Part 1
Sgt. Scott Ansman’s pledge to take away their unborn child from his girlfriend — because she allegedly was not taking care of herself the way a pregnant woman should — precipitated the final fatal fight between the lovers on the afternoon of last Aug. 24, according to the murder suspect’s mother.
Additionally, the National Guard veteran portrayed the victim to his mother as “a party girl on drugs and alcohol who was leading a wild life.”
A medical source said today that “the lack of pre-natal care greatly increases the risk of birth complications for mother and child. It also increases the chance of mortality.”
Marilyn Ansman told the newspaper this morning that her 35-year-old son, married and the father of three very young children, asserted he killed his girlfriend, JoAnn Crystal Harris, 29, of Leimert Park, in self-defense.
Another Side
This is the first time that Sgt. Ansman’s version of events has been aired, even by proxy. Mrs. Ansman met with the newspaper in her South Bay home to discuss the personal side of the case, a range of feelings and facts.
In the melee leading to the homicide, the victim stabbed the murder suspect four times, Mrs. Ansman said, three times in the shoulder and once in the hand.
The mother said her son told her and she said toxicology reports verify that drugs were in Ms. Harris’s system at the time of her death. She said her son told her that Ms. Harris had been drinking in addition to allegedly being on drugs.
Working Through Details
How Sgt. Ansman planned to care for the baby — given that he had his family at home and just became a father for the third time seven months ago — remained unclear.
His wife Flora, who has moved her family to the Pacific Northwest where her parents reside, knew about the pregnancy.
The senior Mrs. Ansman believes her son and daughter-in-law discussed an arrangement for the baby, but she is not sure. This unanticipated development led to a bevy of other questions that Mrs. Ansman could not answer.
The Accusation
Sgt. Ansman, a National Guard veteran, faces first-degree murder charges — which could mean the death penalty — in the brutal slaying of Ms. Harris and their baby at the National Guard Armory in Culver City, where he served as the Supply Sergeant.
A month ago, the District Attorney’s office added the condition “with special circumstances,” to cover the killing of the unborn fetus.
If found guilty, Sgt. Ansman could be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole or receive the death penalty.
In an bizarre closing act to their relationship, Sgt. Ansman himself called 9-1-1 from the National Guard Armory to report the homicide. He was mopping up pools of blood from the floor when police arrived to investigate. He reportedly asked the police to wait a moment while he completed the cleanup before admitting the officers inside.
The Setting
The first thing you notice when driving up to the longtime home of Marilyn Ansman in the South Bay is a large American flag, perhaps the perfect metaphor for the family for the past three generations.
Three generations of Ansman men have proudly worn military uniforms.
Not that the waving flag stands out on the narrow working-class street lined with modest one-story homes of families who work hard to make a living.
Flags are freely sprinkled among the landmarks of the gritty neighborhood, occasionally on aging one-story homes, other times in sticker form on well-traveled vans and cars parked in crowded driveways.
In this southwestern section of the city, barely removed from an industrial zone marked by gritty businesses, breathing space on these slender parcels is not as generous as elsewhere in Los Angeles.
Barking dogs on this street, especially those fenced in, never took a vow of silence. When a neighbor calls out to her husband, who is across the street struggling to control a couple of tiny, chattering, cranky terriers, her medium-sized voice echoes the breadth of the avenue.
Life’s Nightmarish Turn
Greeting a visitor on the first ring of the doorbell, the clearly distressed Mrs. Ansman explains that she is nervous. So many mostly tragic first-time events have land-mined her life since Aug. 24. So many tears have been shed, privately and in the company of her son. So much uncertainty suddenly clouds the present and the immediate future of her middle son.
In her conflicted mind, unaccustomed visions and unusual feelings criss-cross, jam into each other and compete for her challenged attention.
She tries to sort through and separate her feelings, but her mind keeps playing a re-run of the day of the killing.
Trying to Accommodate
After instinctively offering a libation, the round-faced widow, in a navy blue jumper and white blouse, takes her favorite seat in a plump, darkish easy chair.
She immediately begins rocking, because it is what she does and because it helps to assuage her nervousness and the still-peculiar feelings of urgency, anxiety and tragedy that she is trying to live with.
On medication since shortly after the still obscured series of events that brought Ms. Harris’s life to an end, Mrs. Ansman is a pragmatist.
She neither complains about her plight nor brags about conquering an ocean of jumbled emotion.
Far From a Spotlight
From a seat on an L-shaped, equally cushy and darkish couch, most of the house can be seen. Even with two small children around, the busily appointed space is tidy.
In total, the Ansmans and their home both are plain.
Above all values, the three generations of Ansmans — the six of them — who share this space are ordinary Angelenos. They probably would not be noticed anywhere they go.
An emphatically patriotic and blue-collar family, they put their head down and drive to make a living because that is what each preceding generation was taught to do.
Who Would Have Noticed?
They lead quiet, unnoticed lives that never would have been chronicled, even in a small-town newspaper, prior to the Friday in August that slathered two previously unconnected families beneath overlapping waves of mourning.
To say it differently, the Ansmans reflect the landscape of workaday families where everything is not necessarily as desired or dreamed about. Perfection and idealism long ago were remanded to the status of family heirlooms whose job is to collect dust.
Were a picture of the family being painted, shadings would be required to mute the imperfections.
The Last Time
Rocking to and fro in her chair across the room that blurs into the kitchen area, Mrs. Ansman wears a benign expression. Forty-one years after her marriage, she is kind of on her own and kind of is not.
High above the large, flat-screen television just south of the doorway is a collection of family photos, dominated by a color portrait of her late, bespectacled husband Thomas Sr. in his U.S. Army uniform.
When he died a decade ago, that was the last time in the Ansman family that Everything Changed.
(To be continued)
