An LA Cop. John Bowermaster
ordered the formation to attention and to count off by four. After everyone identified themselves as one through four, he ordered all number ones to step forward to the front of the formation. A quarter of the men moved forward.
The lieutenant instructed everyone, “Look at these men. This is how many of you won’t come back alive.”
There was complete silence among the men standing on the tarmac. A year later as Ed boarded his plane returning home, he turned a final time to look at a country that showed him war and the death of friends.
He remembered the lieutenant’s comments on the tarmac that night. He thought to himself, The lieutenant’s estimate was low.
On August 1, 1969, Sergeant Bowes returned to where it all began, Fort Ord, to finish his last six months of active duty. Compared to Vietnam, Bowes thought army life in Monterey, California, was a vacation. Clean sheets, hot showers, and clean clothes every day. No more eating in the jungle with the snakes, leeches, and those damn mosquitoes!
The Jungle
Ed Bowes had completed his military service and was a civilian again. During the summer of 1970, the murder trials of Charles Manson and his followers brought national attention.
From their brutal two-night murder spree in early August 1969 when they killed Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, and three others.
Followed by the brutal stabbing murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca during the second home invasion the following night. After his tour in Vietnam, Ed decided he wanted a career working outside.
Something that offered excitement and action. Ed followed the Manson trial on the radio and decided the Los Angeles Police Department offered what he was looking for. In November 1970, he joined the LAPD.
After graduating from the academy, the department assigned Ed Bowes to Wilshire Division.
For many officers, it was the first time they experienced the harsh reality of what people were capable of doing to each other.
Ed grew numb to the blood, death and violence in Vietnam. Carnage at crime scenes didn’t shock him or send him in search of a place to be sick.
During his first three years, he learned police work, the streets of Los Angeles, and the problems criminals caused on them. He found he enjoyed working morning watch. The hours were from 11:45 p.m. to 08:30 a.m. Like Vietnam, most action occurred at night.
There were plenty of criminals and he enjoyed getting them off the streets. They assigned him to 7-X-96 one of two units working the south end of the division, an area called the jungle.
Ed worked X-96 with two partners. When one man was on days off, the other two worked the unit.
May 17, 1974, 12:05 a.m., was a warm spring night in Los Angeles. Ed Bowes and his partner Paul Fitzpatrick along with sixteen other officers assigned to morning watch, gathered in the basement’s roll call room in the old Pico station.
The old station was on Pico Bl. Built around 1925, it had outlived its usefulness and was scheduled for demolition in the coming months. The assigned Wilshire officers would move into their new facility now under completion on Venice Bl. The new station was a fortress, complete with a helipad on the roof.
The design features for future police stations included roll down metal gates. No exterior windows on the building, except the lobby. Brick and concrete protected the station against attacks from rioters or groups like the Black Panthers who were always threatening to kill police officers.
It was time for roll call. Everyone was waiting for Sergeant O’Rourke to begin the morning watch briefing. The men wanted more information on the militant group in the San Francisco area, calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army.
The SLA was a group of black militants that were robbing banks in the San Francisco area. The gang’s leader was a lunatic calling himself field marshal Cinque. Patty Hearst was Randolph Hearst’s daughter, a newspaper-publishing tycoon. The SLA kidnapped her from her Berkeley apartment and held her for ransom.
Cinque demanded Randolph Hearst purchase three million dollars of food and distribute it to the poor of San Francisco in exchange for Patty’s release. Randolph Hearst agreed to his demands.
Hearst purchased and distributing the food to the poor, but Cinque never held up his end of the bargain by releasing Patty.
During her captivity, Cinque brainwashed Patty, convincing her to join their cause. She adopted a new name, calling herself Tania. Patty helped the SLA rob banks in San Francisco.
After pulling a bank robbery in the bay area, the FBI believed the SLA and Patty were going to Los Angeles. They described their vehicle as a dark-colored van with no side windows.
The SLA got into a shooting at a sporting goods store after arriving in Los Angeles earlier that day. They transformed Patty from a kidnap victim to a gun carrying member of the SLA, robbing banks and now involved in the shooting at the sporting goods store. The last couple of nights, the morning watch officers stopped every dark-colored van close to the FBI’s description of their vehicle.
Sergeant O’Rourke was approaching his thirty-year anniversary on the job. He only had thirty days left and a wakeup before he pulled the pin and retired. Police work was not a high priority on his list of things of interest.
O’Rourke only wanted to talk about the little farm he bought in Ireland near the village of Kenmare overlooking the bay. He was counting down the days. Telling anyone who’d listen.
“Lads just thirty days and a wakeup, then you can color me gone!”
O’Rourke walked into the roll call room, speaking in his Irish accent. “All right, lads, set yourselves down. You know your assignments—if not, I’ll be posting them on the board in the hall.
“There’s nothing new on the SLA from the feds. They’re telling us what we already know, there in Los Angeles! Cinque and his lads are here in our fair city. As if we didn’t know that! So be keeping your eyes open. Stay sharp out there, lads. It’s another warm one tonight. Expect those tempers to be flaring. So be getting out there and relieve those lads on PM watch.”
In 1974, there was a fad started in California called streaking. A person would run naked in public. During the live broadcast of the Academy Award Ceremony in Hollywood in March, a naked streaker came out from back stage left, running across the stage in front of the entire TV and academy audience.
It became the conversation on TV and radio for weeks. When Sergeant O’Rourke ended his briefing, two officers wearing paper bags covering their heads entered the roll call room from the front hallway running naked, exiting the back door.
They ran to a waiting police car jumping inside and left the parking lot eastbound on Pico Bl, speeding away out of sight.
Sergeant O’Rourke with the rest of roll call laughed at the two men. No one ever admitted who the officers were that ran naked through roll call that night. The incident just became a funny footnote in the last chapter of the old Pico station’s history.
7-A-91 was the second unit assigned with 7-X-96 to patrol the jungle. On a warm night, it didn’t take much for tempers to rise causing somebody to become unhinged and get involved in a shooting.
They crammed the jungle with hundreds of multi-story apartment buildings and dozens of short streets, alleys, and cul-de-sacs. Between Santa Barbara Bl. On the north, the old Baldwin Hills Dam off Stocker Avenue on the south. The Lamert Park area off Crenshaw Avenue on the east and La Brea Avenue on the west.
Thousands of people live in that area. Paul grabbed the microphone from the hook on the front of the Motorola police radio and cleared for patrol. “7-X-96 morning watch clear. Control, 7-X-96 roger, handle a shooting at 6085 Nicolet in the courtyard. 7-X-96 roger.”
A few minutes passed. X-96 pulled up to the curb south of the call’s address, avoiding parking in front of a possible ambush site. Paul lead the way into the courtyard in front of Ed. Through two broken black metal