The Answer to Crime Starts Inside the Home

I’d filed away the story of the terrible home invasion murder, aiming to do a follow-up. But it sat in my drawer for more than a month, ignored, until last week when I was invited to a discussion on violence.

Hate crime was the planned subject matter of the event at the Santa Monica YWCA. Young people, ranging from teenagers to preschoolers, had been invited to air their feelings by the USA Network, which has been showing a special, narrated by Dennis Franz, called “Healing the Hate.”

Hate crimes are usually thought of as violence prompted by hatred of a race, religion or someone who is gay or lesbian.

But the discussion soon moved beyond that as the kids discussed the general violence that afflicts our society.

Sally Young, the Y’s executive director, asked if they knew anyone who had been shot. A Santa Monica High School student raised his hand. “My sister’s boyfriend, a while back, he got shot in the back of the head,” he said. The boy related the circumstances of the shooting, then added, “it so happened that he was shot by a person of his own race.”

Race wasn’t the cause of this shooting. Nor did race have anything to do with the home invasion murder that occurred on Aug. 25.

*

Back at work, I pulled out the old story.

Around dusk on a Sunday, two men knocked at the door of Vanessa Sills’ home, in an affluent, predominantly African American neighborhood located where the flatlands of the Crenshaw district begin to rise into the rolling Baldwin Hills.

She opened the door. They asked for someone by name. It wasn’t anyone who lived in the house. The men burst in, hogtied her and one shot her in the head. She later died at UCLA Medical Center.

In back of the house, Sells’ 16-year-old daughter heard the shots. Searching through the house, the men found the girl and hogtied her.

“You’re lucky we’re not Jeffrey Dahmer or we’d rape you,” one of them said. The shooter fired three times, two bullets cutting through her scalp but not penetrating her skull, the other hitting her ear. They fled with the mother’s Lexus, which had been parked in front, and some jewelry.

The next day, Los Angeles police arrested Carlos Hawthorne, 20, who was charged with murder. Police said that he had called 911 and reported seeing three men running away from a Lexus, apparently a clumsy attempt to throw the cops off the trail. A 911 operator kept him on the line long enough to trace the call. Police caught him in the phone booth, and said he had the keys to the stolen Lexus.

The second man is still at large.

Friday, I drove to the neighborhood. It was midmorning. The street was quiet. I walked by the victims’ house. It is an attractive, cream-colored post-World War II L.A. ranch house like the others on the block--perfectly tended even though, neighbors said, nobody was staying there now. Outside, a sign announced that it was protected by a 24-hour service that provided “armed response.”

I asked a neighbor, Marianne Ferguson, how people on the block felt. “We’re still in shock,” she said. “We’ve tightened up security. We definitely don’t open our doors until we know who’s there.”

*

Vanessa Sells had taken all the precautions. “She had done all the right things,” said Det. Rick Marks, who, with Det. Ray Morales, is investigating the case.

What’s the answer?

Some will say she shouldn’t have opened the door. But that’s no way to live. If you buy a house in a decent neighborhood, you shouldn’t have to cower behind a locked door.

More cops? If we tripled the size of our Police Department, cops probably wouldn’t have been standing guard in such a quiet place.

Stiffer penalties? I’m sure the killer knew about the death penalty when he pulled the trigger.

I thought back to the kids’ discussion at the YWCA. The answer, they felt, was within themselves, and their families. No grand solutions, no sound bite cures.

“Violence is a learned behavior,” said Santa Monica Police Chief James T. Butts, who took part in the discussion. “Children respond to what is taught in the home and what is respected in public. They can move away from violence.”

Kid by kid, family by family, block by block.