This Is What Friends Are For?

I read the account, it left me with a Sunday morning shiver, then I took a week’s vacation. When I got back, letters from readers made it clear it had left them feeling the same shiver.

Written by Times staffer Nora Zamichow, the story chronicled the May 1997 strangulation slaying of 7-year-old Sherrice Iverson in a Nevada casino restroom. Within days, police arrested Jeremy Strohmeyer, a Long Beach high school senior. His trial on murder and sexual assault charges is set to start next month.

The criminal charges are gruesome enough; the police version is that the killing was a relatively spur-of-the-moment event.

What chilled me and other readers, however, was the cavalier reaction Strohmeyer’s male buddies had to the slaying. Several of his pals--I counted at least four quoted in the article--suspected that Strohmeyer had killed the little girl, but none called the cops.

To a man, and I use the word loosely, they said they were adhering to something akin to a knight’s code of conduct, in which friends don’t rat on friends. I could understand if fear of retribution had caused their silence, but none cited that.

When asked why he hadn’t turned in Strohmeyer, one said: “I didn’t want to be the person who takes away his last day, his last night of freedom.”

Another friend had this to say: “It’s a man thing. If your friend does something really bad or really wrong, you’re not going to go out and narc on them real quick. . . . For men, it’s like a respect for your male friends. It’s like almost an oath, a pact that you take when you become best friends with a guy. . . . I’ve talked with a lot of guys about it--what they would do it their best friend killed somebody. Every guy I’ve asked has said they wouldn’t say anything.”

A third friend said, “At that time, I was grounded . . . I really didn’t want to go to [my parents] and say, ‘Oh, mom, my best friend killed someone, so can I go to the police?’ ”

The temptation for the rest of us is to fulminate about this “code of silence.” What kind of young men are we raising, who believe not telling the police about a slaying is virtuous?

Before we decry the younger generation, however, let’s look around at some of society’s more respectable quarters.

Do police departments routinely expose their own wrongdoers? Or, as we’ve seen over the years, do they often protect their own?

Do doctors reflexively turn in other doctors who screw up? How about lawyers?

We’ve all read about the Catholic Church’s spotty record regarding priests who were found to have molested children. Some were merely reassigned to other parishes, without a hint of their troubled pasts.

If institutions and professions as venerable as these have adhered to their own codes of silence, why should we be shocked that a clutch of high school students did the same?

Protecting someone’s professional reputation is not the same as protecting a possible killer, but what is the moral distinction?

You’ll notice I’m asking more questions than making flat statements. That’s because I may live in a glass townhouse, myself. I can’t imagine protecting a friend who might have killed someone, but would I turn someone in for egregious professional misconduct? How about for padding an expense account?

One letter-writer raised the possibility of an analogy between the code of silence among Strohmeyer’s male friends and men in the larger society who “laugh at idiot behavior . . . and wink at truly destructive behavior,” such as extramarital affairs of friends or physical abuse of women.

Another letter-writer (both were women) noted that while none of Strohmeyer’s male friends would turn him in, several female acquaintances reported their suspicions about him. She suggested the different reactions between the genders was more than coincidence.

I need more evidence.

For example, if the slaying suspect had been their best girl friend, would the girls still have turned her in? Maybe so, maybe not.

What’s inescapable, though, is the skewed sense of honor among Strohmeyer’s circle of friends. Somewhere along the line, they got the idea that “protecting” a buddy outranked a killing. Somehow, they got the idea that they had no obligation to society to identify a possible killer.

As one Strohmeyer friend said: “I knew right from wrong, and I knew I was doing something wrong. And I felt guilty. It was eating away at me. I wanted to tell someone, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t live with myself turning Jeremy in, even though I know that was the smart thing to do. I couldn’t bear doing that, because he was my best friend.”

With friends like that . . . we’re all in trouble.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com