Ghettoside

In July, Officer Francis Coughlin was on patrol when he came across a group of young men drinking in Nickerson Gardens. The group fled, including one in a wheelchair, who Coughlin saw tossing aside a bag of marijuana; Coughlin didn’t care about the drugs, but he used drugs as a pretext to search for guns. As it turns out, the man in the wheelchair was carrying an old revolver. He arrested the man and sent the revolver to the firearms lab.

Although the LAPD had a hi-tech system known as the National Integrated Ballistic Information database (NIBIN), at the time, the system had never successfully matched a bullet to a gun, and manual matching proved to be better still. The job of finding the gun that was used to shoot Bryant Tennelle fell to Daniel Rubin; in August, the revolver seized by Coughlin finally made its way to Rubin. After checking and rechecking it, Rubin determined that it was a match. Because of the high turnover of the illegal gun market in Los Angeles, it was unlikely that the man in the wheelchair was a suspect; however, this did mean that he was connected somehow in a chain of people.

Lyle Prideaux had, since Bryant’s death, been reassigned as detectives’ lieutenant in South Bureau Homicide; as the case was getting cold, he believed it needed a shake-up. When he asked around, Skaggs’s name continually came back to him. Though the two had never met, Prideaux decided to assign Skaggs to the case alongside Bernal. Neither Bernal nor Skaggs was happy with that arrangement; the two worked very differently, and for Skaggs, in particular, this meant that Bernal worked incorrectly.

His belief regarding Bernal was rooted in his opposition to what he called “checklist work”—work that gave the appearance of justice while in reality simply going through the motions. Leovy explains that this style of justice is part of the systemic, racist justice system: “[w]hite conservatives” in the South, for example, “favored legal systems that looked the part, but still achieved their racist intent—a ‘winking’ system that, by design, just went through the motions” (153). Eventually, this meant that white people had the law while black people did not; as a result, black society was lawless, which, as Leovy has argued elsewhere, engenders gang violence and communal justice. During the second great wave of black migration, this had explosive results in the riots of the 1960s:

Black protest against overzealous police and prosecutors remains a cherished template for left-leaning critics of criminal justice. But another, profound grievance of the period went mostly ignored—the inadequacy of official response to black-on-black violence (156).

Leovy writes that “[r]eformers focused on the rights of the defendants, seemingly blind to the ravages of underenforcement” (157). When the pendulum swung back the other way, the result was draconian sentencing policies; however, “[s]ince it’s not the harshness of punishment but its swiftness and certainty that deters crime, black people still had good reason to feel unprotected” (157).

Skaggs and Bernal finally had it out; after taking it to Prideaux, Prideaux took Bernal off the case. Despite their differences, Leovy notes that Bernal did much of the initial legwork that laid the ground for Skaggs, a sentiment echoed by even Skaggs’s staunchest defenders. However, Skaggs was simply the right person for the job at the time. 

Skaggs was required to work with a partner on the case; as Barling was no longer available, he chose Corey Farell, with whom he had recently been working. However, when Skaggs needed to re-interview the man in the wheelchair from whom Coughlin had retrieved the revolver, Farell was tied up, so he took Rick Gordon along with him, the two being “arguably the two finest ghettoside detectives in the city at that time” (162).

When Skaggs and Gordon returned to interview the man, he had already been interviewed several times by various combinations of detectives, including both Gordon and Skaggs. However, “[t]o Skaggs, it was obvious the man in the wheelchair was lying” (163). Gordon took lead and asked the man to elaborate upon his earlier claim that he had gotten the gun from a homeless crack addict. At first, the man stuck to his story; however, when the detectives were about to leave, he finally recanted and told Gordon and Skaggs that he had gotten the gun from a gang member nicknamed No Brains of the One Hundred and Eleven Blocc Crips. The detectives promised to keep the man in the wheelchair’s name out of everything, but in the end, they would go back on that.

Skaggs recalled a detail from earlier: after Bryant’s killing, his friend, Chris Wilson, and Chris’s older brother had gotten into a fight with who they believed to be Bryant’s killers, and it was reported that one of the group was a member of the Rollin’ Nineties, who were related to the Rollin’ Hundreds. A database search told Skaggs that the one member, a sixteen-year-old probationer, had recently been taken into custody.

When Skaggs met with the probationer, “he had none of the swagger that might have been expected from a hardened Rollin’ Nineties Crip. His eyes were full of tears” (169). He promised to help as long as he didn’t have to appear in court (as with the man in the wheelchair, he did end up having to appear in court). He told Skaggs and Farell that, as they had heard many times before, everybody in the neighborhood knew who the killer was: “It was no mystery—except to the police” (169). The boy had been in Hot Springs, Arkansas visiting family when he heard that a gang rival had been shot; soon after, he found out it had actually been a police officer’s son and was told to stay in Arkansas: “People were mad about it. ‘That Baby Man from Bloccs is stupid,’ someone said” (170). Skaggs now had two names related to the killing; Baby Man was revealed to be Devin Davis. However, though people knew him, the identity of No Brains remained elusive: “The case now had not just direction, but momentum” (171).

No Brains was later discovered to be Derrick Starks, who was currently being held in jail under the wrong name. He was currently being held due to a car crash connected to a parole violation. The report stated that there had been a girl in the car; the man in the wheelchair had mentioned that Starks hung out with a “good girl,” so Skaggs viewed this as an opening. As with Starks, though, it took some effort to find the real name of the girl, who turned out to be Jessica Midkiff. 

Jessica Midkiff was 22 years old; she had been a prostitute for years prior, but at the time she was taken in to be interviewed by Skaggs, she was trying to adjust course, having recently left a rehab program designed to treat prostitution like an addiction. She seemed fully willing to cooperate, which made Skaggs “wary. She seemed a little too willing […] His first instinct was to dismiss her presentation as an act” (176). He had initially believed she might have been a “knowing getaway driver” and planned for an adversarial interview, but “faced with her near hysteria, he dialed it back” (177). Midkiff promised to cooperate, but as with the others, wanted her name kept out of it and did not want to testify in open court. She had been with Derrick Starks, and Starks had abused her; he had been calling her from prison, and though she wanted to be rid of him, she feared for her family.

As Skaggs and Midkiff talked, his ideas about her began to shift: “She still seemed a likely liar. But he wasn’t seeing the usual signs. He couldn’t read her” (179). He read her rights to her, but when he mentioned the shooting off Western, she was confused—it turned out that Starks had crashed his car because of a car-to-car shooting, but that had taken place elsewhere. However, once Skaggs had established which shooting he meant, she was forthcoming, though terrified.

On May 11, after spending the night at a cheap hotel with Starks (something they did frequently), she had wanted to drive Starks’s truck, the black Chevy Suburban. As they were driving, they picked up two other boys, one of whom was Devin Davis; she didn’t get a good look at Davis, though, because Starks wouldn’t allow her to look at other men for too long. Davis taunted the other boy, telling him that he wasn’t “real crippin’.” They drove to the Eighties, where Starks handed one of the other boys a gun. Davis said he was going to take care of some business and left the car. She heard gunshots; Davis returned, and they raced away.

Midkiff’s personal story “was typical of south-end prostitutes, that is, it was sordid, dramatic, and monotonous” (183). However, Skaggs also saw that “Midkiff was atypical in some ways”: she was a drinker and chain-smoker, but not a drug addict, for example, and “[s]he was clearly bright despite her lack of formal education” (183). Skaggs still viewed her with some suspicion; however, this was because he “couldn’t see that Midkiff actually was at one of those rare crossroads in life. She was telling the truth: she wanted to change, but she didn’t know how […] this interview was a turning point” (183).

As the evening wore on, Skaggs became more certain that Midkiff was telling the truth. Her memory was impressive; Skaggs“was astonished by how well she remembered the sequence of events seven months before,” and more so, that she was confident in her story, one that never changed, even when Skaggs tested her (184). Midkiff hadn’t been aware that anyone had died in the shooting; it was common to hear gunshots that don’t land, so the events of that day didn’t stand out for her. By the end, Midkiff agreed to testify in court.