Lawrence Edwards Jr. sat inside his grandparents’ house, in the 100 block of U Street, on a hot summer’s evening in Bakersfield.
It was Aug. 14, 2006, and his grandfather – beset by dementia and incapable of speech – was in hospice care. Edwards Jr. and his son, Lawren Edwards, had driven from their Long Beach home – up the 5 freeway, traversing the grapevine, and cutting over to State Route 99 – to say, possibly, their final goodbyes.
But then, while inside the home in which he grew up, Edwards Jr. was jolted by the cannonade of a .38 caliber firearm – pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
A horrifying thought consumed him: My son is out there.
Edwards Jr. sprinted through the house, opened the door and went out into the front yard. He watched his son stagger. Then Lawren Edwards, a 17-year-old recent Wilson High graduate with dreams of joining the U.S. Army’s drumline, fell toward the ground. Edwards Jr. caught him. He held him. His son clung, briefly, to life.
“He was still alive,” Edwards Jr. said this week. “He couldn’t speak. A .38 caliber, five shots. You ―”
His voice trailed off. His son, he said, died quickly.
But in that moment, his body shaking, Edwards Jr. had another thought: I just want to be five years away from this day.
Now, 13 years later, Edwards Jr. is a different man from who he was in the aftermath of his son’s killing. He’s learned, he said, how to forgive, how to move on, how to be happy.
“Being angry won’t bring my son back,” he said.
On Sunday, Aug. 18, Edwards Jr. will once again undertake a ritual that he said has been necessary to ease his pain: He will talk about his son. He will discuss forgiveness – and how it helps heal wounds.
He will do so at an NAACP meeting at Ernest McBride Park. That meeting, open to the public, will include a panel – composed mostly of religious figures and parents whose children have died – discussing how to use love, forgiveness and non-violence to find peace in your life.
The discussion, while broadly applicable to any situation, comes amid the backdrop of violence splashed almost daily across the country’s front pages: A mass shooting in El Paso left 22 dead, with the suspect, police say, having posted a manifesto online warning of an immigrant “invasion.” Another shooting in Dayton, Ohio, left nine weekend revelers and the suspected gunman dead.
And on Wednesday, Aug. 14, the anniversary of Lawren Edwards’ death, six police officers in Philadelphia were shot after a routine serving of a narcotics warrant turned into an hours-long standoff.
In cities such as Long Beach, Los Angeles and even Bakersfield, meanwhile, gang violence, often in a cycle of retaliation, remains rife. Hate crimes have continually risen.
None of these issues has easy solutions, parents of victims, religious leaders and organizers of Sunday’s meeting said this week. But learning how to forgive, they said, is a critical piece.
“If you harbor resentment or anger toward a person who wronged you, it prevents you from moving forward,” said Naomi Rainey-Pierson, president of the Long Beach branch of the NAACP. “I want young people to know that by letting resentment go and moving forward, you can find peace.”
For Edwards Jr. and others who’ve lost children to violence, forgiveness is not easy. But it is, they say, necessary.
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Lawren Edwards, by his father’s account, was an eclectic sort.
He grew up listening to classical music, jazz and rock. He ran with musicians and skateboarders. One of the proudest moments of his pre-high school adolescence was when his middle school teacher picked him to take care of the class gerbil over the summer.
He was on the Wilson High School drumline.
“He was a good kid,” his father said.
On Wednesday, Edwards Jr. sat in a barber’s chair in the Bixby Knolls salon, on the corner of Carson Street and Long Beach Boulevard, he’s owned for more than two decades. In his lap rested a framed photograph of his son.
The younger Edwards, in the photo, sits on a stoop staring at the camera. An Army lanyard hangs around his neck.
“This week, he told me he was ready to cut his hair,” Edwards Jr. said, “and join the military. He wanted to be on the Army’s drumline.”
That week, the father and son also had plans to attend the Long Beach Jazz Festival. But instead, Edwards Jr. said, his son wanted to hang with his friends.
“In a way, it’s a good thing they did,” the father said. “They ended up taking a lot of photos.”
Including, he added, the one he held in his hands – the one that normally hangs on the wall opposite the elder Edwards’ barber’s chair.
A few days after that photo was taken, father and son drove to Bakersfield to say goodbye to Lawren Edwards’ great-grandfather.
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When the younger Edwards went outside to talk to his girlfriend, he stepped into a neighborhood that, on its surface, looked like a placid portrait of post-World War II Americana.
The 100 block of U Street is a short trek from State Route 99 and about 2 miles from Bakersfield City Hall. The houses there, for the most part, appear as if they were modeled on Levittown, N.Y., widely recognized as the country’s first modern suburb. Trees line the block and neatly trimmed lawns precede each home.
But in 2006, and even today, this quiet image of suburbia belied Bakersfield’s ongoing gang problem.
“There was significant gang violence in Bakersfield in 2006,” Sgt. Nathan McCauley, Bakersfield Police Department spokesman, said, “which unfortunately still very much exists today.”
Closer to home, in Los Angeles and Long Beach, gang-related violence – as well as other types – appears to be declining.
But it is far from gone.
In Los Angeles, for example, gang-related homicides dropped 32% during the first four months of the year compared to the same period in 2018, according to the most recent data available.
But still, according to the LAPD data, 34 people died; there were also 313 gang-related shots fired and 197 people wounded by gunfire.
Long Beach’s gang-related data is not as available. Violent crime, however, has declined 13% in the first six months of 2019 compared to last year – though the 13 murders represent a slight uptick.
And gun violence, generally, remains a continually vexing issue.
In 2018, firearms accounted for an estimated 74% of homicides and 32% of suicides across the county, according to county data.
“Gun violence destroys the fabric of communities, and grieving families are left mourning the loss of a loved one,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda L. Solis said in a statement, in late May, in which the county proclaimed June 2 as Gun Violence Awareness Day.
There has been no shortage of solutions offered in recent years, with the Democratic Party touting the renewal of the assault-weapons ban and universal background checks; the Republican Party, meanwhile, has discussed the need to improve mental-health care and what they say is the desensitizing nature of violent video games.
But, experts say, there are frequently common traits among mass shooters, including a sense of anger and bitterness.
That anger can stem from anything, such as misogyny, racism or a perceived lack of economic opportunity because of another group of people.
Politically, meanwhile, an October 2018 Reuters/Ipsos poll found most Americans are “seething” about one thing or another – widening the country’s divisions.
While there is no political panacea for much of the anger that’s seemed to boil over in recent years, folks like Rainey-Pierson and Howard Laibson, rabbi emeritus of Lakewood’s Congregation Shir Chadash Synagogue, say doing the individual emotional work of learning to forgive each other can act as a palliative.
“When we forgive,” Laibson, who will be on Sunday’s panel, said, “we remove the burden of anger and resentment, which causes us harm.”
But forgiving, he and others say, is not easy – and can, in fact, take years.
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In the years after his son’s death, Edwards Jr. developed a morning routine: He’d walk.
Edwards Jr., an early riser, would get up each day and take a stroll down the sidewalk – and sob.
“I’d call myself the ‘weeping walking man,’ ” he said. “Then the endorphins would kick in and I’d feel a little better.”
But those sobs, he said, were illustrative of the emotional prison in which he was both inmate and jailer.
“I was angry,” he said. “I couldn’t move on with my life.”
And with reason.
When his son stepped outside on Aug, 14, 2006, Edwards Jr. didn’t think much about it. Bakersfield had a gang problem, he knew, but his son was in the front yard in a residential neighborhood. He just wanted to talk to his new girlfriend. He wasn’t in a gang and, regardless, he was born and raised 135 miles from Bakersfield.
But his son, Edwards Jr. said, apparently resembled a gang member from the neighborhood.
As the younger Edwards spoke with his girlfriend, his father said, a man in a white T-shirt came up to him. His girlfriend, who later recalled to Edwards Jr. what she heard while on the phone in Long Beach, said the man asked Edwards where he was from.
But, it seems, his answer didn’t matter. The shots rang out.
Edwards Jr. made it outside just in time to see the man in the T-shirt hop into a white vehicle and speed away.
Edwards Jr. and his wife held a funeral a week later, placing their son in a crypt at Inglewood Park Ceremony. But the pain, he said, didn’t end there. His marriage deteriorated and eventually ended, the chasm created by their son’s death proving insurmountable.
And closure was hard to come by. The police, Edwards Jr. said, had a suspect. They believed the killing was an act of vengeance by a gang member – who mistakenly identified the Edwards as responsible for a separate slaying.
But the suspect’s girlfriend gave him an alibi, Edwards Jr.. said.
The police couldn’t corroborate that because, said McCauley, the Bakersfield police spokesman, the case remains open to this day. It is in the hands of the city’s cold case homicide squad.
“I was in a fog,” Edwards Jr. said about the aftermath of his son’s killing. “The worst thing is knowing your life is changed forever.”
That’s a feeling common to those who’ve lost loved ones, particularly children.
Bishop Joe Ealy, the founder and head of Gospel Memorial Church of Christ, across the street from Poly High, remembers the night of June 5, 1995, when he received a knock on his door telling him his son, Errick Ealy, had been shot.
Errick Ealy, 24, had returned to Long Beach two days prior – from St. Louis, where the acting troupe he was a part of was performing a play – for the church’s homecoming celebration.
He was with friends, at a house near Hill Street and Lime Avenue, when a gang member pulled out an assault rifle and fatally shot him as he ran away.
The bishop learned his son was dead at the hospital.
“I remember everything about that night,” Ealy said. “I was in shock.”
Ealy stopped ministering for a couple of weeks and even after he returned to the pulpit, Ealy said, he was sad and angry.
The man who shot Ealy’s son was ultimately convicted.
But the bishop, a man of God, spent years praying and meditating, trying to fulfill what he said was Jesus Christ’s primary message of forgiveness.
“I got justice,” he said. “I pray that he (the man who killed his son) accepts Christ. Being angry and bitter won’t bring my son back.”
For Edwards Jr., also a man of faith, thoughts of his son long consumed him. He thought about him on walks and at work. The anniversary of his death and his birthday, Oct. 4, were trying.
But four years after his son’s death, Edwards Jr. had had enough. He spoke to his son.
“I still have to be on this Earth, so I might as well be happy,” he remembered thinking. “So I told him, ‘Son, I love you. But I need time. I need to get my life back.””
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For Edwards Jr., part of that journey was reading books about forgiveness.
He also spoke to community mentor Melanie Washington, whose harrowing life story would break most people – but instead forced her to help others.
Washington, at 10 years old, watched her stepfather – who had raped her – kill her mother and older sister. Later, she married a man who abused her and was eventually killed by a gang member.
Then, in 1995, one of her sons was shot and killed by Donte Carothers, a gang member her son had befriended and was trying to mentor.
She endured an emotional spiral, which included trying to kill herself, and eventually recovered. She even visited Carothers in prison and began corresponding with him.
“You took away my son, so you’re my son now,” Washington, a Long Beach resident, recalled telling Carothers.
Washington, who went on to found Mentoring: A Touch From Above, a nonprofit that helps youth incarcerated in Juvenile Hall, also practices what is known as “forgiveness therapy.”
“I was in hell until my 40s,” Washington, now 70, said. “Why am I still mad at the man who killed my mother and 16-year-old sister? I learned forgiveness is important.”
But even Washington, as well as everyone else who spoke with the Southern California News Group, said forgiveness by itself can’t solve society’s problems.
Political action and fighting for change – such as, they said, socioeconomic help for those in poverty and exposure to those of different races, religions and sexual orientations for folks with bigoted views – are still necessary.
And besides, they said, forgiveness is less about a selfless act of humanism and more about looking inward.
“Personal responsibility and accountability are a big part of this,” Rainey-Pierson said. “If you keep blaming others, it prevents you from growing.”
But if everyone could learn to forgive and commit to non-violence, each person who spoke with SCNG said, then they could “find peace.” And, eventually, the need for retribution would cease.
“The judge who sentenced Donte said he’d never seen a mother act the way I did,” Washington said. “He said he’s seen mothers who’ve lost children try to jump across the table to get to the defendant. He commended me (for being calm).”
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Aug. 14, which was Wednesday, is still a tough day for Edwards Jr.
But it’s getting easier, he said. He spends it talking to family.
And there are moments – memories – that help him along the way, such the scene from his son’s funeral, when the members of his high school drumline honored him by placing their sticks in his coffin as it was lowered into the crypt.
“I feel blessed to have had such a wonderful son,” Edwards Jr. said.
As he sat in his barber’s chair Wednesday afternoon – surrounded by shears, blow dryers and African art – he held his son’s photograph and talked about how he forgave, after years of being in an emotional prison, his son’s killer.
“It was a journey to get rid of the bitterness,” he said. “It was about getting those toxins that were in me out. So I can move on.”
He will say that again Sunday, as he retells the story of his son’s life and slaying. He will tell the story to preach forgiveness, he said, but also to continue the ritual – talking, keep talking – that subdues the pain.
His eyes glistened as he spoke – tears wanting to escape, but held back.
Then those eyes flashed to the television opposite him. CNN was on. It showed chaos in Philadelphia. The chyron at the bottom read, “Breaking news: Six officers shot.”
He shook his head.
“Something,” he said, “has to change.”
If you go
What: NAACP Long Beach branch’s general membership meeting, including a panel on forgiveness
When: 3 to 5 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 18
Where: Ernest McBride Park, 1550 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave.
Cost: Free
RSVP: email mnaacp@gmail.com
