A Random Victim of Gang Violence, May He Rest in Peace

The father sits on a patio chair in the garage, his gaze distant and pained. The sister stands nearby, arms folded, wondering what to say.

Today in Corona they’ll bury a son and brother, Londell Murdock Jr., a janitor who was gunned down in South Los Angeles last week after buying a soda on his way to work. Police believe he was a random victim of two suspected gang members who felt like killing somebody on a Wednesday afternoon.

One killer stood over Murdock after he went down and shot him a couple more times. Then one of the gunmen saw two women watching from a porch and shot them in the back with a .45 as they swept their children to safety.

The women will survive, but Murdock, who had two sons, went to the morgue that day.

“He just made 33,” says the dead man’s father.

This conversation is taking place in Riverside County. Londell Jr.’s sister Claudette moved there because she was afraid to raise two daughters in the city. No place is safe, and she knows that. But as she puts it:

“We can stand out here all day long, and nobody is going to drive by and shoot us.”

It’s an old story in L.A. and every other big city in America. People have fled for years, because in some neighborhoods, dying violently and senselessly is routine.

The elder Murdock can tell you about it. He points to Claudette, and then fixes his sorrowful eyes on me.

“I was driving my truck with her and my wife in 1987 when I saw someone get out of a car with an Uzi,” Mr. Murdock says, showing me how the gunman started firing the automatic weapon. “I put my house up for sale the next day.”

Mr. Murdock moved his family to Madera, near Fresno. Londell Jr., the youngest of five, was 17 then. A few years later, Los Angeles beckoned and, as an invincible young man, Londell could not resist the devil’s call.

By police and family accounts, Londell Jr. ran with a crew, did some time for drugs and then caught himself. He saw where he was headed and decided to give it up. He took a job with the state three years ago, working at the Ronald Reagan building in downtown L.A., says Morris Brown, Claudette’s husband.

Londell had a plan, according to Brown. He wanted to jockey for a transfer to Sacramento. Like his father and sister before him, Londell Jr. wanted to get his sons away to safety.

So why exactly was he killed the way he was, in broad daylight?

Two suspects are in jail, and they won’t talk. LAPD Southwest Division Det. Don Richards says Murdock’s past didn’t necessarily have anything to do with his death. When he stopped for a soda, he did so on turf controlled by a gang, and that’s all it takes.

Will it ever stop?

Not before people get over their fear of retaliation and report crime and criminals, says Morris Brown.

Not before parents do a better job of controlling their kids, says Claudette.

Not before the LAPD gets lots more cops, says Det. Richards.

All of them are right.

But when schools are a disaster, good-paying jobs have disappeared, street thugs are glamorized and hope for a better day is a distant memory, responsible parenting and good intentions don’t always get loved ones home safely.

And there’s one more thing standing in the way of that better day.

“People don’t care,” says Richards, referring to the world at large, and perhaps to a City Council that told LAPD Chief Bill Bratton to get lost when he screamed for more officers.

It’s South L.A., it’s the Eastside, it’s someone else’s problem.

True patriots from coast to coast cheered a $100-billion campaign to show another country what a true democracy is all about. But tell them about the slaughter in American neighborhoods -- where doctors are in pitifully short supply and schools are laying off teachers -- and nobody wants to hear it.

We’ve gone from expecting the murder of fellow citizens to accepting it, because it happens on the other side of the freeway, in the dusky margins, where bad actors get their due.

But that’s not always the way it plays out, says Det. Richards, who has seen too many hearses in a 32-year career.

“You don’t have to be a gang member to become a victim,” the detective says. “It could be as simple as someone walking up to you and saying, ‘Where you from?’ We’ve had a lot of cases where those were probably the last words a victim heard.”

The father sits there in his chair in Riverside County, hollowed out. The sister stands by her father’s side, worried about his age, his health, and his ability to handle the loss of his son.

“He’s gone,” Claudette says, “and we don’t even know why.”

They’ll lay Londell Murdock in safer ground today, an hour east of where he fell.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com