When Violence Is Everywhere

This time, I was sorry that I was right. I had predicted to my colleagues--and staked a cup of coffee on it--that in the wake of the murder of a 3-year-old girl riding in a car that turned down a dead-end street in Cypress Park and was ambushed by gang members, a certain Los Angeles City Council member would offer a reward in the amount of $25,000 for whoever could finger the killers.

But I wasn’t in Los Angeles on Tuesday when it happened just as I said it would.

I was in the city of Compton, at the courthouse whose regular clientele--young men who know the drill--routinely begin unbuckling and unthreading their belts to surrender them to the metal detector before anyone has to ask.

On the seventh floor, where the newest ornament in the district attorney’s ratty offices is a color photograph of D.A. Gil Garcetti, Janet S. Moore heads the hard-core gang unit. As the deputy in charge, she is not supposed to carry a caseload at all, but with five lawyers now instead of the dozen who worked here just a couple of years ago, what else can she do?

So it took her a while to recollect the particulars of another lawyer’s murder case: 4-year-old Joshshaney Henderson, also riding in a car with her family on a Sunday, also killed when gang members opened fire in an ambush.

While Stephanie Kuhen’s family blundered into an alley to be attacked by gang members who’d never seen them before, Joshshaney Henderson’s father was known to gang members. Some of them allegedly were pretending to tinker under the hood of a gold Chevy Caprice at the roadside as they lay in wait for her father. He had had run-ins with the gang before--they had shot him as he sat on his bike--and had identified some of them to investigators.

Joshshaney’s alleged killers are in jail on $2-million bail. Stephanie’s are out there somewhere--and the point is, says Moore, that somewhere is anywhere.

“Too many people think the gang problem is just confined to certain areas of L.A.--’Who cares? Let it stay there. If they shoot and kill each other, what do we care?’ But what this shooting in Cypress Park reminds everyone is that this violence is mobile. They do go to the malls, they do go to the beaches, they do go to the pier, and they take their lifestyle with them.”

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“ So what conclusions if any can be drawn by this documentation of . . . [ a ] rebellion so animated at times that thousands of like-minded teen-agers have taken to the streets, armed and in complete defiance of all authority? . . . Like it or not, these young people are the future of this city and their offspring will be imbibed with the experience of their parents. And so the vicious circle keeps turning . . . “

This is not taken from one more earnest report from some L.A. task force. This is from a recent book about 100 years of street gangs in the Scottish city of Glasgow.

The relentless slaughter has “numbed” us down. The purveyors of violence score a win just by upping the scale of death and chaos, if it gets no response.

A dozen years ago, a murdered 15-year-old could still shock. When we began seeing dead 15-year-olds everywhere, the threshold became 12, then 9 or 10. Now the nation is aghast at a capricious murder that leaped ahead of earlier yardsticks of horror: a 3-year-old killed, her 2-year-old brother wounded as he sat strapped in his car seat for safety’s sake.

It even caught the attention of President Clinton, who remarked in a Jacksonville, Fla., speech Tuesday, “Look at what happened in Los Angeles over the weekend. A family took one wrong turn and because they were in the wrong place, gang members felt they had the right to shoot at them and take their lives. . . .”

It was front page news, too, over the last years when:

* A father’s Willowbrook house was firebombed because he told gang members to take their drug sales elsewhere.

* A 28-year-old woman was killed outside a Watts church as she shielded her year-old niece from gunfire.

* A group of Long Beach high school students kidnaped and murdered a school crossing guard.

* Three little boys walking home from a chaperoned Halloween party in Pasadena were gunned down by gang members who reportedly laughed as they drove away.

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Like heroin addicts, it takes more and more to affect us. We protect ourselves at each retreat: this much violence becomes tolerable, then normal. We can live with locked car doors and rolled-up windows on August afternoons, live with gunfire at night if it doesn’t sound too close.

Against the weekend’s body count came some hopeful news. Stephanie Kuhen’s murder was deplored at a press conference launching a YWCA national campaign for a violence-free week. An LAPD-FBI task force--a kind of miracle of cooperation in itself--has solved more than 30 murders in south Los Angeles in six months.

This week, it takes Stephanie Kuhen to reach critical mass, to reach our attention; what will it take the next?