Safety Net for Family Snags

A family spent two nights in hiding this week -- spirited to safety by Los Angeles police -- after an angry crowd of nearly 100 mistakenly blamed them for the shooting death of a 16-year-old boy at the Jordan Downs housing development.

Police in Southeast L.A. said they were frustrated by the experience and by the amount of time it took for the city’s Housing Authority to find a unit in another area of the city for the threatened family. The incident, they said, highlights the burdens police face with the brutal cycle of attacks and the bureaucratic obstacles they face in trying to quell the violence.

The incident began when a group of would-be robbers confronted a father of two in the housing project, and he fought back to protect his wife and children. In the scuffle, Antonio Turner, who had been among those confronting the father, was accidentally shot by an accomplice, police said.

A crowd quickly formed, vowing to take revenge on the father and his family, whom they blamed for the killing. Virtually every officer on patrol that night in the Southeast Division was called to restrain the crowd and restore calm, Los Angeles Police Det. Sal LaBarbera said.

Officers at the scene were so concerned about the family’s safety that several retrieved a pickup truck from their station, loaded some of the family’s belongings into it and took them to a temporary hide-out in the middle of the night.

Over the next two days, detectives submitted and resubmitted written requests to the Los Angeles Housing Authority, asking it to provide the family with another place to live in a hurry.

To the frustration of police, Housing Authority officials said the LAPD request did not meet policy requirements for emergency relocations, and the family remained in the makeshift hiding place Wednesday night.

On Thursday afternoon, as the family faced their third night in hiding, housing officials said they had at last received the required documentation from the LAPD and had approved the transfer of the family into an empty unit in another area as soon as today.

But in the meantime, the family’s vacant Jordan Downs unit was ransacked and their remaining possessions destroyed.

“We have lost everything. We have nothing, except what’s most important: our lives,” said the father, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Mario. “We are thankful to God, and we are thankful to the police.”

LaBarbera called Mario a hero whose actions may have saved his family.

But LaBarbera said the Housing Authority’s requirements to move the family proved to be time-consuming and confusing for detectives, already stretched thin.

“People ask us what is our biggest obstacle in getting public cooperation,” he said. “The answer is that people are afraid of retaliation. [The Housing Authority] is another city agency. We should be working on the same page. How can we tell people that we can protect them if we are not getting help from our fellow agencies?”

Housing Authority Assistant Director Lucille Loyce responded that the agency acted as swiftly as could be expected, and blamed delays on the fact that Mario’s name was not on the unit’s lease. However, she said, in the future she would consider changing the authority’s policy to eliminate some red tape in cases of emergency relocations requested by police.

The shooting is the latest of several shootings over the last two weeks in the small area surrounding the Jordan Downs and Imperial Courts housing projects.

Victims, including Trent Moody, 15, and Edwin Johnson, 18, were caught in the cross-fire of retaliatory gang attacks, police said. Tensions have been high. Jordan Downs residents were so terrified of retaliation after Moody’s death that they dragged garbage cans into the street to try to block the next drive-by, LaBarbera said.

Mario gave the following account of the episode:

He said that he had ridden his bicycle home from his job at a plastics factory Tuesday night and was walking it to the door of his unit when three teenagers called out to him. One was wearing a green mask, like a military gas mask, he said.

Another showed a knife, pressed it against his chest, and demanded money. Holding him at knifepoint in a dark parking lot, they pulled off his backpack and went through it, throwing the dishes from his lunch that day on the ground, and took his bike, he said. At the same time, one teenager went to a nearby home and retrieved two guns, Mario said.

Then they demanded the keys to the unit where his wife and two children slept.

Mario was a few paces from his front door. “I imagined the worst, of course,” Mario said. “I thought, they are going to rape and rob my family and then kill them.” He refused to hand over the keys.

They threatened to kill him. “I said, ‘OK. Shoot me,’ ” Mario recalled. The boy put the revolver against his head and pulled back the hammer. “And when he put that pistol against my head, and I felt the cold of the gun on my forehead, I thought, ‘They are going to kill me. My God. I’m going to see if I can save myself.’ ”

Mario put his hand up, lifting the barrel off his head, and the gun fired into the air.

Mario then grabbed his assailant, who police identified as Turner, doubling back his hand to pry loose his gun.

Turner’s accomplice remained standing by, gun pointed as the two fought. “The thing in my mind was, what will happen to my family, my children,” Mario said. “I thought, ‘They will have to kill me, because I don’t want to see it.’ ”

The assailant struggled with him, calling out to his friend. The friend fired at the grappling pair, striking and killing Turner, apparently by mistake.

Police, who had saturated both Jordan Downs and Imperial Courts with officers in response to the recent series of shootings, then arrived on the scene, and a crowd gathered. Distraught at the teen’s shooting, they chanted vengeful slogans at Mario, calling him a “child killer,” and threatened to burn the unit he shared with his partner and children, police said.

Mario, who speaks only a few words of English, said he couldn’t understand what they were saying, but “the way they looked at me, it was angry.”

The episode had a racial cast, police said, with the crowd making references to Mario’s ethnicity. Mario is Latino, an immigrant from Acapulco. His assailants and the gathered crowd were black, LaBarbera said.

Investigators verified the details of Mario’s account, and say they will seek murder charges against the accomplice accused of shooting the teenager. Police told the teenager’s family of their suspicions but said that some family members questioned the accuracy of the account.

For his part, Mario said that despite his fear of further retaliation, he was speaking publicly about the incident because, “the problem with us Latinos is that we always stay quiet because of fear.... But the thing is, if you don’t respond, they will continue doing it.”