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Ennis' body was found by police at about 1:45 a.m. lying in a pool of blood outside the driver's side of his Mercedes-Benz. The car's hazard lights were flashing, and both the passenger-side door and the trunk were open. He had apparently been changing a tire and had got as far as putting the spare on the car but had not finished replacing the lug nuts when he was killed by a single shot to the head. His body was discovered by a woman who says she saw a white male leaving the area. L.A. police chief Willie Williams said that "the perpetrator was only there for a few moments or a few seconds, but we don't know what was in his mind." The media were asked not to identify the traumatized witness, who was assisting with a police sketch of the suspect.
With the news and mystery of his son's death, Cosby left the studio, climbed into his Range Rover and headed back to his town house in Manhattan. Mobbed by reporters camped outside his home, the actor refused all comment save one. He turned toward the cameras and microphones and said, "He was my hero."
Ennis William Cosby was born April 15, 1969, the middle child of five and Bill and Camille Cosby's only son. As such, he held a special place in the eyes of his parents--particularly his father. Attorney Johnnie Cochran, a friend of Bill Cosby's, says the actor's face lit up every time Ennis entered the room. Though he kept his family out of the public eye, Cosby would let the subject of Ennis drag out a conversation--with his son becoming a loving punch line to jokes. He was always keen to remind people that Ennis was a natural and graceful athlete, interrupting a 1985 Playboy interviewer, for example, to say, "Young Ennis, by the way, is now 6 ft. 3 in. tall." In his 1987 book, Time Flies, Cosby makes a mock complaint about Ennis being a reluctant athlete ("My music is the theme from Chariots of Fire and Ennis' theme is Bidin' My Time"). But he admitted, "I could not resist luring my son Ennis out to the track because I wanted to see how my genes looked in a newer model of me." When Ennis was in high school in Pennsylvania, Cosby would take a break from his busy schedule to catch his son playing football.
Still, it was not easy being a child of Bill Cosby's. The actor-comedian was a born-again family man. He told TIME 10 years ago that in 1979 "if somebody had made me choose between my career and my family, I probably would have let the family go." Later, however, he rededicated himself to them. "I just asked my wife and my kids to forgive me, and ever since then, they've been a part of everything I do." But that conversion brought with it a seriousness about parenting and child rearing. He had already made the weighty decision that his children's names would all begin with the letter E ("to represent excellence," he told Family Circle in 1993). In 1987 he told TIME, "We have plans for each of them. Some of it may be dictatorial, but we think it's a great idea. We take it as far as we can in terms of education and moral behavior."