Jessica Carter is tired of being resilient.
Her brother, Richard Ware, 48, was stabbed to death last month outside a shelter for the Ross Ferris Homeless.
Just eight months ago, another relative – her 36-year-old nephew, Jesse Darjean – was shot with a gun around the block from her childhood home in Compton. His murder remains unsolved.
Murder rates have fallen to a low that has not been seen since the late 1960s in LA County and across the country. However, the clearance rate – a measure of how often police solve cases – remains relatively stable. In other words, even if there were fewer murders to investigate, authorities were unable to bring more murderers to justice. Police data show that killings of black and Latino people are still less likely to be resolved than those of white and Asian victims.
Carter’s Compton’s hometown is still raw under its reputation as a national epicenter of gang violence. But all of that ongoing struggle has seen violent crimes, especially murders — plummeted. When Gang Wars reached its peak in 1991, there were 87 murders. Last year there were 18 people, including the fatal shooting of Dajan on October 24th.
The way Carter sees it, the murderer who took her brother and nephew, both escaped it, but for a variety of reasons. There are no known suspects, witnesses or motives in the Darjean shooting. However, the person who stabbed the wear is known to the authorities. According to a memo released in the Times, the LA County District Attorney’s Office refused to file charges against him and found evidence of self-defense.
Ware’s sister and other relatives disputed the DA’s decision, claiming that authorities did not fully investigate.
“The system failed him,” Carter said.
Without arrests and accusations, Carter and her family simmered in anger, sadness and frustration. With more resources available to digital footprints, DNA testing and police now available now than ever, how about people who took their loved ones still walking freely?
Jessica Carter, right, lights a candle on the sidewalk to commemorate her younger brother, Richard Ware, who was stabbed to death outside a nearby homeless shelter.
(Robert Gautier/Los Angeles Times)
In the case of Darjean, the investigation will be led by the LA County Sheriff’s Office. The LA County Sheriff has been patrolling Compton since 2000, when the city dissolved its own police station. It seems there is a shortage of leads. His body was found in the back seat of his car and was plagued by bullets. The father of three had just returned home late at night from one of his job as a security guard.
For his mother, Sherina Lewis, it seemed that the world would soon forget about it and move on. The press mostly ignored filming. Social media has made it sensational. She couldn’t resist reading some of the comments online. We speculated whether her son was killed by someone he knew, or because of his race and gang affiliation.
But Dajang was not a gangster, she says. Certainly there have been rumors around the neighborhood about escalating conflicts between the Cedar Brock Pyros, black gangs and Latino rivals. But if anything, her son targeted classic cases of the wrong place, the wrong time, Lewis said.
Jesse Darjean in an indefinite photo.
(Jessica Carter)
When the murder detective began knocking on the door for answers, her ex-neighbor claimed she saw nothing. For Lewis, it felt like a betrayal – many of those neighbors were watching Darjean grow up with his children.
“Every day I have to ask God to lift the stiffness of my heart, because I’m angry,” Lewis said. “They are not going to make my son get a cold, I promise you that.”
Lewis almost lost Dajang once before at the moment of his birth.
He and his twin brothers were born three months earlier, and doctors warned that Dargent was unlikely to survive. He was dependent on respiratory equipment because he was suffering from respiratory problems. The prognosis was dark.
Casha, left, and her brother Jesse Darjean as a baby.
(Jessica Carter)
The doctor asked her “name on his death certificate” in case he died on his way to a hospital in Long Beach. Choosing “Jesse” on the spot was painful, she said. In the end, Darjian was a surviving twin.
As a child, he grew up to be extroverted and resourceful. I love cooking soul food, making dance videos with my sister and posting them on Instagram. His brother left as he grew older, but Darjean insisted that he would remain placed. Compton was at home, but he once told his mother. He was not blinded to gang violence, but he came to know another aspect of the city, what represents black joy and resilience.
When his nie ran for Miss Teen Compton, Dargent claimed on her behalf by pulling out a full-page ad in a local newspaper that declared “Compton is the best city on the planet.”
But Dargent knew the pain of losing a loved one. His friend Montae Talbert was killed late in 2011 on a drive-by filming outside the Inglewood liquor store. Talbert, known as M-Bone, was a member of the rap group Cali Swag District, the group behind the viral lap dance “Dougie.”
At about the same time, Dajang’s eldest son’s mother was shot in Compton. A few years later, another uncle, Terry Carter, is a businessman who built a classic lowrider car and started a record label with Ice Cube, and is hit and killed by a vehicle driven by the rap Impreza Rio Marion “Suge” Knight.
After Dahjan’s funeral, where Lewis said he had pulled over 1,000 people, she returned to the scene of the shooting: Brazil Street, right next to Wilmington Avenue, on the modest block of stucco and wooden house home.
With the bravery of an angry and sad mother, she began a door-to-door visit in her old neighbourhood, seeking answers. She wanted to show anyone who saw that she was not threatened by silence.
As she confronts one of Darjean’s close childhood friend about what happened, he vows to know nothing. She didn’t believe him.
“He just cried and broke. I can say it’s eating him,” Lewis said.
The LA County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to multiple inquiries regarding the Darjean incident.
Jesse Darjean holds his daughter Jessica. On the right is another relative.
(Jessica Carter)
On one level, Lewis understands hesitant. The fear of gang retaliation and mistrust of law enforcement still lies in West Compton’s neighborhood. After raising six children there, in 2006 she sold her family home for 50 years and moved to Palmdale because she didn’t want her “children to be used to death.” For her, the final straw was the discovery of a body “supported” by a neighbor’s fence, she said.
Like the black woman before her, Lewis faces great pressure to carry the burden on her family. Keisha Bentley-Edwards, an associate professor of medicine at Duke University, possessing the superhuman will to overcome adversity is celebrated by society in terms such as “Black Girl Magic” and “Strong Black Woman.” But these unrealistic expectations, she said, not only deprive black women of their innocence from an early age, but also contribute to pregnancy-related mortality and other bad health outcomes.
“Most of the time, people expect black women to take care of it,” Bentley Edwards said in an interview. Instead of making the struggle romantic, she said, there should be “specific support like housing and employment” and other resources.
But experts say the safety net is at risk, especially after the Trump administration ended around $801 million in public safety subsidies in LA and other major cities in April. The result was cut in federal funding for victim services programs, which provide counseling and other resources.
Lewis didn’t think she was in such a position to need help.
“The interesting thing is, we are from a Compton-born and raised, but it wasn’t statistical until our son was murdered,” she said. “My kids had two parents’ households. We both worked. We were not in welfare. I worked every day.”
In the months of being arrested for Dajang’s death, his aunt Carter was led to “dark places.” She took a spiritual retreat in the mountains of Nigeria.
She was still working through feelings of anger and guilt when she learned that her brother Ware had been fatally stabbed on July 5th.
She described the days and weeks that continued as a blur of tears. Coming from the nurse’s family, she taught her how to push and train her own grief away, but she wondered how much she could endure.
Wal, who went to Duke, was an informal historian of his family, mapped the vast Portuguese and Creole roots and sought the internet for long-standing relatives. He was always bragging about his daughter, who graduated from nursing school and returned to the Los Angeles area to work in the West Side pediatric intensive care unit. He was joking about all his shortcomings as a father, but he had at least one thing right.
However, in the last few months, Ware’s life has begun to spiral. His diabetes got worse, and a back injury prevented him from continuing his job as a long-distance truck driver. The relatives were worried that he was hiding his drug addiction from them.
He had adopted a bull mastiff puppy named Nala. She was chasing him everywhere, but usually a few steps behind without a leash. Even when he was struggling to interact, he always “spoiled her,” his family said.
For several months he lived from a van that one of his sisters bought for him. He then landed at the shelter, a hangar-style structure at the edge of Griffith Park. He and Nara were kicked out after a while, but he still visited the area frequently, and that is where he said the battle that ended with his murder began.
Prosecutors said in the memo the surveillance video showed Ware and his dog chasing another man into the parking lot across from the shelter. Memo from the DA said the two men were probably involved in an ongoing conflict against women.
Richard Ware’s friends, family and supporters gather near the shelter, where he is stabbed to death.
(Robert Gautier/Los Angeles Times)
According to the memo, the man said Ware had carried a knife due to a previous argument that ordered the dog to attack. On the day of the stab wound, the man said Ware appeared in the shelter with Nala and was looking for a conflict.
After the fight, the corresponding officers find a suspect hiding in a warehouse, a nala, a narrator, and a nearby Portapotti, suffering from a deep wound on his chest. His clothes were torn apart and he had been bleeding heavily from some severe dog bites, the memo said. Prosecutors said the witnesses, in addition to the video footage, supported the man’s story of Ware as an invader.
Ware’s family says the accounts are inconsistent with what they’ve heard from other residents. Other residents claimed that Ware was protecting himself after the other man attacked him with a bottle of vodka. In the meantime, they are working to ensure Nala’s release from the pound.
Richard Ware, 48, was stabbed to death on July 5th outside a Ross Ferris homeless shelter.
(Jessica Carter)
On July 8th, Carter organized a candlelight vigil for his brother outside the shelter where the murder took place. That morning, she said, she cried in the shower before washing herself, so she could run to the Dollar Tree Shop to pick up some balloons.
When she reached the vigil, Lewis greeted a group of relatives holding homemade signs and chanted the name of Ware. After the final prayer, the group released balloons. Most of them floated upwards in the lazy evening wind. However, some were caught up in large tree branches nearby.
Carter’s faces finally crossed as she headed for them. She took it as a sign from the wear, as if he had said his final goodbye before departing for heaven.
“He’s trying to stick,” she said.
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