Daniel Kells

I have a pretty tight circle in which I move.  As a result, I rarely come in contact with children.  My boss’s son is 12, but I only see the kid once a week or so.  A family with a daughter of maybe 10 just moved into my small Hollywood building, so I’ve been seeing her lately ride around on a little scooter.  And there’s an elementary school a couple of blocks away, but I’m rarely actually awake at 8:00 a.m. to see the kids walking to school.  Aside from that, I don’t really have occasion to see kids that much.

On Saturday night, though, I was the Assistant House Manager for an evening of comedy with Eddie Izzard at the Coronet Theater, a 300-seat venue on La Cienega Blvd. in the middle of West Hollywood.  Curtain was at 10:00 p.m., and the show was sold out.

Across the street from the theater is a building that used to house a restaurant (called Acapulco), that closed in the past six months.  On Saturday night, the venue played host to a teen dance party, supposedly called a “Red Level” party.

Aside from my high school graduation (fifteen years ago, ugh!!), I haven’t really seen this many children in one place at one time.  And while many of them were acting mature, talking mature, and certainly dressed mature, they were children.

Obviously the promoters of this event underestimated the crowd, and the doors to the club were closed by about 10:15 p.m., leaving literally thousands of kids on the sidewalks and in the streets.  And obviously the authorities underestimated the crowd.  From my vantage point, I saw one police officer and a few security guards, and nothing else.

The theater where I work has a breezeway that leads to a courtyard, where you’ll find the box office and doors to the venue.  Along with the rest of the staff, I stood at the end of the breezeway and watched as the crowd swelled and swelled, eventually closing down the street (one of the major north/south avenues cutting through Los Angeles).

We also did our best to keep folks who weren’t patrons of the theater out of the breezeway and courtyard.  These kids were loud, and we had a live show and a few hundred patrons to look out for, and we’re paid to protect the audience and the integrity of the show.  Dozens of screaming kids in the courtyard, while not a safety issue, would certainly have caused a disturbance on the stage.

But a couple of kids got past us as we stared entraced at the swelling crowds across the street.  Before I could ask them to step out of the breezeway, I saw what I was seeing in the crowds reflected in their eyes.  I sarcastically asked, “What are you guys, twelve?”  To which they replied, “No, fourteen.”  Fourteen years old, and staring at a crowd, that by this time, was getting rowdy.

I’m not 100% certain how things got from a rollicking crowd to the terrifying hights that it reached, but things snapped quickly.  More than a few fights broke out, one about a hundred feet away, then one very close to us.

The fight a bit further down from us caused everybody near it to start running in all directions, and those people began to trip over the fight that was closer to us.  As arms were flailing and kids were tripping, one of the security guards got right into the middle of the haphazard circle and began to pepper spray anybody and everybody.

Suddenly, tough-talking and -dressing kids were crumbling on the street and the sidewalk, sobbing and crying and shaking, bewildered and blinded.  More fights, more pepper spray, more running, more screaming.

Then, finally (and in my opinion about 15 minutes too late) a substantial number of police officers arrived.  One car after another sped up and out came running a few dozen officers brandishing clubs.  No riot gear, most likely because there wasn’t time, but they had back-up in the sky, in the form of helicopters with search lights.

The helicopter searchlights didn’t do anything but fan the flames.  The area was already quite well lit, but the sound of a helicopter flying closer than I’ve ever seen in this city (and trust me, I’ve seen plenty of helicopters flying overhead), and the randomness of the light only added to the insanity of the moments.

It took about an hour to get the area cleared, and in the end things ended tragically for one person.

According to CBS News, somebody was shot and killed.  The news report, for whatever it’s worth, ignores the mayhem that preceded the killing, and further refers to the person killed as a “man” in the headline, even though the story refers to him as a male, either 17 or 18 years old.

I’m not 100% sure why I’ve even written this.  Perhaps simply to say that I witnessed something awesome (in the truest sense of the word), something terrifying, something tragic.  Children, thousands of them, were set-up and left vulnerable by this event, many of them hurt, one of them dead, and perhaps all of them scarred in some way or another.

The two 14 year olds who cowered in the theater’s breezeway stayed there until the crowd thined and one of their parents was a few blocks away to pick them up.  Eddie Izzard did a 30-minute encore to keep our audience inside the building until the streets were clear enough to get them out, and heading to last night’s show was eerie, if for no other reason than because of the noise that preceded it the night before.

And driving past the makeshift memorial in the alley where the kid died drove home for me the immediacy of life, the fragility of it all, and how quickly innocence can be lost.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 4:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.