Rewards Offered for Leads in 1973 Killing

The last time a reward was offered for Fred H. Early’s killers, Ronald Reagan was governor of California.

It was 1973 and Reagan took the then unprecedented step of offering $10,000 in state money to find the men who had shot and beaten Early, a Los Angeles police officer and father of four girls.

But a quarter of a century after he died of head injuries, his case and the 1974 shooting of Officer Michael Edwards remain the only two unsolved homicides of Los Angeles police officers.

On Monday, the anniversary of his death, his family and city officials gathered to say they were trying again. The Police Protective League, which announced its own reward of $10,000 in 1973, is once more offering that sum. And the City Council is expected to vote today on a motion to extend a $25,000 city reward.

Time, the Police Department hopes, has loosened lips. “We’re 25 years down the line,” said Det. Roseanne Parino. “People become more mature, have more of a sense of mortality. I think just the time and distance from the act may bring people out who at the time were reticent, for whatever reasons, to speak.”

Early was off duty, returning home from a late night with friends, when he saw suspicious activity in the Palms area. Believing that a burglary was in progress, he stopped his car and called police on a public phone. When he saw a suspect run down an alley, he dropped the receiver and chased the man, only to be attacked from behind.

His assailants beat him unconscious and shot him twice in the leg. When he came to, he fired his gun into a block wall to summon help. For the next several months he was in and out of the hospital and died at the age of 31. His youngest daughter was 5, the oldest 12.

Now grown, they stood Monday in front of Parker Center with their own children, showing them the police archive photographs of Early’s funeral and the ceremony in which he was posthumously awarded the police Medal of Valor.

“Today,” Michelle Bonnee, Early’s youngest daughter, said at a news conference punctuated by sobs, “I have the burden of looking into my own 5-year-old daughter’s eyes and trying to answer the questions she has of her grandfather--a man I remember well but barely knew and whom she will never know.”

“We have nothing to lose is the way we feel about it,” Hollie Ashworth, one of Early’s daughters, said of the new round of rewards. “Not that [an arrest] would ever make up for my father. But there would be justice in finding the person who did this and some closure for the family.

“That’s the hardest part, knowing there is somebody out there that got away with this at the expense of four little girls.”