Dispatch: A neighbor mourns teen he never met

-- Seth Laursen

One October night in 2008, Seth Laursen, a 30-year old Pepperdine University law student, was studying  at his Mid-City home when he heard what sounded like a rapid succession of gunshots. After the gunfire stopped, he stood on his porch and stared down at the end of the darkened street, listening.

It sounded like a fight; men screaming; incensed yelling, the breaking of glass.

Jayquan Dion Johnson, a 16-year old black youth, had been shot and killed while standing with friends outside his home near Pickford Street and Cloverdale Avenue. Laursen knew only that something bad had happened.

The paramedics and firemen must have been coordinating on their radios because they all jumped out of their vehicles at the same instant. I saw them load a stretcher into the ambulance and leave.

The following night, while walking his Shih-Tzu, Molly, Laursen took a blurry picture of the candles that had been placed at the scene of the shooting. He could only presume someone had been killed. At home, he uploaded the picture to his MySpace page and wrote:

I didn’t know him, but I mourn him

He asked his neighbors for details of the shooting just a handful of houses away from his, but they knew little. In January, more than a year after the shooting, Laursen came across The Times’ Homicide Report while reading about a high-profile murder in the Mid-Wilshire area. A link from the story to the interactive homicide map took Laursen to his Mid-City neighborhood. There he found the entry for Johnson.

I felt remorse and grieved for him. 16.

Laursen paused

That’s such a young age.

The facts were typical, like hundreds of shootings in L.A. County. Authorities said that on the night of Oct. 20, 2008, an unidentified vehicle drove up to Johnson and his friends and someone from inside began shooting at them. The group ran for cover, but Johnson was struck by a bullet. The vehicle then sped away, striking several parked cars, police said.

Johnson was taken by  paramedics to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. At the intersection where he was shot, police officers cornered off the crime scene with yellow tape as a helicopter circled above the Mid-City neighborhood.

According to the Los Angeles Times’ homicide interactive map, there were 880 homicide cases reported in 2008. About 70 were reported the same month when Johnson was killed, including seven other teenagers who, like Johnson, were also fatally shot. The majority of the killings went unreported by the news media.

In the Mid-City area, located more than 3 miles west of downtown Los Angeles, homicides have been dropping each year since 2007 when there were nine. Last year there were two.

Still, Laursen said the information has been sobering. People like to believe that murders happen only in bad neighborhoods, but they don’t, he said. In fact, they happen just about anywhere, even in Lafayette Square, the wealthiest area of Mid-City, where the average home size is 3,600 square feet.

It’s surreal.

On the first anniversary of Johnson’s slaying, Laursen again walked past candles set up at the site of the shooting. Today, neighbors say the teenager's family has moved away from their white and green apartment home.

Homicide detectives did not return calls from The Times asking about the status of the investigation.

-- Ruben Vives