No justice for the Lopez family
Rick's got a nice piece today about the sad, senseless death of Kevin Lopez. This isn't a courts issue, per se, but it got me thinking. Here's the set-up:
The 23-year-old musician with a wicked sense of humor was killed in the early morning hours of Oct. 20 after agreeing to meet friends outside the home he shared with his wife, Jennifer, and his then-13-month-old son.
Lopez, who worked the swing shift processing checks at a bank, arrived at his Omelveny Avenue home Oct. 19 about 11:30 p.m.
His wife was already in bed when he gave her a kiss before unwinding for the night by playing video games and watching TV. Later, he settled in for a night's sleep.
Then his phone rang.
His best friend, back from a night of partying with a couple of buddies at Universal CityWalk, wanted Lopez to come outside and shoot the breeze.
"I heard him say, `OK, I'll come outside for a little while,"' said Jennifer Lopez, 23.
"I said, `You're going outside now?"'
She checked the time: 3:20 a.m.
Within 25 minutes, Lopez was dead - shot by a Latino man in a passing car as he sat in the back seat of an SUV - a shooting that's considered gang-related because of how it occurred, not because Lopez has any gang affiliation, police said.
"When I heard the shots, I picked up my phone and was calling him over and over and he wouldn't pick up his phone," his widow said.
Heartbreaking, huh? No surprise there, as Rick's an excellent writer. Here's the justice angle that I'll use to justify my blog: why aren't we more outraged every time someone like Mr. Lopez gets shot? Where are the news crews, the breathless pundits talking about reclaiming our streets? Until today, Mr. Lopez got no more than a brief (if that) and an online post at The Homicide Report.
I'm not the first to say this. Miles Corwin, the ex-Times writer-turned-author picked up on it in his story on Ms. Leovy and her excellent work for the Homicide Report, in an LA Magazine story last month (I'd link to it, but their Web site's not loading properly on my computer and don't want to send y'all off into nothing). Mr. Corwin quoted no less an authority than Raymond Chandler, who was taking note way back in "Farewell, My Lovely," 68 years ago.
The disparity between the media (us included) coverage when a murder occurs in an affluent community like Calabasas and in Pacoima is huge. Gang-related killings like Mr. Lopez, even though he wasn't involved in gangs himself, end up on A3, or in the briefs file, but when they show up in the rich part of town, it's A1, top of the fold, followed the next day and screamed across the top of every newscast.
Or, as I was rambling about earlier, if it involves someone famous, no matter how minor the crime or the celebrity, then it's REALLY a priority.
There's always ways that news organizations justify this -- homicide rates are higher in poor communities, so it's less surprising when someone gets killed. Or they say, we've got limited resources, we can't devote coverage to bloodshed and depressing news off on the fringes of our coverage zone.
This used to aggravate me to no end when I worked the weekend shift. Invariably, there'd be a report of a dead body in Palmdale, but the deputies wouldn't want to talk until homicide got there. We couldn't send anyone, since we had one reporter to cover from Simi Valley to Lancaster, so we'd have to do it all by phone. Homicide wouldn't return the call, there'd be no info by evening deadline, and another killing turn into "authorities are investigating a dead body far away."
There's always a reason why these things don't get covered, some legitimate, some just lame excuses. I've been guilty of both the good and bad excuses, but that doesn't make it right. I hope, through this blog and the stories I'm able to cover, to make some amends for that. I'll probably still slip up, too, but I'll do my best to tell the stories of people like Mr. Lopez, who died for no good reason, alongside the glitz and the glamor.
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