Grief Has No Resolution

On March 28, 2003, Sharon Lewis’ 28-year-old son Devron, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus mechanic, was driving home to Inglewood on Jefferson Boulevard after working a late shift. At the intersection of Sycamore Avenue, a slight young man in a hooded sweatshirt stepped into the street and fired a gun at the car as it approached. Devron’s car was a restored 1992 Chevrolet Caprice, mostly red, which happened to be the color of the Black P-Stones gang. But unbeknownst to Devron, this turf belonged to the rival 18th Street gang.

The man kept firing as the Caprice passed, and Devron Lewis took a bullet in the back of his head. The car knocked over a light standard and broke an axle as it slammed to a stop against the curb. Devron was dead.

Two months later, on May 26, Bernice “Bunny” Douglas’ 22-year-old granddaughter Joi Douglas, a seasonal worker at Dodger Stadium and the mother of two small children, descended the staircase of her apartment to answer the door around 1:30 a.m. Having bathed and put on clean pajamas and immaculate white socks, she was in for the night, anticipating going to a picnic the next day.

Moments after opening the door, she lay sprawled back against the steps, bleeding from several bullet wounds to the chest. Other tenants of the building heard the gunshots but didn’t open their doors to investigate -- gunfire being commonplace at night in the neighborhood of West Vernon and Western avenues. So Joi lay there and bled to death. Her body wasn’t found until about six hours later.

Neither slaying has been solved, which is why Sharon Lewis and Bunny Douglas were among victims’ family members who appeared at a recent news conference arranged by detectives of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Southwest Division. It was a congress of grief as seven families, all of whom were bereaved in 2003, described their suffering and implored anyone with information to come forward.

At first, Lewis couldn’t bear what she saw there, “all those families piling up.”

“I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is horrifying,’ ” she said.

The families of victims of unsolved killings are important engines in the mechanism that keeps older cases from being buried beneath the new, according to LAPD investigators.

For the families, however, the price is high. They must not allow their pain to recede. They have to keep after sympathetic but overburdened investigators. They must keep their nerves taut -- though it means being continually pierced by the pitying looks of acquaintances and jumping whenever the phone rings -- in the hope there has been at long last a break in the case.

The Lewis and Douglas families plunged into their cases at the outset.

Within a day and a half of Devron’s slaying, his father, Herbert, and some friends were knocking on doors in the Jefferson and Sycamore neighborhood, seeking anyone with information about the shooting.

A few days later, Sharon Lewis went to the neighborhood by herself to speak to residents. She stopped at the place where her son’s life ended. Pieces of glass from his car were still on the pavement. She put some in an envelope and took them home.

The recent news conference was not the first in which Lewis took part. In October 2004, police arranged another at which Devron’s case was to take center stage. A few days before, however, a triple homicide took place in South L.A. and dominated the news media’s coverage of the event. All Devron got was a single early morning news report on KFWB radio.

Afterward, police posted a $25,000 reward for the conviction of Devron’s killer and accompanied the Lewises as they leafleted the slaying neighborhood, but the family had learned a painful lesson about the comparative newsworthiness of murders in L.A.

Douglas, who had helped raise her granddaughter, was notified of Joi’s death shortly after the body was discovered. She rushed to the scene, still in her pajamas, to be with her.

As do the police, she suspects Joi knew her killer or she would not have opened the door in the middle of the night. Soon Douglas was questioning the young people who came to her home to express condolences. Some of her granddaughter’s many friends were connected to gang members. Douglas is convinced that at least one of them knows something about the killing.

“It might have been some of her friends who came in eating my food and drinking my soda and knowing who killed her or maybe even was responsible,” Douglas said. “Everybody’s a suspect to me -- everybody.”

The killings left Lewis and Douglas with a profound sense of having been betrayed by life.

The Lewises raised their daughter and three sons in an Inglewood neighborhood of single-family homes and two-parent households. They sent their children to private elementary schools to give them a firm foundation for resisting the temptations of drugs and violence when they entered public high schools.

Devron, the youngest, took after his mechanically inclined father, whose stout physique he inherited. He studied diesel mechanics at Harbor College and followed his father’s footsteps into the garages of the MTA. The other boys found work in automobile sales and freight transport; the girl became a nurse.

“Truthfully, I thought I was out of the woods, with the children all grown,” Lewis said. “I thought, ‘God, I made it. Everybody is an adult. Everybody has their own life.’ Then in 2003, my son is shot coming home from work. How do you make sense of that?”

Bunny Douglas, in the words of her son Recardo, Joi’s father, was “a pillar in the neighborhood” of 39th Street and Harvard Boulevard for three decades. She volunteered at local schools and baked coffeecakes for neighborhood police officers. She checked groceries at a Ralphs supermarket and later managed dental offices. Her husband, Thomas, died in 1968, leaving her to raise seven sons and a daughter, the oldest 13, on her own. She has 29 grandchildren, five of whom, along with her two great-grandchildren, live with her.

“I have nobody in prison, nobody in gangs,” she said. “I used to tell my boys when these kids would come around and try to get them in a gang, ‘There’s seven of you -- you your own gang. Tell them you’re in the Douglas gang.’ ”

After Joi’s killing, friends and family erected a small memorial at the apartment where she died. Someone soon threw it into the street. So Douglas had the memorial brought to her residence. Later, someone fired shots into her house.

That sealed Douglas’ disillusionment with the place where she’d made her life.

“For someone to disregard what she meant to that neighborhood and shoot into her home, knowing that there were kids there, the love she felt in the city couldn’t exist anymore,” Recardo said.

So Douglas moved her large household -- Recardo, her daughter, her daughter’s five children, Joi’s two children -- to a large house on a cul-de-sac in Palmdale. It is a light-filled place with white walls and pale blue carpeting and is currently decked with an array of colorful Christmas decorations, inside and out.

In her new neighborhood, Douglas says, she doesn’t have to pray with the youngsters before they go off to school in the morning, asking God to bring them home safely. Desert quiet has replaced gunshots at night. Her new neighbors are friendly. “The grandchildren can play in the streets,” she says with mild astonishment.

One of Douglas’ other sons has moved his family into the new neighborhood, and Recardo and his wife are saving money to get their own house in Palmdale. “Pretty soon they’ll all be here,” Douglas said.

Nowadays, she can barely tolerate visiting South L.A.

“I see carts being pulled, people hanging out,” she said. “When I get off the freeway at Exposition to go to my doctor, I start feeling tense.”

Sharon Lewis, a Los Angeles native, has had a similar reaction.

“I’m fighting with myself even to live here,” Lewis said.

Two months after Devron’s killing, she moved to a safer neighborhood near LAX.

“I see whites and blacks walking their dogs and feel it’s maybe safe enough to go outside,” Lewis said. “And if a friend comes to visit, I feel safe they won’t be shot getting out of their car.”

She no longer opens her purse to beggars, and she keeps a vigilant eye out when pumping gas. She grows anxious as baggily clad young men walk toward her in a shopping mall. She calls her surviving children daily and frets when one of her sons who works nights doesn’t report promptly that he’s arrived home from the job safely.

The slaying has spawned a slow diaspora in Lewis’ family too. Her daughter has moved to Chula Vista in San Diego County. Her husband, Herbert, from whom she is separated, now lives in North Hills.

Devron’s slaying has meant special pain for Herbert. They used to work on cars together and travel every September to Las Vegas to watch football games at the sports books.

“We were best friends,” Herbert said. Three and a half hours before he was killed, Devron left his father a voicemail message in which he said he’d stop by to show him the new wheels he put on the Caprice.

Herbert’s response to the loss has been to work nonstop: eight hours a day at the MTA, five hours a day as a ramp worker at LAX and as much time as possible at his side occupation as an event photographer.

“I just keep myself busy so I won’t think about it,” he said.

The Lewis and Douglas families are haunted by the knowledge that the people responsible for the slayings still walk and drive the streets their young loved ones no longer do and that others know who they are but aren’t saying. The latter is especially difficult to accept.

“I have tried so hard not to be angry, but I’m very, very angry,” Sharon Lewis said. “When I first went into the neighborhood where he died, all I could think of was, ‘How could this happen and no one say anything about it?’ But I was able to get out of there, and those people are stuck. This is where they have to live, so people keep their mouths shut.”

Both families remain in frequent touch with detectives, reporting rumors they’ve heard, the names of neighborhood figures who’ve been arrested for other crimes and might know something about the slayings -- what Bunny Douglas calls “all the little threads.”

For their part, the detectives urge the families to resist despair and remain active in trying to bring the killers to justice.

“Some of our best leads come from families,” said Southwest Division Det. Stan Evans, who led the initial investigation into Devron Lewis’ killing. “I tell them a lot, ‘Never give up hope. Never give up hope.’ Somebody comes out of the woodwork. Somebody finds Jesus. Never lose hope.’ ”

To date, the families’ diligence has yielded only frustration. Meanwhile, the tears still come unbidden, and the detectives’ caseloads continue to mount.

“I sit here in 2005 and I know no more than I did March 28, 2003,” Lewis said. “Nobody could have told me that this would be my life story.”