A Hush Over the Avenue

Homicide Det. John St. John used to say that murder has a smell that lingers long after the bodies have been removed and the crime scene cleaned.

He wasn’t speaking of a specific odor but of the heavy aroma of grief that seems to permeate the very air of the place where a killing has occurred.

I sensed that the other day on Baldwin Park’s Stewart Avenue, standing before the modest wood-frame house where two young girls and two men died so violently on the preceding Sunday.

Dark skies lay over the neighborhood like a funeral shroud and a cluster of candles in front of the house flickered in the melancholy morning.

Flowers were placed against a low metal fence that surrounded the home, adding splashes of oddly inappropriate color to the prevailing gloom.

“Stewart Avenue makes me shiver,” said a young mother who had stopped to pay her respects. Diana Torres has lived on the street all of her 29 years. “I was never afraid until now.”

Fear is an element of murder’s unsettling fragrance and those whose perceptions allowed them to recognize it left the scene quickly.

Others simply stared, by their concentration seeking answers to the riddles of human violence that leaves so much pain in its wake.

I was there to wonder along with them, the perceptive and the stunned, and to once more absorb the tears of the ghosts that haunt us.

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The murder victims were Evelyn and Massiel Torres, 8 and 12, their uncle, Roberto Diaz, 34, and a gardener, Jose Rojas, 33. Three others were wounded. Police said they were shot and stabbed by David Alvarez, 28, who was looking for his estranged wife. He remains at large.

What brought me to Stewart Avenue was not just this slaughter of innocents, as devastating as it is, but the terror that late summer and autumn have again visited upon the places where we live.

I wrote once in a column I called “The Guns of August” about the multiplicity of homicides in one month four years ago, and now it has come again, this time in September, as the days shorten and the weather cools:

A man kills his neighbor in Fullerton. A postal worker is murdered at an ATM in the Crenshaw district. Four are killed in a Canyon Country murder-suicide. A woman checking her car alarm is shot to death in South-Central. A young man is killed near a high school in Placentia. A 19-year-old is murdered in an Arleta drive-by. A Duarte man is shot in a traffic argument in Alhambra. A man is stabbed to death in Canoga Park. A woman is killed in L.A. in a home-invasion robbery. A man murders his wife and two daughters in Pico-Union . . .

And on and on and on.

I’m not going to speculate on why the season seems so violent. It is complex enough to ponder the rage that drives a man to murder children. To attempt to unravel the mysteries of cosmic influences on our sanity would be impossible.

I’m just trying to communicate the horror that murder brings to places like Stewart Avenue.

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“You never get used to it,” Joe Holmes was saying. He’s the homicide detective investigating the crime for the Sheriff’s Department. Holmes has been a cop for 23 years.

He was talking about the scene of horror inside the small house where four people died. He was talking about the children, about their head wounds and about the massive amounts of blood spilled onto the floor.

“You have to maintain your composure even through the disgust that fills you, but your emotions are always behind the composure. They don’t disappear. You keep thinking about your own children, about your grandchildren. . . .”

The Stewart Avenue killing was his fifth multiple-murder case this year. “I hate doing this,” he said, “but it’s my job. Every time I enter an autopsy room I think, ‘Suppose it’s someone I know?’ ”

It’s my job, too. Not to investigate but to weave woes and wonders into the tapestry that will one day be viewed as representative of our time.

Murder was once a rare occurrence, a headline shouted on the streets, and now it is commonplace enough to be barely noticed in the pulse of events that comprise the rhythms of daily living.

Sebastian Torres, who has lived on Stewart Avenue all of his 31 years, remembers when it was a quiet street no one cared much about. “Now,” he says, “it’s a tourist attraction.”

Then let it be just that. And let it be a metaphor for all that is sad and odious about this fading century. Go by Stewart Avenue. Smell the aromas of murder, and then bow your head and mourn for us all.

Al Martinez can be reached through Internet at al.martinez@latimes.com