Gang Terror : Fear Fails to Gag Witness to Murder

Through the misty, urban twilight of March 25, 1982, Patricia Lewis saw two things that changed her life: the panicked pleading of a young man on a bicycle and the shiny smile of his killer.

Fatal misfortune struck 21-year-old Jerome Dunn when he pedaled his Schwinn past a van being driven by Barry Glenn Williams, leader of a South-Central Los Angeles gang known as the 89th Street Neighborhood Family Blood.

Williams had apparently followed Dunn on a whim. Pulling tight alongside as they headed west on 88th Place, he had stopped less than a reach away and fired five rounds from a .38-caliber pistol into Dunn’s recoiling body.

In a gray station wagon down the street sat a disbelieving Patricia Lewis, a 34-year-old neighbor who had been hurrying home to fix dinner for her husband.

Shook His Head

” . . . I saw the young man start shaking his head,” Lewis would testify. “All I could hear (was) kind of like talking, and he was just saying ‘No, no. . . .’ ” Then, “Pow, pow, pow, that’s the way it went.”

Last month, Williams--a 24-year-old father, one-time choirboy, now convicted killer--was sentenced to death for the murder of Dunn, culminating a criminal career that began in his childhood. Prosecutors say the verdict was mostly due to the testimony of Lewis.

But for this witness, swearing to tell the truth came at the expense of her home, her marriage and very nearly her life. Even now, as Williams sits behind bars, it is his accuser who feels imprisoned by a fear of gang revenge.

“In these four years, I feel I have aged 20,” Lewis said recently. “I have nightmares and I had one just last night. . . .

Pleads for Life

“I’ll be running and trying to get in someone’s house, and they’re standing there saying, ‘We’re gonna get you.’ And I wake up. . . . I can still see that young man, you know, just pleading for his life.”

In a county where as many as 50,000 gang members fight a continuing guerrilla war with police, often intimidating entire neighborhoods into silence, Lewis stepped forward when others fled.

What happened as a result tells a tale of life along a few blocks of 89th Street, just east of where the Harbor Freeway cuts between Watts and Inglewood. It is a depressed neighborhood where the windows of houses wear iron bars, and back alleys become nighttime boulevards for roaming youths. And where residents often live in fear of their neighbors’ children.

Based on crime reports, court transcripts and interviews, it is the story of a random killer who once eluded justice through a detective’s blunder, only to be ensnared by a homemaker he passed in the night.

And it illustrates the trouble that gang investigators have in persuading witnesses to come forward, even with promises of police protection.

“The most difficult problem we have in gang prosecutions is keeping track of our witnesses and making sure they’re available for trial because of the fear and intimidation,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Genelin, chief of the hard-core gang unit.

“All you have to do is talk to the people in those neighborhoods to realize how fearful they are,” Genelin said. “In many cases, it’s a question of who controls the streets.”

Barry Williams is portrayed in a psychological assessment done for the court as a victim of his environment. Three days after he was born in 1962, his mother gave him away.

In testimony at Williams’ trial, Aunt Lena Mae Bridges said her sister-in-law had intended to desert the infant at the hospital because “she didn’t want to have him with all her kids.” The aunt interceded and took the infant.

But Bridges’ house in the 800 block of 89th Street was filling with youngsters of her own. So by the time he was 4, the boy had moved in with his grandmother. They lived in the Avalon Gardens housing project, a tree-lined cluster of low-rise buildings two blocks away, where gang factions shared a common identification as Crips and a common dislike for rival Bloods.

“My grandmother was a very God-fearing woman,” Williams wrote in a 10-page letter to probation officials. “She truly believed in the Bible. I liked church, but even if I didn’t, I would still have to attend, because anyone who stays over (at) my grandmother’s house has to attend church. Those are her rules.”

No Impediment

Growing up without his natural parents seemed no impediment.

“I had more toys than the other kids in the area where I lived. In fact, at this moment, I cannot think of one thing I wanted or needed and did not have it,” he said.

Williams sang in the youth choir at St. Augustine Baptist Church and played trumpet in the bands at 93rd Street Elementary and Drew Junior High. He made second lieutenant in the neighborhood cadet corps.

The Rev. Presley Thomas, who lived across the street, testified that Williams was “always a mannerable, respectable young man.”

“I saw some good future in him. . . ,” he said.

Arthur Cox, an admitted armed robber, knew Williams differently.

“I met Barry Williams when we were very young (about 9 years old),” Cox recalled in a 1983 statement to police. “We used to play together. At that time, there were about 25 of us who called ourselves ‘Neighborhood.’ We used to jump kids from school for their lunch money and things like that. . . .

Started to Fight

“When we were a little older, about 12-13 years old, we, Barry included, started to fight against the kids that lived across Central (Avenue). . . . That’s when we started calling ourselves 89 Family Blood, and the kids east of Central started calling themselves Neighborhood Crips. During this time, Barry, who was about 15-16 years old, started to use guns in robberies and started shooting people.”

By age 18, Williams had fathered a son, dropped out of Compton’s Dominguez High School and gotten a job at the Watts Labor Community Action Committee as a security guard. He was lean and not quite six feet tall. His face was made distinctive by intensive eyebrows and a stainless steel tooth plainly visible when he smiled.

He went by the gang nickname “Big Time” as a measure of his aspirations, which sometimes extended beyond the boundaries of his South-Central neighborhood.

Victim Shot

According to Cox, Williams and Willie (Junior) Bridges--a cousin also recently convicted of murder--once claimed to have robbed “this white man in the Venice area. And as the man was giving up the wallet, Barry shot the man anyway. Twice.”

Another time, the pair boasted of “how they had gone to the beach one night and saw this white lady getting into her car. When the lady saw Barry and Junior coming, she hurried into her car and locked herself inside. . . . Barry began yelling at the lady to open the door.

“Barry said that the lady curled up inside the car like a snail. . . . He just shot her in the head through the window and took the lady’s purse.”

Authorities have never been able to tie Williams or Bridges to any such attacks. Cox’s accounts, though vivid, lack details of time and location. Nevertheless, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Joseph Holmes said investigators suspect that Williams and his cousin were “connected” to many more murders.

Live Up to Name

Cox expressed no doubt: “I think Barry shot all those people and did all the robberies because he had to live up to his name and also because Barry had a dream that he would take over Los Angeles, something like the Mafia.”

Indeed, Los Angeles Police Detective Michael Mejia said few street gangs have been as organized as the dozen or so core members of 89th Street Neighborhood Family Blood. After pulling a robbery, for example, gang members would return to a hangout and monitor the resulting police calls over a radio scanner. One member attended criminal justice classes at a local college, then instructed others on how to handle police interrogations.

“There’re a lot of hot gangs in town,” said Holmes, a gang investigator for 10 years. “But in my opinion, man for man, person for person, 89 Family was probably one of the most dangerous gangs around. . . . They actually thought of themselves as Robin Hoods of the street. ‘For my neighborhood I live; for my neighborhood I die.’ ”

Williams looked like an outlaw on July 19, 1980, witnesses said, when he masked his face with a red bandanna and crept up on a crowd of more than 50 people, mostly children, at a Saturday night social organized on 89th Street by the Holy Ghost Temple Church of God and Christ.

Williams and two shotgun-wielding followers confronted the crowd in search of a rival Crip named Kerry Island. “Where is Kerry? This is Neighborhood Family Blood, 89th Street,” Williams called out, according to Island’s testimony.

As people screamed and scattered, the gunmen opened fire, miraculously wounding only three. The most seriously hurt was Michael Hardwick, who caught 53 searing shotgun pellets in his chest and right arm, requiring open-heart surgery and three months in the hospital.

One witness said that when Williams fired his pump-action 12-gauge, the bandanna slipped down his nose, exposing his face. That’s when the witness spotted the shiny tooth.

Rare Occurrence

A few other witnesses came forward that night, something investigators say is rare in the face of possible gang retaliation, although not all may have realized that they would be asked to appear in court. Williams was arrested the next day, and posed for his police photograph by sticking out his tongue.

But the case was automatically dismissed.

On the morning that Williams was supposed to receive a preliminary hearing, none of the witnesses showed up--because they were never notified. The sheriff’s detective assigned to serve them with subpoenas had gone on a month’s vacation without briefing his replacement.

“It is an unfortunate thing that happened,” Sgt. Edgar Thompson testified. “ . . . I was probably, maybe a little remiss. I had such a heavy caseload. . . . Like I said before, it slipped through the cracks.”

That was the end of Williams’ luck.

Fired From Ambush

Last year, he was convicted of the June 16, 1981, murder of Donald Billingsley, an 18-year-old laborer who was sitting in a group of young people at Green Meadows Park on 89th Street when Williams and three others fired from ambush. One witness said that each shot sent sparks flashing from the bushes where the gunmen hid. She said she recognized Williams as a former schoolmate.

Two people survived shotgun wounds. But as Billingsley ran in desperation, he caught a .38-caliber bullet in his upper back. He trailed blood across a hopscotch court before falling dead in a nearby field.

An arrest warrant was eventually issued for Williams. But when officers went to his grandmother’s house, he had disappeared.

At that time in the life of Patricia Lewis, shootings like the one in Green Meadows Park figured in little more than passing conversation. When neighbors would condemn the violence, she would nod and give thanks that it touched none of her family.

A short woman with a pleasant manner, she was active in church and the Eastern Star and knew how it felt to lose a loved one. When she was 11 back in Niagara Falls, N.Y., her father had died from an overdose of ether while undergoing a tonsillectomy. The doctor who administered the anesthetic later left a note saying he was sorry, then hanged himself.

It fell to Lewis’ mother to raise the family’s five children while at times holding down two jobs. In 1963, they moved to South-Central Los Angeles, where Lewis finished school at Jordan High. She eventually married a bus driver named Joe Lewis and lived with him and a stepson in a house on 87th Place, not far from her mother’s.

“She always taught me one thing in life,” Lewis said. “If you live in this world, you have to treat people right and you’ll be treated right. And somewhere down the line, if you do right, you’ll be rewarded.”

Drizzly Evening

Where Lewis lives now, what she looks like, where she works are details that she wants kept secret. Because she testified about what she saw on that drizzly evening in March, 1982, when Jerome Dunn died, she fears that members of Williams’ gang--or some other--might try to kill her.

Lewis’ ordeal began at about 6:30, as she was being driven home in a friend’s station wagon. When the vehicle reached the intersection of 88th Place, a blue van approached from the right and started turning to pull in front of them. The station wagon’s headlights flashed across the driver.

“I looked directly at his face,” Lewis said in court, “and he was laughing.”

She also noticed that in the middle of the driver’s smile was a shiny tooth.

But just as the van finished the turn, it suddenly stopped as Dunn rode his bicycle past on 88th. A lanky, 6-foot-3, one-time Jordan High basketball player, Dunn lived in another neighborhood, apparently belonged to no gang and had merely chosen to cut through Family Blood territory on the way to visit a girlfriend. Against the mist, he wore a blue jacket--the color often used to signify Crip.

The van quickly reversed, almost backing into the station wagon, and Lewis heard the driver say, “Let’s go ---- him up.”

Drew Even

The van sped after Dunn. From the intersection, Lewis and her friend watched the Econoline and the bicycle gradually draw even, then stop. A moment later, the driver extended his arm, holding what looked like a gun.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Lewis’ friend, as she stepped on the gas.

The station wagon had left the intersection by the time a series of shots crackled through the evening.

Two blocks later and Lewis was home. As she climbed out of the station wagon, the blue van happened to drive by again. This time, she got a look at a man on the passenger side, and wondered aloud what to do. Her friend urged her to keep silent.

“She told me as she dropped me off--that was the last time I saw her--and she says to me, ‘I don’t know nothing. I don’t want to know nothing.’ And she left. And I haven’t seen her since.”

Stolen Vehicle

The van, stolen from a grocery store parking lot only 30 minutes before, was quickly found by police, abandoned in a nearby alley next to a block wall spray-painted with gang nicknames. “Big Time” was scrawled at the top.

At the urging of her husband, Lewis told police that she had been a witness. But for two months, she was too afraid to tell them she might be able to identify the driver.

An anonymous caller had tipped detectives that Williams was back in town and somehow involved in the killing. So they went to his grandmother’s house and arrested him on a year-old warrant from the Green Meadows Park attack.

They were still unable to charge him in the Dunn case until, late one night, Detective Mejia telephoned Lewis, politely but persistently suggesting that she was holding back.

Driver’s Tooth

Finally, she thought about the lessons her mother taught and agreed to help. She told Mejia about the driver’s tooth. And her description seemed all the more accurate when she identified Williams from a photograph showing his mouth tightly closed.

In July, 1982, Lewis testified at Williams’ preliminary hearing and helped prosecutors persuade a judge to hold him for trial. Only then did she appreciate the danger in what she had done.

During an interview last month, Lewis said she remembered the 11th-floor hall of the Compton Courthouse being filled with gang members that day as she sat in a separate room, waiting to take the stand.

“Every once in a while, they would peep in and look at me” or “open the door and say something and close it back. One officer had to stand at the door and wouldn’t let them in . . . and I said to myself, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’ ”

On Her Own

When the hearing was over, deputies helped Lewis elbow her way through the crowd and down a stairway. They gave her a phone number to call if she needed help, but once home, she was otherwise on her own. One day soon after, she spotted a group of toughs gathering across the street.

“They stood in the neighborhood, right after I came to court, a whole drove of them stood there and looked across at me,” Lewis said. “I never will forget it. All his buddies on that corner. They stood there, and I was coming in . . . they said, ‘We gonna get you.’ ”

The harassment continued for months while Williams’ court-appointed defense team appealed various legal issues.

“Every once in a while at night,” she explained, “a car would go by, and I would hear some shots ring out. And by the time you get to the door, the car would speed away.”

Heard Rumors

Ironically, Lewis’ husband had organized the cadet corps that Williams belonged to as an early teen. She said even he started to hear rumors on the street about how the gang was out to intimidate her.

Then came countless telephone threats claiming that “if you testify, you’re dead.”

“And they meant it,” she said.

That point was proven on Jan. 14, 1983. About 6:30 p.m., an alleged gang member nicknamed Bongo came to the door and briefly chatted with Lewis’ stepson, occasionally glancing inside.

“I was sitting in the living room with my grandson in my arms,” Lewis testified, “and after he (Bongo) left, I got up and my husband walked through the door. . . . I took the baby, and I went back to the bedroom, and as soon as he sat down, the whole house start being lit up with shots coming through the front door, the living room window, the kitchen window. And shots start going into the wall of my home.”

Bullets Hits Picture

Bullets sprayed across the yellow stucco exterior, shattering glass and ripping through screens. One dug into a living room picture of her stepson proudly dressed in his high school graduation gown.

Her husband “hit the floor and he crawled to the bedroom,” Lewis continued.

“He was on his knees, because the fires just kept ringing out. . . . The bullets just kept coming and kept coming. They would reload, and they would shoot and they would shoot, and it just kept going and kept going for about five minutes.

“I laid on the floor with my grandson,” Lewis said.

When it was over, from 45 to 50 shots had been fired, but no one was hit.

Police had long suspected that an attempt might be made on Lewis’ life. A gang member lived next door and another lived across the street.

Boast Made

Informant Cox had also told investigators that while in County Jail with Williams, the gang leader had boasted of arranging for Lewis to be shot as she hung wash on a backyard clothesline.

Still, it wasn’t until Lewis’ house was fired at again the next month that police began giving her 24-hour protection. Uniformed officers in a black and white cruiser parked in front and never moved unless it was to accompany her.

“It was a total nightmare the way I had to live,” Lewis testified, “and I didn’t want to continue to live like that. I couldn’t go out of my door. I couldn’t go anywhere.”

Several gang members were convicted in Juvenile Court for the second shooting. So, two months later, police pulled off the around-the-clock patrol, deciding that the danger had passed. But Lewis disagreed.

Life in Shambles

She saw her life in a shambles. Her marriage, shaky for some time, had become severely strained. Her home was no longer a refuge, and she was afraid to walk on the street, even in daylight.

“I was just a nervous wreck,” Lewis recalled. “I felt that at any moment, I was just going to burst. . . . I just shook. I cried a lot. I had to get away.”

Late one night in early April, she packed a large, brown suitcase, called a taxi and left.

“I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. No one knew where I was; I just disappeared. . . . I walked away from all that for my life.”

Lewis stayed in hiding for 21 months.

By January, 1985, however, Williams’ attorneys convinced the California Supreme Court that the two murder charges should be tried separately. Deputy Dist. Atty. Carmen Trutanich began lining up witnesses, and James H. Bell, a senior investigator, was given the task of finding Lewis and persuading her to testify again.

“I had a long talk with her mother, and the next thing I knew Pat called me,” Bell said. “I said if she would just listen to me, I would assure her safety as much as I could, and she believed in me. That was a heavy responsibility, because they had already tried to kill her, and then I walk in and say, ‘Don’t worry.’ ”

Lewis agreed to cooperate, but continued to live in hiding. Only Bell and Trutanich knew where. Bell made daily visits to her house and became a source of emotional support.

Creep Away

“She’s a good-hearted person,” Bell said. “She seems like an individual that really would have liked to have done better with her life. Time, of course, has started to creep away from her, and she’s still out there in the ghetto.”

The trial in the Billingsley case began in February. Four months later, Williams was convicted and sentenced to 34-years-to-life.

The Dunn case began in October. Because prosecutors were now asking for the death penalty, it took two months to pick a jury. As Trutanich began presenting his case, Lewis waited nervously for her appearance.

Metal detectors were set up outside the courtroom doors. Knives were confiscated from several youths who entered.

Finally, Lewis took the stand, only a few paces from where Williams sat.

“He stared in my face the whole time,” she recalled.

Lewis recounted what she had seen that night, how Williams had smiled, how Dunn had pleaded. Then defense co-counsel Bernard Gross rose to cross-examine her.

Gross took Lewis back over a dozen details, the hour of day, the heaviness of the mist, how she was seated in the station wagon, if its windows were open.

Lewis said she had looked at Williams’ face for “a minute.” But when the defense lawyer asked her to tell when a minute was up without glancing at the courtroom clock, she called out after 23 seconds.

She also estimated that the station wagon had been about 41 feet away from where she had watched the van driver level the gun. In fact, the distance had been a little more than 300 feet.

Yet, Gross failed to impeach the thrust of her testimony or shake her identification of Williams.

“Did the driver of the van look like this person in the photograph?” Gross asked, holding up the police photo of Williams.

“Yes,” Lewis replied.

“Pretty close to it?”

“Definitely the person.”

“Definitely very close to No. 2”?

“Definitely that person, not close. Definitely that person.”

Another Approach

The defense then tried another approach. Gross brought out a County Jail inmate, dressed in a blue jump suit with his hair neatly trimmed, and asked Lewis if she had ever seen him.

“I was sitting there like this with my fingers crossed,” prosecutor Trutanich recalled. “Out from the lockup this guy comes . . . and I’m going ‘Uh-oh, this is the case, this is it.’ Here she is testifying about an ID (of Williams) some four years ago and saying ‘That’s the guy and I’m absolutely sure’ and out comes this other guy.”

Lewis studied the inmate for a few moments, then asked him to turn directly toward her.

“He seems to be the same young man I saw three years ago,” she said and went on to identify the inmate as not only one of the gang members who shot at her house, but as being the passenger she saw seated in the van next to Williams.

Key Moment

“I just turned and looked at the jury,” Trutanich said. “And if there was ever any point in time when we were on the edge and the weight swung and they finally realized, ‘Hey, this man that we’re dealing with is truly an animal,’ it was after Pat’s testimony.

“You could have taken a knife and cut the air, that’s how thick it was.”

Williams didn’t testify in his own defense.

In his closing statement, defense attorney George Elber argued that Williams couldn’t have killed Dunn, because on the night of the murder he had been with his girlfriend at his aunt’s house. The aunt had testified to that, but the girlfriend said she couldn’t recall.

The defense lawyer described Lewis as “a well-meaning and honest lady who was honestly mistaken.”

Death Sentence

The jury convicted Williams after deliberating 1 hour and 45 minutes. On the jury’s recommendation, he was sentenced to death on July 11. Williams’ conviction was automatically appealed, and he waits at San Quentin.

Dunn’s mother, Anna Hodges, sat through every day of the trial and said recently that she was satisfied with the outcome.

“That’s the only son I ever had; he was the only thing I ever had,” she said.

Of Lewis, she added, “I would do anything in the world for this lady. . . . She lost everything she had.”

Despite all she went through, Lewis said she would do it all again.

“All I can say is, in all honesty, I told the truth,” she said in a quiet but frightened voice. “A lot of things you say is true, people don’t want to hear. Sometimes it hurts.

Must Accept It

“But you have to accept it. If you do wrong, you have to be punished for it, you know, I don’t care who it is.”

As for the danger, she continues to feel, she said, “it is something that I have to accept, that I have to be very careful and just and observe things. . . .

“Maybe I’ll get over this. I don’t think I ever will.”