The trial is over and the jurors have gone home, so I guess it’s safe for me to tell you about the incident at the Compton courthouse that I alluded to in this post.
I suppose it’s really nothing that unusual: a shooting in Compton. I found it worth mentioning because it happened just outside the courthouse where I work, at 9:05 a.m. last Friday morning.
A gang prosecutor down the hall had a sentencing on Friday, in a case in which one man had been murdered, and another had been shot and badly injured. As I understand it, the sister-in-law of one of the victims (the man who was shot but lived) came to court Friday to be heard at the sentencing. She was on Acacia Avenue, waiting in line to park her car, when her back windshield was blown out by gunfire. A strike mark from a bullet was found on her steering wheel in the two o’clock position.
She wasn’t struck, but it’s an absolute miracle that she wasn’t killed.
One of our paralegals was in a car right in front of her.
It’s unknown whether the shooting was related to the sentencing. It could have been coincidence; a bystander caught in crossfire. This is Compton, after all.
The police collected numerous shell casings on Acacia Ave. about 100 feet south of Myrrh Street, the street that runs just south of the courthouse. (That’s right in front of the entrance gate to Compton High School, by the way.) I had driven by that precise spot about 45 minutes earlier.
At the time of the shooting, I wasn’t at the courthouse. I was with a Sheriff’s Deputy about 3 miles away, taking photographs at the scene of the crime in the case I was about to try (possession of a firearm by a gang member). But the expert on my gang case ended up being a primary investigator in the shooting, which is how I learned the above facts.
My jurors were questioned about their knowledge (if any) of the incident. A couple of members of the jury knew that there had been some sort of incident involving the police on Acacia. These jurors had been required to change their route to get to the parking structure because the police had blocked off Acacia, between Alondra Blvd. and the courthouse parking lot entrance. But these jurors didn’t know what had happened, and were instructed not to discuss the matter with other jurors.
As a result, I decided not to blog about it until the trial was over.
Hardly worth writing about, right? No story ever appeared in the L.A. Times. It’s just another shooting in Compton.
Dog bites man.