A Memory of Distant Gunfire

He heard the shots through the blurred perspective of memory, as though they had come from the past and had nothing to do with the present.

They were sharp, popping sounds, and for a moment James Moore sat at the kitchen table, staring and trying to figure out if they were real.

It was late afternoon, and a pale sunlight washed the room with faint shadows. Food cooked on the stove of the tidy West Compton home. Traffic hummed on nearby Redondo Beach Boulevard.

The time required for Moore to separate reality from memory was the blink of an eye, but it seemed forever. When the separation occurred, it was a thunderclap.

Moore bolted out the back door, down the stairs and toward the fence, his brain reprocessing the echo of three gunshots, gauging their direction, placing his young son in the vicinity, screaming not again!

When he reached the fence he shouted, “Gregory!” and almost instantaneously saw his son and two companions on the ground . . . then rising and running toward him, unhurt.

Another drive-by shooting, his brain said.

Moore closed his eyes. It was then, he says, that it all came rushing back . . .

Three years ago, he and his wife, Ceola, were at the same kitchen table, having a last cup of coffee. It was 4 a.m. A night of family card playing had ended. The children were in bed.

“We were just sitting here talking,” Moore said. “All of a sudden, bam, bam! I turned to her and said, ‘Ceola, you hear that?’ ”

Moore’s wife of 20 years didn’t answer. One of two bullets fired at random toward their corner house had pierced her skull. She was brain dead by the time she slumped forward. She stopped breathing several hours later.

A drive-by shooting with no specific victim in mind, a bullet fired toward a light in a window, had claimed the wife Moore loved beyond measure.

“I was just getting over it,” he said the other day as we sat at the same kitchen table, “when the other shooting happened.”

He is a 50-year-old black man who could pass for 40. For the last 20 years he has worked as a lab technician at the B. F. Goodrich Chemical Co. Ceola had been a nursery school teacher and an active church member.

“All the emotions I felt when she was killed came back to me,” Moore said. “I felt grief and fear and anger. Now I’m just plain angry. This is no kind of life! What the hell is going on?”

It was the same question Moore asked when he called us, and the same question I asked as I drove through his neighborhood of neat homes and mowed lawns, of trimmed hedges and fresh paint.

Pride had gone into this neighborhood. Care had gone into it. A young man worked on his car. Children played under shade trees. Neighbors stopped to talk to each other. Stanford Street deserved better than gunfire.

“What kind of existence is it sitting here every day waiting for something to happen?” Moore said, nervously lighting a cigarette. “Everybody is sick of it. It’s getting like the Wild West.

“The kids are scared to death and beginning to carry guns for defense. But one thing leads to another. Where does defense end and offense begin? I wake up every night, listening . . . .”

Three of Moore’s children were living at home when he wife was killed. Dennis, 22, has since moved away. Gregory, 19, and Rhonda, 14, are still there.

Five gang members were arrested after the shooting two weeks ago. No one has ever been arrested in Ceola’s murder.

To the best of Moore’s knowledge, the shooting that took her life was the first in the neighborhood, but since then there have been at least three others, one of which wounded a young boy.

Gang graffiti proliferates on the edges of Stanford Street. Drug dealers clog Visalia Avenue.

“I’ve gone down there and watched them deal,” Moore said. “They’re blond and blue-eyed people, obviously not from around here. I’d take down license numbers and be more a vigilante, but suppose they track me down and go after my kids?”

Moore is trying to unite the neighborhood to somehow solve the problem. He’s asking for more random patrols by sheriff’s deputies, but he’s not sure they’re that interested in helping.

“The night my wife was killed,” he said, “I heard one of the detectives say, ‘Just another day in the ghetto.’ Does that sound like they care?”

James Moore won’t run. The house he has lived in for 10 years is the house his wife chose, and her memory is still bright. But the question he asks is the question we all ought to ponder.

Will it ever be safe again?