Listen up: One woman’s commitment to Say Their Names
Say Their Names L.A., a die-in organized in October by a South Bay resident, involved 626 makeshift headstones representing people who had died in an officer-involved incident since 2012. Photo by Ashley Balderrama
At dusk on a Saturday in October, more than 300 people prostrated themselves on a downtown Los Angeles street.
Each held a wooden board or two, painted black and bearing the name, age, and photograph of an Angeleno who was killed by an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department or the L.A. Sheriff’s Department since the day in December of 2012 that Jackie Lacey became the city’s district attorney. (Lacey was defeated in the Nov. 3 election.) The date was important because during Lacey’s eight-year tenure, only one officer who had ended a life was prosecuted, though 626 people had died.
This was the detail that moved Laura Peterson, who is 34 and currently residing in Hollywood Riviera, to organize the “die-in,” a form of protest popularized at the beginning of the Iraq War. As she and the others lay in the street with wet cheeks, a song by Palos Verdes-born artist MILCK echoed: “They were somebody’s first call, somebody’s home, someone who lived with tears and laughter, who wanted to belong. More than a number. More than a story. More than a memory. Somebody’s home.”
Marco Vasquez’s four-year-old son Jax with his father’s headstone. Photo courtesy of Justice for Marco Vasquez Jr
That afternoon, Peterson carried the self-assuredness of a person who senses she’s where she’s supposed to be. Three years earlier, before her father died and a pandemic changed the world, she had been in a very different place. She worked on Wall Street and got press for being a female trader to watch. She posed in a skirt suit for the cover of Traders Magazine. Then, in 2017, her beloved father, renowned yacht designer Doug Peterson, lost his battle with cancer and her firm gave her three days to grieve.
“Three days was just not enough time,” Peterson said. “I made the decision that I was going to quit.”
She began the work of liquidating her father’s estate, and when the process was complete moved to an apartment he’d kept in Amsterdam. Several months later, on March 9, she boarded a plane with one carry-on suitcase, en route to visit friends in New York, Boston, and D.C. for two weeks. When authorities declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic and Europe closed its borders to Americans, she flew to Los Angeles to shelter-in-place with her mother and stepfather in the South Bay. Weeks stretched into months.
“I was like, let me take what has been handed to me and really focus on me right now,” Peterson said. “There’s not a lot of noise. I did so much journaling and reflecting and so much work on myself. I remember there was an incident in New York where the cops were handing out masks to white people in Central Park and beating up a Black person in Brooklyn for not having a mask and I was so livid. By this point I had learned not to numb my feelings anymore, not to keep scrolling, metaphorically, but to sit there and feel my feelings. I was enraged and everything came up for me. And my mom was like, if you’re angry, do something.”
Laura Jane Peterson. Photo by Ashley Balderrama
Two months later, George Floyd died. A wave of protests against the number of unprosecuted and uninvestigated officer-involved deaths in Black and brown communities followed. Peterson couldn’t think about anything else.
“My stepfather, who is white, got pulled over for not having a license plate on the front of his car,” Peterson said. “He got a warning. Anthony McClain in Pasadena got pulled over for not having a plate. He gave his information and started running and they shot him dead. People say he shouldn’t have been running. Running does not warrant death.”
She began showing up to protest throughout Los Angeles where she learned more about systemic racism and police brutality. She learned how much money Lacey had received from police unions in her campaign for re-election: $2.2 million.When the protests began to die down, Peterson kept going. She attended peaceful protests at which the police would respond to chants with tear gas and rubber bullets.
Dijon Kizzee’s makeshift headstone. Photo by Anthony Carrillo
Then, on Aug. 31, Dijon Kizzee, a Black man, was stopped by the Los Angeles County Sheriff Deputies for riding the wrong way down the street on his bicycle. As he ran away, he dropped his belongings, a pile of laundry that included a gun. Kizzee was shot 15 times in the back, then handcuffed after he was dead. His body remained on the street for 12 hours. For Peterson, it felt like the last straw.
“I wanted to remind people that while we’re talking about George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, that’s happening here in our city,” she said.
She began researching databases of officer-involved deaths compiled by both mainstream media outlets and Black Lives Matter. She made spreadsheets and called friends in other countries to compare notes. She read about creative ways other governments had dealt with crime and violence; Amsterdam, for example, had successfully managed a spike in crime and imprisonment by opening free heroin clinics.
On Sept. 22, she posted on her Instagram that she would be creating a graveyard to show the magnitude of the number of people who had died in an interaction with an officer of the law in Los Angeles since 2012. She called the art project Say Their Names L.A.
Within three days, she had more than 150 volunteers. She assigned one team the job of cutting, sanding, priming, painting, gluing, and nailing together wooden tombstones. Another team did research; each was responsible for 15 of the people the tombstones represented. They searched for everything there was to know: age, ethnicity, surviving kin, details of the death. Another team transferred the information procured by the research team to a computer to prepare it for printing. Still another reached out to the families that researchers had identified.
“Going through the research was really interesting,” Peterson said. “We found that most of these deaths or these instances could’ve been avoided if the police knew how to diffuse the situation. … Most of these cases could have been avoided had someone who had the education and the training to diffuse been there. At the end of the day, it’s not up to the police to decide who gets to live and who has to die.”
In the two weeks before the event, four more people were shot. The team made more tombstones.
Photo by Kemal Cilengir
Peterson got three semi-trucks from her stepfather’s business to transport all the tombstones to the Arts District on the day of the die-in. For four hours, families of those who had died addressed the crowd, speaking about their experience.
In the wake of Say Their Names L.A., fans of her father’s work, most of them wealthy, contacted Peterson via social media to tell her that her father would be disappointed in her. Someone dropped off a load of Communist flags in her parents’ front yard.
The experience made her think about the chasm between the city she was living in and the city 20 miles away, where she had lain in a street. She thought about attending protests in West Hollywood and running away from rubber bullets, past people eating dinner and drinking mimosas. When she ran away from rubber bullets in South Central, people ushered protestors into their homes.
“It just goes to show you that some people exist in a world where this does not matter,” Peterson said. Still she holds onto hope that tides can turn.
“I think Dijon Kizzee’s girlfriend said it best: just because it’s not happening as fast as you want it to doesn’t mean it’s not happening,” she said. “Even the fact that you and I can vote – we fought for that. Our ancestors fought for that. We can’t go back to numbing ourselves. We numb ourselves so much – drugs, alcohol, TV, food, sports – we do anything we can to not feel what’s happening, which is why we are where we are.” ER
Photo by Ray Valdivia