A neighbor they thought they knew

My years as a reporter have taught me that there are two things you can count on when an ordinary Joe goes to jail for a sensational crime.

The neighbors will invariably say: “He seemed like such a nice guy.” And anyone who ever came within spitting distance of his home will angle for celebrity by claiming to have known him.

And so it goes with Lonnie David Franklin Jr., the neighborhood mechanic now accused of being one of the most prolific serial killers in Los Angeles’ history.

It was an open secret on his block that Franklin ran a chop shop, dismantling stolen cars and selling the parts from his big backyard. And he was never shy about showing off the photos he took of naked women.

But beyond that, a passel of conflicting stories emerged when I visited Franklin’s block on the same afternoon he appeared in court to answer to charges that he is responsible for a killing rampage that spanned 25 years and took 10 lives.

Franklin was either a beer-drinking buddy or he never touched the stuff. He was a father figure to young ladies or a pervert always talking about sex and drugs. He was ever ready to help a neighbor or a loner so paranoid that he wouldn’t step out to fetch the mail without locking his front door.

The competing images aren’t surprising. What would any of our neighbors think to say about us if we suddenly wound up in the spotlight?

“He did a whole lot of wrong stuff,” said William Harris, a retired construction foreman who has lived on 81st Street for more than 40 years. “But this murder stuff really surprised me.”

If the accusations are true, Harris may be left wondering not just what that says about his neighbor but what it says about the moral compass of his neighborhood.

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For three days, the scene has been surreal on the short stretch of 81st Street where Franklin lives. The block is cordoned off with yellow police tape, swarming with LAPD officers and staked out by reporters like me.

I passed retirees watching the scene from plastic chairs in their driveways; mothers hustling their children inside; an impromptu evening gathering on a front stoop shaded by overgrown shrubs; neighbors watching as officers seemed to be taking Franklin’s home apart, piece by piece.

Some were angry at the LAPD. “I know Lonnie couldn’t have done this. It’s a setup,” one man shouted. “They brought in the bomb squad, trying to make it look like he’s a terrorist on TV.”

Others were troubled and curious, pelting me with questions about how DNA evidence works, and when and where the crimes occurred. “Something’s wrong,” one woman kept repeating. “Lonnie wasn’t no tough guy. He was a good man,” she said; he cried the last time he was arrested, as his stolen property was hauled off.

Good man is a relative term, I guess.

Everybody seemed to know that Franklin picked up drug addicts and plied them with crack to pose naked. “You could hear him on the video telling them, ‘Move this way, put your leg up,’” said Joe Cole, who lived on the block for 20 years and watched the videos repeatedly.

And Franklin’s house, outfitted with a spotlight and surveillance cameras, was said to be a magnet for crack addicts with stolen car radios, electronic gear and tools.

Years ago, Harris confronted him. “I just told him, ‘You need to slow your roll.’ There was too much going on there in the middle of the night.”

They had enough of a confrontation that Harris started keeping a pistol stashed nearby — along with the heavy stick he keeps to chase off drug addicts who sometimes mistake his place for the crack house down the block.

Then came gangs and crime and crack. By the mid-1980s, the apartment building on the corner was filled with gangbangers, and drug dealers were peddling from his front lawn, he said.

“I couldn’t even pull out of my driveway to get to work for all the cars blocking the streets,” he said.

Police crackdowns in the 1990s helped. A sting operation netted 38 drug sellers and buyers in front of Harris’ home, he recalls. Predawn sweeps rousted and ran off gang members.

And neighbors who had been forced to fence in their yards and put bars on their windows “began looking out for one another,” said Harris’ daughter Donna, who lives across the street now from her father and goes door to door on holidays sharing homemade daquiris.

“We really got to know each other,” she said. Or at least they thought they did.

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Donna Harris feels for Franklin’s son, Chris, whose DNA sample led to his father’s arrest. He just moved with his wife to the suburbs and hates the attention the case has drawn to him.

She worries about Franklin’s wife — a quiet, hardworking Caribbean immigrant who serves as an usher at the church down the block.

She wonders what to make of the news that Franklin finally joined that church last Sunday — turned his life over to Christ as the police were closing in on him.

Like her neighbors, she is struggling to reconcile the fellow she knew with the man described on TV. “You don’t want to think that you could miss it,” she said. “But maybe there’s stuff you just ignore or you don’t want to see.”

Or maybe, when you accept the little stuff — denigrating women, dealing stolen goods — because you’ve seen so much worse go on, you set yourself up to straddle the line between right and wrong.

The question I don’t ask, even though I want to, is can a man you liked be a monster without that implicating you?

“Was it something we should have seen?” Cole asked, repeating the question I asked him. He shrugged, shook his head, waved his beer can in the air, pondering the photos of naked women, the drugs, the casual dismissal of depravity.

“To do the things they say he did, you’ve got to be crazy. Or have a demon.... He’s a man with two faces. He showed his good face around here.”

sandy.banks@latimes.com