Describing a Good Woman’s Brief Life in Broad Strokes

After working in computers and banking earlier, Martha Harris, the murder victim’s 68-year-old mother, said her daughter abruptly changed career paths after the sudden death of her father, to whom she was very close.

Twenty-one at the time, JoAnn Harris announced her intention to become a nurse, like her mother, and that is what she did for the final 8 years of her life.

Ms. Harris’s mother and her only brother, 41-year-old Gerald Bennett, are not clear about why she went to the National Guard Armory a year ago — just that she wanted to join the Guard and explore her nursing career in a new, and perhaps foreign, climate.

Gaps in Details

But this is speculation. Neither Ms. Harris’s brother nor mother could offer further explanation.

Sometime in the last 12 months, she met Sgt. Scott Ansman, a 15-year veteran of the National Guard who commuted from Carson to Culver City because he was assigned to fulltime duty at the Armory. He, himself, was hazy about how long he had known and dated Ms. Harris.

The Earlier Journey

Exactly how and why the couple came to be together under one bloody roof on the late afternoon of Friday, Aug. 24 , continues to mystify authorities.

Wrapped tightly and deeply inside this enigma, her mother — gentle, softly spoken and, in her grief, withdrawn —remarked upon a bitter irony that a devastated parent graspingly may dwell upon.

JoAnn’s beloved father, Martha Harris said, died of a heart attack in May, 1999, the month JoAnn was born. Her baby daughter died at someone else’s angry hand in August, 7 days before her mother’s birthday, Aug. 31.

One of the storylines on the day Ms. Harris was murdered, according to Sgt. Ansman, is that the couple was going to go car-shopping for her.

This statement baffles her family.

Her mother said Ms. Harris always has had her own car, from the start. When she was 16 years old, her father bought a Saab for her to drive. Not long before her murder, Ms. Harris dropped her car off with a mechanic to address needed repairs thought to be middling, not serious, in scope.

Unanswered Questions

There is no shortage of gaps in this tale of murder, which police are attempting to fill in. Not surprisingly in a homicide involving a young woman who, externally at least, seemed to live by the code that governs all citizens, enigmas greatly outnumber answers.

Ms. Harris’s state of mind during the past year was far from an open book. Her family could not say her life was tranquil, and they couldn’t say it wasn’t.

The vague, wandering portrait of Ms. Harris that Sgt. Ansman drew of his girlfriend differs in numerous and important ways from the sketch assembled by the victim’s relatives.

Contrasting Perspectives

The volatility of the Harris-Ansman relationship seems to have come as a shock to her family, and the apparent fact that Ms. Harris was pregnant seems entirely out of character for a young woman raised with clearly defined fundamental values.

While emphasizing a perfumed bouquet of sensitive tendrils associated with Ms. Harris’s closely held personality and interests — such as her flair for composing poetry — her family knew little of her private life.

“JoAnn was a very, very private person,” said her brother, Mr. Bennett.

What Informed Their Childhood

In a household of 4 siblings — 3 from Mrs. Harris’s first marriage and 1 from her second, in 1970 — the children were raised in a loving, middle-class environment suffused with the principles of the mother’s religious convictions as a Jehovah’s Witness.

By all signs as they stride into middle age, the children have grown up to be the kind of adults their business-minded and property-holding parents dreamed about in the 1970s,‘80s and ‘90s.

Their mutual affection for each other as adults was regularly affirmed during a visit to Mr. Bennett’s home this week.

Residentially Close

Three of the four lived within three buildings of each other. The fourth is moving back to Los Angeles from San Francisco, where she has been living. Ms. Harris’s family said she also retained an apartment in Hollywood from the days when she was working there as a nurse.

A distinguishing angle of this story is that the siblings — the surviving three are in their early 40s — have chosen the single life. They also are solid, long-term employees in their various fields.

Model Citizens

Surely not by accident but rather by training, the 4 siblings evolved into pleasant, rock-ribbed, middle-class citizens. With an accent on normalcy and ordinariness, they could have gone a lifetime without attracting the smallest patch of attention.

Their teachers, their mother and stepfather, took their core values from another era, when it not only was dangerous but frequently fatal to be black in a world where whites controlled every lever of power, where white-shaded iron-fists discouraged even whispered resistance.

The parents grew up in the oldtime, pre-Dr. Martin Luther King South.

In Other Times

As children in the pre-civil rights Louisiana and Texas of the 1940s and ‘50s, they were eyewitnesses when the racist set of laws known as Jim Crow ruled “mixed” communities.

Jim Crow forced all black persons to cater to all whites in all situations.

Martha Harris and her late husband both overcame the worst social/cultural handicaps that any modern American could have faced to raise a proud, achieving family.

Friends in a General Sense

Possibly Ms. Harris’s brother and her Mom knew so little of her social life because that seems to have been the family tradition, to prefer a generic approach.

Mr. Bennett explained that the Harrises and Bennetts never have dwelt on such tightly defined relationships as “boyfriends” and “girlfriends.” Specifically, they were known inspecifically as friends, nothing more personal.

(To be continued)