Margaret Mitchell’s Fatal Legacy for All Dwelling in the Age of Fear

We will be judged someday by the way we treat our Margaret Mitchells.

History will ponder our violence, our confusion and our inability to deal with those who need us most, and weigh them against the ultimate nature of our compassion.

Looking back at who we are, future scholars will wonder how a culture so equipped and capable could reach into space but not into the hidden emotions of the human heart; how we could disarm a nation but not one person.

While her specific case may be lost in the reach of time, we would still do well today to consider who we are through the death of Margaret Laverne Mitchell.

Most of you know that the 55-year-old mentally-ill woman, barely 5 feet tall and weighing only a little more than 100 pounds, was shot to death by Los Angeles Police Officer Edward Larrigan on a street corner in 1999.

Mitchell was homeless. She was stopped in the first place because Larrigan and his partner, Kathy Clark, believed the grocery cart she was pushing might have been stolen, at best a hollow reason to stop anyone in a cart-crazy city. During a verbal confrontation, Mitchell allegedly lunged at the officers with a screwdriver.

It doesn’t take much to kill a human being. Larrigan fired once. The single bullet struck her in the chest. She died shortly thereafter.

In a decision issued Tuesday, the district attorney’s office said it would not file criminal charges against Larrigan. There was just too much confusion surrounding the incident to determine whether or not he had actually committed a crime.

Margaret Mitchell, meanwhile, remained dead.

The D.A.’s decision comes as no surprise. And adding to it, Police Chief Bernard C. Parks maintains that Larrigan did not violate department policy. That’s just the way it all comes down in L.A. But if it wasn’t the cop’s fault, I hear you ask, why did our City Council award $975,000 to Mitchell’s heirs in a civil settlement?

The council obviously felt someone was to blame, but who?

It isn’t a who, the scholars of 3001 will determine, it’s a what. And that “what” is fear. Mitchell brandished the screwdriver because, in her blurry consciousness, she was afraid of Larrigan. Larrigan drew his pistol because he was afraid of Mitchell.

One can argue, and many have, that there ought to be ways to disarm a frail, confused woman without gunfire. “She should’ve been knocked down with a nightstick,” a retired cop with 25 years in the LAPD told me. “A woman’s got a screwdriver, and I can’t handle it? Come on. ... “

But things are different when you’re afraid. Training falters, rules don’t work. Fear triggers a survival instinct that orders us to respond in any manner to save ourselves. Margaret Mitchell, in her way, was trying to survive. So was Edward Larrigan.

In the three possibilities listed in a summary of the D.A.’s decision on the Mitchell shooting, fear isn’t specifically mentioned. The possibilities were, briefly, that Larrigan fired accidentally, that he fired in self-defense or that he fired without provocation. They couldn’t decide which one applied, so they’re taking no action at all.

It wasn’t the first time.

In 1992, Efrain Lopez, waving a broomstick handle, was shot nine times by Police Officer Neil Goldberg and died. The officer was neither prosecuted nor disciplined. But the city still paid Lopez’s survivors $200,000.

In this case too, the shooter reacted with fear, indoctrinated with the police mantra that anything can be a weapon. Even a broomstick handle.

Fear embraces more than the death of Margaret Mitchell or Efrain Lopez. It enfolds our city, our nation, our world. A walk in the park holds as many hidden perils as a walk in a war zone. To be black is to be fearful. To be white is to be fearful. Jews fear Arabs, Arabs fear Jews. And everyone fears being afraid.

I hope that 2,000 years hence, when they talk about us and read about us and consider us, they will understand how frightened a people we were

One of them, sad to say, was a tiny woman living on the outer edge of reality. Forgotten in life, she looms large in death. And she may continue to cast a shadow for centuries to come.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.