The funeral home in Lawndale was packed last month, with mourners spilling into the parking lot and onto nearby sidewalks to pay respects to 29-year-old Michael Hemphill III.

Hemphill, a security guard who left behind a 10-year-old daughter, was described by friends and family as a happy man who enjoyed life. Police don’t know much about his killing, except that he was shot in Watts, among a gathering of people.

Those who came to commemorate Hemphill described the persistent violence that shades their own lives.

“This should not be a custom,” the minister, Akela Wroten Jr., told the standing-room crowd. “We gotta protect one another.”

Vera Conner described her son, known as “Mike Mike,” as a happy-go-lucky man who continued hanging out with boyhood friends in the Nickerson Gardens housing development even after he moved away.

Shortly after 11 p.m. April 12, gunfire rang out at the gathering ...

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Allen Thomas grew up seeing Nipsey Hussle driving around his Vermont Slauson neighborhood.

The slain rapper was among those who inspired Allen to strive for more out of life.

In an essay, Allen, a senior at Crenshaw High School, wrote of growing up in poverty and witnessing gang violence.

“Every day I see people deal drugs and others who are there hanging out with their homies doing absolutely nothing,” he wrote.

He wanted to be different, to attend college and maybe even become a doctor, he said. He was killed March 16, three days before his 18th birthday.

Allen stood in a driveway in the 1200 block of West 57th Street when a sedan drove by and someone inside began shooting. He ran, but was struck and later died at a hospital.

Police have no suspects.

A few feet away, his grandmother heard the shots.

Patricia Williams, 73, said she ...

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It was in Jamie Baker’s nature to be helpful. So when she met Danny Jones, 49, at a family gathering last year and he told her he needed an in-home caretaker, she volunteered for the paid job.

Baker, a mother of two, traveled from Victorville to South L.A. for days at a time to care for Jones, a relative of her mother’s. But in recent months, she became afraid, her mother said.

Baker told her family that Jones padlocked the doors and would hold her captive. He’d take her phone and change the password.

“He had to be the one to let her in and out of the house,” said her mother, Lisa Baker.

Lisa Baker thinks that her daughter continued seeing Jones out of concern and because she wanted to trust him as family. But he was addicted to methamphetamines, she said, and tried to ...

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A $10,000 reward is being offered for information in the shooting death of a 22-year-old man who appears to be the victim of a “totally unprovoked” attack, officials said.

Gerardo Macias Hernandez, 22, was shot and killed shortly before midnight Saturday, March 16, in a Compton strip mall in the 2800 block of East Alondra Boulevard.

Earlier that night, Macias Hernandez was visiting with family when he heard a car accident and urged his family to go to the scene and help.

After Macias Hernandez, along with six others, left the scene of the accident, they went to get gas in a Chevy Tahoe. The Tahoe pulled into a strip mall about 11:30 p.m. and three vehicles drove slowly toward the Tahoe.

A person shot at Macias Hernandez from a dark-colored sedan and then sped off, authorities said.

Officials said that after reviewing video footage, the attack ...

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A one-time Palmdale resident who had been “couch-surfing” in Sunland before camping in Griffith Park the past few weeks has been arrested and charged in the Jan. 16 shooting that killed three men and wounded another on a remote, unlighted road in Palmdale.

Jonathan Paul Misirli, 35, was arrested around noon on April 30 as he walked out of Griffith Park on North Vermont Avenue, just north of Los Feliz Boulevard in Los Feliz, said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lt. Derrick Alfred.

Misirli, who is white, was arrested without incident, Alfred said.

Alfred said he couldn’t reveal the suspected motive for the shooting that killed three Los Angeles area men the cold, rainy night of Jan. 16 on Ranch Center Drive and 40th Street West in Palmdale, near an abandoned housing development that got platted but never built.

The dead men were identified as Olukayode A. Owolabi, 27 ...

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