WHEN IT RAINED BULLETS IN THE CITY OF ANGELS

Back when I worked as a police officer and homicide detective for the LAPD in South Central Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s, it was a custom there that on New Year’s Eve the local citizens would fire off their guns in celebration.  You would hear a cacophony of gunshots from 11:30 PM on New Year’s Eve till about 1:00 AM New Year’s Morning.  If you were working patrol during those hours, you would try to get back to the station and sit in the parking lot to avoid getting hit.  I vividly recall pulling into the station parking lot and seeing a guy who lived in one of the apartments next to the station run out on his porch and fire a bunch of rounds from his gun into the air right around the stroke of midnight.   If you couldn’t make it back in by then because you were on  a call, as soon as you cleared that scene you’d at least try to make it to a freeway underpass if you weren’t close to the station.  It wasn’t that people took a free pass to shoot at the cops, it was just that there were so many guns down there and so many rounds going off you might become an accidental casualty.  Newton’s Law of Gravity, what comes up must come down, definitely plays into effect here.  All those rounds being shot in the air have to go someplace, so if they go up, eventually there going to go down. They also come down at the same speed they went up.  My homicide partner at 77^th Street Division handled a murder that happened just around midnight one New Year’s Eve where the unfortunate victim happened to be walking down the street when a spent bullet  came down and hit him on top of the head, killing him instantly.  With so many people firing their guns off in celebration in the area, how were you going to identify the shooter?  The case went unsolved. One year we put a tape recorder on top of the station on New Year’s Eve and left it up there for about an hour.  When we played it back, it sounded like the Battle of Hue City (Viet Nam).  So every year when I celebrate the New Year, my memories take me back to the one night each year when it rained bullets in the City of Angels.

THE NIGHT STALKER

From April 1984 through August 1985, the state of California was terrorized by a series of 13 grisly murders that would eventually become known as the Night Stalker case.  Richard Ramirez was eventually arrested and convicted on the case and now sits on Death Row.  Because the murders happened in both the City and County of Los Angeles, both the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had their own separate task forces to investigate the crimes.  I was one of the 11 LAPD Metropolitan Division officers who were loaned up to LAPD Robbery-Homicide Division to assist their detectives on the case.  I can still vividly recall one of their senior detectives giving us our initial briefing on the case.  He told us that they thought the killer was taunting the police because at one of the murder scenes he scrawled what looked to them to be a Sheriffs badge.  What we didn’t know at the time, but found out as the case progressed, was that it was a pentagram, the sign of the devil.  As the investigation continued, it became more apparent that the suspect was involved in devil worship.  I mentioned to the lieutenant in charge of our task force that the Catholic Church has an exorcist in each of their diocese who would be very knowledgeable on that subject and maybe able to help us.  He gave me the approval to contact the Los Angeles Archdiocese, and they put me in contact with a priest in one of the nearby parishes.  When I contacted him by phone, I was somewhat circumspect about the real reason we wanted to talk to him.  I just told him we were working on a case that might have overtones of devil worship and could he help us out.  He readily agreed to talk to us, and I brought him down to the task force headquarters at the old Parker Center headquarters of the LAPD.  When he walked into the task force office he saw the large computerized print out with the words’ Night Stalker Task Force’ spread out on the wall.  He turned to me and said, “I thought this was what it was about.”  For the next hour and a half, he spoke to us about devil worship, Satan, and the Black Mass.  There were 6 veteran homicide detectives from RHD along with 11 hardened street cops from Metro in the room at the time.  He had our rapt attention.  When he was finished, it was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop.  We all wondered what had we gotten ourselves into here.  I’ll write more about this case in some of my up-coming posts.