Four people were shot Thursday night at a South L.A. community program meant to prevent gang violence, police said, marking the second shooting at a Summer Night Lights event in a week.
The shooting in Vermont Vista appears to be gang-related, police said.
About 11 p.m., more than 20 community members were gathered in a healing circle at the Algin Sutton Recreation Center, grieving with the family of Javonnta Murphy — a 32-year-old man who was found dead inside a barrel at Malibu Lagoon State Beach on Monday.
The sound of gunshots interrupted their healing.
“A car came up and just started shooting,” said Kevin “Twin” Orange, a gang interventionist who has overseen the Summer Night Lights programming at Algin Sutton for the past 17 years.
“There’s no book to show you what to do in times like that,” he said. “The crowd was traumatized. It put a damper over this community.”
Officers monitoring the event in the 8800 block of South Hoover Street put out a call for help after shots were fired, said Melissa Podany, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles Police Department.
Paramedics responded and brought three victims to a hospital. A fourth victim went to a hospital on their own.
Three of the victims — a 51-year-old woman, a 65-year-old man and another man whose age was not available — were stable, police said. The fourth, a 23-year-old man, was in critical condition. Orange said they were all residents of the community.
The suspect, whom police did not describe, fled by vehicle in an unknown direction. No arrests have been made.
“That fact that there was another shooting at a Summer Night Lights program speaks to the need to scale community safety efforts,” said Fernando Rejón, the executive director of the Urban Peace Institute. “Even though generally the numbers say L.A. is safer in the last couple years because shootings and homicides are down, the reality of this is it impacts a lot of people who live in those communities.”
Historically, Summer Night Lights has come to symbolize community peace and resilience for neighborhoods long dogged by violence. Launched in 2008, the program aims to create safe environments, providing free food and activities to families at nighttime in the summer, when crime is known to rise.
Families would come together to play late-night basketball and share laughter over face painting and card game tables until “they were tired enough to just go home,” said Skipp Townsend, a renowned gang interventionist.
Townsend said he used to work at Summer Night Lights in its early years. In those days, he said, there was “safety for everybody. That’s what it represents.”
Now, he isn’t so sure.
“I would always take my children with me to work. But I wouldn’t dare do that now, because I have no clue what might happen,” he said.
On July 27, a week before the Vermont Vista shooting, a volunteer at a Summer Night Lights event at the Wilmington Recreation Center was shot and killed. Jose Refugio Quezada, 46, was barbecuing when someone opened fire, striking him.
“This community leader lost his life to the very type of violence he was working so hard to prevent,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement after the slaying. The shooting “is a tragic reminder that we must fight even harder to ensure that our communities have the tools that they need to stop this senseless violence.”
Summer Night Lights programming continued the night after Quezada was killed with a vigil, guarded by increased police presence. The night after that was an “oldies night,” with music and grilling to celebrate his life.
“We just continue to program to ensure that we’re signaling that the parks belong to the community,” said Karren Lane, L.A.’s deputy mayor of community safety. “We take it very seriously. The city is not going to abandon neighborhoods and communities.”
Lane said the violence of this past week reinforces why this sort of programming is so crucial.
“That’s why we target these sites,” she said, adding that areas with Summer Night Lights have shown a 3% decrease in violent crime compared to nearby areas without. “We’re in communities that are impacted by violence. People feel safer when SNL is at the park.”
Through late August, 44 Summer Night Lights events are being hosted throughout Los Angeles, Wednesday through Saturday. Usually, the events are held from 7 to 11 p.m., but Lane said some may not run as late moving forward and will have both increased law enforcement presence and access to mental health services.
That’s the case at Algin Sutton Recreation Center, where more healing circles will be held in the coming days.
“Everybody is on the same page of making sure we don’t let the naysayers disrupt something for the community. We can’t give in to them because they’re out here doing these evil acts,” Orange said. “We got to fight through it.”
