Christ was Shot

Christ was Shot

      My last call Christmas Eve 2011 was a homicide. A man was shot and when on the ground the shooter made sure the message was sent, don't fuck with me.

      

      It has been cold in Los Angeles the city of Angels. The scene was at a repair shop South East of Downtown, about a fifteen minute drive no matter what route you took to get there.

During my overalls which are the wide angle shots used to show the entire scene in pieces, I noticed the grease stained asphalt parking lot. The grease had been baked into the porous pavement and now when well below sixty degrees it was quite solid and smooth where vehicles being fixed waited dripping the lubrication that is referred to as the 'life’s blood' of any machine.

  

     I began close ups, the evidence already marked for me with numbers on a plastic teepee that also had scales that marked in perpendicular fashion a short metric scale, just in case someone cared what size the object was in real life. Procedure is always born of a failure in court.

During close ups of the last three numbers that included the dead mans cut up clothing and small puddles of blood I was told basically what happened. The victim went to help a friend who was being robbed. The man rushed upon the robber armed with the best intentions, vigor and pure moral fortitude. Christmas Eve and the man brought the intangible faith based parts that are the best of us all to a gun fight.

     He was shot, then while down as the others scattered for their lives the robber shot him again.

John 15:13 refers to laying down ones life for their friends. That is why, as I left and saw many heading off to midnight mass dressed in finery, setting off fireworks, and making merry in general I thought in this industrial portion of the City of Angels that Christ was shot. Because he lives in and around all of us and since we celebrate his birthday to a varying degree of reverence that man became for me, on the earth that no longer binds him, Christs truest representative.