Haunting questions linger over fatal brawl

Many of the two dozen people attending a public affairs forum Saturday at a Crenshaw-area coffee shop had been thinking about the fight all week.

They were unsettled by news accounts of a showdown between two young women who were angry because they were dating the same man. Their feud sparked a brawl at a busy South Los Angeles intersection that involved as many as 30 young black women, drew hundreds of spectators and left Shontae Blanche, a 22-year-old pregnant college student, dead.

The brawl wound up on the agenda at their Urban Policy Roundtable meeting, along with home foreclosures and the city’s new N-word ban. But what exactly, one man wondered aloud, did this ugly spectacle of unladylike behavior have to do with public policy?

Community activist Eddie Jones was there to help him figure it out. The “young lady who died was a peacemaker,” mowed down as she tried to stop the fight, said Jones, of the Los Angeles Civil Rights Assn.

It was a tidy good-vs.-evil rendition. But the audience wasn’t buying.

“If I was . . . pregnant, I would be at home,” declared a middle-aged woman, her graying dreadlocks pulled into a bun. “She shouldn’t be out there trying to break up no fight.”

Heads nodded and others clamored to speak. What unfolded was a kind of communal soul-searching among people inured to local gang feuds and violence, but bewildered by what they considered a brazen display of depravity among young women, some of them mothers.

“We have become unbiblical,” one man declared. “This is why our children behave like this.” Others offered up a varied list of culprits -- crack babies, foster care, the prison system, welfare, rap music, bad parenting and the pharmaceutical industry.

Their comments made it clear that activists who try to make hay on this will have their work cut out.

“I came here to find out what’s going on,” said Warren J. Smith, a motorcycle-loving preacher who calls himself the “Gospel Rider.” “I heard they were out there fighting over a guy in prison. Now you’re telling me that she’s some innocent bystander that came out here and gave her life. . . . For what?”

--

I left the coffeehouse sharing their discomfort. Girl fights are nothing new; I can remember the crowds that gathered whenever news of a female showdown spread through my high school 30 years ago. But this was different. This was not schoolyard smack down. These were grown women, and one of them died.

I headed for the gas station at Slauson and Western, where the brawl ended. It’s where Blanche was struck by a car that police say was deliberately driven into the crowd by a woman involved in the fight. The woman is being held on suspicion of murder.

I found the scene dispiriting. The air was thick with the scent of marijuana. Clumps of young men stood idly by, sipping from liquor bottles tucked in paper bags. A motherly-looking woman loudly chastised them, with a string of insults and obscenities.

It was clear to me the tragedy had left its mark. A steady stream of visitors filed past a shrine of balloons, candles and photographs. A dozen young women were hard at work, washing cars with grim efficiency, and the donation envelope was bulging. An elderly woman brought a brood of preteen boys and ordered them to help wash cars.

She didn’t know Blanche or Unique Bishop, the 21-year-old accused of killing Blanche with her car. It didn’t matter, she said; she’s not trying to sort out her feelings. “I just feel such pain for both their mothers,” she said.

Blanche’s mother, Mildred Hayes, said she hadn’t spent much time trying to figure out what happened that afternoon. “I don’t know if it was just a girl fight or whatever,” she said. “I just wish my child hadn’t been there.”

Blanche was her oldest child, she said; a girl who tried hard to steer clear of trouble and graduated with honors from Dorsey High. “When everyone else was out running the streets, she was inside doing homework,” Hayes said.

But Blanche’s life wasn’t that simple. She was raised by her grandmother; both her parents were in and out of prison, Blanche’s grandmother had said last week. She was married and five months pregnant, but her husband is incarcerated.

“She wasn’t no angel,” a cousin said as she collected donations at the carwash Saturday. “She had her dark side, like everybody else. She knew the streets because she grew up here. But she didn’t hang out. . . . And she didn’t have nothing to do with this ‘Girls Went Wild’ stuff. To have her die like this is bull. . .”

--

Even though there were dozens of people at the carwash, nobody wanted to talk to me about exactly what happened the day of the fight. The possibility of retaliation was too strong. Also, they know how stories like this play to a public conditioned to stereotypes. It’s too easy to sensationalize it, Jerry Springer-style.

Indeed, my colleague Richard Winton, who helped report the news stories, was bombarded with hate mail last week, including an e-mail from a self-described “white nationalist” who called the episode “typical Negro behavior” and blamed the “pointless and idiotic death [on] deficiencies in Negroid intelligence.”

I wondered what that writer would think if he had the conversation I did with a thoughtful 34-year-old friend of the dead girl’s family. This is a neighborhood, she told me, where a girl is expected to handle her business and not back down from a fight.

But she’s worried that rule no longer matches the reality of the streets.

I imagine she’s had her share of fights. She seemed tough, and her stick-thin arms were inked with tattoos. She told me her nickname but asked me not to put it in the paper. Things are tense enough, she said; she’s not trying to fuel another feud.

“Ten years ago, you could fight and walk away,” she said. “Now, you have to think, ‘Maybe I should just let this person kick my butt, because then it’s over and you don’t have to worry about what’s coming next.’ ”

And that was about as much soul-searching as anyone was willing to do. They had cars to wash, an obituary to write and a funeral to arrange. And a candlelight vigil to plan for tonight, where a neighborhood can gather to mourn.

--

sandy.banks@latimes.com