Summoned to a scarier L.A.

Never get mixed up in the problems of random strangers. It’s survival rule No. 1 in this crazy metropolis.

Tailgating freeway lunatics, assorted hoodlums, stressed-out moms screaming at their kids in public: We give them a wide berth and look the other way.

Then an envelope comes in the mail.

It’s called a summons for jury duty.

That slip of official paper forces us to get close to the messy lives of others. In my case, jury duty took me inside the world of a former college football player with problems controlling his anger.

He was a good son whose life went awry after he began dating a beauty who lived near the Crenshaw district. She already had a child with someone else, but he was so in love that after just five months he tattooed her name on his arm. Seeing her required visiting her apartment building, which just happened to be filled with gang members.

Shakespeare wrote, “The course of true love never did run smooth.” In the case of the man I will now call “the defendant,” true love led to two counts of assault with a deadly weapon.

The defendant in the courtroom of Judge Ronald Rose had just turned 30 and his future was in my hands. For a night or two, it was my duty to lose sleep thinking about his problems.

You may think of us journalists as busybodies, but we really aren’t. We’re voyeurs who look at crime and other spectacles from a distance.

As “Juror No. 18,” I was forced to get involved. My fellow jurors even made me the foreman. In the end, I realized it was one of the most important responsibilities I’ve ever been given.

Jury service is the closest thing we civilians have to a draft, and when your own summons comes in the mail, you may be tempted to try and weasel out of it.

Do not -- especially if the summons says “criminal court,” because they need you there the way a city about to be flooded needs people to fill sandbags.

There’s a universe of conflict, dysfunction and violence in Southern California. No matter how much we want to turn away or to pretend it isn’t close to us, it’s always nearby.

The first hint of how chaotic things are is the sheer size of the crowds in the jury assembly room at the downtown courthouse. The county workers running the place told us that getting off by claiming hardship is tougher than ever. I soon found out why when a group of us were sent up to Judge Rose’s courtroom for the questioning known as “voir dire.”

We were asked if any among us had been touched by a violent crime.

Three Latina women raised their hands.

“My uncle was killed by gang members,” said the first, who then began to weep quietly. We passed her a box of Kleenex across the jury box. She held on to it for a minute or two, then passed it to a second woman, who said: “My brother is in prison because he set fire to someone’s house.”

“I was the victim of a crime,” said a third woman, who bit her lip and said she could not speak about the crime out loud. The words she could not say offered up a silence thick with private suffering.

All three women were dismissed from the jury pool.

Here, then, is an uncomfortable truth about Los Angeles: Even if only a few violent criminals live among us, the hurt they inflict touches more people than can be counted, the pain spreading through circles of friends and relatives of both perpetrator and victim.

So many of us have been affected by crime, in fact, that there are fewer of us who can stand apart from it and be dispassionate judges of the facts.

Our jury ended up being eight women and four men. Once the trial got underway, the basic story was clear.

The defendant had gone to the building where his girlfriend lived to apologize to a young man who lived there -- for what, we were never told. His apology was rejected and an argument ensued. The defendant drew a gun, fired three shots at the front door as he left the building and a fourth down the street as he ran to his car. And it was all caught on a surveillance video.

On a second video, of a police interrogation, the defendant told detectives he’d been assaulted earlier by gang members near the same building. He fired his gun, he said, because he thought he was about to be attacked again.

The young man arguing with the defendant on the video was a critical witness but did not testify. “He chose not to be found,” a detective had told us. And the building’s other residents were obviously reluctant to cooperate with the police.

Our job as a jury might on one level seem straightforward. We needed to determine if the defendant acted in lawful self-defense.

“I feel like we have one set of laws here that we’re being asked to enforce,” one of the jurors said. “And they, in that building, have a whole other set of laws.”

But some of us argued that the law should be applied the same way everywhere. Didn’t we have a duty to convict simply to protect the women, children and bystanders in the direction of all that gunfire?

There are neighborhoods where the law works efficiently, and others where it does not.

Our heads and hearts are needed in those jury boxes to sort it all out and hold the city together.

We took our duty seriously enough to deliberate for 11 hours. A few of us wept. Nearly everyone said they lost some sleep. We split 7 to 5 in favor of guilty on the first assault charge, and 8 to 3 on the second. Finally, the judge declared a mistrial.

Later, two other jurors and I talked to the prosecutor and public defender. We found out we were not the first jury to deadlock on the case. The defendant, we discovered, has been in jail for nearly a year, turning down various plea bargains to argue his innocence.

The attorneys told us not to feel bad -- deadlocks happen all the time.

But I wished we could have seen more evidence and gotten to the truth.

Because now I have seen how much our city needs us. It’s our eyes and ears and attention that help ensure more and better justice.

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hector.tobar@latimes.com