Behind The Gates 2: A Post Apocalyptic Survival Thriller by Bobby Akart

Author:Bobby Akart [Akart, Bobby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-SIX

Monday

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department

Homicide Division

It was the start of the week. To be sure, the homicide division of any major city was inundated with new case files on Mondays. In Chicago, for example, on any given weekend, forty plus would be shot and half a dozen killed. LA had similar numbers. The previous Friday night, however, would go down as the deadliest since the Rodney King riots of 1992 when sixty-three people died during protests. Thus far, law enforcement in LA had received reports of seventy-one homicides.

To help, the governor of California activated the National Guard in the region. Already stretched to capacity statewide due to the other power outages and the massive storms sweeping across the northern half of the state, guardsmen did all they could to protect the government properties during the power outage. They were not fully mobilized until daybreak, when the power was restored.

As for the homicide detectives, they were unsure of where to start. Many of the murders were gang-related, so those cases were punted to the gang task force. The remainder inexplicably got the mayor’s office involved.

At the behest of the governor, the mayor was asked to put pressure on law enforcement officials to protect those who had been killed in underserved communities as well as the refugees, the displaced individuals seeking shelter from the chaos taking place in the Bay Area and nearby parts of Northern California. For that reason, any killings that took place along Interstate 5, U.S. 101, and the Pacific Coast Highway were included in the list of priorities.

Detectives were reviewing the cases when the death of a man within the affluent, well-known community of the Colony caught their attention. LaRon Johnson, a native Angeleno who grew up in South Central LA, reviewed the police reports related to the incident. There were a few witness statements obtained by the deputies who responded to a 911 call made by Lee Wong, a detective on the Interagency Gang Task Force. Johnson didn’t know Wong, but he made a mental note to reach out to the man to determine what he could add to the reports, as he noticed Wong had not been interviewed by the deputies who responded to the call.

There were several aspects about the case that troubled Johnson. The missing weapon was one. The fact that the victim had not broken into any of the homes in the Colony was another. While one home was clearly riddled with shotgun pellets, there was nothing that tied the weapon to the victim.

Then there was the matter of vigilante justice. The vigilante self-assigns the role of judge, jury and executioner, deciding who is breaking the law and exacting their own form of punishment without oversight of the criminal justice system. Further, Johnson knew from personal experience, vigilante violence disproportionately harmed marginalized communities like South Central LA.

Johnson believed America’s history of terrorizing the black community with lynchings and other violence was a prime example of vigilantism’s racist roots. A lynching was designed to send a message of unacceptable behavior to others.

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