Tenacity Turns to Tragedy in South L.A.

Let them wonder. Let people who don’t live there ask why a middle-class family would stay in South Los Angeles when it could go elsewhere -- why the Murrays didn’t move up and out, as so many of their friends did, before their tall, quiet, carefree son, Sean, 20, was killed last month in a drive-by shooting.

It’s not that Rodney and Vivian Murray didn’t think about it. Over the years, as gangs and chronic poverty encroached on their quiet L.A. neighborhood, staying seemed increasingly quixotic.

Yet leaving, too, seemed impractical. And there was another issue: defiance.

The gangs were annoying, even menacing. But, “I was not going to have them run us out,” said Vivian Murray.

“My son should be able to walk in his own neighborhood,” Rodney Murray said.

Besides, the Murrays had seen the costs of running -- how businesses dried up and services declined as successful minority families like theirs left. They wanted to stand and fight.

“We believe in certain values,” said Rodney Murray. “Education. Participating in the capitalist system. We believed in what America stood for.”

The Murrays spoke from the home they have owned since the early days of their marriage -- a graceful Tudor cottage shaded by sycamores on a residential corner just south of Century Boulevard and west of the Harbor Freeway.

Their son, Sean Gregory Murray, who worked at a veterinary clinic, was shot a block from the house last week and died from infections at a hospital three days later.

Police said Sean, a high school graduate with no gang ties, was the random victim of a gang attack, perhaps an initiation rite. He had been visiting an acquaintance and was seeing her off at 9:30 p.m. April 25.

Sean -- tall, with a long, prominent nose -- had been a good student, was free spirited and had a knack for mechanical things. It helped him advance from performing menial jobs at the clinic to becoming an operating room technician. He liked deep-sea fishing and paint ball, Rodney Murray said.

Vivian Murray, 52, said she had barely slept since her son’s death, spending her days careening between numbness, anger and pain.

Rodney Murray, 53, hovered near his wife, touching her knee on occasion and blinking back tears.

Both said they worried constantly for their children but had not imagined that such a calamity would befall them. Despite violence nearby, the gang fights remained somehow distant, involving combatants they barely knew and quarrels they were not party to.

The Murrays have lived in this house for more than 20 years. She is an office manager in a dental clinic, and he is a professor of business at Compton Community College. Sean lived with them as well as his younger sister, the couple’s high school-age daughter.

Vivian and Rodney Murray came from families that epitomize the history of South Los Angeles, with its churn of successive migrations.

Rodney Murray is black, the child of East Texans who came to L.A. in the 1940s. Vivian Murray is Mexican American, descended from an earlier generation of immigrants than many of the new arrivals who now populate their neighborhood: Her mother was from the Texas borderlands, her father from Kansas.

His father settled first on the east side of Central Avenue, Rodney Murray said, because discrimination prohibited blacks from living to the west. Vivian Murray’s parents moved twice, after African Americans began flowing into their neighborhoods, she said. She shrugs at the old family prejudices.

The Murray’s three-bedroom house is their first. Rodney Murray spotted the for-sale sign one day in 1984 after taking a wrong turn.

Built in 1905, the whimsical house has peaked roofs, French windows and shingles that wrap over the eaves like something out of a fairy tale. Inside are arches and built-in cabinets with glass doors.

“A magic place,” Rodney Murray said, “right out of Hansel and Gretel.” They bought it right away for $75,400.

It seemed natural at the time -- staying local, settling in a cozy little house near where they had both grown up.

“I didn’t even think about it,” Rodney Murray said. “I saw someplace that I liked, and that was decent and affordable.”

The Murrays set to work fixing it up, a little at a time, remodeling, adding apartment units, painting. “El Paso pink,” Vivian Murray said. “We wanted it to be beautiful.”

When the children came, the Murrays had a pretty lawn in front, a basketball court in back.

But the neighborhood was changing. Rodney Murray blames crack cocaine for tearing down a vital, mostly black community. Middle-class, working people were leaving in droves. One by one, their friends took off, fleeing to suburbs -- Lakewood, Downey, Fontana or Moreno Valley.

To Vivian Murray, she and her family were the ones with a right to be there; not the bullies and criminals.

“We are not dumb,” she said. “We wanted a nice house and a beautiful yard for our kids, and that is what we had.”

For her husband, there was another dimension. A student at Cal State L.A. in the late 1960s, he was of the civil rights generation. As a child, he had listened to his parents’ stories of terror and lynchings in Texas. He hung portraits of Malcolm X and Frederick Douglas in the dining room and committed himself to “fighting and voting and supporting black businesses anyway I can,” he said.

Those who fled were observing the principle of “every man for himself,” he said. But for him, South L.A.’s fortunes were one with black advancement. It was “a battle worthy of fighting,” he said.

“People like us who were educated should stay and demand services -- better policing, better stores,” he said.

With a master’s degree and a job as a sales manager, then a teacher, Rodney Murray relished opportunities to offer advice. When Sean’s friends came over to play basketball, he would lecture them to stay in school, get good grades.

But things got worse. Gang members would stroll brazenly across their manicured front lawn; Rodney Murray installed a wrought-iron fence around the property.

Prostitutes and their johns sought shelter in the trees on the side of their property. Rodney Murray would go out at night with a flashlight to scare them off. And there were shootings. They could hear gunfire sometimes. Now and then, people died in adjoining blocks. On New Year’s Eve, the din of gunfire sent them diving for the floor.

Members of the family would leave for work and school, return home and shut themselves in, Vivian Murray said. She felt they could keep the violence at bay; they weren’t part of it. There was noise and conflict in surrounding blocks. But the house, with its foot-thick walls and shade trees, felt like a refuge.

“In the midst of all this violence, we were bunkered down,” Rodney Murray said.

He worried, especially about his son. But there seemed no easy answer. The danger for young black men appeared to know no boundaries: Even people in nice neighborhoods were losing sons.

Besides, where were they to go? The house’s value had soared to $380,000. Where in L.A. could they get a similar house for that?

Yet the everyday discomforts were becoming constant. The neighborhood was going through yet another ethnic transition. It meant many more people in the same space.

New immigrants from Latin America were crowding in. The Murrays felt the chafe of clashing cultures. The newcomers were Spanish-speaking; the Murrays spoke only English. Neighbors had roosters, ducks and goats. They blocked the Murrays’ driveway with ice cream trucks. They converted garages for families of 10.

Finally, the Murrays were ready to fold. “We wanted out. I had had it,” said Rodney Murray. “I was 50. I was tired of being a warrior and a soldier.”

They made a three-year plan. They would wait until their daughter finished high school, then move west.

When shots rang out down the block April 25, Sean’s sister ran out of the house instantly, sensing her brother was in danger. A few minutes later, her parents were at their son’s side. Sean’s abdomen was torn by bullets. He said he wanted to sleep. Briefly, after surgery, he seemed to rally. But hours later, his heart rate surged. He died April 28.

A few days after, Vivian Murray sat in her dining room, surveying the home the family had worked hard to improve, even as the neighborhood changed. They will move as soon they can, she said.

“African Americans in my opinion are going to be marginalized, and that will be a horrible thing,” Rodney Murray said. “They will be pushed further and further out, pushed into the margins, pushed into prisons and all the places people don’t want to see.”

He said he still believes in the same ideals, but “you get tired of being the only ones to fight.”

“It is over,” he said. “We have lost.”

Police ask that anyone with information about the case call them at (213) 485-6902.