Beating Victim Has Empathy for Suspects

Ernest Adams sat on a desk chair in his spotless one-room apartment in Little Tokyo, waiting for the detective to come get him. The formerly homeless man was scheduled to testify against his attacker, a young Inglewood man who allegedly watched a “Bumfight” video last summer and then went joyriding with a friend, looking for someone to beat with a baseball bat.

Adams was the guy they found. He was hospitalized for months after the attack. But he didn’t seem to be looking forward to his day in court.

“I have reticence,” he admitted, stroking a beard that’s a wild black bush. The moment he was clubbed last Aug. 16, the lights went out, he reminded me, and he was under a blanket at the time anyway. So there would be nothing he could tell the jury about the beating or his assailant. I told him that didn’t matter. The prosecutor probably just wanted the jury to see him. Adams was in a coma for 21 days and went blind in his left eye.

He has savage crisscross scars in his head, and a good-size dent, from the nearly fatal blow and the brain surgery that saved his life.

“I have resentment because they didn’t give me a chance,” said Adams, a very bright man who loves books and speaks as though words are too important to rush. “I feel sorry for them because they were under hallucinogens.”

Do you know that, I asked?

“No. But they were out of their minds to think they would beat homeless people. Eighty thousand homeless people in L.A. County, and they determined they should all die. They left me for dead.”

Adams buttoned his shirt while we talked, saying he’d like his assailants to do five or 10 years in prison followed by “10 or 15 years of psychiatric treatment.” He was worried that if the jury saw the damage to his head, his attackers would grow old in jail, and I told him it was an awfully generous thought from a man who was nearly killed.

Maybe it’s because he’s been on the other side of the law himself a time or two, including once when he was wrongly accused of murder and then acquitted after serving 10 months in jail awaiting trial.

He looked at the clock and said we should give the detective another five minutes before going to court on our own. Adams is studying for a real estate license and his workbook was on the desk, along with a stack of index cards. On the top one, he’d written: “Proverbs 18:9. One who is slack in his work is brother to him who is a master of destruction.”

Everything in the one-room apartment was in its place. Sliced bread on the kitchen counter next to the peanut butter. Furniture polish on top of the refrigerator next to a can of “Carpet Fresh.” Next to his bed was the chair he was sitting in when the bat came crashing down, and Adams told me he looks at it from time to time.

“It strengthens my resolve,” he said, reminding him to pay his rent on time, to raise no ruckus and to honor his lease so he doesn’t end up back under the stars, where he spent 19 straight years until the night he was beaten.

“I’m lonely,” he allowed, telling me he visits his old pals near 3rd and Flower now and then. But that’s another life and he doesn’t want to return to it full time. The beating got him the disability check that covered the rent, and he’s been in his new home since March.

“You see the bed? I sleep on top of the covers because I’m afraid people will come in here, and if I have covered myself, I could get killed. I am nervous. The slightest noise will wake me up.”

When the detective didn’t show, Adams and I walked to the Los Angeles County criminal courthouse and took the elevator to the district attorney’s office, where prosecutor Mike Lebovich told Adams there’d been a delay and asked him to come the next day.

Tuesday morning, Adams and I made the same walk and took the same elevator, and he waited to be called.

I slipped into the courtroom, where 20-year-old Justin Brumfield sat at the defense table looking thoroughly uninterested in the proceedings. He was scratching on a pad with a pencil, head down, and seemed to ignore a televised recording of his interview with police just after his arrest, in which he admitted to hitting two people with an aluminum bat, inspired by a “Bumfight” video. His colleague, 20-year-old William Orantes, will be tried separately.

Assuming they’re guilty, I can’t begin to imagine how the hearts of two kids turn so cold, but it doesn’t help that some creep is making and selling videos about the joys of beating up street people.

Earlier in the trial, the jury heard about how Brumfield wrote a so-called poem before he was arrested, and it included the line, “And I don’t care if ya a bum Mack, I’ll knock out all ya teeth in ya rack.”

“Trust me mann,” the poem began, “Im back to ma killa chit. I just cant stop makin’ it hurt. My anger takes over & I just lose it. I got my bat, dats all I need to put in work ... But what’s da difference between a beatin & murder?”

Good question, and it happens to be central to the case.

Lebovich is trying to prove the intent was to kill Adams rather than just rough him up, and that’s why the charge is attempted murder. The second person allegedly hit by Brumfield that night took a shot to the arm, but Adams got it in the head. The photos of his injuries were so hideous, Lebovich decided not to show them to Adams or ask questions about them in court.

When he was finally called, Adams entered the courtroom in bluejeans, black shoes, green shirt buttoned to the neck. From where I sat, it didn’t look like Brumfield laid eyes on him. He was in his own head, seemingly indifferent.

“I am blind in my left eye,” Adams told the jury when asked about the damage. He was asked to step down from the witness box and show jurors the scars, which are hard to look at without cringing.

“I want you to look at this individual in the blue shirt at the end of the table,” Lebovich said, pointing to Brumfield. “Do you recognize this individual?”

Adams looked across the courtroom with a gripping stare and held it. No, he said. He would tell me later that he wanted to take the young man into the next room and box him. He also was thinking about how a kid of such slight build would get thrown around in prison.

Adams was thanked by Judge Sam Ohta and dismissed, and when he stepped outside the courtroom the next witness was waiting in the hallway and introduced herself.

It was Brumfield’s mother, who, with voice trembling, told Adams he was in her prayers.

He thanked her and strode out of the courthouse like a man who had somewhere to go, books to read, jobs to seek. There’d be no slack in his work.

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Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at latimes.com/lopez.