Joan Didion - Where I Was From

There had also been more substantive incidents, occurrences that could not be written off to schoolyard exaggeration or adolescent oversensitivity. There had been assaults in local parks, bicycles stolen and sold. There had been burglaries, credit cards and jewelry missing from the bedroom drawers of houses where local girls had been babysitting. There had even been, beginning in the summer of 1992, felony arrests: Donald Belman’s son Dana, who was generally said to have “founded” the Spur Posse, was arrested on suspicion of stealing a certain number of guns from the bedroom of a house where he was said to have attended a party. Not long before that, in Las Vegas, Dana Belman and another Spur, Christopher Russo, had been detained for possession of stolen credit cards. Just before Christmas 1992, Dana Belman and Christopher Russo were detained yet again, and arrested for alleged check forgery.

There were odd quirks here, details not entirely consistent with the community’s preferred view of itself. There were the high school trips to Vegas and to Laughlin, which is a Nevada casino town on the Colorado River below Las Vegas. There was the question of the certain number of guns Dana Belman was suspected of having stolen from the bedroom of the house where he was said to have attended the party: the number of guns mentioned was nineteen. Still, these details seemed to go unremarked upon, and the events unconnected. People who had been targeted by the older boys believed themselves, they said later, “all alone in this.” They believed that each occasion of harassment was discrete, unique. They did not yet see a pattern in the various incidents and felonies. They had not yet made certain inductive leaps. That was before the pipe bomb.

The pipe bomb exploded on the front porch of a house not far from Lakewood High School between three and three-thirty on the morning of February 12, 1993. It destroyed one porch support. It tore holes in the stucco. It threw shrapnel into parked cars. One woman remembered that her husband was working the night shift at Rockwell and she had been sleeping light as usual when the explosion woke her. The next morning she asked a neighbor if she had heard the noise. “And she said, ‘You’re not going to believe it when I tell you what that was.’ And she explained to me that a pipe bomb had blown up on someone’s front porch. And that it had been a gang retaliatory thing. ‘Gang thing?’ I said. ‘What are you talking about, a gang thing?’ And she said, ‘Well, you know, Spur Posse.’ And I said, ‘Spur Posse, what is Spur Posse?’”

This was the point at which the principal of Lakewood High School and the local sheriff’s office, which had been trying to get a handle on the rash of felonies around town, decided to ask certain parents to attend a special meeting at the high school. Letters were sent to twenty-five families, each of which was believed to have at least one Spur Posse son. Only some fifteen people showed up at the March 2 meeting. Sheriff’s deputies from both the local station and the arson-explosives detail spoke. The cause for concern, as the deputies then saw it, was that the trouble, whatever it was, seemed to be escalating: first the felonies, then a couple of car cherry bombs without much damage, now this eight-inch pipe bomb, which appeared to have been directed at one or more Spur Posse members and had been, according to a member of the arson-explosives detail, “intended to kill.” It was during this meeting that someone, it was hard to sort out who, said the word “rape.” Most people to whom I talked at first said that the issue had been raised by one of the parents, but those who said this had not actually been present at the meeting. Asking about this after the fact tended to be construed as potentially hostile, because the Los Angeles attorney Gloria Allred, a specialist in high-profile gender cases, had by then appeared on the scene, giving press conferences, doing talk shows, talking about possible civil litigation on behalf of the six girls who had become her clients, and generally making people in Lakewood a little sensitive about who knew what and when they had known it and what they had done about what they knew.

What happened next was also unclear. Lakewood High School students recalled investigators from the sheriffs Whittier-based sex-abuse unit coming to the school, calling people in, questioning anyone who had even been seen talking to boys who were said to be Spurs. “I think they came up with a lot of wannabe boys,” one mother told me. “Boys who wanted to belong to something that had notoriety to it.” The presence of the investigators at the school might well have suggested that arrests could be pending, but school authorities said that they knew nothing until the morning of March 18, when sheriffs deputies appeared in the principals office and said that they were going into classrooms to take boys out in custody. “There was never any allegation that any of these incidents took place on school ground or at school events or going to and from school,” Carl Cohn said on the morning we talked in his Long Beach Unified School District office. He had not been present the morning the boys were taken from their classrooms in cutoffs and handcuffs, but the television vans had been, as had The Los Angeles Times and The Long Beach Press-Telegram. “Arresting the youngsters at school might have been convenient, but it very much contributed to what is now this media circus,” he said. “The sheriffs department had a press briefing. Downtown. Los Angeles. Where they notified the media that they were going in. All you have to do is mention that the perpetrators are students at a particular school and everybody gets on the freeway.”

The boys arrested were detained for four nights. All but one sixteen-year-old, who was charged with lewd conduct against a ten-year-old girl, were released without charges. When those still enrolled at Lakewood High went back to school, they were greeted with cheers by some students. “Of course they were treated as heroes, they’d been wrongly accused,” I was told by Donald Belman, whose youngest son, Kristopher, was one of those arrested and released. “These girls pre-planned these things. They wanted to be looked on favorably, they wanted to be part of the clique. They wanted to be, hopefully, the girlfriends of these studs on campus.” The Belman family celebrated Kristopher’s release by going out for hamburgers at McDonald’s, which was, Donald Belman told The Los Angeles Times , “the American way.”

Some weeks later the district attorney’s office released a statement which read in part: “After completing an extensive investigation and analysis of the evidence, our conclusion is that there is no credible evidence of forcible rape involving any of these boys…. Although there is evidence of unlawful sexual intercourse, it is the policy of this office not to file criminal charges where there is consensual sex among teenagers…. The arrogance and contempt for young women which have been displayed, while appalling, cannot form the basis for criminal charges.” “The district attorney on this did her homework,” Donald Belman told me. “She questioned all these kids, she found out these girls weren’t the victims they were made out to be. One of these girls had tattoos for chrissake.” “If it’s true about the ten-year-old, I feel bad for her and her family,” one Spur told David Ferrell of The Los Angeles Times. “My regards go out to the family.” As far as Lakewood High was concerned, it was time to begin, its principal said, “the healing process.”

Donald and Dottie Belman, at the time they became the most public of the Spur Posse parents, had lived for twenty-two of their twenty-five years of marriage in a beige stucco house on Greentop Street in Lakewood. Donald Belman, who worked as a salesman for an aerospace vendor, selling to the large machine shops and to prime contractors like Douglas, had graduated in 1963 from Lakewood High School, spent four years in the Marine Corps, and come home to start a life with Dottie, herself a 1967 Lakewood High graduate. “I held out for that white dress,” Dottie Belman told Janet Wiscombe of The Long Beach Press-Telegram. “The word ‘sex’ was never spoken in my home. People in movies went into the bedroom and closed the door and came out with a smile on their face. Now people are having brutal sex on TV. They aren’t making love. There is nothing romantic about it.”