I walk past at 5:15 p.m. There’s an ambulance and fire truck. Airdrome is closed off at Robertson.
Yellow crime-scene tape stretches across the road.
The body is covered in a white sheet. I pull out my cell phone and take pictures and video.
None of them are worth publishing.
A fireman comes over and asks me to stop taking pictures. "The situation is an emergency," he says.
I drop off my books at the library. I walk home.
A police car rolls up. Then another.
I grab my video camera. I walk back.
Three black trash cans are now rolled up to the body to hide it.
There was a homeless man who lived in a car here. I assume he’s the one who died.
A policeman walks over to me as I videotape.
"You find this entertaining?"
"I’m just doing my job."
"Let me see some ID."
I leave my camera running as I rifle through my wallet.
I show him my LA Press Club card.
He notes it is out of date. He wants something up to date.
"That’s all I have," I say.
"You don’t have a current press pass," he says.
I get the video I want and walk home.
Video (My confrontation with police)
Holly emails:
I just read your story about the dead body by your house… what a weird coincidence. This past Friday, someone was killed right in front of where I was sleeping — the body was right next to the driveway, and there were two cars abandoned at the scene there. Someone was obviously chased by the other– but why didn’t the killer get back in their car and leave the scene? At first the body was covered with a white sheet, but then as I watched the cops lifted the sheet off and I got to see the body– a Mexican guy in his early 30s I think. I slept through the whole incident (amazing for someone who used to have insomnia but now doesn’t even take over-the-counter sleeping pills), but the cops knocking on my door at 5 AM to ask if I’d heard anything woke me up. It was really disturbing. I took a picture of the crime scene as soon as it was light, but the body was already gone. The cops came again to my house last night due to the faulty house alarm going off, and when I asked about the murder, they told me it was a stabbing due to a domestic dispute– the woman had killed her boyfriend/husband. I still don’t know much else about it. The strange thing was there was no blood. I didn’t see any on the body and I checked the area the next morning after the cops left– nothing. All I could do was stare at the body and think how maybe two hours ago he was at a party, laughing, talking to someone, telling someone he’d see them later. And now he’s lying on the sidewalk by my friend’s car: lifeless, the heat already leaving his body. I hate death.
ERSNews.com reports Nov. 2, 2007:
Luke Ford is a well known blogger and writer in Los Angeles. Luke tells ERS he was on his way to the library On Halloween to drop off some books he had checked out. He stumbled across what could be a crime scene, a dead guy with a white sheet over him and the LA Fire Department on scene. Some yellow tape was up, but the cops had yet to arrive. Luke had his cell phone with him and took some snapshots and cell phone video. A member of the LA Fire Department asked Luke not to take pictures. Luke moved on and headed home. At home, he got his video camera and returned to the scene. The LAPD was there and the area was sealed off with crime tape. Luke had a video camera and what transpired next can be seen here.
Why this LAPD cop saw fit to harass Luke Ford, we don’t know. What the video shows is an LAPD cop who seemly needs a little "media training." When confronted by the cop Luke follows his demands, although the officer had no right to be trying to get stop Luke from documenting the scene from a public street in a public place. Luke as you can hear on the tape was nothing less than friendly to the officer when he demanded to see some kind of ID from Ford. He wanted to see a "press pass," the one issued by the LAPD. Although Luke supplied an LA Press Club identification, which the officer noted was expired, Luke offered to provide him his business card but the officer wasn’t interested. The officer was extremely hostile and confrontational. In the end, Luke thought the better of it and left the scene.
ERS views this incident as a great example of how the LAPD operates on the streets of LA in recent years. We’ve had our own run-ins with them on occasion, both in the "official" mainstream media way and in what We’ll call the "new" media way. The LAPD seems to believe it can determine who ‘legitimate" media is and who isn’t. Note to LAPD, you can’t and you shouldn’t. An attitude of we’ll decide who the MEDIA is and who it Isn’t. That’s not the way it works in a country with a free press.
Last year ERS co-founder Eric Longabardi exposed the LAPD’s ineptness and indifference when it came to the ever burgeoning business of paparazzi on the streets of Los Angeles. People. who like Luke have nothing more than a camera and the ability to take a picture from a public place. ERS thinks the LAPD might be behooved to give its officers a little "media training" before sending them out in the City of Angels.
