Sometimes in journalism you get the chance to make a difference in one person’s life.
Back in the 1990s, I was in my office at Mother Jones one morning when the front desk buzzed me to say there was someone who would like to talk to an editor. It was the week following the Rodney King beating by police in L.A. and there had been destructive riots with looting in downtown San Francisco.
My visitor was a soft-spoken young man carrying a large package. He asked me if we could speak privately.
Back in my office, he explained the purpose of his visit. He’d been caught up in the anger of the moment, he said, and had been angry and frustrated by yet another act of police violence against his community — he’d grown up in South Central L.A. -- when he had joined the rioters and broken into a Radio Shack and stolen a computer monitor.
“I knew it was wrong almost the minute I did it, and now I feel bad,” he told me. “I’d like to ask if you’d return it.”
I looked closely at my young visitor. He was perhaps 21 years old with an honest face and a sincere manner.
“Tell you what,” I said. “I will return it for you if you’ll tell me why you stole it in the first place and what you wanted it for.”
He agreed and I assured him that we would protect his identity in any article that I might publish based on our conversation.
So we started talking. He described growing up in poverty, surrounded by violence and family tragedy (he’d lost a brother in a random shooting) but told me how he had avoided getting into the worst things himself, largely due to his passion for music. His hope was to learn how to make music of his own and he had grabbed the monitor in the mistaken belief it could help him with synthesizing.
A few days later I arranged for the monitor to be returned to Radio Shack, which eventually led to a call from the D.A.’s office asking me to identify my informant so he could be charged for a crime.
I flatly refused and asked, “How many of the hundreds of rioters that looted have even offered so much as to turn the stuff they stole back in?”
“He’s the only one.”
That was the last I heard from the D.A., who couldn’t make a case without my testimony, but an editor over at the San Francisco Examiner read our piece in Mother Jones and asked to reprint it.
That set off a completely unanticipated seres of events, including a flood of donations from the public to help the young man buy a real computer, which in turn could help him pursue his musical dreams.
I made sure he got the money and that’s where this story ends, as far as my involvement is concerned. But often when one story ends, another begins.
And in this case, the young man sent me word a few years later that he was performing in local bars in a hip-hop band under a pseudonym.
But that's his story to tell.
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