now those two Japanese guys, that’s tourist money.”

*

There were 25 people killed in Los Angeles County last weekend.

Among them were Andre Gonzalez, 21, shot over on Gladys Street; Robert Achie, 30, shot while driving his car in West Covina; Felipe Angeles, 23, shot while being robbed; Paul Slattry, 26 days old, beaten to death; Richard Villapando, 2, beaten to death; William August, 16, shot in front of his home; Gordon Armstrong, 52, shot to death; Chad Edwards, 26, shot in a trailer park; Rigoberto Martinez, 34, shot on a Whittier street; Sotheat Phoung, 17, shot while cruising in Long Beach; Lee Bolin, 57, stabbed in his Long Beach home.

Those didn’t make the paper either. A few others made the inside pages, including two incidents where teen-agers and young people were gunned down in restaurants. Bill Clinton didn’t call their parents.

For some reason, we deemed their deaths of lesser worth, of lesser interest. It wasn’t necessarily about race. It wasn’t necessarily about class. They just happened to be from Los Angeles, a place where we have come to see our own lives of less value than others.