Family Scene
On a warm afternoon in the serene, heavily tree-shaded Leimert Park neighborhood, Ms. Harriss only brother, 6-foot-7 Gerald Bennett, sits at a right angle from his mourning mother figuratively and literally in his pin-neat ground-floor apartment.
Undeniably, smoking anger wells within Mr. Bennett over the way the Culver City Police Dept. has handled the homicide of his baby sister on the day of her brutal murder, and since.
A Time to be Open, Candid
If it were not so unseemly, he would love to stretch his lungs and shout out questions that he says are causing him nightmares as he tries to get used to the fact he never will see his sister again.
After 21 years as a child and young man, and after 20 more as a responsible, full-grown adult, Gerald Bennett knows what it feels like to drive, to work, just to exist, to merely breathe, as a black man in a white mans world.
Is It Different Anywhere?
No, this is not the supposedly dreaded South.
This is supposedly civilized Los Angeles.
By his experiences stopped by cops because he is black racism is like the air, practically everywhere, and, like the air, practically invisible to those of a more prolific skin color.
By no means is racism on his mind all day. But its ugly, villainous presence, he suggests, is never farther from a black man than his mothers Holy Bible is from her comfortable grasp.
Culver Citys Reputation
Closer to the point, this is about Culver City. To many the Heart of Screenland, Culver City has its own dreaded historic reputation for racism.
Mr. Bennett regards the Police Dept. as indivisible, inseparable from the communitys decades-long anti-black image.
The racist image, Mr. Bennett feels, never has diminished even as Culver Citys newly won glitz and glamour have become practically ubiquitous. Down to this wrenching day, Mr. Bennett feels closely watched, a claim no white man ever has made.
Black and White
The victim, Mr. Bennetts sister, was black.
The man accused of killing her, 34-year-old Scott Ansman, a 15-year veteran of the National Guard, was white. And married.
Not just because of what he has learned in the past week, Mr. Bennett is convinced that unmistakable strains of racism, like rivers of blood, are running through this anguishing story.
What Happened
Ms. Harris and Sgt. Ansman were lovers, and she was pregnant, it was reported, on the afternoon of Aug. 24 when Ms. Harris was battered to her death, in part with a baseball bat. Police said Sgt. Ansman himself called 9-1-1. Almost inexplicably, when police arrived at the National Guard Armory, by Vets Park, they found the Guardsman mopping up the blood-soiled floor of the gymnasium of the where the young woman had been executed.
The accused man kept mopping, even after police arrived, even after the Guardsman pointed out the body, across the floor.
So much of what he has heard and read about the afternoon of his sisters murder infuriates Mr. Bennett.
Like turning a giant bucket upside down and spreading its contents all across the floor the better to inspect them Mr. Bennett feels a surge and an urge to spill out all of his feelings onto the living room carpet.
Responding to Impulsive Feelings
It is so tempting. Ordinarily as soft-spoken and nearly as disciplined as his mother, anger within Mr. Bennett especially over the way Culver City police are handling the case fights with grief for primacy in his mind and in his heart.
Mrs. Harris, his mother, though, is too close by for that to happen.
Several feet away on a plump couch, his kindly, round-faced, widowed mother, her eyes permanently damp these days, painfully hears every word he utters. Disciplined by her soul-deep religious beliefs, she probably wants to wince at her sons strong words. Years of training as a mother wont let her. Gently but mama-firmly after 43 years of practice and repetition as a mother, Mrs. Harris cautions her son to restrain his feelings and his searing words.
Where It All Starts
The Harris-Bennett familys pillow-soft approach to life comes naturally, far more naturally than the grieving-angry-awkward-inquisitive situation they find themselves in.
Mainly, it seems, through the profoundly religious influence of the matriarch, Martha Harris, mother of 4, of whom JoAnn, at 29, was the youngest. As long as anyone can remember, certainly predating the births of her children, Martha Harris has been a Jehovahs Witness.
Fiscally, emotionally, spiritually, the members of the Harris-Bennett family are as cohesive as immediate relatives can be without living in the same building with each other.
They know what is going on in each others lives.
JoAnn Harris just lived around the corner from her brother. With one of her two older sisters.
Planning a Funeral for Two
Probably since JoAnn Harriss beloved father died, 8 years and 4 months ago, the imposing Mr. Bennett, at 41 years old the last surviving male, is the fulcrum of the family.
This makes him the spokesman, a role he readily accepts and embraces.
In the process of planning his sisters funeral for this coming Saturday a funeral for two, he says, since she was with child Mr. Bennett presents several questions he would like no, demands to be answered:
Did Race Play a Role?
Give the lifelong closeness of the Harris-Bennett family, why was his sister characterized as an apparent transient? This stains the good name of his family. He suspects that because she was black, it was easier for police to cast her as a pitiable soul who was loose from her moorings, wandering through life.
Why wasnt the family notified more promptly than 5 days after JoAnn Harris was murdered? Wasnt her address on her drivers license?
Why did police rifle through the around-the-corner apartment of his two sisters and then deny the condition in which they had left it?
What really happened the afternoon his sister was killed? The accused killer said she demanded money from him, and that seems to have led to the crime. When her father died in 1999, Ms. Harris stood to gain a significant inheritance, and even though she didnt receive it, Mr. Bennett said he knew of no reason for her to need money.
(To be continued in the familys own words)
