Uh oh. Fire at Universal Studios.

For those of you familiar with the back lot tour at Universal Studios, the following attractions and parts of the back lot were destroyed:

destroying a soundstage, the theme park’s King Kong attraction, a video vault and sets such as the Courthouse Square seen in “Back to the Future” and the New York streetscape from “Bruce Almighty.”

The smoke from all those burning plastic videos (forty to fifty thousand) is causing health concerns for neighbors in Toluca Lake.

Sigh. Fire season in LA sucks. Hope all the firefighters battling the blaze are safe. According to LA Observed (linked above) four were being treated for heat exhaustion or burns.

The new Simpsons ride was not affected.

I celebrated my release from jury duty yesterday afternoon by eating a delicious brownie and finally talking about the trial. As you might expect, I hated being silenced about my experience and the trial.

The trial revolved around four 20/21 year old Latino defendants charged with gang loitering. One defendant was charged with a second count for violation of a gang injunction. Both crimes are misdemeanors.

According to the prosecution, the four defendants (plus two others) were members of a gang near LAX. On November 17, 2007, they were loitering at the corner of a park. The sheriff’s deputies who detained them and also testified witnessed them throwing gang signs, showing off their tattoos and calling out their gang’s name. They did this with the intent to establish their dominance in that neighborhood and publicize the gang. This caused non-gang members to be intimidated. The defense countered that some of the young men were (a) not active gang members (or were never jumped in), (b) all four of the young men were not at the park on that afternoon, (c) the young men were arrested at different locations in their neighborhood (not in a group), and (d) the district attorney’s office and sheriff’s department targeted these young men as part of a current push to enforce gang injunctions. After a couples hours of deliberation, we found all four defendants not guilty. I don’t think the guys were angels. If I saw them on the street in a group, I’m sure I’d feel intimidated and avoid them too. However, the prosecution’s case and the evidence didn’t get us past the standard of reasonable doubt so we returned a verdict of not guilty on all counts.
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I’ve lived in the same place for 7.5 years. In that time, I’ve had the same neighbors in the units across and above me. There are 8 apartments in each of the two buildings, both managed by the same company. We share a driveway so we see each other come and go, wander around and smoke a cigarette, hang out on the balcony, pick up our email or barbecue behind the cars in the carport.

Of all the people who live in the two buildings, I only know two names. It’s the same with Isa, my roommate. We keep to ourselves. This feels odd considering I came from a neighborhood where we knew our neighbors quite well. I mean, one neighbor held a small 4th of July block party.

The only names I know are those for Carlos, the building manager. We need to talk to him to fix stuff, like our bathtub that won’t drain making it impossible to shower. And there’s Yuri, who lives with his family across the hall from us. When he was in middle school, he used to ask for help on his homework. He’s no longer a kid. I know when he gets home ’cause I can hear his hip hop music blasting from his car.

I don’t know the Latinos living upstairs nor the elderly woman across from them. She’s the one I wonder about these days. The woman in unit #3 drove a green sedan with a Culver City Senior Citizens decal on the window. I’d only see her mid-morning when she’d return from errands. If she had groceries, sometimes she’d ask for help getting them up the stairs. I’d help, of course. Of course, I never knew her name.

I haven’t seen her car in a while. I haven’t seen her in a while. Yesterday, I noticed men moving away furniture out of her apartment. When I returned from a May Day activities and a meeting on campus, I noticed furniture out on the curb waiting to be picked up by the trash collectors.

I came back in and asked Isa, “do you know what happened to the woman upstairs?”

We both agreed it was weird that the Latina woman upstairs was driving the green sedan. Neither of us had seen her green sedan or her in a while.

“Do you think she died?” I asked Isa.

“Possibly.”

“How sad… we don’t even know,” she said.

“Yeah.”

I had a weird vision of seeing her taken away in an ambulance, but then remembered that was a scene in Dagoberto Gilb’s The Flowers.

I’ll find out what happened. I’ll just talk to my neighbors.