The murder may have been a not-unusual end to the life of a gang member. But though he had joined the Bloods at age 8—long after his parents had abandoned him—Beley was more than a gang-banger, and his death brought a pointless close to a life that held promise.
A talented photographer and natural raconteur, Beley possessed gifts as diverse as the 100 or so mourners who came to the Inner City Arts center to eulogize him on July 21. Miguel Angel Corzo, director of the Getty Conservation Institute and a mentor to Beley, read a tribute from Vice President Al Gore, a fan of Beley's photography. "The lives of all of us," Gore wrote, "were touched by the talents of this young man." Fenton Bailey, a British filmmaker who interviewed Beley for L.A. Stories: From the Eye of the Storm, a BBC documentary on the impact of the April 1992 Rodney King riots, recalled how "wise [Beley] was to the harsh realities of the world."
Ironically it was Beley's prediction in that film of his early death that nearly won him a new life. He was an 11-year-old whose street smarts and wide-eyed curiosity attracted the attention of Bailey, 36, and his colleagues Alison Pollet, 27, and Randy Barbato, 35, as they recruited 10 Angelenos in order to document their lives with video cameras. "Ennis was so sweet and clever," recalls Pollet of the boy she first glimpsed at a South Central youth center. "He was a joy." Taping himself in the dreary apartment Beley shared with Howard Glen, his 75-year-old guardian, the fourth-grade dropout told a chilling tale of watching his best friend, a boy nicknamed Goofy, die in a drive-by shooting a couple of years earlier. Weighing his own prospects for survival, he added, "I hope I live through the end of '92. I hope I live to 25, or more."
Beley's words so touched the crew, says Barbato, that "the only ethical thing to do was to allow him to be part of our lives." They invited him to their offices in nearby Koreatown, even letting him spend nights there on a sofa. Beley, it turns out, had a flair for photography and storytelling, and when L.A. Stories aired in Britain on the first anniversary of the riots, his stark view of street life prompted a London Observer critic to describe him as "an extraordinary 12-year-old."
The BBC then asked him to serve as a video correspondent at the federal trial of the police officers accused of the King beating. Working alongside professional photographers and charming them with his precocious wit (he described one woman as "so skinny she could Hula Hoop a Froot Loop"), Beley met freelance photographer Lauren Greenfield, who loaned him a camera and asked him to contribute to a book of children's photos she was compiling. When Picture L.A.: Landmarks of a New Generation was published in 1994, Beley's photos were singled out for praise by L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan. After seeing the volume, Tipper Gore, an avid photographer, acquired two of his prints—"Wilshire Place," a photo of an ad on a city bus, and "Crenshaw Boulevard," a shot of a low-rider car—which now hang in her family's Washington residence. "Ennis didn't have any preconceived ideas about L.A.'s landmarks," says Greenfield. "He was so fresh."
Profiled on several network news programs, courted by leaders in the media and the arts, Beley seemed bound for better things. He even went back to school, sent by his new friends to the private United World International School of Learning in the Crenshaw district of L.A., where he finally graduated from sixth grade. But no matter what he achieved during the day, at night Beley went home, and at home he became Bandit—a street kid who would soon sport a gang tattoo on his arm and a target on his back. "If I don't hang out," he told a National Public Radio reporter in 1993, "I don't know what somebody going to do. And I don't want to die."
Again, Beley's friends came to his aid. "We had to get him out of South Central," Barbato says. "We all loved him, but none of us could take him in." So they pooled their money and last fall sent Beley to the the all-black Piney Woods Country Life School southeast of Jackson, Miss. "It seemed like the perfect environment," says Barbato. "It was the opposite of where he came from." Alison Pollet went along to help him get settled and, in November, Ron DeVeaux, a freelance TV cameraman who became something of a big brother to Beley after they met in 1993, flew to Mississippi so he wouldn't be alone on Thanksgiving. Within a few months, though, the school's strict rules started chafing against Beley's street-hardened sensibility. "I can't hang," he complained to dean of students Lepolian Gentry, who had taken an interest in Beley. But although his attitude and grades improved, Beley got into a fist-fight in March and was suspended for the rest of the school year. "He was very sad," Gentry recalls. "I hated to see him go."
Back in L.A., Beley's adult friends responded to his dismissal by taking a tough-love approach, talking to him on the phone but no longer lavishing him with meals, clothes and privileges. "I wasn't sure how I could help him," Pollet recalls. "I thought he needed to help himself." For his part, Beley sent Pollet an apology. "I am sorry for getting kicked out of that school," he wrote. "I still love you like a mother."
His real mother, Patricia Smith, now 39, disappeared from Ennis's life when he was an infant. Born July 9, 1980, he was the youngest of the four children she left to bounce from from to home. Beley's father, Michael, neither lived with Smith nor cared to see his son, except on rare occasions, but when Smith began a romance with Howard Glen, the older man grew attached to her infant son. Realizing soon afterward that Smith was involved with drugs—"It messed her life up," he says—he kicked her out but had her leave her baby with him.
Beley's world became the backroom of Glen's dry-cleaning shop, with old graffiti on the bathroom walls, roaches on the floor and a single king-size bed for the two to share. While Glen loved Beley—who called him Dad—he was a near-destitute old man unable to protect Beley from the neighborhood toughs who drew him into their orbit. "I don't know what he did out on the street," Glen says. "But it makes me sick just to think about it."
What Beley was doing, it seems, was searching for something he never had. "He was really desperate for a family," says Barbato. DeVeaux tried hard to be a surrogate father. "And I was making progress," he says. "He used to go to church with me almost every Sunday. If I would have had more time, I would have been successful."
But Beley's time was running out. He had talent, and he certainly had friends, but it was his craving to belong that, in the end, denned his life—and destroyed it. For an all-too-brief time he examined the world through the lens of a camera, and it is impossible to imagine what he might have found if he had kept on looking. Instead, he went back to the place he knew best—the street—put on his colors and walked into the darkness.
PETER CARLIN
KEN BAKER in Los Angeles
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