After my father’s phone call, we left the party immediately, so I don’t know if the willows ever stopped swaying. While the earth itself settled back into its more reliable wobbly orbit, we booked our plane tickets to Southern California and tried to figure out what was going on. No one knew much. The best anyone could do was direct me to a few news items gleaned from the Internet.
Headline No. 1, from KTLA:
BULLET-RIDDLED BODY FOUND IN CAR
LOS ANGELES—A body riddled with bullets was found inside in a car in South Los Angeles, police said Saturday. Police responded to a call of a suspicious person sleeping in a vehicle in the 1000 block of West 60th Street at around 5:20 P.M. Friday, said Officer Rosario Herrera of the Los Angeles Police Department. On inspection, officers discovered the sleeping man propped up in the car’s passenger seat was really a bullet-riddled body wrapped in blankets. The body was identified as that of Michael Alexander Allen, 29. Allen suffered multiple shots to the torso, Herrera said. Police have no motive or suspects in Allen’s shooting. Anyone with any information on the shooting is asked to call the LAPD Criminal/ Gang/ Homicide Unit at (213) 485-1383 or (877)-LAPD-24-7.
These were the basics. One didn’t know how he died, or how he’d ended up in the car. About his corpse, however, there was information to be found in a Los Angeles Police Department blog.
Headline No. 2:
Man Found Dead in Car
LOS ANGELES—The Los Angeles Police Department needs the public’s help to identify and locate suspect or suspects who fatally shot a 29-year-old man on July 17. Yesterday, at around 5:20 p.m., a patrol unit from 77th Division was dispatched to the 1000 block of West 60th Street. The radio call was generated in response to a report of a suspicious vehicle with what appeared to be a person sleeping inside. When the officers arrived they found Michael Alexander Allen, a 29-year-old male Black, wrapped in bedding on the passenger seat. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The vehicle and victim were transported to the Coroner’s Office where he was taken out of the car.
Did the police hoist the “vehicle and victim” onto a flatbed tow truck, or winch them on behind and pull them, a yoked pair, along the road? Did passengers riding in cars alongside witness a seemingly “sleeping” man? The gods must chortle every time death’s chariot, like Charon’s ferry, pulls up in the form of a rusty tow truck. This is too routine a feature of death in America, in our blood-spattered culture, this image of the dead being hauled off as “evidence,” the most basic human ritual of ministering to and caring for the deceased interrupted.
Yes, of course, it makes more sense to invite the next of kin not to a street corner but to the coroner’s office to claim the victim’s belongings. Yet the rawness of the rough concrete curb at 60th and Vermont, and the grimy adjoining gutter that paralleled the road’s black asphalt, was surely a more suitable cauldron for the smelting of grief than any coroner’s antiseptic office. And when one thinks of Michael now, one never thinks first of the clickety-click wheels of a coroner’s efficient bureaucracy but of this corner, whited-out with urban despair. Here, smack on the corner of Vermont and 60th, belong the gnashing of teeth and rending of veils.
As we waited to fly across an ocean and continent, Karen and her daughter, Roslyn, Michael’s “Big Sis,” went to claim his few, forgettable belongings. The little hatchback appeared to have bloodstains on the floor of the passenger’s seat, but my cousin, Roslyn, also struggling with poverty, so needed a car that she would soon claim it as her own all the same.