Non-Celebrity Memorial : Family of Slain Football Player Tries to Pay Tribute

There was no media circus at Kevin Murray’s funeral this week.

No boom mikes. No photographers. Just 200 or so mourners and a coffin containing the bullet-riddled corpse of a 17-year-old Fairfax High School senior who was killed in a June 4 drive-by shooting on 49th Street just west of Normandie Avenue in Southwest Los Angeles.

Although the deceased was a football player--linebacker, Fairfax Lions--he had no connection to O.J. Simpson. So the press and the public stayed away from what has so far been chalked up as just another unsolved killing.

That does not sit well with Kevin’s family.

“People should know about these things, not just when it happens to celebrities,” said Kevin’s 71-year-old father, Albert Murray.

The Murrays, who live in a duplex in the Mid-City district, want to ensure that Kevin’s death was not in vain. They are soliciting donations for a memorial fund to reward people who come forward with information on Kevin’s death or other murders.

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So far they have raised $205. They intend to put some of Kevin’s insurance money toward the fund, collect at least $1,000 and begin paying for tips that could help the stymied police investigation.

“Everybody’s afraid to give their names, to come forward,” Murray said. “You can’t get anything done that way.”

The father understands why witnesses may be reluctant to speak out. He understands that gang violence is routine and that intimidation of witnesses is common. But someone has to stand up to the criminals, he says.

“I’ll sacrifice my life, if necessary,” he said. “I’ve lived a nice, long life.”

When Albert Murray came to the City of Angels in the late 1940s from Houston, he fell in love with the sheen of the place. But Los Angeles has changed. “The angels no longer have it,” he says. Now “it’s the city of the devils-- Los Diablos. “

The Murrays have lived in the same Mid-City duplex near Redondo and San Vicente boulevards, west of La Brea Avenue, for 21 years, in an area Murray says used to be called South Wilshire. “Now I guess it’s called South-Central,” he says, a sober reference to the way the geographically inaccurate use of South-Central has spread in the Central City. They raised Kevin and their two older daughters in Los Angeles.

Sandra Murray, Kevin’s older sister, who teaches junior high school in South-Central, says “when I tell my students Los Angeles used to be clean, and the buildings used to be beautiful, they don’t believe me.”

She remembers growing up in Compton, where her behavior on the streets was watched by neighbors. When she misbehaved in public, Sandra Murray says, her neighbors would scold her before she got home.

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Now, she says, that community spirit has been lost. It’s a spirit she hopes a Kevin Murray Memorial Fund might revive.

“Kevin’s fund could move people because they’ll know there is a source to help their kids,” she said.

“People have just been dormant long enough,” Albert Murray said. “They say, ‘Oh, that’s too bad, did you hear about so-and-so?’

“And a lot of the time they don’t even hear. There are a lot of kids getting killed out there, and they’re not on the news. . . . The only people who remember them are family and a few close friends.

“We need to keep them alive in our memories, so this won’t happen again.”

Kevin was a good kid who wanted to become a firefighter, who stayed away from gangs and generally out of trouble, his father says, “though he was a teen-ager, and he wasn’t perfect.”

The detective on the case, Jerry Johnson, said Kevin appears to have been killed by gang members. Kevin’s family believes that he was the victim of a case of mistaken identity; that gang members, riding through the neighborhood to retaliate for an earlier shooting, mistook Kevin and his friends for members of another gang.

Murray and three friends had just pulled up to the curb on 49th Street in their 1978 Chevrolet station wagon about 11:30 p.m. when a dark car drove past and opened fire. One passenger threw himself over Kevin’s body as the bullets hit. Kevin’s three friends were injured; two remain hospitalized. Kevin was pronounced dead at the scene.

Without witnesses or anything in Kevin’s past that would explain why he would be the victim of a drive-by shooting, there is little the police can do to solve the murder.

“Sometimes there’s just no rhyme or reason for it without any witnesses coming forward, or without something in the victim’s background,” Johnson said.

Police are looking for witnesses, aware that testifying against gang members is “like testifying against the Mafia,” the detective said.

But Kevin’s family is determined not to let him become another statistic in the Los Angeles body count.

“That’s the problem,” said his mother, Delores Murray. Those hundreds of murder victims “just keep on fading.”