No Matter How Loud I Shout (50 page)

Despite a premature arrest, the case against Hugh had at first seemed more open-and-shut than Leon Jones's. The investigators from the Inglewood Police Department had determined that the same two guns used in the drive-by that killed two-year-old Kyiara Nicole had also been used to kill fourteen-year-old Tila French and to wound two of her friends as they stood on a street corner.

More importantly for the state's case, two of the ten junior high students who had been standing with Tila on that corner when the bullets started flying eventually told police they were sure that one of the shooters was Hugh. Yes, they had initially told police they couldn't ID the killer, but
they had changed their minds about that after a few days. Now they were sure he had been the one who marched up to Tila and said, “You're not going anywhere, bitch,” then killed her with three shots. They knew Hugh from school, they added, and had always steered clear of him because he was so crazy.

When you say crazy, the cops had asked, you really are trying to say he was mean, right? The last thing they wanted was to set up an insanity plea. Under this prodding, the kids readily agreed that's what they meant to say: He was mean.

“Why would he want to kill a fourteen-year-old girl?” Peggy Beckstrand asked later on, during her first briefing with detectives on the case. One of the detectives was young and smooth-faced; the other was a big redhead who chomped on a soggy cigar throughout the meeting, though he never lit it.

“Well, she was in the arms of another guy, all kissing and hugging, and the other guy was from a rival gang,” the cigar-chomper explained. “Hugh was jealous.”

Hugh was part of a tagging crew called EWF, which was aligned with the Rolling Sixties Crips, one of the toughest street gangs in LA, the cops told Peggy confidently. The kid kissing Tila was from the Inglewood Bloods, the Crips' mortal enemies, the detectives explained.

“He shot her face off,” the redhead said, the cigar wagging in his mouth as he gritted his teeth. “It was one of the most brutal murders I've ever seen.”

Peggy grimaced. This was the kind of case she wanted done perfectly. They had to nail this monster . . . “Can the mother of the baby that was killed ID him?” she asked. “I'd like to charge him with both murders if we can.”

The two detectives nodded in tandem. They hadn't actually done a lineup yet, but they knew she would do it, they promised.

“Good,” Peggy said. She paused a moment, then asked, “By the way, what does EWF stand for?”

A grim smile crept over the detectives' faces. The young one said, “Every Woman's Fantasy.”

“God,” Peggy said, running over a checklist with the cops on what they had to do before busting Hugh. “Let's get this guy.”

But then the police stumbled on Hugh when they went to search his home, and he was arrested before Peggy had given the okay and before the checklist had been completed. Immediately, the case began to seem
less substantial than she had been led to believe. The prosecutor assigned to try it, Kevin Yorn, from the DA's hard-core unit, which handles major gang crimes, felt confident, but Peggy began harboring doubts. She found out that one reason the Inglewood detectives were in such a rush to make an arrest—in addition to the enormous pressure from the chief and the public chafing under a citywide curfew and crackdown—had to do with vacation plans. One of them had reservations to go abroad, and didn't want to lose his airfare.

When Greg Humphries looked at the police reports, he saw more reasons for doubts.

He saw the police had first heard the name “Hugh” several days after the killings from a kid named Marcus. Marcus was positive Hugh had done the shooting, he told the police. He didn't actually see anything, but his good friend Martell saw it all, and had told him crazy Hugh was the shooter.

The police then went to see fourteen-year-old Martell, who was absolutely positive that Hugh was the killer. Martell wasn't actually there, of course, but he had heard all about it. Hugh was a gang member and crazy and always high on drugs, Martell told the police. (This comment, uncorroborated and, it turns out, untrue, was what led the detectives to assure Peggy Beckstrand that Hugh was a hard-core Rolling Sixties member.) Martell knew all this, he told the police, because his friends Donte and Steve saw it all and told him Hugh did it. The word was all over school.

So the police followed the chain of schoolyard rumor to Donte and Steve. Donte assured the police he knew nothing. Steve, a convicted armed robber at age fifteen, had been on the street corner and was questioned right after the shooting by officers. (He was the boy Peggy would later rush to keep apart from Hugh in the courthouse holding tank.) At that time, Steve said he had ducked behind a car at the first gunshot, and had seen only the killer's feet. Days later, Steve said he believed the killer of Tila French had been his schoolmate Hugh because he recognized the shooter's distinctive haircut. Under intense prodding by detectives. Steve later amended this new story by saying he had seen Hugh's face, too.

Steve's girlfriend then came forward and said she had been present at the shooting as well, and that she, too, had recognized Hugh as one of the killers.

Though the police represented these witnesses as convincing, Humphries saw from the police reports just how the story had been passed from one kid to the next, a rumor about Hugh that spread throughout the
school and the neighborhood until, finally, two witnesses suddenly came forward who had previously known nothing. As the lawyer investigated further, he learned that the two kids who first pointed the police toward Hugh, Martell and Marcus, had had several clashes with Hugh in the past. And the two new witnesses who identified Hugh as the shooter turned out to be their friends, and to have had their own run-in with Hugh, accusing him of stealing an electronic pager from them two days before the shooting. The lawyer saw in this a ready motive on the part of the two witnesses to assume the worst about Hugh, if not to lie outright.

Humphries also learned that, contrary to the detectives' assurances to Peggy Beckstrand, the mother of two-year-old Kyiara Nicole could not identify Hugh as the shooter. She never was able to identify anyone as the killer of her daughter, and so Hugh was charged only with the killing of Tila French and the wounding of two other kids on the corner that night.

And as for Hugh being “crazy”—which the police had interpreted as meaning violent and cruel—it turned out kids at school had teased him for being “crazy” because of his odd behavior a year earlier. A year before his arrest for murder, he had developed uncontrollable urges to smash windows—at home, at businesses, and at school. Hugh had been on probation at the time for graffiti, and when the window-breaking started, his mother kept calling his probation officer for help. But she could never get through. One day, Sharon Stegall picked up the phone instead of Hugh's regular PO, heard the desperation in the woman's voice, and agreed to go help. He had just broken twenty-five windows in the space of an hour, his mother said. When Sharon went to his house to talk to him, Hugh pleaded, “Miss Stegall, please help me.”

She got him into a program that helped him control his behavior and changed his life. He returned to school and got a steady job in the evenings. Later, he called Sharon up and said, “I just wanted to thank you, Miss Stegall. You saved my life.”

“I'll tell you this,” Sharon said after she heard Hugh had been arrested in the Inglewood murder case, “that boy's no hardcase gangbanger, and he's no killer.”

The final blow to the police case came when attorney Humphries traveled seventy miles north to the city of Oxnard, where Hugh had sworn he was selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door at the time of the murders. Hugh and his family had told the police this after his arrest, but they had not checked it out. Had they done so, they would have learned, as Humphries did, that not only did Hugh's boss verify his alibi, but there
were also receipts from his door-to-door sales, and three new customers, who had met him for the first time that night, and who swore Hugh had been there at the time of the shootings. One of these witnesses who bought a subscription from Hugh was a respected employee of the California Youth Authority facility in nearby Ventura. These people were unbiased and unimpeachable, with no reason to lie.

At this point, Humphries tells prosecutors what he has learned, turning over the names and addresses of these witnesses so detectives could question them. By then, the trial prosecutor, Kevin Yorn, has joined Peggy Beckstrand in expressing doubts about the case, but the police resist unsolving the worst murder spree in Inglewood history, insisting that Hugh was their man and that his alibi witnesses had to be part of a conspiracy. When they grudgingly go to check the story out, they accuse the boy's employer of being a lying pedophile, then approach the alibi witnesses in Oxnard by asking whether Hugh had offered them a bribe to lie on his behalf.

“It's such a high-pressure case, they won't back down,” Humphries complains to Deputy DA Yorn. “But he's a genuinely innocent kid who could be convicted of a terrible crime while the real murderers remain free. It's scary.”

With a hearing imminent on shipping Hugh to adult court, Humphries demands the prosecution first demonstrate it had probable cause to keep him in custody. Yorn could easily prevail—only the state has the right to put on evidence at such hearings—but the prosecutor agrees to let Humphries put sworn affidavits on the record from his three alibi witnesses. When Judge Scarlett compares the prosecution case with what the defense lawyer has assembled, he says there is no contest—and no case. He finds no probable cause to believe Hugh a murderer, orders him released, and sends him home with his jubilant mother, aunt, brothers, and sisters. A detective on the case sits in the old jury box in Scarlett's courtroom, watching them celebrate, then bitterly denounces the juvenile justice system as insane, predicting Hugh will end up killing someone else within the week. “Wait and see. More people are going to die.”

Instead, about a week later, the two witnesses who had accused Hugh begin to waffle. Steve is doing time in camp for a probation violation by this time, and has had more time to think about his testimony. Maybe they had been mistaken after all, he and his girlfriend admit. Then the police concede that Hugh has nothing to do with the Rolling Sixties Crips, either, and that EWF is just a band of geeky graffiti artists that Hugh rarely sees anymore, now that he is so busy trying to make money with his door-
to-door sales. In the end, the police have to admit they were wrong about Hugh, that they had tried to send an innocent boy to adult court to face a life sentence in prison. He really had been selling magazine subscriptions when Tila French and Kyiara Nicole died, they say. Peggy Beckstrand orders the charges dismissed against Hugh.

The Inglewood Police Department, which had announced Hugh's arrest in the sensational case with such fanfare, makes no press releases about Hugh's release a month later, or the fact that the case remains unsolved to this day.

“Hugh's case is a classic example of how the cops put in less energy working cases for Juvenile Court. They did a rotten job,” Peggy Beckstrand says after dropping the case. “But that wasn't immediately clear. If he had had a less able defense attorney, we might never have learned the truth. Hugh would have landed in adult court, and he probably would have been convicted. It's that simple. In a way, though, this case is an example of the system working. The checks and balances did what they were supposed to. Justice was done, right here in Juvenile Court.”

She thinks about it a moment, then adds, “Thank God.”

·  ·  ·

Incredibly, in the same month that murder charges were disproved against Hugh and Leon, the same thing happens in yet another murder case, another client of Sherry Gold's, another boy charged with a murder he did not commit.

This time at stake is the life of a fourteen-year-old neophyte gang member whose apt nickname is Shy Boy. He is a quiet, dark-haired kid with large eyes who does well in school, who has never been in trouble before, but who desperately wants to emulate the older gangsters he admires, the homeboy heroes who have respect in his eyes. Unlike Leon, with his agonizing history as a foster child, Shy Boy comes from a solid home and family; his mother, as soon as she learned her son had secretly joined a gang, put him on a strict curfew and began taking special parenting classes offered at the local police station to help steer her boy clear of trouble.

But Shy Boy had attached himself to a particularly violent Hispanic gang in a neighborhood miles from his own home, the Venice 13. And just when Shy Boy joined, Venice 13 had gone to war with an equally violent African-American gang, the Shoreline Crips. Both gangs claimed the same turf, the scarred and bedraggled Oakwood section of the beach-side community of Venice—along with exclusive rights to the lucrative Venice street drug trade. This gang war soon escalated into a vicious racial
struggle that spilled over into the community at large, claiming innocent victims. Drive-bys, firebombings, and other armed assaults between the two gangs had taken twelve lives in the space of three months. Six others were wounded, a home had been torched, countless lives endangered and threatened. Seven other Oakwood residents, with no gang membership and no reason to be attacked except for the color of their skin and the fact that they were ready targets on the sidewalk, had been shot at in Oakwood by one faction or another. In an even more ominous turn, so had four LAPD officers, though none had as yet been hit. But computer-generated flyers had been found posted around Oakwood, urging residents to provide safe havens in their homes to any gangsters heroic enough to kill a cop. Oakwood had become a shooting gallery, and Shy Boy was in the middle of it, prized by the Venice 13 because his age conferred upon him a certain invulnerability. Fourteen-year-olds in California still stayed in Juvenile Court, even for murder. Desperate to please, Shy Boy was a valuable tool to the older gangbangers.