Chase Darkness with Me by Billy Jensen

Author:Billy Jensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2019-07-11T21:11:51+00:00

11.

The Halloween Mask Murder

El Monte, 2016

In the six months since I had started on this social media murder-solving quest, I had gotten one solve (Marques Gaines’s attacker in Chicago), one found missing person (Mariah in California), one assist on a murder investigation (getting the ID of Joseph Santillan, the final suspect in the Nashville murder of Teddy Grasset), and a handful of cases where I was pretty sure I had identified the suspect but police didn’t have enough to make an arrest (Pacman’s killer in Chesapeake, White Boy Q’s killer in Tallahassee, Danielle and Sheila’s killer and potential accomplices in Humboldt). And then there were the cases that I was striking out on. Dozens of them. Random shootings and hit-and-runs across America.

I knew I was hitting the right neighborhoods, and I knew people with information were seeing the videos or sketches of the killers, but the “no snitch” ethos pervades many communities. On top of fears of reprisal, when you are in a community that has been fucked over by the actions of a few bad police officers, the ripple effects are massive.

In October 2004, seven Milwaukee police officers sadistically beat Frank Jude Jr. outside an off-duty police party. The Journal Sentinel newspaper in Milwaukee investigated the crime and published photos of Jude taken right after the beating. The officers were convicted, and some reforms were put in place. But the city saw an unexpected side effect. Calls to 911 dropped dramatically—twenty-two thousand less than the previous year. You know what did rise? The number of homicides—eighty-seven in the six months after the photos were published, a seven-year high.

That information comes from a 2016 study done by Matthew Desmond, an associate social sciences professor at Harvard University and New York Times bestselling author of Evicted. He told the Journal Sentinel that a case like Jude’s “tears the fabric apart so deeply and delegitimizes the criminal justice system in the eyes of the African-American community that they stop relying on it in significant numbers.”

With shootings of unarmed civilians being captured on cell phones and shared on the internet, the distrust of the police is not relegated to that local community. The stories of the high-profile wrongful death cases of Tamir Rice in Cleveland or Eric Brown in New York spread fast across the country. We were in a worse place than we were twenty years earlier, when the vicious police officer beating of Rodney King went unpunished and Los Angeles went up in flames. It meant more and more crimes would go unsolved because the police were just not trusted. Why risk your life telling an organization about a crime when you think that members of that organization are out to get you? And how can that ever change?

Those were the thoughts rattling around in my head when I exited the I-110 freeway in downtown Los Angeles and headed toward the Hall of Justice. I was meeting with the Los Angeles sheriffs, hoping to find cases to cover for Crime Watch Daily.

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