Prophecy Fulfilled

Ennis Beley’s life improved dramatically after he predicted his own early death.

That was the good part. It lasted three, maybe four years. It was the rest of it, the first 12 years of his life, that killed him.

Less than four years after the hopelessly precocious, deeply fatalistic grade-schooler from South-Central predicted in a documentary about post-riot Los Angeles that he might, just might, if he was lucky, live to be 25, Ennis Beley was gunned down. He was 15.

Despite the fact that he had been, for a time, the darling of the world media, that he had met the mayor and dined with a celebrity--despite all the near-miracles that came to him--he was right about his life.

Last Tuesday, Ennis Beley--who had attracted prosperous and worried friends, who had won a scholarship to a private boarding school in the South, whose photograph of L.A. life hangs in the home of the vice president of the United States--put on a bold gang-red sweatshirt and was walking with a girlfriend in his old haunts when a lightblue Nissan Pulsar pulled up behind them, police say. The passenger got out and fired. Ennis went down. The girl ran. The gunman walked over and shot Ennis Beley again and again as he lay on the sidewalk.

“I wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t surprised either,” said Howard Glen, 75, who knew the boy’s mother and reared him from infancy in his home in the back of his dry-cleaning shop on Normandie Avenue, near a flash point of the riots.

Ennis was 12--nearly illiterate and a junior member of a Bloods gang since he was 8--when a group of young television producers for a BBC documentary arrived at the dry cleaners in spring 1992. L.A. had barely stopped smoldering.

The producers handed cameras to nine people to document their lives in the wake of the riots. Among them were a surgeon, two cops, a teacher, a reporter--and Ennis.

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Video: Children and teachers are milling about in front of the 52nd Street Elementary School in South-Central.

Voice-over: “I had a little problem today between going to school and not going to school. I ran away yesterday from school and I ran away today. It’s like, I got too many problems on me right now . . . “

The boy who showed up irregularly for school went faithfully each week to the Koreatown offices of World of Wonder Productions to exchange his spent tape for new and to learn cinematography. Then he went twice a week, then more often.

Beguiled producers and writers and photographers soon were taking the wiry kid with a mouthful of teeth and cheerful vulgarisms to the mall, to the movies, to hip Hollywood joints such as Red and Revival, to Denny’s for Grand Slam breakfasts.

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Often he hung out at the production offices all day. And then he began staying overnight at the homes of the company’s co-owners and staffers. He was as fascinated by their lives as they were by his precocity and unsettlingly adult street savvy.

Sophisticated in his urban swagger, Ennis was still a naif about the world his friends lived in. When New York writer Alison Pollet took Ennis to join her parents and brother at a Palm Springs hotel for a holiday, she said, “he brought along his own ratty towel. He didn’t know they give you towels.”

A handful of his young benefactors paid his tuition to United World International School of Learning, a private school in South-Central Los Angeles. Maybe there he would get the attention he needed, they thought. Maybe there he would flourish.

But he skipped classes and picked fights there as well--all the while turning in cinematically stunning and emotionally grueling videotape of himself and his street milieu.

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Ennis is animated and agitated, waving his hands and hunching his shoulders as he tells the story of his good friend.

“Goofy One died on August the 5th in front of Goofy Two’s house . . . We thought they were firecrackers. And then, after the car took off, we see Goofy dropping down to the floor . . . I don’t know what the [expletive] is going on, though. Goofy [Two] is telling me to help him, and I’m like, ‘Damn, I don’t know what to do, man. What? What do you want me to do, man? [Expletive] that. Call the paramedics--I ain’t touching him. I cannot touch no dead body . . .’ ”

The full-length BBC production aired in Britain in 1993, on the one-year anniversary of the riots; Ennis stole the show. Filmmakers and viewers were rapt at one scene of Ennis and two friends his age reenacting the Rodney King beating. Ennis played King; his friend put a real semiautomatic to Ennis’ head before pretending to beat him.

In Los Angeles, he was working his youthful magic at the second, federal trial of the officers who beat King.

The BBC outfitted him with another camera, more videotape, and he joined the media pack outside the courthouse. Soon journalists from across the country and around the world were filing stories about Ennis Beley, the 12-year-old video correspondent who tossed out one-liners such as “She’s so skinny she could Hula Hoop a Froot Loop.”

But when he wasn’t videotaping or at Disneyland or at a dinner with transvestite pop singer RuPaul, he was back home on the streets.

He would leave the dry cleaner’s clad in red and return late, pounding for Glen to let him in. Safely inside, he would stand to the side of the heavy steel screen door and peer nervously back outside.

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“I was having a nightmare . . . Some dude threw a ball at the back of my head. Then he pulled out the gun. He pulled the trigger, but no bullet came out. The second time he pulled the trigger, the bullet went in my finger, right here. And I was like ‘Ahhhhh, I got shot!’ . . . That dream made me get a good thing through my head. [But] everything was all right.”

Outside the courthouse, Ennis met and befriended Lauren Greenfield, a professional photographer who enlisted him in a book project called “Picture L.A.: Landmarks of a New Generation.” This time it was a still camera that was put in his hands; friends and photographers and even Al Gore called his pictures remarkable.

Ennis’ L.A. “landmarks” included young men flashing gang signs, a boy riding a toy tractor where a school once stood, an earthquake-shattered freeway. “I was thinking yesterday how many of Ennis’ landmarks had to do with violence,” Greenfield said.

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By the summer of 1995, Ennis had confessed to a nonviolent felony and had gotten a gang tattoo. “That was a pivotal moment,” said writer Pollet, whom Ennis called “Mom.” “That’s when we knew we had to get him out of here.”

His new friends helped Ennis apply to the highly respected, no-nonsense Piney Woods Country Life boarding school outside Jackson, Miss. He was accepted and awarded a scholarship. Pollet and the others bought him a black trunk for his first pair of dress shoes and school uniforms, and she flew to Mississippi with him last September. He held her hand during orientation.

She told him this was it, this was his chance. He said he understood. Then she left.

In March, the school suspended Ennis for fighting. He sobbed on the phone to Glen and then hopped a Greyhound bus back to Los Angeles.

*

“I hope I live through the end of ’92 and ‘93, and I hope I make it through this year now . . . And, um, I hope I live to 25, or more. I hope I live, you know, until God says I gotta go right then.”

In the weeks following his return to the dry cleaner’s, Ennis had “some awfully narrow escapes,” Glen said. He was being threatened by somebody. He was beaten with a baseball bat in a fight over a bicycle and stayed in bed for three days. He stayed inside even after he recovered.

Most of the group of friends had decided on tough love: They would call him and send him letters, but they wouldn’t see him. They loved him, they said, but didn’t know what else to do. Neither did Glen.

“He had so many people,” said Greenfield, “but it just wasn’t enough. He needed a home, but none of us could give him that completely.”

Early Tuesday afternoon, Ennis Beley pulled on a T-shirt. Then he pulled a red sweatshirt over it, even though it was hot.

“He said he was going out,” Glen said. “He asked me for a dollar. I gave him a dollar. He caught the bus, and he went north.”

Ennis and the girl were near Crenshaw High School when the young man in the Nissan yelled a gang reference and then fired. Ennis died in a hospital emergency room. July 8 would have been his 16th birthday.

For three months, Ennis’ new trunk sat in the middle of the dry-cleaning shop, still packed with his things, still with the tags from his bus trip home. Glen had asked Ennis’ friends to come pick it up. He was afraid to leave it there, lest it be stolen.

“He had everything going for him,” Glen said. “He did. Everything.”