Are Crime Victims Beneath the Law?
The plight of a Crime Victim, part 2
“The Journey begins”
It all began on a summer evening in July eighteen years ago when our 25 year old son advised his mother and me that he was going to a private party near our home being given for a friend that had recently joined the military. Our son Tom came home around 8PM after helping a friend’s sister move. Even though it has been 18 years I still remember vividly as though it was only a few hours ago that the evening began as nearly all other evenings had in the short twenty five years of Tom’s life and that was usual and for the most part uneventful.
At that time I was a business owner and our son was one of the company’s employee’s. Also, he was single and still lived at home with his mother and me. The last conversation I ever had with him was about business matters and the fact he was going to take his written examination and driver’s test at the DMV to get his commercial driver’s license.
After our conversation he showered and got dressed to go to the party. By this time it was around 9PM or perhaps a little later. He kissed his mother as he walked out the door and I without saying goodbye told him to be careful and if he drank at the party and felt he shouldn’t drive to call me and I would come and drive him and his truck home. It was only about 1-2 miles from our house to where the party was taking place. That was the last thing I ever said to my son as he walked out our front door never to return to our loving home again.
Our daughter was away at college at this time in another part of the state and she called us a few minutes after our son had left to tell us that she would not be at her apartment that evening as she was going to spend the evening with some friends staying overnight at their home. She called to give us their names and telephone numbers something both of our children had been trained to do and still did even though they were adults. By this time it was after 10PM so my wife and I went to bed and slept soundly through the night, unaware of what was happening or ever dreamed in our most horrible nightmares could happen perhaps was at the very same time we went to bed, our son was being murdered.
At approximately 7:30AM the next morning, a Sunday I was awakened by the ringing of our doorbell. My first thought after being awakened it was one of our son’s friends stopping by to pick him up to go surfing as he was an avid surfer. However and tragically that was not to be the case.
I put on my robe went to the front door of our home, glancing through the peephole so I could see who it was I saw two men dressed in suits that I did not recognize. They greeted me when I opened the door. They identified themselves as detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department. They asked me if I knew a person by our son’s name. I told them yes, I am his father. One of the detectives then informed me “he was sorry but my son had been shot and killed at a party the night before.” It seemed that a group of people arrived at the party that was not invited, an altercation had taken place and in the ensuing pandemonium shots had been fired which resulted in our son being shot and he died at the scene.
Obviously becoming quite emotional and in shock I regained my composure long enough to do what will be the second worst duty I will ever have to face in my life and that was to go to our bedroom and awaken my wife to tell her that our son was dead, he had been shot. I will never forget for as long as I live or am able to remember the screams of anguish from my wife as she clung to me as we went back into the living room to talk to the two detectives.
Since the party had taken place on a Saturday night and it was now early Sunday morning and no city offices were open the detective in charge handed me his business card, the keys to our son’s truck which was still parked at the scene where he was murdered. On the reverse side of his card he had written a file number issued by the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office where our son’s body had been taken and the coroner’s telephone number so we could contact them to make funeral arrangements.
Our son was dead, murdered; he was now a case and file number of the Los Angeles Police Department and the County Coroner’s office, only a few short hours before he was a vibrant, healthy and athletic handsome young man of 25 years of age, our loving son. He was now a number, just another to be added to the cold and brutal murder victim statistics. He was no longer our living son; he was now the property of the State of California, a case number to be assigned to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.
The next few hours and days are a blur in my wife, daughter and my mind’s as we were consumed with the task of notifying elderly grandparents, other relatives and friends of this enormous tragedy that had just occurred. We now had the task of making funeral arrangements, preparing an obituary which my wife or I were not prepared to write and probably wouldn’t have been able to do so had it not been for the help of my brother, sister-in-law and their two daughters that had arrived from the mid west. It was through their overwhelming, loving and unselfish support my wife, our daughter and I were able to survive the first step of this ordeal which had been cast upon us.
Our journey through life had just been detoured from happy and basically carefree members of society that were law-abiding who never considered ourselves as being above the law, to crime victim survivor’s now cast into the undesirable position of being in many respects as I will outline in future articles as being “beneath the law.”
Next: A Parent’s worst nightmare