Californian mourns a childhood friend lost in a changing community

On a recent trip to the Inglewood Park Cemetery to visit my best friend Mike, I noticed that his tombstone was dirty.

I hadn’t come in a while, and apparently no one else had either. As I cleaned up, I surveyed the area around me. At 17, Mike was the youngest interred there by far. Most people buried nearby had at least reached their 40s by the time they died. Many, I realized as I looked at the dates, had been dead now longer than they were alive, their stories tracing back to different points in Inglewood’s past.

Beyond the cemetery, I was confronted by the rapidly gentrifying present of this place that raised Mike and me. Just across the street, where the old Daniel Freeman Hospital once stood, developers erected fancy condos way too expensive for the average Inglewood resident to afford. The skyline is now filled with new landmarks: SoFi Stadium, opened in 2020; the Forum, renamed in 2022, and now painted red, not the blue of my childhood; the Intuit Dome, the most recent addition, opened in 2024.

The Inglewood that Mike and I knew has been constructed over. But the cemetery preserves the neighborhood’s complete narrative. I made sure to wipe the rest of the dirt off Mike’s tombstone before leaving because I wanted to be sure that his life is remembered in its telling.

From foe to friend

The way I met Mike sounds like a shitty Netflix comedy. We both attended Beulah Payne Elementary School at 215 W. 94th Street. I was in first grade and he was in second. I can’t remember the specifics of the encounter, but I know that it ended in one of those petty schoolyard scraps.

Flash forward three years to when my parents decided to send me to private school to keep me out of trouble. St. John Chrysostom was less than two miles from Beulah Payne but it felt like another universe, one where I was convinced I wouldn’t fit in. Except on my first day I recognized a familiar face. There was Mike, with his tan brown skin and small widow’s peak.

It turned out Mike had been sent to St. John in hopes it would keep him out of trouble too. This time around, instead of fighting, we bonded over being two Mexican kids from the inner city, different from our private school classmates, mostly Black and Filipino, who we didn’t think knew a day of “the struggle.”

If I was more reserved and prone to internalizing, Mike wore his heart on his sleeve and was always willing to go toe-to-toe with anyone on the schoolyard. Yin and yang, we balanced each other out. Mike quickly became more like a brother than a friend. It feels funny to say that our inner children came out when we saw each other, as we were both so young back then. But neither of us had enjoyed many opportunities to just be a kid. I always said my childhood ended at 9, when my brother was diagnosed with leukemia. Mike had to grow up even faster. His mother, who had health problems, died when he was around 7. As long as I knew him, his dad was away in prison. Since Mike’s parents were out of the picture, we used to hang out at my place, play video games, and just be.

On different paths

Looking back, it’s easy to see why our lives diverged. Because my dad got caught up in gang life when he was young, he and my mom, both born and raised in Inglewood, were careful to encourage me and my siblings to go another route. Mike didn’t have those kinds of role models in his life.

The summer of seventh grade, Mike left St. John and joined a gang—and I made the painful decision to distance myself from him. Since my brother had gotten sick, I had stopped causing trouble. I wanted to show up for my family. I also knew that if I wanted to make something of myself, I had to stay out of that life. Mike understood my reasons and took them in stride. One thing about Mike: He always protected me.

The last time I saw Mike was at the St. John fall carnival in 2019. We didn’t talk about the fact that we didn’t see each other as much anymore; we already knew why it had to be that way. Underneath everything, we knew there was always only love.

More than a statistic

Mike died that spring, after being shot near Century Boulevard and South Freeman Avenue.

I teach high school kids now, and I’m acutely aware that what happened to Mike is an unfortunate reality for many young men like him, who grew up in similar circumstances in Inglewood or elsewhere. These kids matter, but they rarely get the attention kids from more well-off backgrounds get. If you do a search online, the only coverage of Mike’s death is one sentence in the Los Angeles Times’ Homicide Report.

Mike was more than a statistic, more than a victim of homicide in an inner city. He was my friend and my brother. When I go to visit him at the Inglewood Park Cemetery, I am reminded of the good times we had together. And I find comfort knowing that in this place, inhabited by the dead but filled with memories, with pain, with the essence of life in this city, Mike remains a permanent part of Inglewood’s story.

This commentary was adapted from an essay produced for Zócalo Public Square.