Family Struggles to Cope With Painful Absence

How to tell a 3-year-old that his father has been slain?

That problem is one of many facing Jasmine Sallie, 25, after the shooting death earlier this month of her boyfriend, Larry Watson.

Watson, 24, the victim of an unsolved homicide for which police sought tips last week, was a family man in a part of L.A. where the prevalence of absent fathers and unwed “baby mamas” is a constant lament.

He was among those uncelebrated, clandestine fathers who remained devoted to his two boys -- 3-year-old Larry and 15-month-old Jailen -- despite his youth and poverty.

On paper he may have looked the part of the “deadbeat dad,” Sallie said, but in reality he was a daily presence in his sons’ lives until the drive-by shooting June 4 in the 9200 block of South Central Avenue.

Since that night, his older son appears bereft, and Sallie says she feels like a single parent for the first time.

From afar, Watson did not stand out from other young, black male South-Central shooting victims killed on nighttime streets. He was shot multiple times while standing with a group of four men at 10 p.m. Another man was wounded but survived.

The case seemed so typical that reporters asked few questions at a news conference that police held Wednesday to draw attention to Watson’s slaying.

When the silence stretched out too long, detectives with the Los Angeles Police Department declared the session over. News crews packed up their cameras, and Watson’s commitment to his family, like his death, remained a private affair -- visible only in the face of his small son who clung limply to his mother and aunts in the background.

Watson was still a teenager when Sallie became pregnant with Larry. Jailen, their second son, was also unplanned. Sallie got public assistance under the aegis of unwed single motherhood. Watson paid her no formal child support. They put off marriage.

But the couple somehow forged a relatively stable family life and a hopeful future, according to Sallie, family members and police. Sallie’s friends who had children were jealous: They told her they wished their children’s fathers were as reliable as hers.

Watson played with his two sons every day, cooked for them, fed them, changed them.

“His life revolved around his two sons and his girlfriend,” said his sister Monique Watson, 34. “Anyone who knew him knew about his kids.”

Afraid of endangering Sallie’s public assistance, he usually stayed nights at his sister’s place so it didn’t look like he lived there, though in truth he sang to his sons in the bath every night, then tucked them into bed.

He would often doze off in their room. Sallie would find him on the floor in the morning, sleeping next to them. One of her first thoughts when he died was, “How am I going to get these kids to sleep?”

Like Sallie, he had graduated from high school. His parents, both retired aerospace-industry workers, had sent him to University High School on the Westside to avoid gangs, and he worked wherever he could -- warehouse jobs, security jobs.

Most recently, he was a part-time paintball referee at a family sports center in Bellflower. He gave Sallie cash when he had it, or spent it on toys or food.

Neither of them really belonged in South-Central, Sallie said. After graduating from high school, she became a medical administrative assistant and then was laid off, she said. After the birth of her second child, she used public assistance to move out of the small studio the couple had shared so the boys could have a room.

The couple had problems, but they also had plans. They separated for a month, got back together. They wanted a house, a safer place to live. Watson had recently enrolled in a program to become a mechanic. She planned to become a medical lab assistant.

Watson was with his sons the night he was killed. He and Sallie had just brought the boys back from his sister’s apartment, where they splashed in the pool.

They pulled over in the red zone in front of the apartment to unload the children. Then Watson went back outside to move the car.

Sallie was running the bath when she heard the shots and ran out to find Watson crying tears of pain and begging for water. He was pronounced dead later at California Hospital Medical Center.

He will be buried in Louisiana, his parents’ home state, where they decided to retire. They were visiting L.A. the weekend of his death to watch his sister Monique receive her master’s degree from the University of Phoenix.

In the first days after the homicide, 3-year-old Larry kept looking around as if searching for a missing face.

In recent weeks, Sallie noticed he clings more, whines more. Every few minutes, he flops against his mother -- or anyone who happens to be near -- with his arms spread wide, silently demanding to be hugged.

At Wednesday’s news conference, the toddler pointed excitedly to his father’s face in the large portrait that police had propped up.

But as police talked before the cameras, he lay like a dead weight in his mother’s embrace, his cheek plastered to her shoulder.

At one point, Sallie had just one arm to hold him; she was also gripping Jailen by the hand. When she grew tired and put the older boy down, he fussed, had to be peeled off a stranger and finally deposited in the arms of an aunt.

Sallie has sought the advice of a family doctor to help deal with the boy’s confused grief. She has tried to explain to him that his father is dead -- “Daddy’s with the angels,” she told him -- but no matter how she puts it, the boy does not understand, she said. He seems to believe Watson is only away temporarily.

Police say they are looking for tips of any kind to help solve the killing and will take anonymous calls. They asked those with clues to call detectives at the LAPD’s Southeast Division at (213) 972-7850.