Monsters That Still Haunt on Halloween

In a couple of weeks, it will be Halloween again.

For one night, small apparitions will haunt the sidewalks, bent on the begged loot of candy bars. Their shrieks will be at the delight of a large treat landing unexpectedly in their bags.

Three Halloweens ago, the screams were real. The fear, the blood were real.

The monsters were real.

Three Pasadena boys, barely teenagers, trick or treating their way home from a party, were mistaken for gang members, ambushed and murdered. Three of their friends were wounded. And three men convicted of killing the boys wait to learn whether a jury will send them to their deaths or to live in prison until death comes to them.

Stephen Coats and Reggie Crawford were both 14 when they died. Edgar Evans--Eddie--was 13. The essay that won him third place in a Martin Luther King Jr. Day contest ended with an earnest plea that the three greatest commandments of the 10 should be raised up on billboards: “Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and love thy neighbor as thyself.”

At 13 and 14, male humans are either still boys or already, in social worker parlance, “youths,” sometimes prefaced by “troubled.” The dead were obviously boys; the three convicted of murdering would have carried the label “youths,” and clearly troubled. At the age he could get a driver’s license, one already had a gun. One stole a car while still a teenager. One committed two assaults in the California Youth Authority where he had been sent for undisclosed transgressions.

Pasadena’s police chief called it the city’s most promising killed by its most lost.

The promise got blown away. The lost are still no less so.

*

In a couple of weeks, it will be Halloween again. Only the jar of black and orange candies atop the court reporter’s desk marks the coming holiday.

Otherwise, Judge J.D. Smith’s courtroom is duplicated on every floor, same paneling and linoleum, same torpid air, same black robes and tan uniforms. A court is like escrow for crime, where neutral parties stand between the two concerned ones, to levy dispassionate judgment in lieu of revenge.

Had that happened three years ago--had two crimes gone to court instead of to the streets--three boys would be alive. A gang member had been killed earlier that Halloween night, a payback for an earlier shooting, and the dying man’s “associates” plotted revenge outside the hospital emergency room. “To get some back for that. . . . To kill a Crip,” one defendant testified, while denying anything to do with the boys’ murders.

(These cannot have been the easiest clients. When an earlier jury adjudged them guilty of murder, one blew the F-word at them like spittle. Another--who a reporter had heard hiss angrily at his mother after her sympathetic testimony that he had been a bed wetter--threw his gang sign at the dead boys’ families.)

A defense attorney no longer on the case had told the jury that convicted these three that “no matter how thin the pancake, there are two sides.”

This week, in the women’s bathroom near the courtroom, a supporter of one of the convicted trio demanded of me, “Are you going to write both sides, or just one?”

At this stage, what is the other side to three murdered boys, except the vast, foggy defense of the failings of society, schools, government--travails that Eddie Evans wrote in his essay.

It is an argument that contains the seeds of its own contradiction, every time an Eddie Evans grows up bright and hopeful in the same neighborhoods that produce Lorenzo Alex Newborn, 25, Herbert Charles McClain Jr., 26, or Karl Holmes, 20.

Newborn’s attorney, Carl Jones, was more forthright: “There’s no winner here. If they get death, the [dead boys’] relatives don’t win, and the defendants don’t win with life. The D.A.’s talked about three deaths. What we have is six deaths.”

*

The last thing Stephen and Kenny Coats’ mother told her boys that Halloween night was that “they couldn’t eat any candy until Mommy checked the bags.”

Such was the terror of Halloweens past. Razor blades in the apples, straight pins in the cupcakes. The pleasure of giving out homemade treats ended when hospitals began X-raying Halloween hauls.

Costumes caught fire until the law made them fire retardant. Then it was masks that blocked a kid’s vision, and we went to face paint.

After a while, I began giving away bright pencils and new dimes. Eventually, kids stopped coming to my door at all--attending instead, I presumed, safe, sponsored parties, like the ones Pasadena has staged since the boys died.

The pleasure of Halloween was its pretend danger, the delicious knowing that at the scariest moment, the mask could come off and there was no vampire, just the neighbor. It never occurred to us to worry--nor should we have to--whether the vampire really is the neighbor.