Lights and Sirens
Part 54 of A Policeman's Tale of the American Riviera
“Closure is a preposterous concept worthy of the worst aspects of American daytime TV.”
~James Ellroy
The Gun and Drug Free Zone
Ellroy was right: there’s never any closure. There’s no closure for the young girl in her bedroom off the Old Coast Highway who decorated her room with flowers and candles and pink mood lighting, pressed repeat on a slideshow of memories with her boyfriend on a MacBook, then took her mother’s .38 from a drawer in the nightstand and shot herself in the head to a haunting soundtrack by Katy Perry. The shockwave of a .38 caliber bullet fired at close range into a child’s temple blows the eyes out of the sockets, and forces gray bulbous brain matter out of the nose. Which is how her mom found her, and would be forced to remember her, and how you found her, and would be forced to remember her. There’s no closure for that, not for the young girl distraught at a teenaged breakup, not for her mother who is a wailing lump of humanity on the living room floor, and not for the cops who were drawn again into the furious orbit of human emotions, responding to a flood of 911 calls reporting shots fired—no further details—in an otherwise idyllic neighborhood.
There’s no closure for the woman who tried to jump off the sheer cliffs at the Douglas Family Preserve, or her husband who stood at the top in a paralyzing panic of rage and terror and indecision. When you got down to her, compelled against your instinct by the better angels of your own nature, she was held to the cliff by a miracle of gravity and a single plant whose roots were the only thing preventing her from falling to a certain death. I just want to die, she kept saying, over and over, as you straddled her body with all of your strength and prayed that she would not fight you, that the shallow-rooted plant that had made its life there, that you reached across her body and gripped until your hand and arm were numb with conviction, would not give out on you both. There’s no closure to be found in that story, where a husband was losing his wife to mental illness in real time, and not for you, even decades later, when the memory of your own fear while dangling 200 feet above the rocks and the crashing tide on a vertical cliff remains vivid enough to induce vertigo.
There wouldn’t be much closure for the family of Lorenzo Carachure either, at least not in the beginning. The four defendants in Carachure’s murder, who had conned a mope into driving them over to the west side of Santa Barbara to kill another human being, were splintered on the anvil of American justice, and like most gang members who are put to the question they turned on each other. Nobody knew anything except that it could not have been them, it had to be someone else. Despite the heroic efforts of Hans Almgren, a brilliant and devoted senior prosecutor, and despite the overwhelming amount of evidence, including Mize’s taped admission, the first trial ended in a hung jury on the murder charge. It was a slap in the face to the victim and his family, and to everyone who had worked the case and simply knew the truth. But the old saw rings true: a jury is composed of nine licensed drivers. You roll the dice and you take your chances. You had to admire the bravery of a single prosecutor—who wasn’t just fighting the vagaries of reasonable doubt in the minds of citizens plucked from their day jobs to hear about a world they didn’t even know they lived in—but also the concentrated efforts of four capable defense attorneys. It took considerable courage and conviction to stay in the fight.
