Death on a Quiet Avenue

In this era of carpet-bombing, carpet news coverage and the concept of war as entertainment, the incident on Portola Avenue holds no cosmic significance.

Only one gun was fired and one life taken.

But the disruption has altered the nature of a neighborhood almost as much as if troops had marched down its streets. Serenity, once lost, is no less gone by whatever means it perishes.

And gone it is from Portola Avenue.

Anger lives there now behind the lawns and the flower gardens. Fear whispers beneath the pepper trees.

A killing in any neighborhood might precipitate a similar response, but it is intensified here by the gentle nature of the victim.

He was a dog named Henry and he died whining softly.

The incident that strangled tranquility on the eastern edge of Torrance occurred one quiet afternoon a few days ago.

A woman named Sherry Valine was walking her golden retriever down Portola Avenue when Henry, a Labrador retriever, sensed their presence.

He was in the house of his owner, Jeannette Clarke. Henry was essentially a house dog and rarely went out.

This time, he did go out, to sniff and circle around this newcomer to his turf. There was snapping and growling, but never a fight.

Clarke came out of the house with her 11-year-old son, Willie. She ran for a hose, Willie for a leash.

Meanwhile, parked nearby, a man named Lawrence Liebhauser, who owns property on the block, took a .38 caliber revolver from his car and, without saying a word, crossed the street and shot Henry dead.

What followed bordered on pandemonium.

Clarke and her son screamed hysterically, as the boy cradled the dog in his arms.

Sherry Valine ran from the scene, not sure where the gun might be aimed next.

Thirty people gathered in the street. One neighbor had to be restrained from attacking Liebhauser. Others cursed and shouted.

The guy next door said there might have been a lynching if the cops hadn’t arrived when they did.

Liebhauser, 47, who lives in Palos Verdes Estates, was cited for firing a gun inside the city limits, a misdemeanor. The possibility exists he may also be charged with cruelty to animals, a felony.

Police say he admitted shooting the dog and felt it was right to do so. He willingly gave up his weapon when they requested it.

He told me later he was trying to stop the dog by wounding it because the animal was out of control. Valine was screaming for help, he said, and no one was responding.

“The dog’s back was straight up,” Liebhauser said, “and his eyes looked like a dog from hell. Someone had to do something.”

One truth is clear. It was a killing that never should have happened.

Neither golden nor Labrador retrievers are known for savage instincts. There were no pit bulls that day on Portola Avenue.

Henry was considered a loving pet. He’d never been in any kind of fight. Kids on the block played with him and no one ever got bitten.

Valine said later the encounter between Henry and her pet was only a “dog thing,” and she never felt threatened.

She added: “I was more afraid of the gun than I ever was of the dog.”

“There are a lot of unanswered questions,” Police Sgt. Ronald Traber said. “No matter how you cut it, this is an unusual circumstance.”

The dichotomy of serenity and gunfire is unsettling as well as unusual.

The people on Portola Avenue are angry not only about the death of a dog, but about what it has done to their neighborhood.

This is a caring place, they’ll tell you. People know each other and look out for one another.

“We felt safe here once,” neighbor Malcolm Smith said, “but I don’t know that we’ll ever feel that way again.

What bothers Jeannette Clarke, beyond the dog’s death, is that her son was only a few feet away when Liebhauser fired the shot that killed the animal.

It could have just as easily been her boy who was shot, she says. One of the bullets went through the dog and lodged in a door across the street.

Portola isn’t the first quiet street in America to be stunned by violence. We’ve become a society accustomed to cruelty.

But there’s a sadness to the end of serenity wherever it occurs, a passage of a time that will never come again. Innocence dies crying. We’re all a little less for that.