We were on our way to a story out in the Malibu Hills. The son of the person who created Barney was suspected of shooting a neighbor.
77th Street Police Station•••
As is pretty much my recent string of luck, we we diverted off that story to cover a breaking hit and run in South Los Angeles. A four year old was the victim.
Amanda Burden live at 10:00pm.•••
The sun had already set by the time we got to the neighborhood where the incident happened. I’m not particularly fearful of bad neighborhoods, but I’m not crazy.
We drove past the address we had for the incident, but the scene had already been cleared. The police and emergency personnel were gone. All that was left were just random people from the neighborhood. They looked at us. We looked at them.
We kept driving.
Our job at that point was to try to find the family of the victim or witnesses. I want to remind you that we are in a South Central Los Angeles neighborhood at night in a brightly logo’d news vehicle.
There’s brave and there’s reckless. I’m a little of each from time to time, but there was no reason to put ourselves at risk on this assignment. Plus, there were a couple of additional details that we found out after talking to a watch commander at the local police station.
Apparently the kid had suffered only scrapes and bruises. Pretty far from the serious condition we’d been told earlier. The driver was still wanted for fleeing the scene, but it wasn’t likely we were going to go knocking on doors looking for him either.
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