Tagger’s Death Divides Charitable People

We’ll call them Frank, Louise, Anne, Barbara and Daphne. Some of those names are real and some aren’t. They did something nice last week for a stranger--and they don’t think a simple kindness should inspire publicity. What they did is help out an impoverished woman named Mary Barbucescu, a Romanian immigrant who on Wednesday scrounged together $42 to buy a monthly bus pass, only to discover that the MTA had raised the price by $7 to $49. That was $7 she didn’t have.

It so happened that Times reporter Chip Johnson and photographer Richard Derk were at the MTA Customer Service Center in Van Nuys when Mary broke down in tears. She needed the bus pass, she explained, to search for work. And Mary had just learned that she would qualify for only one more month of food stamps.

The switchboard got busy after Mary’s plight was splashed across the Valley Edition. Chip spent Thursday morning on the phone with a score of people who wanted to help Mary with a donation. A couple of them said they would like to help her find a job. (Chip also heard from one person who called to say that, hey, life’s tough and Mary should stop crying and buck up.)

Frank, Louise, Anne, Barbara and Daphne were among the do-gooders. It isn’t only their generosity that intrigued me. I was curious to know their feelings about an event that has inspired a different kind of public reaction--the fatal shooting of a 18-year-old graffiti vandal named Cesar Rene Arce by William Andrew Masters II, who was arrested but ultimately released after prosecutors judged it to be an act of self-defense.

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Frank, a Lake View Terrace resident, was the first to call me back. He said he had put $10 in an envelope and mailed it to Mary. And it wasn’t the first time he’s helped out people like Mary.

“I’m a bus driver,” he explained, “and this really pisses me off. . . . This lady here--honest to God, I felt so bad about it. For the last 10 years I’ve been seeing these people. And some are really nice, decent people trying to earn a living.”

The day the Metropolitan Transportation Authority raised the daily fare from $1.10 to $1.35, many riders were surprised. That day, Frank says, he reached into his own pocket seven or eight times to help people who were a quarter short. “Hey, I know guys who would throw their mother off a bus. . . . I can’t do it. It’s not in me. I’m not the kind of person.”

I asked Frank how he felt about the killing of the “tagger.”

“You want my honest opinion? I feel no pity. I’m sorry. They raise hell with us. . . . The MTA police catch these guys, and the next things you know they’re back there the next day.” Frank has had his own brushes with vandals--so he believes Masters may well have acted out of self-defense.

“I didn’t want to see the guy killed,” Frank added, referring to Arce. “But I had a funny feeling when I read that story, this guy”--now he meant Masters--”was going to get hurt.”

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Louise was next. She’s a 75-year-old grandmother who lives in Sherman Oaks. Louise sent Mary $50.

“The situation in this city--to do this to people who are poor,” Louise said, disgust in her tone. She also seemed puzzled by my interest. “What kind of world do we live in when you have to interview somebody for doing something humane?”

Louise, like Frank, isn’t new to charity. She and her husband “are very happy to help where we are able.” Like the time many years ago, when Louise helped stage Christmas for juvenile delinquents in Newhall. “Nobody ever thought of them at Christmas.”

I asked her about the Arce killing. Louise said she followed the story “very sporadically.”

“It’s very difficult, because it’s an offense carrying a handgun,” she said. “But perhaps he was attacked in such a way that it was self-defense. How do you give an opinion on something like that?”

Some people, I told her, don’t care about Masters’ motivation. They just figure: Good riddance.

“That’s unbelievable,” she said. “For doing graffiti? They don’t deserve to be crucified the rest of their lives for that. Oh, no, that’s not right. That isn’t right at all.”

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“I want to make sure this woman gets her bus pass,” Anne said. “This is the most ridiculous thing.”

Disgust also dripped from her words. A 45-year-old federal employee who lives in North Hollywood, Anne couldn’t help but compare Mary’s $7 shortfall with another story on the page--a report about Barbara Yaroslavsky’s $279,000 war chest in her campaign to succeed hubby Zev on the City Council. The cost of politics in this town could buy a lot of bus passes.

“The bus should cost less. They can’t keep raising the price.”

When we discussed Arce’s death, Masters’ self-defense alibi never came up.

“I’m thrilled about it. I couldn’t care less. I wish they could shoot them on sight,” Anne said. “What this city looks like with that garbage all over the walls. . . .”

Later, I asked if she was just venting, or if she literally meant her words.

“I literally do,” she said. “I literally do, because I think it would very quickly solve the problem.”

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“That was heart-wrenching,” Barbara said of the story and photo about Mary. “You had to be made of stone or be Newt Gingrich not to be touched by that.”

Barbara is a 62-year-old homemaker who lives in Westlake Village. And, as you may have surmised, she is not a Republican, but “a devoted, losing Democrat.”

“What this woman needs is a job,” Barbara said. Mary’s circumstances, she said, are “incredible to people like us. We’re not sitting on top of the pile. But when we look at what we have, and what this woman has, we feel like the Rockefellers.”

When I asked Barbara about the Arce shooting, she apologetically acknowledged that she hadn’t paid much attention.

“We have become so used to shootings. It was a terrible thing, but it was just another shooting. That just sounds awful--I know. I did not read the story. We have become so immune to these stories.

“I wish we could throw all the guns in the Pacific. Guns are alien to me. . . . We won’t allow one in the house--we don’t think they’re necessary, even in the world we live in.”

Another thought took shape in the course of these interviews. I asked Barbara: Did she think Mary would inspire such sympathy if she had immigrated from Mexico, and not Romania? Or what if Mary was African American?

“Would people answer you honestly on that?” Barbara said. “I don’t know.”

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Daphne was last. She’s a 40-year-old Tarzana resident who works in job placement. Her profession has made her familiar with the ins and outs of various transit agencies. She resents the waste inside the MTA--on expensive meals, on junkets, on unnecessary and overpriced studies. Billions are being spent to build subways, Daphne points out, but there’s little to help a woman like Mary.

“The picture of her crying capped it, but the story was touching enough,” Daphne said. “Being a recruiter, I thought, ‘What if I had a job to give this woman?’ God, I talk about her like I know her. . . . She’s just trying to get a ride on this damn bus, and it’s just out beyond her reach. Contrast that with the . . . MTA blowing money left and right.

“I just couldn’t believe it. I thought I’ve just got to get this woman some money. Just tell me where I need to mail it.”

When I asked about the dead tagger, Daphne let out a big sigh.

“You know, I’ve got some mixed feelings about that one. I understand the guy who shot the tagger was in some fear of his life. But gosh, there must be some other way to deal with this.”

Daphne thought back to when she was growing up in Baldwin Hills. If she got into mischief on her way to school, grown-ups in the neighborhood would scold her and tell her folks, who’d punish her all over again. And she evidently turned out all right.

But somehow, it’s come to this.

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.

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