The Scarecrow

A drug crackdown at a housing project in Watts has drawn fire from local activists who complained Tuesday that the LAPD only paid attention to the problem in the minority-populated complex when a white woman was allegedly murdered there.

Police announced the arrest of 16 residents of Rodia Gardens on drug charges and the seizure of a small amount of drugs following a one-week investigation. Police spokesmen said the “peep and sweep” operation was in response to the murder of Denise Babbit, 23, of Hollywood.

A 16-year-old alleged gang member who is a resident of Rodia Gardens was arrested in the slaying. Babbit’s body was found two weeks ago in the trunk of her car at a beachside parking lot in Santa Monica. The investigation traced the crime back to Rodia Gardens, where Santa Monica police believe Babbit, an exotic dancer, went to buy drugs. Instead, she was abducted, held for several hours and repeatedly sexually assaulted before being strangled.

Several community activists questioned why efforts to stem the tide of drug dealing and related crime in the projects did not come before the murder. They were quick to point out that the victim of the trunk murder was white while the members of the community are almost 100 percent African American.

“Look, let’s face it,” said Rev. William Treacher, head of a group called South Los Angeles Ministers, also known as SLAM, “this is just another form of police racism. They ignore Rodia Gardens and let it become a stew of drugs and gang crime. Then this white woman who puts drugs in her body and takes her clothes off for a living goes down and gets herself killed there and what do you get? A task force. Where were the police before this? Where was the task force? Why does it take a crime against a white person to draw attention to problems in the black community?”

A police spokesman denied that race had anything to do with the anti-drug operation and said similar operations have occurred in Rodia Gardens numerous times before.

“Who complains about getting drug dealers and gangbangers off the street?” asked Capt. Art Grossman, who directed the operation.

Carver stopped reading the story. He didn’t sense any threat to him. Still, it didn’t explain why someone from the Times-presumably Cook or McEvoy-had put trunk murder into a search engine. Were they just being thorough, covering all the bases? Or was there something else? He looked at the two previous stories in the archives that mentioned trunk murder and found they had been written by McEvoy. They were straight news stories about the Denise Babbit case, one about the discovery of her body, and the second-a day later-about the arrest of the young gangbanger in her murder.

Carver couldn’t help but smile to himself as he read about the kid getting tagged for the murder. But his humor didn’t let him drop his caution. He plugged McEvoy into the archive search and soon found hundreds of stories, all related to crime in Los Angeles. He was the crime beat reporter. At the bottom of each of his stories was his e-mail address: JackMcEvoy@LATimes.com.

Carver then put Angela Cook into the search engine and got far fewer stories. She had been writing for the Times for less than six months and only in the past week had she written any crime stories. Before that, she wrote a variety of stories on events ranging from a garbage strike to a competitive eating contest. She seemed to have no specific beat until this week when she shared two bylines with McEvoy.

“He’s teaching her the ropes,” Carver said out loud.

He guessed that Cook was young and McEvoy was old. That would make her the easier mark. He took a chance and went onto Facebook, using a phony ID he had concocted long ago, and sure enough she had a page. The contents weren’t for public consumption but her photo was there. She was a beauty with shoulder-length blond hair. Green eyes and a trained pout to her lips. That pout, Carver thought. He could change that.

The photo was a portrait shot. He was disappointed that he could not see all of her. Especially the length and shape of her legs.

He started humming. It always calmed him. Songs he remembered from the sixties and seventies, when he was a boy. Hard rockers a woman could dance and show her body off to.

He kept searching, finding that Angela Cook had abandoned a MySpace page a few years earlier but had not deleted it. He also found a professional profile on LinkedIn and that led to the mother lode-a blog page called www.CityofAngela.com in which she kept an ongoing diary of her life and work in Los Angeles.

The latest entry in the blog brimmed with Cook’s excitement over being assigned to the police and crime beat, and being trained for the position by the veteran Jack McEvoy.