In Death’s Random Path

Sometimes I tell my son that the meaning of his name is “Trust nobody and smile.”

Bill Cosby, from his book “Fatherhood.”

*

Maybe the son trusted the wrong somebody. Maybe the son forgot to smile. Exactly what happened on the Sepulveda Pass in the closing-time hours Thursday is not yet known. A young man was found shot to death beside his car on a frontage road above the San Diego Freeway. He was the son of a celebrity. He had stopped to change a tire.

Strangely, it is this last, banal element of Ennis Cosby’s murder that resonates. Fixing a flat should not be an invitation to a bullet, and yet it happens. Most often, the stories can be found deep in the newspaper, running no more than a few paragraphs. Most often, of course, the victim is not the son of a television fixture, a comedian known for his image as a sage and witty father, America’s Dad.

It happened to Moet Williams and Gerald Well, both 24 years old. They were changing a tire on the Harbor Freeway when a carload of young men stopped and offered to help. You guys from Carson? Williams and Well were asked. “No,” they shouted back, “We’re from San Pedro.” This was the wrong answer. A gun came out, and Williams and Well fell wounded.

It happened to Imelda Barba. On a Sunday night last summer, the 39-year-old was riding in a car through East Los Angeles. When the car ran out of gas, the driver pulled off the Santa Ana freeway and walked away to find a service station. Barba was waiting in the car when a shot crashed through the rear window, piercing her skull.

It happened to Miguel Soto. His flat occurred at 3 a.m. on the San Bernardino Freeway. The two robbers who pulled up behind Soto did not bother with questions. They just started shooting: “California Highway Patrol officers,” The Times reported in the third and final paragraph of its account, “found Soto wounded and called paramedics who rushed him to County-USC, where he was listed in critical condition.”

This typically is where these cases vanish, with the victims clinging tentatively to life in some trauma center, assailants and their motives unknown. This will not be the case with Ennis Cosby. His murder will receive the full and enduring attention of television crews, police investigators, newspaper reporters, politicians, radio talk show hosts and, eventually, prosecutors.

And that is as it should be. Do not begrudge Ennis Cosby the commotion his death will cause. What is unseemly is not the flood of public outrage and journalistic pathos and forensic detail flowing down from the Sepulveda Pass. What is unseemly is the paucity of response generated by the shootings of Moet Williams, and Gerald Well, and Imelda Barba and Miguel Soto and so many others like them.

Whoever they were.

Whatever became of them.

The killing of young Cosby was not the only front-page murder to occur in Los Angeles on Thursday. Later the same day, in an opposite corner of the city, a gang member opened fire at a crowded bus. One of his bullets found, randomly, a 17-year-old high school student named Corie Williams. Whether this outrage received more or less coverage because of the Cosby case is an open, and perversely cynical question.

Nonetheless, the fact remains that these twinned tragedies cannot help but foster a sense that the wheels of the city have fallen off, that the last angels of Los Angeles have vacated the premises, leaving murderers in command.

Statistics would indicate otherwise. Statistics would demonstrate many big cities have higher per capita homicide rates, that violent crime across the basin is on the decrease. The numbers would indicate that blocked arteries and booze and maybe even lightning strikes pose more statistically significant threats than random murder.

And the numbers also would give no comfort at all for the Cosby family, or the Williams family, or for Los Angeles as a whole. The collective sense is one of escalating madness, that Los Angeles has become a place where no cautious person would ever stop to change a tire, never choose to take the bus.

Even in less notorious times, the sheer vastness of the metropolis can contribute to the feel of Los Angeles as demon city. To the roving news copters, Los Angeles on any night can be anywhere between San Diego and Santa Barbara. Thus, it’s no mystery why every broadcast of the television news bleeds mayhem: So many millions settled in so many communities cannot help but produce acts of carnage with ratings-friendly regularity. It’s simple math.

The question is what matters more: the statistics that describe Los Angeles by and large as a relatively safe city, or the feeling generated by the images of a packed bus being riddled with bullets, or of Bill Cosby’s son sprawled beside his flat tire, the last of his blood running downhill toward the main of the city?

There will be much wrestling with this now. How to stop what happened on Sepulveda Pass and on that bus remains the central political issue facing Los Angeles. When a candidate promises he is “tough enough to turn it around,” what happened to Ennis Cosby, and even Moet Williams, personify the “it” in question.

Why the question is asked more urgently in the context of Ennis Cosby’s death, and not in the wake of the uncovered slaughters that each year add up to something like 2,000, is in the end irrelevant. What matters is that it will be asked.

“Every death is one death too many in our city,” Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams said Friday. That he chose to say this at a news conference he called to field questions on the Cosby case was perhaps an unfortunate choice of venue, food for cynics. Still, the sentiment was correct.

Back up on the pass: It is 1:30 a.m. Friday, the same time of night Cosby was shot, one day before. Clues of what happened are few: some discarded coffee cups, a plastic case that had carried police flares, a vague stain in the asphalt that otherwise might be mistaken for oil. A police helicopter hovers above, throwing its spotlight down on the road and into the ravines--exactly 24 hours too late for Ennis Cosby.

Directly overhead looms the Big Dipper, brilliant in a clear sky. A warm wind pushes the branches of eucalyptus trees, and carries with it the fragrant air that seemingly can only be found in Los Angeles at this time of year. It is, in short, both dreadful and beautiful: It is Los Angeles.