A Case Full of Questions

The kidnapping and execution-style slaying of 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz and the subsequent arrests of former friends of his older half brother were shocking enough when they occurred in August. Now the release of grand jury testimony adds to the shock--and the outrage.

According to the transcript, the father and the attorney of suspect Jesse James Hollywood, who authorities believe masterminded the crime and who remains a fugitive, knew about the abduction while Nick Markowitz was still alive--and did not notify police.

What’s more, Los Angeles police officers failed to immediately respond to the one person who did call 911: a passerby who wrote down a license plate number after seeing four young men kick and punch a boy and throw him in a van.

That was Aug. 6, a Sunday morning, in West Hills, where Markowitz lived. The following Tuesday night, the El Camino Real High School junior was shot nine times and buried in a shallow grave in the mountains outside Santa Barbara. The Los Angeles Police Department did not trace the van until almost a month later, when told of the connection by Santa Barbara authorities.

Now, three months after that, an LAPD spokesman says only that its response--why even call it that?--is “under investigation.”

And so to the why and how of this incomprehensible crime is added the most haunting question of all: What if?

Investigators say that the motive for the crime was a drug debt Markowitz’s big brother owed Hollywood. Hollywood’s friends, Ryan Hoyt, 21, of West Hills, William Skidmore, 20, of Simi Valley, Jesse Taylor Rugge, 20, of Santa Barbara and Graham Pressley, 17, of Goleta, are in custody and have been charged with kidnapping and murder. But motive and method don’t get to the heart of the mystery of how young men who had played together on the same West Hills youth baseball league, who grew up in a neighborhood known for comfortable homes and involved parents, may have committed such a chilling crime.

And what of the adults who knew of the kidnapping? Bad enough that half a dozen teenagers knew Markowitz was being held in a Santa Barbara house. Only one contacted police and only after news of the slaying broke. Some testified that they felt threatened by Hollywood, others that the casual, party-like atmosphere, the drugs and alcohol, made the kidnapping seem unreal.

But Jack Hollywood and Simi Valley attorney Stephen Hogg, contacted by Jesse James Hollywood hours after the kidnapping, knew it was real, knew, according to the older Hollywood’s compelled testimony, “that some of his friends were holding a kid, and they . . . were worried that they were in some kind of trouble.” The elder Hollywood, along with others who saw or helped his son, has been granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony.

Time and again, according to the grand jury testimony, Markowitz’s kidnappers assured him he would get home OK.

The teenager believed the empty promises. He did not try to escape.

Nick Markowitz’s safe return need not have rested solely on his own wits or on the whims of his abductors. In the words Rabbi James Lee Kaufman spoke at his funeral, “There are deaths, such as this, when we can’t shake an angry finger at God and say, ‘Why?’ We can only look to ourselves.”