Family That Survived a Crime Still Feels the Pain of Violence

For 15-year-old Ezekiel Ford III, words come slowly, if at all.

He told me which school he attended. With considerable effort, he pronounced the names of the three hospitals where he has been treated since--as an innocent bystander simply playing with his 2-year-old sister--he was shot in the head and both legs when gang members began wildly firing their guns in front of his South-Central Los Angeles apartment house.

The boy could say no more. The rest of the story had to be told by his mother, Vanessa Smith, who is picking up the pieces, taking Ezekiel across town to therapy twice a week. She will soon begin the same process for her daughter, who was shot in the stomach, left leg and arm.

Bobby Grace, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who successfully prosecuted the assailants, has been urging me to write about Smith and her children. Grace said that while society correctly expresses outrage and sympathy for the murdered victims of crime and their survivors, we forget the wounded. Their lives are changed forever. Their recovery, if it happens, may take many years.

Like Ezekiel Ford, his sister and their mother, survivors and their families can look forward to lives dominated by doctors and health insurance companies, by visits to hospitals, by days of hope alternating with weeks of despair.

Maybe you could write something about what that’s like, Grace said.

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I talked to Smith and the children in the small house they moved to after the shooting, which occurred at nightfall last Feb. 15. Ezekiel, a gentle young man who obviously had a lot to say if he could only manage the words, sat next to his mother. His sister Shantel cuddled close to him. She had an ugly wound around her Achilles’ tendon. Another sister, Crystal, 13, was also on the couch. She hadn’t been involved in the shooting.

Vanessa Smith and Shantel had been visiting a cousin, who lived in an apartment in back of theirs. When Shantel grew restless, Smith took her outside to play with her brother, Ezekiel, in the alley that fronted their apartment.

“I was heading for my cousin’s when I heard all the shots,” she said. “There were over 30 of them. That’s when I hit the ground, screaming.” But she was immediately up again. “I ran back,” she said. “By the time I got there they [the shooters] were running down the alley and I saw my kids lying on the ground. She [Shantel] was lying on his back. I grabbed her. I thought he was gone. I thought I better put her down. The blood was running. That’s when I blacked out.”

What had happened, Grace told me later, was that three members of the Six Deuce Brims, a gang affiliated with the Bloods, had become enraged because a car driven by an enemy Crip had driven through their territory.

They went to a big shot in the Six Deuce Brims, an O.G., or original gangster, who supplies guns to the group. From his arsenal, this gangland supply sergeant handed out an AK-47, a Miller 9-millimeter semiautomatic and a Mitchell .380 semiautomatic.

The three gangsters--Reginald Carr, 23; Ollie Miller, 19; and Dion Mitchell, 20--believed that Crips were hanging out at the end of the alley. That also happened to be where the children were playing.

The gang members moved down the alley, their guns loaded and ready. They saw shadowy figures in the semidarkness and opened fire. Thirty shots were fired from the AK-47, nine from the 9-millimeter and one from the .380, cutting down Ezekiel, Shantel and their cousin, Larry Welch, 15, who escaped with minor wounds.

Ezekiel and Larry weren’t gang members, Grace said. The gangsters had no idea who their targets were. They just blasted away at shadows.

The wounded children were taken to Martin Luther King Jr./Drew, where surgeons saved Ezekiel’s life. His mother was too frightened to go back to the apartment. She slept in a car in the King parking lot for two nights to be near the children and then was moved into a motel by the Los Angeles police.

With her health insurance, the children were moved to private hospitals, first to Childrens and then to Cedars-Sinai. Now Ezekiel is in therapy at Daniel Freeman.

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What makes a column different from a news story is that I am supposed to draw conclusions from an event like this.

But that’s beyond me. I don’t think anybody has the answer. In this case, the shooters were each given three life sentences, plus many more years in prison. That takes care of them, but I doubt it makes life easier for Vanessa Smith and her children.

I told the family about my own experience as the parent of a child who was a victim of a violent crime and, who, like Ezekiel, lost the power of speech and was partially paralyzed. We were lucky. After therapy, she recovered completely.

“See,” Vanessa Smith told her son, “you can do it.”

When the interview ended, I chatted with Ezekiel for a few minutes. He replied briefly, working hard to form each word.

I pointed out that he was talking. “A couple of words this week,” I told him. “A couple more words next week, pretty soon they won’t be able to shut you up.”

He laughed, his face alight with an eloquent smile.