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The scene around 1466 East 54th St., a yellow frame and stucco building, quickly took on a surrealistic air. While sweating TV camera crews toted their equipment into place, 18 heavily armed members of the Los Angeles police department's special weapons and tactics unit (known as SWAT) got ready for battle. Wearing bulky flak jackets, they closed in on the house and gently clicked off the safeties on their semiautomatic weapons. Curious neighbors wandered over, largely unimpeded, to see what was happening. Knots of people stood in their backyards, waiting for some Friday-night entertainment. Minutes later, a Los Angeles police sergeant flipped on his bullhorn and broadcast: "Come out with your hands up! The house is surrounded."
There was no reply, no movement.
Five minutes later, he repeated the order. When again there was no response, an officer crept behind a wall near the house and threw a sizzling tear-gas canister through the tattered window curtains. A mangy, dun-colored dog scurried off the porch.
The gunfire began immediately, the two sides firing almost simultaneously. Bullets cut swaths through the walls of the house. Blue smoke belched through the windows as those inside replied with automatic fire of their own. For nearly an hour the firefight went on, one of the most furious gun battles ever waged in a U.S. city, with at least 1,000 rounds of ammunition expended by both sides.
It was an incongruous blend of circus and bloodbath. The number of lawmen on the scene swelled to 350. Miraculously, no civilians or officers were seriously wounded. Neighborhood dogs kept up a howling chorus that could be heard over the most intense firing. In a park on the corner, kids climbed to the tops of slides for a better—but hazardous —look.
Staring Witness. At 6:35 p.m., as the first trace of smoke began to curl up from the dwelling, a black woman staggered out, her face puffed and cracked by the tear gas and a smear of blood showing on the back of her white blouse.
She was Christine Johnson, who had been living in the house. Trembling with fear, she stammered: "They held me!
They held me!" She said there were five persons still inside—three white women and one white man and one black man.
Then she was hurried away in an ambulance.
Christine Johnson got out just in time. The lick of flame was creating an inferno. Dark brown smoke shrouded the structure, then rose high enough to hide a police helicopter hovering over the scene. Sheets of ash the size of magazine pages rose gracefully into the air and floated to earth a half block away.