Soon ja du where is she now

That crystallized in when a 15 -year-old girl named Latasha Harlins was shot and killed by a convenience store owner named Soon Ja Du. You could see the money in the video tape. And the suspect grabbed the backpack, and there became a physical altercation over the backpack. And as our victim turned to walk away from the scene, the suspect raised a weapon and shot the victim in the back of the head.

Latasha Harlins would have turned 45 this year on January 1. According to surveillance video from the store, Du grabbed Latasha by her sweater and she attempted to remove her backpack. After that, Latasha swung at Du.

Du eventually fell down, and she then threw a nearby stool at Latasha. As Latasha was attempting to leave the store, Du shot her in the back of the head. In the Netflix documentary, Latasha's friends and loved ones discuss the big dreams she had for her future. The film is mainly narrated by Latasha's cousin, Shinese, and her best friend, Ty. Latasha wanted to become a lawyer, and she also had a goal to own her own business so that she could be free from being watched and followed by merchants for the color of her skin.

That could be our day job and we could own businesses because every time we go into a store, they're either following us, giving us dirty looks, disrespecting us — don't you want to have something on your own? But the sentence was light: five years probation. Du was an individual who made a grave mistake," said Angela Oh, a Korean-American civil rights attorney who was working with her own community at the time.

Korean immigrants and Korean-Americans started businesses in South L. They did not know about the historic struggles of African-Americans. So in the decades leading up to this moment, Korean-Americans were unaware of how they became part of that struggle too. When Latasha Harlins was killed in and Soon Ja Du got probation, blacks saw it as another example of injustice.

That's why Angela Oh thinks the unrest eventually moved from South L. It was a shell of a building for years before a Mexican grocery store took it over in the early s.

Angela Oh said Korean-Americans would ask her afterwards, "What have we done? There's a life span to that kind of governing. The son of a Texas sharecropper, Bradley once cautioned a reporter, "I am a very complex man in my reactions, emotions, and in the way I do things.

When the end of his reign was tainted by allegations of unethical conduct, reporters asked: Why does every big-city mayor in the country except him recognize a potential conflict of interest in accepting a paid position as an adviser to a private corporation?

The color rose in his waxen face, as did the pitch of his usually monotonous voice, and he snapped, "I'm a very unusual person, and I don't want you comparing me with somebody else in some other city Yet this man--so much an enigma to even his closest associates that he was known as the Sphinx of City Hall--enjoyed immense popularity during most of his twenty years in office.

Los Angeles was already the nation's third largest city when he was elected, in But it was on Bradley's watch that Tinseltown got respect: he energized culture and the arts, turned the moribund downtown into an international trade center, expanded the airport and the harbor, making the latter the nation's leading port, and laid the foundation for a commuter rail network.

In a city only 13 percent Black, Bradley accomplished all this with a remarkable, now tattered, coalition of Jews from the city's West Side and Blacks that lasted for years. All the while, the city's ethnic mix grew larger and more complex. Los Angeles--gateway to the Pacific, the new Ellis Island--became the latest social laboratory for testing the promise of democracy and the limits of assimilation and accommodation.

Many said the riots made a mockery of Bradley's greatest claim--that he was able to unite the inhabitants of the nation's most ethnically diverse city. That may be, but Bob Gray, a long-time aide, remarked harshly, "His legacy is going to be that his friends got enormously wealthy during his tenure. At this moment, though, in this room, he towered as he long had: an aloof, admired father figure to a sprawling metropolis.

The former jock and cop assumed his customary stance before the night's audience--a ramrod covered with taut, brown skin draped in the best threads. I hadn't seen anybody that bright, that committed, that could concentrate on a full workday and then wind up with top grades in his class in school. He's going to be a tremendous voice. Then Bradley recalled the day Lloyd passed the bar. The mailman dropped the notice in the box.

In the course of a brief but meteoric career there, he tried criminal cases and got convictions. He was an "intense young man, one who had an eager, active mind," Bradley said with passion. As His Honor spoke, I could understand the kinship between these two men. Legend had it that Lloyd, now among the richest Black men in the city, had arrived in Los Angeles in the s with a hole in his pants and twelve cents in his pocket. Those on the street below, and in the corridors of the courthouse during the Du trial, who alleged that Lloyd was an Uncle Tom were often generations removed from him and Bradley.

These were men who'd pulled themselves up by bootstraps attached to thin air, and were the survivors of an even more cruel and circumscribed world than the one protested in the spring uprising, Sa-I-Gu.

Such generational polarizations were hardly new. In their time, in their way, Lloyd and Bradley were dangerous men escaping a certain fate--the fate of Black peasants whose life was unprotected and whose labor was bought so cheap as to equal servitude in the rural South of their time.

Such devices could, of course, become crippling, reactionary patterns difficult to abandon even if one had the consciousness to try. And if these patterns served one's ambitions, if these ingrained impulses could be transfigured as the art of political and social compromise--well, with Montaigne, Lloyd and Bradley would no doubt assert "ambition is not a vice of little people. Bradley went on: "Most of the people who have any knowledge of him think he's the best.

Well, Charles thinks he's the best, so it follows. When he was elected to the Los Angeles City Council in , Bradley said, he gave up the legal practice he shared with Lloyd. He is a man who "doesn't run away from controversy. In fact," Bradley said, edging toward the desperate and absurd quality that would characterize most of the evening, "he is one of the most controversial figures of our time.

Well, they'll be picketing outside. There's going to be a lot of controversy. His friend would have let him off the hook, he said. And then the Sphinx of City Hall, his voice turning stentorian, declared: "I honor this man because I know him. I honor this man because I respect him. I honor this man because I love him as a human being and a friend. I'm proud to present this commendation to him now, Charles Earl Lloyd A loud round of applause was followed by a sudden "Boo, boo.

Hearing the heckler, Lloyd commandeered the microphone. Chronically sounding like a man about to have a stroke, the high-strung attorney, his voice cracking slightly, said, "Mayor Bradley, I love, admire, and respect you. And I love, admire, and respect each person present here tonight. I need you. Do I have you tonight? The audience applauded on cue. On the other side of the ballroom, a Black man who called himself Brother David, a member of the Latasha Harlins Justice Committee, shouted at the mayor, "This is a mockery.

All of you should be ashamed of yourself. Thornbury, the master of ceremonies, commandeered the stage again. I have more to say. The mayor left and the room calmed during a lengthy and boring speech, several awards to judges, which included honoring a little-known jurist named Lance Ito as the Los Angeles Superior Court Judge of the Year, followed by the group's official recognition of Lloyd.

Of the night's honoree Thornbury said, "In spite of the rampant racism that characterized his life [Charles Lloyd rose to great success as a] man who worked within the system.

A man who surmounted the barriers without succumbing to the rage or yielding to the prejudice that surrounded him. If all of us were as color blind as Charles Lloyd, our city would be a far better place in which to live.

Charles Lloyd is a defender; judges and juries decide guilt or innocence. Charles E. Amidst applause, Lloyd stood at the microphone and said, "I love you. I accept it because I know I deserve it.

The muttering woman banged her glass on the linen-covered table. The judiciary must remain free and independent," he said, affirming one of the evening's mantras. The group applauded. You've been patient, I love you, I am not going to take any more of your time. You are applauding the vindicator of murder. Then, with a skillful display of outrage contorting her body, the obvious plant, who later revealed she was a part-time actress as well as a member of the Harlins Justice Committee, stormed out.

She was Denise Harlins, the aunt of Latasha. Her voice was surprisingly steady. Over the bloodshed of her, to get what you're getting right now. Her fractured wail elicited a threat.