An empty chair at graduation because of a promising life cut short
In Monday's L.A. Times, we wrote about the death of Clarence Bourne, who died June 23 in Exposition Park:
As smiling men and women in blue graduation gowns entered the hotel ballroom and took their seats, Angela Myles eyed the chair that would not be filled.
The chair would be occupied by a neatly folded cap and gown instead of by her son, 20-year-old Clarence Bourne.
Myles, sitting at the front table with her two daughters, couldn't stop staring.
"Why can't my son be there too?" she kept wondering, her eyes occasionally filling with tears.
Bourne, the youngest and only boy in a family with three girls, was killed in Exposition Park five days earlier, gunned down as he walked home from his girlfriend's house. Family members said he wanted to get home early that night for a job interview in the morning.
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