Second Street merchants offer advice to Belmont Shore’s most recent sexual assault victim, and wonder how it all looks to the police

We’ve been talking for the better part of 15 minutes–after I’ve advised him that my name is Theo Douglas, I’m a newspaper reporter for The District Weekly, and I’d like to talk to him for a story about the recent sexual assault near Second Street–when John Anderson seems to realize that I’ve been writing down everything he’s told me, and he might not like the way it looks in the newspaper.

“I don’t want you using any of this,” he says–after we’ve jawed about Russ Roca’s recent District piece on fixed-gear bikes; and after, yes, we’ve discussed the sexual and physical assault June 15 of a 17-year-old girl near Livingstone Drive and Second Street.

You know–the sexual assault Long Beach police waited exactly one week to confirm took place? That one.

I try unsuccessfully to convince Anderson that I can’t use his quotes with a fake name, and that I can’t use his middle name instead of his first name either.

That’s not the way it works. You don’t say a bunch of stuff to a reporter on-the-record and then try to take it off-the-record. It’s the ethics of the business, I say.

We give you a fake name and pretty soon everybody wants one. And then everyone else realizes it, and we all wave goodbye–not just to the news business, but to the news itself.

Because who will want to talk to us if we’re just a bunch of ass-clowns going around making shit up? Anyone can do that.

I’m almost out the door of the shop where he works when Anderson wishes I weren’t going away mad–just going away.

“That’s fucked up,” I hear him tell another employee, and so I turn back around for one last round of convincing him that fixing society’s ills–the one’s he wasted no time enumerating–sometimes means standing up and being counted, giving one’s name, and serving as an example, just once, for others.

It doesn’t work. I’m out the door again when I see it: a Press-Telegram newsrack just east of where Anderson works–vandalized, with the finish on the Plexiglas window sanded off so you can’t see inside.

I do a quick search and find three other wrecked racks with whitened Plexiglas windows, on both sides of the street–for the Los Angeles Times, and Long Beach Live and Palacio de Long Beach magazines–and I feel like pinching myself.

This is Second Street, right? The boutique-iest shopping district in the city? The first place Long Beach police barricaded during the 1992 riots that followed the verdict in the Rodney King case?

Yes. It is. People must be pissed off about this. Or not.

“Probably graffiti. That’s a bummer,” says the even-tempered hostess outside the western-most outpost of Open Sesame, when I try explaining to her what’s happened. “Have a nice day.”

Well, at least everyone–everyone who will talk to me on the record–must be just white-hot with rage at the very idea that a 17-year-old girl–someone’s daughter, someone’s granddaughter, someone’s niece–could be sexually assaulted within walking distance of the city’s most heavily-walked area.

“It does surprise me. I’ve been here a couple months, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Lesley Mendoza, manager of The Children’s Place, a kids haberdashery. “But maybe you need to be more cautious and try not to be out late.” So it was her fault?

“Not at all,” Mendoza says. “But we have to be careful. Women have to be careful.” Maybe Second Street just needs more police.

“I think there’s enough, to be honest with you,” Mendoza says. Or perhaps the police who patrol this pretty street should concentrate on its many bars.

“I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s a problem,” Mendoza says. “I think people just need to be cautious. They need to be responsible.”

Long Beach Police Sgt. Dina Zapalski says we have to be careful not to judge the victim in this case.

“The victim is never at fault when something like that happens,” Zapalski says–and no, police have nothing new to tell us about the case. “Just because it’s 2 in the morning doesn’t mean it can’t happen at 7 at night.” Agreed.

Finally–when I’ve given up hope–Anderson agrees to let me print his name, and the fact that he lives and works on Second Street. But not where he works. He’d said in person that he doesn’t want the police visiting his store after they read this.

“Fuck the police. I don’t care what they think. They’re lazy,” Anderson says when I reach him via cell phone. “I realized that yesterday as I was working my ass off.”

At the shop, he’d said much the same: “They just need to patrol,” Anderson had said. “They hang out in front of Starbucks. They don’t do shit down here.”

Zapalski disagrees. “The minute they get in that car, they’ll be somewhere else,” she says. “Wherever there’s a problem.”

On the subject of retaliation, she says, “I don’t know anything about that. I think sometimes people are afraid to talk to the police.”

People I talk to worry what will happen when they talk about the police.

Anderson’s admirable change of heart is commendable, but I’m struck by how cautious merchants are to speak their minds–in the area of the city where we all should arguably feel the safest.

Even business owners who came of age during what’s considered one of the most permissive eras of the last 50 years are more reticent than you’d expect.

“I grew up in the ’60s and people were really anti-establishment, but as you get older you see the point in that,” says Paige Henley, who has owned the venerable McCarty’s Jewelry since 1982. “But I think that the police department has reformed.

“It’s not smart to think that you’re invincible,” Henley says of the young woman who was assaulted two weeks ago–in Second Street’s second major sexual crime of the year. “People have to be alert. People have to be careful.”

(The area’s other sexual assault was in January near Second Street and Belmont Avenue, and the victim and suspect knew each other. It did not, Zapalski says, take place in an alley, and is considered unrelated to last week’s crime.)

I ask Henley how he feels that police waited a solid week before confirming June 21 that yes, a 17-year-old had been, in Long Beach Police Department’s words, “lured” into an alley and brutalized.

“There’s no reason to hide it,” he says. “I would think that the information being released sooner than later is better.”

Without divulging specifics, Zapalski says police work deliberately to be sure of the facts in sensitive cases, before informing the public.

“Obviously, if we felt like this guy was a danger to the public and we really needed to get the information out there, that would speed up the process,” she says of the suspect.

So, I say to Henley, what about the bars everyone always names when they think of trouble spots?

“I don’t know those people who are complaining, but people always complain when there’s a bar around,” Henley says.

And that’s about it. I do ask him if McCarty’s security cameras were any help in helping police identify a suspect–but Henley says they’re all trained to look inward, at the store’s display cases.

“I live in Seal Beach, so I didn’t hear about it right away,” Henley says–and I’m almost out the door when he wonders how this will sound in print. “I’ve got friends in the [police] department,” he says. “I don’t want to seem overly … .”

Don’t worry, I assure him. You don’t.

Tags: California, Long Beach, second street, Southern California, The District Weekly, Theo Douglas