A Pain That Won’t Go Away

Charles Mallet pulled back the chiffon curtain in his living room one summer night to see what was keeping his son.

Kermit Mallet, 27, was in the driveway of the family’s small stucco house in a quiet Inglewood neighborhood, saying goodbye to friends. Charles could see the young men under a streetlight, standing in a circle, talking.

He was about to call Kermit inside, an instinctive reflex among many black parents in south Los Angeles County. But Charles then saw his son double over with laughter. They’re having a good time, he thought. I’ll give him another minute. Charles let the curtain drop.

The gunshots seemed to explode through the house.

Maudra Mallet, Kermit’s mother, was in a back room, talking on the phone. Maudra could hear her son screaming.

Charles ran outside. He saw a bullet wound in Kermit’s hip. He reached out and the blood flowed warm over his hands.

Kermit looked at his father. Charles remembers his expression of bewilderment. “Why me?” Kermit said. He was crying.

“Hold me, Dad.”

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Before that night -- Aug. 7, 1998 -- the Mallets were a happy, solid family. Afterward, they were three people, passing each other in the kitchen, shrinking from each other’s pain.

Charles Mallet, 67, is a retired IBM engineer; Maudra, 66, a retired schoolteacher. The couple had adopted Kermit as an infant and later adopted a baby girl, Monica, Maudra explained, “because Kermit was so good.”

Maudra remembers a house “full of life.” Charles would wrestle with Kermit on the living room carpet. Or he would put on records and invite his wife to dance. Kermit and Monica would join in.

When the children were grown, Charles and Kermit stayed close: Both cross-country runners, they’d get up early and jog five miles together. Maudra loved to cook for Kermit and rejoiced in his gentle affections: “Come here girl,” he would say to her some mornings: “You ain’t got yo’ kiss today.”

Monica, now 27, was the adoring, more troublesome, little sister. Where Monica rebelled, Kermit sought compromises, wanting everyone to be happy. It was exasperating to her, the way he never seemed to get in trouble.

They were middle class, educated, aspiring, content -- the kind of people who might have been expected never to come close to violent atrocity. But they had one risk factor: They are black.

During the 1990s, 4,193 black men were killed in Los Angeles County, most often by other black men. That figure reflects a homicide rate far higher than that for white or Latino men. Skin color, age, gender and geography had made Kermit vulnerable. He was a target simply because he was young, black, male and standing outside.

As a family, the Mallets would experience what so many black households endure: a violent event that ricochets through the lives of the victim’s loved ones. The gory, traumatic scene on the sidewalk refuses to fade from memory. The perpetrators are not caught. And the world spins on, seemingly indifferent to the shooting of yet another black man.

The result is a corrosive combination of grief, rage and helplessness.

There would be a moment, several months later, when Maudra would look around and think she barely recognized the family they had been. It seemed that her husband and daughter “just froze up on me,” she recalled. “I was getting on his nerves. Monica was getting on mine. We were scared. I thought this family was going to break up.”

Plans to Become a Teacher

Kermit was a slim, smooth-skinned young man with an easy, unassuming laugh and straight posture. He looked right at you when you talked, taking in every word.

The gunshots left him sprawled across the front lawn. Charles ran up, tried to calm Kermit, fumbled to block the wound. I can’t breathe, Kermit was saying. You are going to make it, Charles told him. A neighbor ran over with a blanket.

The paramedics arrived. Maudra Mallet tried to get closer to Kermit, but police held her back.

A police officer picked up a shred of Kermit’s torn red T-shirt. A gang color, he said. He turned to Maudra. Was Kermit a gang member? he asked.

“My son was not in a damn gang,” she said. Kermit had just come home from Southern University in his parents’ home state of Louisiana. He had served three years in the Navy, was a veteran of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and had returned to Los Angeles to become an elementary schoolteacher. Before seeing his friends that night, he had left his study materials for the teachers’ qualifying exam open on his bed.

There was room for one in the ambulance. Charles got in and they pulled away.

Maudra stared at the driveway. Kermit’s blood had run into the gutter. She looked at the spot where he had fallen. There was torn clothing, the litter of medical packaging.

Dazed, she pulled out the garden hose to wash her son’s blood from the driveway. One of Kermit’s friends took the hose from her hands.The family kept a vigil at Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center. Maudra was sure that her son would pull through. They waited and prayed.

The wound was in the pelvic area, the site of a major artery, and Kermit suffered massive internal bleeding.

Two days later, Monica and her father left the hospital to have breakfast at the International House of Pancakes. Maudra called them there. Come now, she said. Kermit is receiving his last rites. Monica fainted in the restaurant.

At the hospital, Monica went to her brother’s room for a moment alone with him. She stood by his bed and tried to smile.

“Kermit, you look good,” she said, trying to keep her voice cheery. “You are gonna pull through.”

But a second later, she came apart. “No you don’t. I’m lying,” she heard herself sob. “You look horrible.”

Kermit, hooked to an IV, had swelled by 50 pounds, a common complication for shooting victims who suffer internal bleeding. His hands were tied to the bed and he was on a respirator. It was as though her brother wasn’t there, wasn’t contained in the body before her, Monica thought. She panicked and ran from the room.

On the morning of Aug. 9, 1998, Monica called a cousin, Courtenay Brown, in Denver to say that Kermit had died. Could Brown call the rest of the family?

Brown remembers sitting on his couch, stunned and suddenly weary. He made the calls, a series of abbreviated conversations. People said little.

Overwhelmed by Grief

Murder doesn’t end with death. For every story of killing in Los Angeles, there is another less-often-told story of the searing course of long-term grief.

In those first days, Monica remembers thinking that her mother was suicidal. She collected pills from the medicine cabinet, hiding them as a precaution.

She remembers her father crying. She had never seen him cry before.

Relatives who flew in for the funeral said that Charles looked exhausted, without hope. His shoulders drooped.

Charles Mallet is a thoughtful, methodical man who speaks quietly and slowly, choosing his words carefully. Even his laughter seems thoughtful.

Maudra is Charles’ opposite: emotional, a talker. She often sits back with her hands folded, saying whatever is on her mind.

In marriage they were complementary. “I love that man!” Maudra would exclaim to Monica in her Louisiana drawl. “He’s a good man!” But grief pulled them apart.

Maudra could not accept Kermit’s death.

She wondered if he had still been breathing when they put him in the body bag. Had they really checked? She thought of how cold he might have been in the morgue.

At the funeral, she thought she saw Kermit’s chest move in the casket and, for an instant, was joyful. She looked around, secretly anticipating the mourners’ surprise when Kermit sat up in his coffin, alive.

Even after he was buried, Maudra started at every knock at the door. It was her son, coming home at last. She thought of Lazarus. Why couldn’t that happen again? The daughter of a Louisiana Baptist preacher, Maudra had always had her faith. But now she felt betrayed. She raged against God.

Driving, Maudra would notice other motorists, laughing and talking in their cars, and hate them for being happy.

The killers had driven past Kermit and his friends that night, then circled back with their headlights off, witnesses had told the family. Police could not determine a motive and had few leads to go on.

More streetwise young men would have known, Maudra thought. But Kermit had been gone for years -- serving his country, attending college. He was not on the lookout for drive-by shooters, for cars with headlights turned off.

Maudra wished that Kermit had been a gang member. Maybe then he would still be alive, she thought.

Meanwhile, Charles had little to say. He seemed weary, inward. He tried to listen to Maudra. But she kept asking the same question. “Why did God let this happen?”

Over and over. “You can only answer it so many times,” Charles said. After a while, he would just shake his head.

“I wanted to talk about him, but no one wanted to,” Maudra said. “It made me angry, made me cry more.”

She would sit for hours in the living room staring at Kermit’s picture. Sometimes she had visions: She would gaze at Kermit’s picture a long time and find him conjured before her -- Kermit’s body, as three-dimensional and real as if he were standing in the room.

Other times, Maudra would go to Kermit’s room and sleep in his bed or press her face against his baseball caps. They still smelled of his after-shave.

Maudra’s tears wore on Monica. “Mom, you have got to stop it,” she would say.

Maudra poured out her anger in group therapy sessions. The couple had discovered Loved Ones Victims Services, a counseling organization in South Los Angeles for people grieving after homicides.

Charles also went, but he only listened.

He had remained quiet, subdued in grief, until one day several months after Kermit’s death.

It was near Christmas. Charles had mislaid Kermit’s watch. Maudra had cleaned off Kermit’s blood and had given the watch to Charles as a gift.

Charles spent the morning going from room to room, anxiously looking. Maudra heard a thump in the front bedroom. She found her husband lying face down on the carpet, unconscious.

She ran to call 911, crying to herself. “God, you can’t do this to me. You took my son. Please don’t take my husband.”

Charles spent two days in the hospital. The doctors could find nothing wrong.

A Birthday Forgotten

Monica had played a motherly role to Kermit, even though she was four years younger. She was strong-willed and would sometimes scold Kermit for being too easygoing, unwilling to assert himself. She remembers Kermit’s responding with his aw-shucks smile and thinking: I’ll never get through to him.

Monica is petite, with light freckles and photogenic features, an actress and producer who attends the American Film Institute. She and Kermit teased each other, confided in each other, swapped advice on romance.

Sometime after his death, Monica called television stations and the Los Angeles Times, asking them to report on what had happened to Kermit. None did.

When Kermit’s birthday came that October, two months after his death, the Mallets threw a party. They invited people and served cake and ice cream.

Monica’s birthday was the next day. Her parents forgot. She didn’t mention it.

She was preoccupied with the thought of Kermit’s killers. She began teaching basic education at a Los Angeles County juvenile hall. She wanted to look into the faces of people who commit such atrocities. She worked with murderers. But it brought her no answers. The young inmates seemed not to feel the pain they’d caused. They bragged about killing people.

Somebody must know who killed Kermit, she thought. Someone was bragging about it.

To the juvenile wards, Monica was upper-class looking. They called her Miss Malibu.

One day, she cracked. She knew more than they thought, she told them. Her brother was murdered in a drive-by.

It worked. Her students were hushed into silence.

Monica tried it on another class. But this time the youths reacted differently. “So what?” one said. “We don’t care.” She never tried it again.

Months after Kermit died, a student made her lose her temper. “One of you all probably killed my brother,” she thought.

She started to cry as she got into her car, and soon she was screaming and sobbing with her hands on the wheel. She arrived home completely unhinged -- flailing, striking at her parents.

To stop her, Monica recalls, “they sandwiched me.” She finally calmed down. She had a headache.

Memories Bring Pain

Winter passed. Then spring. Every day, Maudra and Charles visited Kermit’s grave among the green rolling hills of Inglewood Cemetery, a few blocks from the house.

Bullet slugs from the night Kermit was shot had left two deep cavities in the pink stucco of the neighbors’ garage. Maudra shut her eyes every time she walked past.

She argued with Charles over whether to move. Maudra couldn’t stand the memories.

The Mallets live in a neighborhood of magnolia trees and sea breezes. A lace tablecloth is on the dining table. A vase of roses.

Charles refused to move. As a young man coming out of the Navy, he had walked off the train at Union Station, taken one look at the clear skies and swaying palms, and resolved to make Southern California his home.

The stucco house he later bought also has palms nearby. He brought his wife to that home, raised his children in that home. “I’m proud of where I live,” Charles said quietly.

Maudra hated it there now. Charles felt their growing distance. He tried not to let her see. “I know him,” Maudra said. “And I know when he’s being phony.”

‘Keep This Family Together’

For nearly a year, Monica held her silence after her parents forgot her birthday. She finally pointed it out in group therapy. Her parents were mortified -- and contrite. Maudra admitted, “People had to remind me that I had another child.”

Maudra had kept going to a local Catholic church, despite her anger. She would sit in the pew, ignoring the sermon, intent on her own fervent, inner dialogue, remonstrating with God.

For a long time, she thought only of Kermit. But little by little, thoughts of her daughter and husband crept in. She gave thanks for Monica, and she found herself praying: “Lord, keep this family together.”

One day she asked God to forgive her anger. The sanctuary seemed to brighten.

Charles had begun to write about Kermit. He wrote straightforward accounts of what happened that night, and would try to capture his pain in words, then tear the paper to pieces. With each new draft, the writing more closely matched his feelings and his grief seemed a little easier to bear.

He talked more, and Maudra became more tolerant of his silence.

Living Life for the Moment

But all three Mallets say there is no end to it. Four years after the death of her son, Maudra has developed high blood pressure and complications from diabetes. She feels especially ill around the anniversary of Kermit’s death.

She has stopped cleaning. Now Charles does it. She has stopped cooking. She can’t seem to season things right anymore. The food doesn’t taste right.

Charles has come to see life as fleeting, he said, and he lives for the moment. “It helps me that I am up in age,” he said. “Someday soon I will be passing on.”

Monica said it seems that life has gotten easier for her parents. “But then, just out of the blue,” she said, “you see the hurt, or they start crying. Or my dad will come to me with his little sad eyes talking about it, asking me to call the detectives.”

The case remains unsolved. Police say they do not know why the killer aimed at Kermit.

Monica said Kermit’s death “made me angry at black people for a long time.”

“It hurts so bad. It makes you not trust anyone -- takes your security, and your faith in mankind and your race. Everything, just stolen from you.”

She bats away tears and forges on.

“I’m still angry. When my parents are gone, I will be alone. He was the only one who knew me and felt like me,” she said, starting to cry.

“There are so many things I wanted to tell him. People I date. Who I might marry. All that is taken away from me. And those bastards don’t even understand. They don’t see life as anything. It is so unfair. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it.”

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