An innocent in the line of fire

Hot summer days in old L.A.

Waves of heat waft over the Valley with a debilitating effect. Energy drains from walkers on the pavement at an inverse ratio to the rising temperature.

An old dog trots listlessly down an empty street in Canoga Park. A cat curls up in the shade of a pepper tree in Woodland Hills. A young boy bounces a basketball in Van Nuys, the monotony of its tempo reflecting the ennui of a day that seems somehow all wrong.

We’re sleepwalkers in the ovens of July. Only on the coast, where a cooling fog drifts in as the afternoon deepens, is there any relief from the relentless heat.

I sit with my friends Shana and Jackie by a window in an oceanfront restaurant and watch the gray waves surge in and draw out to rhythms as old as the moon. We talk very little, because there’s something about this day that limits conversation. It’s not a day for chatter.

More than heat mutes loud talk and embraces us in solemnity. A summer sadness lingers over the city. The image of a little girl, trapped in adult rage and response, dominates the news, and our thoughts. Suzie Pena, not even 2 years old, died with a bullet in her head because she was there.

And television, eager to stir the brews of calamity, asks, “Who’s to blame?”

Everyone grieves. A front-page photograph of Suzie’s weeping mother captures the encompassing sorrow of a community in mourning like the clay of an ancient statue that depicts the burden of women in pain. The mother of us all cries at the deaths of children everywhere.

Our new mayor is already called upon to appear, to comment, to explain what happened and why -- and he can’t. The chief of police, his visage drawn, his eyes troubled despite an authoritative front, promises an investigation. Not who’s to blame, but why it happened.

Both suggest that the father was responsible. He scooped up his little Suzie and stood off a small army of men with guns. Was the infant actually his shield or did he take her in his arms in an instinctive response to protect her? Or was she simply his booze- or drug-driven challenge for them to dare to fire at a man with a baby in his arms?

Summer shone down on Watts as the standoff grew increasingly more dangerous. Fate hid in the heat waves.

I have known and been good friends with policemen for more years than I care to remember. They’re not much different than you and I. They hurt. They cry. They ponder their motives and the propriety of their response. They struggle with their own unanswered questions far into the hot and sleepless nights.

I’m not among those who shout police brutality or cover-up. Not yet, anyhow. I do wonder, and always have wondered, however, about police training. Were all those bullets truly necessary?

It’s a question we’ve heard before, most recently in May, when sheriff’s deputies fired about 120 rounds at a car-chase suspect in Compton, endangering the entire neighborhood. Twelve deputies were suspended.

This I know, from experience, that there’s an almost pathological need to pull a trigger once gunfire dominates a scene. Already wired by surges of adrenaline, an armed unit, reacting to the roar of repeated volleys of fire, seems to almost automatically respond by “joining in” as a single force against eminent danger.

Bullets fly, but not in the orderly patterns of academy training, clustered in the wooden heart of torso-shaped targets at a safety-conscious range, but in the random flight of wayward missiles toward a general direction. Almost always, in the real world, when the barrage impacts, someone is hit, and often someone dies. In this case, it was a very small someone whose life had barely begun when it was so tragically, and unnecessarily, ended.

One feels the need to build some kind of monument to this pretty little girl, this pigtailed Suzie, this innocent of all innocents, who found herself one summer day in the way of fate. Flowers strewn on the pavement aren’t enough. Bundles of money collected for her funeral aren’t enough. These words, and all the words spoken on her behalf, aren’t enough.

Even investigations and punishment lack the endurance of meaningful atonement. Lessons must be learned here, and their value applied long past the time of mourning, when collective memory gathers a little girl into its embrace, and the face of the latest victim of gunfire is laid gently to rest on a city’s conscience.

For now, the face of Suzie Pena stays with us as the days move on through the rising heat of summer, and we do the best we can with what we have in the cruelty of the basin’s furnace.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.