In a Watts housing project, 'a death angel' kept knocking this summer
Even before the shootings last month that drew the attention of politicians and police, gang interventionists and longtime residents, the Imperial Courts public housing project in Watts had seen a lot of death.
On July 1, Brenda Slocum succumbed to lung cancer. She was 63.
Five days later, her son, Rodney "Rah-Rah" Richmond Jr. — who grew up in Imperial Courts and still stayed there often — died of a heart attack, just after celebrating his 38th birthday. He was reeling after his mother's death.
On July 10, yet another Imperial Courts resident, Dwight Lockett Jr., 43, died in an automobile crash. That week, another neighbor in the complex died of cancer.
By late July, when a pair of shootings in Watts killed two people and injured seven near Imperial Courts and the nearby Jordan Downs housing project, grief prevailed. In the words of one resident, Cynthia Mendenhall, a "death angel" kept knocking on people's doors.
"Oh, Jesus," she said as she considered
