The detectives managed to locate two people who saw two teen-agers run from the area of the shooting, Parks said. One witness had asked the teen-agers what happened and they cursed at him and kept running. The witnesses said they did not see the teen-agers carrying guns.

He said that while the teen-agers are considered suspects, there is not enough known about the shooting to classify it as riot-related. Willers was white and the two teen-agers black, but there were no other disturbances reported in the immediate area that night.

Parks is seeking additional witnesses or anyone with information about the shooting and has put together a composite drawing of one of the teen-agers.

“The killing had nothing to do with looting, rioting, the things other deaths in the city were related to,” Parks said. “There is really no indication what it was about.”

Other motives common in street killings were easily dismissed. Willers had not been robbed. And Parks believes that the time lapse between the slaying and the car collision and shooting indicates that the incidents were unrelated.

What the detectives are left with is a case in which the victim apparently didn’t know his killer and had not even seen the shooter until moments before the slaying. The detectives said such cases are the most difficult to solve.

“We have very little to go on,” Parks said last week. “In a classic murder case, you spend a lot of time with the victim’s background and many times you get a direction from that. But in this case, the victim doesn’t know anybody in this city. He is just a random victim of L.A. violence. It doesn’t matter who he was or what he did, it’s not going to lead us to his killer.”

Parks said the best hope for making an arrest may be a drawing of one of the teen-agers seen by the witnesses. “It’s all we’ve got,” he said.

Police have more to go on in investigating the two other deaths in the San Fernando Valley that at least were initially counted among the 60killings attributed to the riots.

Edward Traven, 15, was fatally shot in San Fernando about two hours before Willers. He was killed by a gunman who fired into the Cadillac he was sitting in with his brother and a friend at San Fernando Road and San Fernando Mission Boulevard.

The gunman had shouted “Where are you from?” – a gang challenge – and police said Edward had associated with gang members. Police say his slaying was an example of a gang shooting unrelated to the riots, though members of his family have insisted that the boy’s death would not have occurred if not for the atmosphere of violence spurred by the riots.

San Fernando detectives said they are attempting to identify a suspect from among the area’s numerous gang members.

The killing of Imad Sharaf, 31, is also unsolved. His body was found the morning of May 3when firefighters answered a report of a brush fire near the on-ramp to the San Diego Freeway at San Fernando Mission Boulevard. Police said Sharaf, who was a photo lab technician, had been doused with a flammable substance and set afire.

Although he, too, was listed as a riot victim, Los Angeles police believe otherwise. Investigators in that case are concentrating on Sharaf’s business and personal dealings while looking for a motive and suspect.

“It was some sort of dispute, we believe,” Detective Olivia Pixler said. “It seems that whoever killed him knew him.”

She said the fire may have been an attempt to disguise the killing as riot-related.

The Willers killing remains the Valley case from the riot period in which police have the most tenuous grasp on what happened. And part of the mystery that sticks in the minds of those who knew Willers or are investigating his death is the reason he decided to go back outside his motel room.

“We have no idea why he went back out,” Parks said. “He didn’t say why to anybody. The only thing we can think of is maybe he went back out to look at the wreckage” of the cars involved in the earlier chase.

Willers’ sister, Dianne Housden, suggests that her brother did not realize the danger he was in. Raised in a suburb of Portland, Ore., he lived most of his life in the Pacific Northwest and Utah, Nevada and Arizona.

“What was happening in Los Angeles was totally foreign to him,” said Housden, who lives in Everett, Wash. “I think he couldn’t believe what was happening and wanted maybe to go out. I think he must have thought, ‘Gee, this is weird’ and wanted to see. He was a free spirit. I don’t think he could have known the danger he was putting himself in.”

Willers’ foreman agreed.

“John was a friendly, open person,” the foreman said. “He comes from a place where you don’t have this kind of stuff, the riot or the drive-by shooting business. He would never have thought he might be in danger. But he was.”

Housden said she knew that her brother was in Los Angeles because a day before the riots began, he had called and said he was trying to locate his two teen-age children whom he had lost touch with but believed were living with his former wife in Southern California.

“He was going to try to find his kids but never got the chance,” Housden said.

In Willers’ suitcase, police found cards and money orders made out to the boy and girl. Housden said this week that she finally located the children, who live in Hemet, and will forward their father’s last gifts.

Like Willers’ fellow employees, Housden said her family has had a difficult time dealing with the death.

“We are not from an area that is violent,” she said. “We were not brought up in an area like that. It’s not right to have this happen to anybody, but there was no reason for this to happen to him.

“John’s crime was that he was at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

note: The murder of John Willers remains open and unsolved.

AFTERWORD: THE NOVELIST AS REPORTER

by Michael Carlson

Michael Connelly is a reporter. A good one. Not in the tabloid sense of someone who, like a pulp fiction writer, does whatever it takes to twist the elements of a story into a recognizable template that doesn’t stretch his audience’s emotions beyond the certainties in which tabloids deal. Nor is he an “investigative journalist,” the modern term applied to grad school rewriters of press releases when they score a celebrity interview. He’s a reporter in the best sense of the word, able to gather information and see the story buried beneath all those facts, able to sort through the impressions of all sorts of people and see how they affect those facts and, most of all, able to put it all down on paper so his reader can do the same thing.

When I began my career, I had to study the UPI style book. All the things it said about structuring a story – the famous who-what-when-where-why and how – are laid out in Connelly’s stories, clearly and cleanly. He organizes his stories like a reporter should, to make sure the reader sees what he has seen. This is much more than doing a Jack Webb “just the facts, ma’am.” That ability to set a story out clearly serves Connelly’s greatest strengths as a reporter: his perception and his empathy.

By perception I mean the ability to see and to hear, or, better, to listen to what is being said and to see what it means. This involves the greatest skill a good reporter can have, the ability to understand people. You can’t see a good story unless you can see where it is coming from. Too often in our world, journalists move from graduate schools into hermetically sealed newsrooms, protected by security passes and cut off from the real lives of the people about whom they are supposed to report. They’ve grown up in a world where the relationships are clearly delineated, the conflicts take place along a very narrow perimeter and the people they write about exist only as fodder for copy.