Los Angeles County, where scores of people die at the hands of others each year, there is a haven that for years has known no murder.

For the last three years, no homicides have occurred in a remarkable patch of South Los Angeles. Measuring a mile wide from Hoover Street to Halldale Avenue and stretching from 73rd to 85th Street, it is an island encircled by the harsh realities of life in the urban core: One cannot walk a block outside its borders without coming across the site of a killing from the last three years.
The odd calm of the area is more striking when compared with a same-sized tract a mile directly to the south. There, on the grid of streets between 101st and 112th streets, 28 people were slain in the same time period. It is one of the deadliest neighborhoods in the county.These two starkly disparate realities were detected as part of The Times' ongoing effort to chronicle every homicide victim in Los Angeles County each year. On its website, the newspaper today launched a new version of the Homicide Report, which now allows readers to view the locations of homicides on maps, as well as analyze killings by various demographic factors. It is based on coroner's data and Times' reporting from the start of 2007 to the present.

The visual cues in the area that has been spared bloodshed, which is situated within the Vermont Knolls neighborhood, speak volumes. Most streets are lined with modest but appealing single-family houses. Frontyards often have no fences, the lawns are green and well-maintained. On recent days, a man meticulously swept the grass clippings off the sidewalk and young children rode scooters and bicycles without a parent to be seen.

There are some obvious reasons why this slice of Vermont Knolls is different. Over the last decade, an effort by the city and private investors has jump-started a rehabilitation of the commercial corridor along Vermont Avenue. Derelict buildings have slowly found tenants, pushing out people who once loitered and caused trouble, said Marqueece Harris-Dawson, president and chief executive of the Community Coalition, an influential advocacy group in the area.

Also, in the heart of the area is the Crenshaw Christian Center, a mega-church that occupies the old Pepperdine University campus stretching from Vermont to Normandie Avenue. The center dominates the landscape and serves as a hub for social activities and community outreach programs.

But other factors further separate the neighborhood from its more violent surroundings -- advantages that Harris-Dawson and others said cannot be easily repeated elsewhere.

The area is home, he said, to a generally older group of residents. The predominance of single-family homes instead of apartments means a less densely packed population and less turnover. And many in the neighborhood own their homes and have had roots in the area for generations.

The result is a place where people know each other, have an emotional and financial investment and don't take kindly to anything that might disturb the peace.

"We gently urge people to get the outside of their homes together. And if they don't keep them nice we'll send them a little note," said Lawrence Koonce Sr., who has lived on 81st Street for 43 years and is president of the local neighborhood watch group.

"People keep an eye out," he added, saying that residents have built close ties to the Los Angeles Police Department officers who patrol the area. Koonce, 64, recalled a neighbor who watched a suspicious-looking stranger knocking on doors a few weeks ago and called police when the person tried to break into a house.

And, for years, police have targeted the Hoover gang, the predominant criminal group in the area. Most recently, in July 2007, a yearlong LAPD investigation resulted in the arrest of 18 Hoover members suspected in an array of violent crimes. The clique had been using as a base the home of one member's grandmother in Vermont Knolls.

"Sometimes we fall asleep with the doors unlocked because it's so comfortable," said resident Marlene Turner.

A mile to the south, in the section of the Westmont neighborhood where 28 killings have occurred, residents live with no such sense of safety.

Densely packed, dreary apartment buildings catering to renters with Section 8 government subsidy vouchers are squeezed next to rundown houses that often have additional apartments added on. Real estate signs in front of boarded-up homes advertise foreclosure sales by banks. Street corners are dotted with liquor stores, coin-op laundries or small churches. The area, in many ways, is a cliche of urban blight.

On a recent day, two mothers sat perched on a cinder block wall keeping close watch over their children as they played on the sidewalk below. It was the same corner where Keith Orange, a 45-year-old black man, was shot to death a year ago, and a block away from seven other recent killings. Nearby, a group of several young black men sat on a stoop drinking from bottles of malt liquor. It is the type of place where a well-meaning resident greeted a reporter with the warning, "You shouldn't be here."

The level of violence is far less today than in the early 1990s, when the crack cocaine epidemic pushed homicide rates to more than double current numbers. The area, however, is still deadly.

"Walk outside at night? Oh, no, no, no," said Evette Robinson, a waitress who has lived in the area with her two teenage daughters for nine years.
As many as 15 different gangs vie for control of the streets in the three-quarter's of a square mile, and nearly all of the killings in the area are either known or suspected to be gang-related, said Chris Bergner, a sergeant in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's anti-gang unit, which struggles to control the neighborhood's streets. Gang territory can change from one block to the next and, unlike some neighborhoods where gangs fight to control drug sales on street corners, in this neighborhood there is relatively little drug dealing and blood is spilled over the smallest slights, whether real or perceived, Bergner and residents say."You've got these kids who just want to get a reputation, who kill just to be able to say they did it," said former gang member Ken Cunningham, who now owns a small plumbing company and ministers at a local church. "There's a mentality of 'When in Rome, we do as the Romans do.' "The victims in 21 of the 28 homicides were black men and women. Five were Latinos.Too often, said Bergner and other law enforcement officials, witnesses to killings and other violent crimes refuse to cooperate with police out of fear of retaliation from gangs. "You can know exactly who committed a murder, and it doesn't mean a thing because no one will say it aloud," Bergner said.
In interviews, several residents were largely supportive of gang injunctions in the area and other efforts by the Sheriff's Department, saying they wish for a greater police presence. But cops alone, many were quick to say, are not the solution. It is, they said, a neighborhood without any viable options to counter the pull of gangs. Unemployment is high and job training scarce. For youths, there is a dismal local high school, no parks, few after-school programs and little to do during the long summer months.
The killing of Joseph Watson stands as a sad reminder of such truths. The tall, quiet Washington Preparatory High School football player had tried to stay invisible to the gangs and follow the path of his stepfather, Jessie Adams, a retired cop. Whenever gang members shot at the boy or jumped him, Adams encouraged Watson to hang on. "I'd tell him, 'Keep it up, just keep it up.' " Watson, 17, died on the sidewalk on Budlong Street from multiple gunshot wounds on a January night in 2007. Police suspect he was killed by a local gang member as punishment for his refusal to join.

Eric Zamarripa, 38, gang-related shooting was the first of three in Echo Park and Highland Park that left two people dead and one injured.

Eric Zamarripa, 38, gang-related shooting was the first of three in Echo Park and Highland Park that left two people dead and one injured. A suspected gang member was detained Monday in connection with the three shootings, as the Echo Park neighborhood where two of the shootings took place remained shaken.“It’s horrific,” said Susan Borden, 60, who has lived on Echo Park's Valentine Street for almost 30 years. “The fact that there were no innocent victims is amazing.”Borden and Chavez, 33, said the area has changed in recent years with more affluent people, young singles and trendy coffee shops moving in and with some Latino families, which had been there for decades, moving elsewhere. Chavez moved to Echo Park from Jalisco, Mexico, with his family when he was 17 and said it was “very, very rare” to have white people in the neighborhood in the 1990s. He said he began noticing the demographic shift about six years ago.The area used to be much more violent than it is now, Borden and Chavez said.“This is generally a fairly quiet neighborhood,” Borden said. “The neighborhood has changed radically, but there’s still some pockets” of violent activity.

Police said the three shootings were connected and gang-related. They began about 5 p.m. Sunday with shootings on Baxter Street and Echo Park Avenue. About a half-hour later, police said, the same man driving a black truck shot and killed Carlos Gonzalez, 37, in the 4300 block of Toland Way in Highland Park.

In a bizarre twist, police caught up with the suspected shooter in court. Andrew Upshaw, 33, was waiting Monday to appear before a judge on a single count of felony drug possession when police came into the downtown courtroom with their guns drawn and arrested him. He was being questioned by Los Angeles police, who expected to book him in connection with the shootings.Chavez, who works for the city’s Bureau of Sanitation, said that despite the shootings, he does not think his neighborhood is any more dangerous than most other places in L.A. Still, he did not want his two young children to know how his neighbor died. So he told them, “It’s a movie that somebody was filming.”Previous L.A. Now posts reported that the third shooting, on Toland Way, was in Glassell Park.

Mira Loma Detention Center rival gangs riot

The Tuesday started as a fight between detainees from rival gangs and spread to the detention center's outdoor yard, said Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Nearby sheriff's stations sent additional deputies to separate the detainees. The brawl was diffused "within minutes" after tear gas was used, said sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore. Fights among incarcerated gang members periodically break out at state jails, prisons and immigrant detention facilities, sometimes sparking riots. The federal Department of Homeland Security contracts with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department to staff and manage the Mira Loma Detention Center in Lancaster, which holds about 900 detainees who are in the process of being deported or awaiting resolution of their cases in immigration courts. Ten detainees were treated for injuries, including two who suffered serious head injuries. Sheriff's officials will evaluate how Mira Loma guards separate detainees based on gang affiliation, Whitmore said. About 45 detainees involved in the riot have been identified as suspected gang members and moved to other federal facilities.