Store Owner Defies Code of the Street, Pays With His Life

Of late, George DeJohnette must have gotten used to gunfire.

Several times, says his family, the windows of his liquor store-market were shot out.

In March, a man using one of the pay phones in front of Mont Clair Liquor was killed by a blast from a passing car.

And last Saturday night, DeJohnette broke Rule No. 1 about urban gunshots. He looked.

Whenever Los Angeles Police Detective Verne King asks crime witnesses, “What did you do when you heard the shots fired?” almost everyone tells him, “I found the ground.”

But the 45-year-old DeJohnette didn’t. When he heard the blasts down the street a little after 11 p.m., he stepped out in front of the store to see where they had come from.

They had come from a blue compact car--possibly the same car, King says, whose occupants had shot and wounded two men a few minutes earlier a few blocks away.

But DeJohnette could not have known that. The blue car made a swift U-turn and drove back down the street. And as it passed the store at 28th and Montclair streets, said King, a shotgun barrel slid out the passenger side and the gun fired.

An instant later, a local man, Lonnie Tatum, 31, lay on the sidewalk with leg wounds. And DeJohnette, a Pasadena resident whose 16-year-old son was working inside the store, was shot in the chest. He died just over an hour later.

King had met DeJohnette in March, in the fashion that police officers too often meet people--over spent bullets and broken glass.

That time, gunfire from a red pickup truck had littered DeJohnette’s store and killed a 24-year-old man talking on the phone outside. Detectives had kept DeJohnette working late that night so they could collect evidence from his store. There were bullets far inside the shop.

“He was telling me that things were getting a little too hot around there,” King said, “and he was anticipating selling his store in the near future.”

Early last Sunday, it was King who went to the hospital to view the body. At first, “the name didn’t register with me. As soon as I walked in that hospital . . . I recognized him, and I said, Why? Why did that man do two things? Why didn’t he sell? And why did he step outside when he heard the shots?”

DeJohnette’s five or so years owning the corner store had gotten gradually tougher, his brother and a fellow merchant, Lawrence Albert, said.

He got rid of the arcade games that drew rowdy gang kids and loitering dope dealers to his store and market, scaring away the folks who came to shop. He called the police when the ruffians instead congregated in front of his store and dealt their dope on the sidewalk, by the three pay phones.

“George was trying to fight the dope that was being sold on that street in front of the liquor store,” said the dead man’s elder brother, Grover DeJohnette, who believes retaliation was behind the shooting, as he believes it was behind the “seven or eight” occasions the store’s glass windows were smashed.

“I think it was planned,” and someone was “trying to scare him out of there,” the brother said. “He would call the police on them numerous times,” he said, “and I think that this just built up over the time, and they finally got him.”

Intimidation and retaliation of residents by gangs “is a fact of life,” police Sgt. Jack Davenport said, “and everybody knows about it.”

King said police are uncertain whether the shooting was gang-related, drug-related or both. The investigation is continuing.

According to his brother, DeJohnette had once owned a liquor store in Pasadena, but about five years ago, when local churches got together in a neighborhood clean-up campaign, DeJohnette sold out and bought the Mont Clair.

‘Fight the Dope’

He was being squeezed out of business again, says his brother, this time by henchmen of one of the biggest employers in the city’s poor neighborhoods: Crack Inc.--drugs.

A few months ago, as part of his effort to make his corner safe, DeJohnette had gone to the Southwest Division police station with his friend, Albert, who co-owns the dry-cleaning business across the street. They took along the signatures of area residents who wanted to start a Neighborhood Watch program.

Years ago, Albert had helped to start up a still-thriving youth program in St. Louis, but he believes the young people in his neighborhood are beyond clubs and advice. He said they steal from the merchants to taunt them with their powerlessness. They menace ordinary shoppers. Business is being hurt. People are afraid.

‘You Don’t Know’

“When I go out now,” says Ethel Coleman, who was in bed when she heard the shots that killed DeJohnette, “I pray the Lord to give me a safe trip there. And when I get back here, I pray and thank him for taking care of me. When you walk to the store these days, you don’t know who you’re facing.”

“We all have to come together,” Albert said. “It’s the only way we’re going to stop it.”

And all these months, DeJohnette “was thinking about selling,” Albert added.

He was fixing up the store for prospective buyers, said his brother.

“And I think he was going to get out of selling liquor altogether,” he said. “The neighborhood liquor store, I think, is on a decline. Dope addicts hang around liquor stores and go in and out, use the phone to make their deals.”

It is the kind of place, in short, that King calls “a natural habitat” for crime.

But none of it happened soon enough for George DeJohnette. Not the Neighborhood Watch and not the sale of the store, which his family has closed.

“He wasn’t afraid of dying, I don’t think,” said his brother. “All of us have got to die” and, “if it comes down to that, innocent folks have to die for what they believe in. I think he did.”