My car after a parked truck was pushed into it. The pick-up was hit by a man driving an Impala after he fled a shooting a few blocks away. After the crash, the street was blocked off for hours while police searched for three armed suspects.
LOS ANGELES, 2:30 a.m. —
The most ironic moment of my life — literally, the most ironic — happened tonight after three friends came over to check out my apartment. They are considering moving in when I leave in June, and just as I was telling them I had never experienced any problems with street parking, we heard a loud crash — and then another, and then another. Then a car alarm began to shriek. We ran outside to see what had happened, and I realized people were congregating near where I had parked my car earlier this evening. I silently groaned as we walked toward the wreck, and sure enough, there was my car — completely smashed from behind by a pick-up truck, and possibly totaled.
As we got closer, we realized it was a three-car wreck. A man driving an Impala had smashed head-first into a pick-up truck that was parked right behind my car. The pick-up truck was then rammed into the back of my car. We approached the Impala and discovered the driver unconscious and slumped over the steering wheel, bleeding all over the deployed air bag. Bystanders called out to him and asked if he was okay, but there was no response. Someone wondered aloud if he should shake the driver to try to wake him up, but others quickly said the man should be left alone until paramedics arrived. Someone else said we should get back because he might have a gun.
About four different people, myself included, called 9-1-1 and told them we were at 2701 Menlo Ave., half-way between 29th Street and Adams Blvd. After I was told the fire department was on its way, I hung up the phone and squatted down by the car to try to get a better view of the driver’s injuries. I debated running inside to get my camera, but just then the 9-1-1 dispatcher called me back and asked if this was the same crime scene where people had fled a wrecked car. I said I wasn’t sure and that only the driver was there by the time arrived. Everyone was discussing what they had seen, and someone said they thought the Impala had hit a tram before it ran into the truck.
Skid marks and broken glass left by the Impala the next morning.
Within minutes the police arrived and cleared the area. The wreck happened in front of my next-door neighbor’s house, and we stalled long enough in front of my building to see an officer in a bullet-proof vest point his gun at the wrecked car and yell at the driver to put his hands up. He yelled at the man over and over again to show a weapon if he had one and to put his hands up, and I wondered if he thought the driver was faking his injuries. I thought to myself, “Trust me, officer, that guy’s not faking anything.” Police officers began yelling at us to get inside because there was an armed suspect at large. An officer told me the suspect had run towards the backyard next to my building and that nobody was allowed to come outside. This was at about 8:30 p.m.
After that, LAPD established a perimeter that shut down four streets in the West Adams neighborhood. Seven people were stranded at my apartment, including two who had exams the next day. It was too loud to study with the search helicopters circling the building and shining lights in our windows, and only the two of us who lived there had our books anyway. We opened a bottle of wine and turned on the news, but there was no mention of the armed suspects at large. I looked at the Los Angeles Times website, where the top story about Manny Ramirez and No. 2 was on Twitter. No suspect updates there.
We put on a movie and spent the next hour calling people and trying to figure out what had happened, formulating theories that were essentially based upon hearsay. We still weren’t sure if the Impala had hit a USC Tram or just swerved around it. There were also rumors about a gang shooting, but we hadn’t heard any shots fired on our street before the wreck. The helicopters made it hard to hear anything that happened after the crash, though. One of my friends also overheard an officer say that a police car had sped the opposite direction of the Impala, away from where it ultimately crashed, shortly before the accident. None of us knew what to make of that.
At 9:33, we received a text message from the TrojansAlert emergency message system. It said shots had been fired at the corner of Budlong and Adams, which is a few blocks northwest of my apartment. It also said that one suspect and one weapon were in custody while three suspects were at large. So the man driving the Impala was fleeing the Budlong shooting when he crashed his car. The police cars must have been driving towards that crime scene when they passed the Impala going the other direction.
We kept watching and waiting while the police searched for the other three suspects. Anytime we looked out the door to see what was going on, flashlights hit us in the face and voices yelled at us to get back inside. We watched a SWAT team storm the house two doors down, and another moved silently through the backyard next door. Eventually a SWAT team member banged on our door and yelled, “Open up! Police!” They asked if we had seen see the suspects who were at large, and we said no.
We switched back and forth between “Shrek 2″ and the local news. Finally it was 10 o’clock, and we were hopeful there would be a package about the search. No such luck, though; the top story was a car chase in San Clemente, and most of the news show was devoted to replaying tapes of the police shooting out the wheel of the other car and spinning it off the road.
At 10:30 p.m. we got an emergency alert e-mail that confirmed the Impala had hit the tram. It also said the suspect who was taken into custody had a gun shot wound, but we didn’t know if he had been shot at Budlong or by police. At 10:47, we got another text message that said two suspects were at large and two were in custody. At 10:55, latimes.com ran a news brief that reported that police had shot a suspect they were pursuing on foot near USC’s campus. About that time I heard that the Impala’s driver had died on the way to the hospital, but I can’t verify that. That’s what the police told a friend of a friend, so who knows.
After the second suspect was caught, the street got much quieter. The helicopters had apparently fanned out more, and the police cars parked out front turned their headlights off. Three of the people in my apartment decided to see if they could leave the area with an LAPD escort. I told them to knock if they weren’t allowed to leave, and locked the door behind them as they walked out into the hallway. They began descending the steps as I shut the door, but I had barely crossed the room when I heard them pounding to be let back in. I thought it was a joke, but they rushed in past me when I opened the door.
“They wouldn’t let you leave?”
“We didn’t ask. There’s a guy standing outside the door with a rifle pointed at the backyard next door…”
“Seriously?”
” Yeah. We looked around the corner and he was just standing there with this huge gun. And he looked like he was concentrating really hard. Like life and death hard. So we didn’t want to say anything and interrupt him— it just seemed like a bad idea.”
We sat down to watch some “Family Guy” episodes.
Around midnight, one of my stranded friends went back out to see when he could leave. He was told all four suspects had been apprehended, but that LAPD still hadn’t decided what to do with the students on Menlo. Finally, at 12:28 p.m., an LAPD officer agreed to escort people out of the area. I asked him if I could take pictures of my car, and he said no. “Don’t leave your property,” he said. “We shot somebody; this is a crime scene.”
We spent hours trying to put the pieces together and re-create that evening’s events based upon text messages, rumors, an e-mail, and a three-paragraph L.A. Times story, and we still don’t know how any of the shootings happened. “So much for the information age,” I thought earlier tonight. At first I was just frustrated the local news didn’t cover the story because I wanted to know what was going on, but soon I realize the implications were bigger than that. If this wasn’t on the news, it’s probably because armed suspect chases in South L.A. aren’t news. Quarantined blocks aren’t unusual; SWAT teams, canine units, and searchlights do not turn heads. They call those search helicopters “ghettobirds” for a reason. If you are a resident of South L.A., this is your life. This is the broken system in which you live.
The next morning, a Spanish language newscaster came out to ask construction workers about the crash. We wondered if the red streak on the ground is dried blood.
5 Comments
March 12, 2009 at 7:19 pm
I was wondering what all that commotion was last night! I heard that gnarly loud car slammage and actually theorized someone was running from the cops and slammed into a car when I started hearing all the search helicopters. I didn’t theorize that one of the cars was yours though! Thanks for the story, sorry about your car :/
March 12, 2009 at 10:42 pm
Holy shit, Janna!! You failed to mention this when we talked on the phone yesterday! I’m glad you’re OK, but you better hurry up with finding a new place haha. At my old place the most exciting thing that happened was that a girl was attacked while jogging down the street from us and got her iPod and jewelry stolen. Except with her it turned out that she was just a crazy psycho who wanted attention so she made it all up and gave herself the black eye. We do have a lot of “ghettobirds” at night with search lights, though, so maybe things like what happened outside of your house are happening right around me in Miami and not getting reported, either. Something to definitely think about. It’s beyond messed up that news content has to be edited for its entertainment value.
March 14, 2009 at 4:19 am
Sorry to hear that happen to you. In all honesty I am not surprised that there were not reports and you will not hear anything about it or anything else. Two or three years ago I lived in Webb and there was a shooting outside. It was after a Nike match and there were many people heard it so did many of us residents. The resies tried to find out what happened and magically no one knew. We even tried to get campus security and other students to get involved, but it went no where. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I feel like its a problem and as you acknowledged that it South Central so people just don’t care
Be careful until you leave that area. I’m glad to hear your fine, take care of yourself
March 30, 2009 at 3:12 am
[...] Guest Essays This didn’t even make the nightly news [...]
April 4, 2009 at 2:58 am
It is so sad to see Cordelia end in such an undignified way… she was a good car…except for when she hydroplaned. It makes me think of that old Frank Sinatra song “When I was seventeen, it was a very good year, it was a very good year for small town cars and long summer nights, we’d hide from the light…when I was seventeen”