Re “Why Did Shooting Victim Ward Seek Out Culver City Cops?”
Proud and solitary.
Or was it proud but solitary?
These two traditional-sounding pillars framed the largely untraditional odyssey of David James Ward.
Fittingly, he met the end of his life on his terms , just the way he had determined to live all 66 years leading up to Sept. 21, dying the way few non-criminals do.
After interviewing street friends of David James Ward, County Sheriff’s Dept. investigators say they still do not know, and likely never will, why he walked to the Culver City Police Station early on a Saturday morning, and challenged officers before a single bullet cut him down.
What, now, did he have to live for?
Why bother?
Not long after daybreak four weeks ago tomorrow, Mr. Ward climbed out of his aging, immovable 1950-ish panel truck, parked just off Venice Boulevard, around the corner from the Hare Krishna temple – technically the City of Los Angeles – where he had parked overnight for years, possibly decades.
By the time he reached the Police Station on Duquesne Avenue, a hefty walk for one of any age, he was “casually but well-dressed.”
Mr. Ward looked as regular as any other denizen of small, clean-cut community.
It was 7:15. Patiently, silently, he waited outside the vehicle entrance to the Police Station grounds, just south of the main doors.
Even though he was armed with a handgun, he did not look menacing.
He may as well have been lying in a comfortable bed, trapped by an incurable disease.
He was ready to go, not to kiss life goodbye but to mysteriously evaporate, vanquished as if he never had existed because he had no one who cared.
Now that his claim to permanence had been disrupted, there was no reason to continue fighting.
Once inside the police grounds – where visitors never are welcome – Mr. Ward, the serene intruder in an unprecedented scene, announced he had a gun.
Confronted by an unknown number of officers and ordered to drop his weapon, he refused. At least five bullets were sprayed. One exploded inside its target.
When he was pronounced dead shortly later at UCLA Hospital, one man’s naggingly peculiar journey had ended the same way it mostly was experienced – choked with baffling insoluble question marks.
For the past month, Sheriff’s Sgt. Bill Cotter has been the lead investigator, and he has pieced together this story.
Based on conversations with street friends, Mr. James had been “somewhat distanced from his family” for at least 30 years.
He had lived primarily in his 1950s-era truck ever since. Occasionally, a friend would permit Mr. Ward to bathe, freshen up in his home.
This evidently is what happened to put a publicly presentable face on the chosen final day of his life.
How did he sustain himself from the early 1980s until last month?
“Apparently Mr. Ward was somewhat of a craftsman,” Sgt. Cotter told the newspaper. “He would do odd jobs, help people in terms of labor, things like that.
“From what my partner and I learned, he led a very solitary existence.
“Just sort of a sad story in a lot of ways.”
The raison d’etre for deciding to close out his life arrived unremarkably, in the form of a dangling detail that persons living traditional lives might have been capable of shrugging away.
Sgt. Cotter:
“His friends said that a City of Los Angeles building inspector had told the Hare Krishna people that Mr. Ward would have to move his vehicle. The vehicle had not been moved for years, probably because it couldn’t. He had driven it here from the East Coast, possibly 35 to 40 years ago.
Where was he to go if forced to quit his truck?
Despair surely set in, gripping his throat until he did not want to breathe anymore, one may speculate,
He was, we said, a man of skyscraper pride.
He did not need anyone’s help.
For years he proved it.
In all of his isolation, he was extraordinarily independent.
In a life perhaps scarce with legacies, one salutes with pardonable pride.
Equipped with few natural survival tools, Mr. Ward supported himself himself.
Perhaps Mr. Ward’s most laudatory accomplishment in living his life his way was that he never took any government assistance.
That, he must have concluded, is my way.
