When was miles corwin born

On the afternoon of Dec. He assumed his position in the front row of the audience, just seats down from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, as President Obama took the microphone. He was a regular guy, a working stiff and it was an honor to have his war service mentioned.

Following his graduation, he wrote 95 letters to each newspaper in the state of California requesting a job. Besides his first opportunity in Torrance, throughout his career Corwin has worked for the St. As a crime reporter for the LA Times, his experiences were extraordinary.

He was on the witness stand of the Robert Blake murder case, interviewed and prepared the obituary for Theodor Geisel author of the Dr.

Seuss series before his death and he was even called upon to write sports stories because of his college water polo background at UCSB during the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Dressed like a businessman, he was out of place, but risked his safety to ensure a well-rounded perspective in his nonfiction book about the effects of senseless murders.

Teaching is a perfect complement to writing books. I like working with students. As Corwin reflected back on his career and the recent experience in Washington D. It is physicallyimpossiblefor them to be do ing everything they're supposedto be doing on theircases.

The onerous caseload has had a profound impact on the overwhelmed, overworked detectives. They, too, are casualties of the murder count. That August night I tracked the three murders, Pete "Raz" Razanskas headed the homicide investigation of the woman who had been found clutching the crack pipe.

I watched him work a few other crime scenes that year, and I enjoyed his sense of humor and was impressed with his ability to spot ob scure details that other detectives missed, details that later. And un like most homicide detectives who work in South-Central for a. Razanskas also supervises detective trainees, and I thought that the best way for me to learn about homicide in SouthCentral was to follow him as he trained a new detective.

I could. But I wanted to make sure he had the right trainee. I wanted to follow someone who cared about South-Central and didn't. I wanted someone who was bright and knowl edgeable enough so I could learn from the trainee as well as from Razanskas. And I wanted someone who was open-. I knew Razanskas was due for a new trainee. If his new partner did not seem like the right choice for me, I had planned on finding another detective team. I soon discovered that his new partner was a woman named Marcella Winn, a child of South-Central who would now be in.

During her seven years with the LAPD, Winn proved that she had the toughness and the smarts to succeed in a department that traditionally had been white and male.

Winn was confident of her abilities, self-assured and very outspoken. She would not be one of those timid trainees who would do something just because Razanskas told her to do it.

As soon as I met Winn, I knew I had found the right detec tive team. And they assented to my presence because they be lieved it was important that people learn how the hundreds of murders a year in South-Central take a terrible toll on the resi dents, the families of the victims, and the detectives. To get a better understanding of the consequences of mur der and its impacton a community, I also spentmuchtime talk ing to therapists and clients at Loved Ones of Homicide Victims, a remarkable South-Central counseling center.

There has been much written about black-on-black crime. They sought out and hired accomplished black therapists to work with their mostly black clientele, who had lost children,parents,spousesand siblings to homicide. Every Saturday morning,a group of people gathered at the center's headquarters, behinda Baptistchurch. They were gra cious enough to allow me to sit in on their sessionsduring the summer and fall of , while they met with a therapist and shared their anguish, their fear, their struggleto survive the loss of loved ones.

I shadowed Razanskas and Winn from March, when Winn investigated her first murder, until October, when she and. Razanskassplit up. I was there in the middleof the nightwhen they picked up their "fresh blood" cases and began their crime scene investigations. I was with them in the interview rooms when they interrogated suspects.

I was with them when they notified parents that their children had been murdered. I was with them at autopsies and when they traveled across the coun try to arrest fugitives and bring them back to Los Angeles.

Although I followed the detectives' cases from spring to fall, the focus of this book is on one summer in South-Central. Summer is when there is more than one murder a day in South-Central, when weary detectives lurch from crime scene to crime scene,. Summer is the most murderous time of year. Summer is the homicide detective's season.

Once summer began the pace quickened dramatically. And throughout the summer, Razan skas watched Winn carefully because he knew if she could make it through the crucible of a summer in South-Central, she could make it in homicide. Prologue Pete Razanskas was a young police officer,just a few years out of the academy, when he and his partner were dispatched to a gang shooting.

The homicide detectives at the scene were per plexed by a 3-inch cut on the victim's right palm because there was no evidence indicating a knife had been used. It was Razanskas who spotted a slight lead-colored smear on the victim's nickel-plated. He told the detectives that when the shooter fired at the victim, one of the. This could have caused the bullet to fragment, and a sliver from the bullet might have cut the victim's hand.

A few years later, Razanskas picked up his first homicide experience when he was promoted to a specialized unit that in vestigated Latino gangs. Although nobody in the unit was a de tective yet, they were allowed to work gang murders. In the early s,after about ten years with the LAPD, he made de tective and was assigned to a station in South-Central Los An geles where he investigatedrobberies. This was regarded as the minor leagues then, a training ground for homicide.

In those days a lieutenant would approach an up-and-coming young de tective and say, "Son, you want to get divorced? How about Years later, he realized that the lieutenant's words had been. Two of his marriages ended in divorce. The hours had been too long and the pressure too great. He knew he had spent too much time at the station, time he should have spent at home with his family. He had made it to homicide and he had succeeded there.

But Razanskas sometimes wonders if the. Razanskas' route to the Los Angeles Police Department was an unlikely and circuitous one. His parents are Lithuanian. He spent his childhood years in Venezuela. He went to high school in southern California. And now he wears Western boots, chews. Razanskas, who is 46, has played the part so long he now even looks a bit like a grizzled cowhand. He is lean, has a broad, gray, droopy mustache and deep-set pale blue eyes with crow's-feet from too much squinting.

At homicide scenes, he slowly saunters about, as if he is reluctantly heading out to the barn on a cold morning. In the early s, when Razanskas returned from Vietnam.

But he was married, broke and needed a job. He decided to become a cop. After graduating from the LAPD academy, Razanskas was assigned to a South-Central police station, a few miles from the home of Marcella Winn, a junior-high-school student at the time, who, 20 years later, would be his partner.

South-Central was a far differ. The gangs and drugs had not yet taken hold. In dustry had not entirely abandoned the area. The Latino influx had not yet begun. Winn learned about hard work from her father. He was up at five o'clock every morning, collecting garbage for the city. He worked his route alone; he felt that a partner would slow him down. When he returned home in the early afternoon, he show ered, ate lunch and headed off for his second job as a mail handler at the post office.

He returned home after midnight, was up at five, and did it all over again. By the time Winn was finishing high school, her neighbor hood had changed. The Rollin 60s began covering the walls with graffiti and doing drive-bys. Some of the boys on her street ran with the 60s, but Winn's parents were strict and would not let their daughters associate with them.

Winn was a good student and was known as a girl who did not hang out. After high school, Winn worked at a law office and attended community college and, later, a state college. When she was 30 units shy of her degree in political science, she quit school. She was bored in college and she wanted to make some money.

Winn had considered becoming an attorney but decided she was too restless to spend her life at a desk.

She decided to become a cop, in part because police work was a way for her to protect her neighborhood from some of the forces that were destroying it. She was angry that every one she knew seemed to have lost a family member or a close friend to homicide, angry that people did not feel safe on their own streets. She wanted to do something to change her neighborhood, to bring it back to the way it once was.

Many of her friends were shocked by her decision to join the LAPD, which had a long-standing reputation in the black community for racism and brutality. Being a black cop in South-Central adds just one more difficulty to an already diffi cult job. When she first began working patrol, suspects would ask her, "What you want to arrest a brother for? Winn is a tall, imposing woman and can be intimidating. She has spent a lot of time lifting weights in the police academy gym, but she does not have the mien nor the manner of a body builder.

Winn, who is 35 and single, can quickly lose the wary cop demeanor and turn on the charm. Since Winn has joined the homicide unit, she has heard fewer snide comments on the street.

While patrolofficers, par ticularly black patrol officers, often are challenged in SouthCentral, their usefulness questioned, their motives impugned, residents cut homicide detectives some slack because they share a common goal: They both want the killers off the street.

South-Central is not an isolated, monolithic neighborhood of crumbling high-rise tenements, like East Coast slums. Much of the area consists of vast tracts of stucco bungalows, small apartment buildings and palm trees that belie the danger on the streets. When visitors travel through South-Central, they often ask, "Where's the ghetto? South-Central is a microcosm of Los Angeles, and, like the city, it is a pastiche of many neighborhoods. It is composed of working-class neighborhoods with well-kept single-family homes; pockets of dilapidated apartments, rock houses and corner hookers: crumbling commercial strips dominated by.

This is a Los Angeles that is unknown to most residents of the city, a city so sprawl ing and segregated, it is still possible to spend an entire lifetime in Santa Monica or Encino and never find a single reason to visit South-Central. More than , people live here, about a third of the households subsisting below the national poverty level. It is a multiethnic city within a cityonce mostly black, now about half Latinowith simmering racial tensions and dozens of warring gang factions.

Razanskas and Winn lived through the changes in the area. Razanskas and Winn are assigned to South Bureau Homi cide, which is responsible for all murders in Los Angeles' killing fields, a jagged strip of streets that runs from South Los Angeles to the harbor.

This is such murderous terrain that if it were a separate city it would rank among the nation's top ten for homicides. Razanskas and Winn work the most violent. Razanskas, a supervising detective, and Winn, a detective trainee, are partners. For a while Razanskas also will be Winn's mentor and teach her the rudiments of homicide investigation. It is no accident, not simply the luck of the draw, that. Razanskas, an easygoing good old boy, and Winn, an intense, ambitious black woman, are partners.

Lieutenant Sergio Rob leto, who heads South Bureau Homicide, often pairs up detec tives with disparate temperaments and divergent backgrounds. He believes the partnership will develop a greater range than the sum of its parts. He knows Razanskas has the patience of a hunter who likes to slowly stalk his quarry before making a move.

But sometimes Razanskas can be too patient, can ap proach a case too deliberately. Robleto wants Razanskas to be occasionally prodded by a young, gung-ho detective who will push him and force him to justify any delay.

Robleto knows that Winn is a hard charger, an intense, im patient detective who is eager to rack up arrests and quickly move on to the next case.

He wants Winn to work with someone who. Razanskas has such a strong personality he can easily in timidate a trainee. But Robleto knows Winn is not easily intimidated. It is not easy for a black woman cop to succeed in the LAPD, where sexual harassment and racism in the ranks. She does not intend to get pushed around on the street, nor in the squad room.

Homicide in South-Central is a young detectives' game. Most of the detectives are in their 20s and 30s. Razanskas is the. Most of the detectives he started with have retired,or are now supervisors. Most cannot sustain the pace of working 24 hours, even 48 hours at a stretch,juggling dozens of old cases while attempt ing to keep track of an inexorable wave of new ones.

This takes its toll. And a few of Razanskas' supervisors believe it has taken its toll on him. He still can be dazzling at crime scenes. His knowledgeof firearms, trajectories, ammunition types and other nuances of homicide still is highly respected. He still has a remarkable memory and can recall arcane details from ancient cases.

They believe he is approaching burnout. If he can't convince them other wise, he may be forced to leave the bureau. In some homicide units, detectives can go on, year after year, aging gracefully until retirement.

Their experience and years of service are looked on as an asset. But these are units where detectives may work only a handful of homicides a year. At South Bureau, detectives have one of the heaviest work. Some cannot take the grind.

They work a year or two and then request a transfer. Razanskas has been in vestigating homicides almost 15 years. As Razanskas and Winn begin their partnership, Winn has. And Razanskas has to prove he is still the detective he once was. At the same time, he has to. From the overcast days in June when the fog never seems to.

Homicide detectives in South-Central Los Angeles usually do not wait long for a murder. On Detective Marcella Winn's first weekend on call, she spends an edgy Friday evening at home, waiting for the call of death. She watches a video of the movie Tombstone and munches on popcorn, but cannot keep her. She keeps waiting for the phone to ring. Be fore going to sleep she lays out her gold linen blazer, beige blouse and green rayon slacks; she does not want to have to.

Winn has been in the homicide bureau only two weeks and this will be her first murder inves tigation. She would just as soon get started tonight. But this is a rainy March night, one of the rare Friday nights in SouthCentral when people are not being battered,bludgeoned,knifed or shot to death. On Saturday morning, she cancels her pedicure appoint ment. She is afraid of having to race to a murder scene with wet nails. Winn spends a few hours watching reruns on television,.

Waiting for a homicide call is like waiting for that big sneeze that just won't come. When the sun goes down, Winn is sure that tonight will be the night. After all, this is Saturday night, the most murderous night of the week. She is number one on the weekend rotation, which means she rolls on the first murder of the weekend. And She tosses and turns, waking up every hour or two to check her answering machine and her beeper, to make sure she has not slept through a call.

By Sunday morning Winn is a wreck. She buys a paper and discoverspeople were murderedall over the city this weekend.

Just not in South-Central. She takes her beeper and cellular phone to the gym and spends a few hours on the treadmill and weight machines, hoping to work off some nervous energy.

It is drizzling Sunday night, and she invites a friend over to play dominoes. After a few games, she tells him, "You better go home now. I may get one. This is Sunday night. The weekend was a wash, Winn figures. All that worry for nothing. She dozes off at On this cool, breezy spring weekend, Felipe Angeles Gon zales spends Friday night at home, a small South-Central bun galow that he shares with nine other recent immigrants from MexicoCity. He and a few roommates watch a moviecalled El Coyotey LaBroncaon the Spanish language television station.

On Saturday morning he is up at Gonzales and a friend, who both work at a stereo manufacturing company, buy a few. He is separated from his wife, who lives in Mexico with his four daughters, but he sends money home every month.

His fa ther drives a beat-up Volkswagen for a taxi company because he cannot afford his own cab. When Gonzales was 16 he, too,. Gonzales' dream is to save. During the week, Gonzales works 10 to 12 hours a day, glu ing fabric on speaker boxes. He attends English classes every weeknight and works most weekends at the swap meet.

His one release, his one break from the long hours, the monotonous work, the homesickness, the danger he feels every day on the streets, is dancing.

On Saturday night, after working at the swap meet all day, he drives to a friend's birthday party where he knows he can dance to his favorite music:cumbia, an earthy Afro-Columbian sound popular among young Latino immi grants. He begins dancing from the moment he arrives at the apartment, tiring out a number of partners, and dances until midnight, when the party breaks up.

Gonzales returns to the swap meet on Sunday. In the eve ning he and a few roommates prepare a dinner of came asada with tortillas, salsa and one of Gonzales' favorite dishes. Gonzales asks them to do him. On the way back from the store, he wants them to stop by the apartment of a woman he knows. He wants to see if she is there. They pick up the beer and drop him off near her apart ment, at the corner of 49th and Figueroa. It seems to Winn that she had just closed her eyes when the telephone finally rings.

She checks her alarm clock. It is a few minutes before midnight. Shot in thechest. On the street. Two possible witnesses. Winn is a detective trainee and Razanskas is her supervisorand her partner. Winn has passed the written de tective exam and is waiting to take her orals. She has all the re sponsibility and authority of a detective.

Now she must earn her shield. This night, she thinks, is getting off to a bad start. Razanskas and Winn pull up to the murder scene, an inter section lined with ramshackle two-story apartment buildings, storefront churches, a used-car lot and an auto repair shop ad.

The area is blocked off with yellow crime-scene tape. A handful of bystanders strain against the tape, trying to get a look at the body. There is an eerie quiet on this early Monday morning; the only sounds are the staccato dispatches from the squad car radios and the hissing of the flares. Razanskas and Winn grab their flashlights and walk to the edge of the flares.

He looks off into the distance and imperson ates Robert Duvall playing the whacked-out colonel in Apoca lypse Now. Winn still seems half-asleep, but Razanskas is full of energy, laughing and pacing beside the flares. This is the part of the in vestigation he enjoys the most, when there isjust a body and a few possible witnesses who may or may not have seen any thing, and he has to searchfor threadsof evidence,vague leads, shades of clues, sort it all out, and ultimately figure out what happened.

Razanskas enjoys working with trainees at murder scenes. This is his stage and he is playing his favorite part the lead. He and Winn approach a uniformed officer who is leaning against a squad car. The officer tells them he was only able to locate one witness, who is back at the station giving a state ment The witness will be of little use because he saw the. All he knows is that three men in a car were shot in what looked like a botched robbery. Two of the victims, who were bleeding heavily, sped away and left the slain man on the sidewalk.

Both victims in the car were shot. One may not make it. Razanskas turns to Winn and says, "You got one victim tits up. You got another victim circling the drain. If he goes down, you got a twofer. The detectives have little to go on.

Was it an attempted car jacking? Or was it a straight robbery? Did the men resist? Or were they shot anyway? How did the victim end up on the street? Razanskas starts with the physical evidence. The body is laidout on the sidewalkundera whitesheet. Twoshellcasings, the victim's glassesand a can of beer he had been drinking are all circled in chalk. The drizzle has stopped and the skies have cleared.

Shallow puddles by the curb glisten under the full moon, and the white sheet looks like it is glowing. Razanskas shows Winn how to diagram the crime scene. He tells her to include the location of the streetiampsand the flood lights from a storefront church. This will make it difficult for. He tells her to record that there is a full moon tonight and to in clude the temperature. He demonstrates how to record the lo cation of evidence with a measuring tool that looks like a golf club with wheels.

She records the data while he calls out,. In fact, they are not allowed to even touch the victim until the coroner investigator arrives. He has first crack at the body. You're my partner. A uni formed officer berates her. Razanskas calls him off. Treat 'em right and they can be a good source of information for you. But as he walks closer she recognizes him and smiles broadly. Razanskas investigated her brother's murder a few years ago and caught the killer.

He asks her softly, so other by standers cannot hear, if she knows what happened. She says she does not, but promises to ask around. Razanskas and Winn approach the victim's body, and she. She crouches, shines her flashlight on the syringe and studies it, concentrating intently. Winn is embarrassed,flicksoff her flashlight and slaps it on her palm. She shakes her head.

Everythingis so new and unfa miliar to her. She feels self-conscious following Razanskas like a puppy, wandering about in the dark, not knowing what she is supposed to be looking for.

And she is worried. Although this is her first murder, Winn is listed as the primary investiga tor on the casepartners usually alternatewhich means she is responsible for solving it.

And this case looks to her like a loser. There are no decent witnesses and there is no solid evi. She bemoans her rotten luck. Why did she have to get stuck with this one? Why couldn't she have picked up a slamdunker for her first case? Maybe there is more to the case, but she cannot see it. Winn has been promotedquicklyand often during her seven years with the Los AngelesPolice Department: from patrol to a gang task force, to vice, to an elite burglary unit, to a detec tive trainee in bunco forgery, where she investigated a number of complex white-collar crimes.

She has been successful in every unit she has worked. But now Winn worries that murder cases might exceed her abilities, that she simply may not have the skills to be a homicide detective. She decides if she is responsible for solving the case, she is going to take some initiative. She is going to search for some evidence on her own. She wanders off into the darkness in the.

Ten minutes later she returns. With the first break of the. She found a witness. A true eyewitness. She is so excited that she stutters and her hands flutter as she tells Razanskas. He saw the three Latino victims pull over to the curb. One went to the apartment building and rang the doorbell. He waited a minute or two and then turned around and began to walk back to the car.

Three black men"kids Two of them had pistols. They demanded money from the victim. They told the other two men to get out of the car. But the three Latino victims did. They did not resist; they just appeared confused. A robber, angered by the delay, shouted, "Kill him. The witness yelled at the shooters, to try to scare them off.

One of the robbers began shooting at him, and then they all disap peared into an alley. We'll talk to him again in the morning. You know, it sounds like our victim didn't present any threat to them at all. They just shot him in the back for no reason. Random murders without motive. Murders where victims. Murdersthat are merelyhomicidal afterthoughts.

The coroner investigator arrives and Razanskas calls out to him, "Hey, be nice to her. The investigatorempties the victim's pockets. Felipe Angeles Gonzales.

His death will attract no television cameras, no photographers straining behind the crime-scene tape, no reporters scrambling for poignant biographical details. Gonzales' death is lost in a sea of statistics,just another one of the 25 homicides in the county this weekend.

This same weekend, in another part of Los Angeles, another. Two year-oldJapanese exchange students, attending a local. The story made the front page of all the local newspapers and led the evening news. President Clinton called the vic tims' parents.

The governor of California and the U. S ambas sador to Japan issued statements. The LAPD yanked the case from overworked local detectivesand assigned it to RobberyHomicide Division, a squad that specializes in complex and high-profile cases. On a damp sidewalk, about 20 miles north of the San Pedro parking lot where the Japanese studentswere shot, the body of Felipe Gonzales draws little attention.

The handful of rubberneckers have long since moved on. The only ones left are the coroner investigator, Razanskas and Winn. I want the predators who did this off the street. I don't want themwalking aroundjacking people I care about. I still have family in this neighborhood. Every victim deserves a decent investigation. He is only a few inches over. Un der his right nipple is a red blotch the size of a dime.

The coro. Gonzales' stomach is distended and drawn tight as a drum. The bullet tumbled end over end and caused massive internal. This is the final indignity of death. Gonzales is sprawled out on the sidewalk, his trousers around his ankles,. The coroner turns the body over and Winn flinches when she hears a sudden hissing soundair escaping from the victim's. There is a neat, perfectly round entry wound just be neath a shoulder blade.

Winn and Razanskas crouch beside the. Razanskas tells her to write down the direction the head is pointingnorthwest.

He studies her notes for a momentand then tells her not to be so precise when describingthe angle of the left arm to the body. A defense attorney will have a. Did you measure it out on the street with a protractor? Razanskas tells her that a murder investigation is like a chess game. You got to anticipate questionsyou mighthaveto answeryearslater at a trial. If you don't, yourcrime scene reportis going to come back and bite you in the ass.

At dawn, the anomalous sound of a rooster crowing in South-Central breaks the early morning calm. Before the coroner wheels the body away on a metal gumey, Razanskas takes a Polaroid picture of the victim's face. This will save them time, he tells Winn. The detectives then trace the suspects' route, illuminating their way with flashlights, to a dirt alley littered with old sofas and rusting bedsprings.

They spot a trail of fresh shoe imprints. He calls over an LAPD photographer, who just arrived at the scene, to take a picture. When you're done with the research you have an idea for the beginning, middle and end -- it's there for you. In crime fiction, you really have to sit down and plot out where the book is going, and that's what was most difficult -- 'What's the narrative arc? Simply breaking free of all facts that had filled his head over the years also proved a challenge, he says.

But at first it limited my imagination. Realizing that in fiction the story sometimes needed to unfold in ways that in the real world would never happen, Corwin says he eventually loosened up and allowed himself license to break free of the rules he'd observed on the beat.

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