The Fight Against Crime: Notes From The Front : Crime Hits Home for D.A. Secretary

Elizabeth Lambert spends every working day on the Valley’s crime problems--at a distance.

As a secretarial worker in the Van Nuys branch office of the district attorney, Lambert is a clerical cog in the giant machine of the criminal justice system.

Lambert has been a part of the prosecution support team since 1986.

Last week, they became a support system for her.

In the few seconds it took someone to empty a gun into her son, Lambert jumped from the secretarial bullpen of crime to the front lines.

Lambert’s son, Oscar Palis, 17, of Arleta, was killed by a hail of bullets just before midnight on Aug. 26 in Mission Hills.

Initial police reports suggested the incident was somehow gang-related, although the case detective now says the circumstances of the unsolved homicide are unclear.

Los Angeles Police Detective Troy Shin, of the Asian Investigations Section, said he has no indication Lambert’s son was in a gang.

On the Monday morning after the shooting, news of the young man’s violent death swept through the prosecutors’ office.

“Did you hear what happened to Elizabeth’s son?” asked one prosecutor after another as they met in the courthouse offices, courtrooms and corridors.

Although such senseless carnage is the very stuff of their professional lives in the district attorney’s office, prosecutors were stunned by the news--as shocked as if they had just arrived by Greyhound from a peaceful hamlet in the Heartland, as if they had never heard of such an outrage.

“We were walking around in a daze,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Cohen said. “We deal with tragedy daily and we deal with the victims daily, but now it’s in our home.”

The secretarial staff, normally one step removed from grief-stricken victims, was even more disturbed, hugging each other and crying, Cohen said.

“They have a different perspective than we do,” the prosecutor explained. “The paperwork is passing by them and the interesting ones they probably read, but . . . “

An office friend, who had telephoned Lambert, said the grieving mother was not interested in talking to reporters. Nor was anyone in the secretarial ranks willing to discuss Lambert or her office duties.

“There’s a reluctance to talk,” said Head Deputy Dist. Atty. Phil Wynn. “If you’re going to put something in the article, say we love her.”

Lambert’s duties involve typing up criminal charges and tracking cases as they move through the system, Wynn said.

At other times, Lambert works at the reception desk. There, she has a front row seat as detectives and prosecutors pass by on their way to do battle in court, carrying with them “murder books” filled with hideous crime scene photos and evidence envelopes containing guns, blood-stained clothing and other gruesome reminders of the violence the system exists to combat.

After trials are resolved, Lambert logs the outcomes, reduced by then to sterile Penal Code abbreviations, into a computer system that keeps track of criminals, but hardly of crime’s toll.

A prosecutor wondered aloud last week if Lambert would ever be able to separate her duties at work from her incalculable loss. Could she ever again punch “187”--the Penal Code number for murder--into the computer without thinking of her son?

“This really highlights the enormity of what we are faced with here on a daily basis,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Lea Purwin D’Agostino said.