Ordeal at Charlie’s Market

When I was a kid in Oakland, I stole a bag of doughnuts once from a grocery store on East 14th Street. They were glazed doughnuts in a brown bag. I did it because we were poor and I was hungry, and because it was an exciting thing to do.

I hid the doughnuts inside a jacket and sidled out of the store as casually as I could, but I was a clumsy thief and the grocer, a man named Fred Barnes, saw me.

He shouted “Hey!” and came after me, red-faced and snorting fire, and cornered me in an alley about a block away.

I made a run at him to try knocking him out of the way, but he caught me by the nape of the neck, marched me back to the store and took my name and address.

He said he’d be notifying my parents and juvenile authorities and I would be catching everyone’s hell in just a few days.

Which brings me to Aldo Vega.

He stole a box of cookies from a place called Charlie’s Market in Lynwood, and also was a clumsy thief.

The owner of the market, Michael Kim, saw him. Aldo, a 14-year-old, took off. Kim jumped in his car and caught him three blocks away. Then he shot him.

He did it, Kim said, because the boy with Aldo had a knife. No knife was found, but a screwdriver was later recovered. He did it, Kim said, because Aldo appeared to be reaching for a weapon. There was no weapon, but Aldo admits hiking up his shirt and reaching into his pocket.

There was just that damned box of cookies scattered on the sidewalk.

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No criminal charges were filed against Kim because the kid stole cookies, didn’t he, and Kim feared for his life, didn’t he? Cookie thieves are notorious for murdering grocers.

The case was instantly compared to the killing of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins in Compton three years ago. She was shot dead by grocer Soon Ja Du after the two had struggled over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice.

Du was fined $500 and placed on probation. Few killers are granted such an easy way out.

Aldo didn’t die. The bullet fired from Kim’s .38 missed his heart. The D.A.’s office announced magnanimously that it would not file shoplifting charges against him.

There are similarities between the shootings of Latasha and Aldo. Both guns were fired by Korean Americans, though Latasha was black and Aldo is Latino. Both shootings were set in motion by the theft of items worth less than $2.

Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti said no charges would be filed against Kim because no prosecutable crime occurred. Commentators, defending Kim’s actions, pointed out that 35 Korean American owners of small businesses have been shot in L.A. in the past year. He had a right not to become No. 36.

But Chicano activist Armando Sotomayor cut through the statistics and legal justification when he stood on the steps of the Criminal Courts Building and said, “You don’t shoot a 14-year-old boy over a 49-cent box of cookies.”

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There are those who see the shooting of a Latino by a Korean as a racial incident. I don’t. I see it as a metaphor of the time and place in which we live, in a society packaged by violence and summarized by clashing rights.

Aldo Vega had no right to steal from the store. Michael Kim had a right to pursue him. Aldo Vega had no right to make a threatening gesture. Michael Kim had a right to defend himself.

Rights are endlessly debated in a nation that revolves around them. But the debate ends when guns are fired.

There are an estimated 200 million firearms in private hands in this country, and arguments are increasingly terminated, and rights defended, by their use.

Homeowners shoot at intruders, car owners shoot at thieves, property owners shoot at trespassers . . . and grocery store owners shoot at kids who steal orange juice and cookies.

No one will ever know whether Kim actually feared for his life or was trying, in his way, to teach a lesson. Give him the benefit of the doubt. He was in a state of terror.

But I can’t help wondering what would have happened to me those many years ago had similar conditions existed. Would Fred Barnes have armed himself, pursued me and shot me dead when I lunged at him?

I doubt it. We were a different world back then, less prone to cause pain and more inclined to weigh the value of a human life against the loss of a grocery product.

Barnes took my name, but never turned me in. I lived in fear for weeks that he might, and the fear stamped its message on my life. The grocer taught a lesson without a shot being fired.

You didn’t shoot a kid over a bag of doughnuts back then. Sadly, things have changed. Michael Kim and Aldo Vega, thrust together in the context of petty crime and excessive punishment, will symbolize that change for a long time to come.