California: Watts Again

The crowd was angry—and far too impatient for the slow, normally undramatic pace of a coroner's jury. Surging through the halls of the Los Angeles County Courthouse, it shouted its case in tattered handbills: "Wanted for the murder of Leonard Deadwyler . . . Bova the Cop."

In life, Leonard Deadwyler, 25, was an unemployed mechanic, an anonymous face among the 450,000 Negroes who live in the abrasive ghetto of Watts. In death, he was made a martyr, his name a provocation to riot. Speeding his pregnant wife to a hospital one night early last month, Deadwyler was stopped by police, then killed when Officer Jerold Bova's gun went off. Los Angeles police called the shooting an accident, but few Watts Negroes believed them. Sporadic rioting, the second outbreak since last August's uprising, struck the area.

Different Tales. When policemen restored order to the courthouse and the hearings were televised, Los Angeles heard two dramatically different stories. Mrs. Barbara Deadwyler, seven months pregnant, testified that her husband was hurrying her to the hospital after she began having labor pains, which, it turned out, were false. When Deadwyler noticed a pursuing patrol car, he voluntarily pulled over to let it escort them. Officer Bova, according to her testimony, put his service revolver through the passenger window and pulled the trigger, shooting Deadwyler in the stomach. He then turned impassively away. Four Negro witnesses agreed with her that the car had come to a full stop when Bova approached it.

The police told a different story—of a wild 40-block chase at 80 m.p.h. and an apparently drunken driver who stepped on the gas just as the investigating officer reached in the window. Taking the stand in his own behalf, Bova, 23, said that the car "gave a sudden lurch forward. My feet were knocked out from under me. I recall making a grab to get my balance. At this time, my revolver was unintentionally fired."

Backing him up were the testimony of his partner and a white bus driver, and a laboratory test that showed Dead-wyler's blood had an alcohol count of .35 (.20 above the level of intoxication). A passenger in the back seat refused to say whether he, too, had been drinking, though police played a recorded interview in which he admitted that he had been so drunk he didn't remember anything that happened.

Shoveling Sand. Mostly, the case underlines the fact that in Watts today a white policeman still feels compelled to approach a Negro's car with a leveled gun. Though federal agencies have allotted it $16 million since the riots —and only last week announced a $2,700,000 grant to break its isolation with better bus service—so far, said a federal official, it has done little more than "shovel sand against the tide."

The city, under the uninspired leadership of Mayor Samuel Yorty, has done less. Yorty blames Communists for the continuing unrest—and feels that is enough. City departments were barely dissuaded from closing a Watts coffeehouse, one of the few social centers around, for minor infractions of building and license regulations. City police, rightly or wrongly, are still bitterly distrusted by Negroes. Nobody expects the coroner's jury, or any subsequent trial, to settle matters in Watts for long.