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Cosby taught Douglas to learn at his own pace, and not to be overly worried that he was slower than his schoolmates. "He taught me never to give up. It was special because I knew he had the same problem, and when he got tired he never gave up." But Cosby helped Douglas with more than schooling. Douglas accompanied Ennis and a girlfriend to New York Knicks' games, sitting in front of the players' wives. Douglas remembers proudly, "They asked me if I was his son." And then there was the terror. "One morning I woke up with a fear of dying. I would lie in bed at night and be afraid to close my eyes, thinking what if I didn't wake up. I was afraid. My mother told him about it. The next time we met we talked about it. My father had been shot and killed when I was three months old. Ennis was comforting. He said, 'You are born into this world, and we all have to leave it sooner or later. It is natural. Everyone has to die. It doesn't help to worry about it. It will happen when it is your time. Hopefully we all go in a nice way.'"
On Dec. 18, 1996, Ennis dropped off a paper at school and took off on a break from the inner-city pressures of New York. He flew to California to stay at his parents' large Tudor-style house in a T-shaped intersection shared by Whoopi Goldberg and Steven Spielberg in Los Angeles' exclusive Pacific Palisades. Shortly after midnight, on Jan. 15, it was his time.
Ennis Cosby died in one of the safest areas in Los Angeles. The northbound Mulholland Drive exit off of the I 405 freeway, which connects West Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley, leads down onto a quiet access road landscaped with rolling hills of green shrubs and small trees. The eastbound road leads to Bel Air, where maps are sold on street corners for tours past the homes of some of Hollywood's biggest stars.
There were other murders in Los Angeles that day. Corrie Williams, a senior at Centennial High School in Compton, was killed riding a bus in South Central in broad daylight, in a place people expect such things to happen. It was allegedly committed by gang members, who, a Los Angeles Times survey found, commit about half the nearly 2,000 homicides in the city each year. As L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan was calling the Ennis Cosby murder "priority No. 1," Bill Cosby linked his son's death to the Compton case. In a phone call, he told police chief Williams he was concerned about Corrie's family. Earlier, the Cosby family released a statement that read, "Our hearts go out to each and every family that such an incident occurs to. This is a life experience that is truly difficult to share."