1

’Tasha
The Girl with the Wonderful Smile

The Decedent
The autopsy report was devastatingly clear: “The decedent,
Latasha Harlins, died as a result of having sustained a gunshot
wound . . . to the back of the head. . . . The entry wound was 2¾
inches below the top of the head. . . . The exit wound . . . is 1½
inch from the mid line of the back of the head.”1
Latasha Harlins was 15 years old when Soon Ja Du shot her.
She died shortly thereafter, face down on the floor of her local
convenience store, the Empire Liquor Market located at 9172
South Figueroa Street in South Central Los Angeles. On that
day, Latasha became part of a gruesome national statistic: 23.5%
of homicide victims are female. Still, Latasha’s murder was
unusual—only about 10 African American girls her age, out of
every 100,000, were killed that year.2
The police investigators found two one-dollar bills crum-
pled in Latasha’s hand. The elastic band of the UCLA Bruins cap
she wore that morning broke when the bullet passed through it.
Paramedics ripped open the front of her multicolored blouse,
searching for a heart beat. Blood seeping from her head stained
the back of her shirt and jacket, eventually reaching her blue
pants. Blouse, pants, cap—seemingly ordinary, casual clothing
for a teenaged girl to wear on a Saturday morning. But on that
day—March 16, 1991—the ordinary became extraordinary.
Store owner Soon Ja Du testified that her son Joseph had told
4 The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins

her about people who wore clothes like Latasha’s: they were, according
to him, gang members and dangerous. Latasha’s clothes, her age, and the
color of her skin made her, in Du’s estimation, an “other” who was not
to be trusted, but who was to be feared. Du’s perception of Harlins as a
racial and/or ethnic stranger as it were, also resonates with national
homicide statistics. Three out of ten homicides are interracial when the
victim is a “stranger.” Most “stranger homicides” also involve a gun.3
Latasha Lavon Harlins was born on January 1, 1976, at the Christian
Welfare Hospital in East St. Louis, Illinois, the first daughter of 16-year-
old Crystal Harlins. The Harlins family, led by Crystal’s mother Ruth,
had been in East St. Louis since the late 1940s. They were an extended
family, with at least three, sometimes four, generations living together.
Latasha, her mother, her two younger siblings named Vester, Jr. and
Christina,4 along with Sylvester Acoff, father of Latasha’s siblings, joined
Ruth Harlins in Los Angeles in 1982.5 Denise and Shinese, Latasha’s
maternal aunt and first cousin moved from Atlanta to join the family in
1983. Richard Brown (a.k.a. Harlins), her maternal uncle, also lived in
the home.
This is the story of Latasha Harlins. It explores her tragic life in Los
Angeles, her family, her community, and the forces—historical, polit-
ical, economic, cultural, legal, and criminal—which shaped who she
was, how she behaved, what she thought, and what happened to her on
that morning in the late winter of 1991 that ended her life.
The homicide detectives on the scene seized Latasha’s backpack,
along with its contents—a jar of cream, a pair of female underpants, a
toothbrush, some other toiletry items, and a few other articles—as evi-
dence. The police took photos of her dead body and then walked from
house to house in the working-class neighborhood near the site of the
shooting, trying to get a positive identification of the murdered youth.
Neighbors kept pointing them toward one apartment building, then to
one apartment in particular leased by Ruth Harlins. Denise Harlins,
Ruth’s daughter, opened the door and spoke to the policemen. As his
description of what happened to Latasha wafted backward and filled the
room with unexpected dread, grandmother Ruth collapsed. Shinese
went screaming through their home. The dead girl was not only her
cousin, but also her best friend and roommate; Latasha had borrowed
Shinese’s lime-green backpack with a clock on the front when she left
 ’Tasha 5

home the previous evening. Soon Ja Du later testified that she was cer-
tain Latasha had a weapon in that clock-faced backpack. She was certain
Latasha had a weapon that she was going to use to kill her. The police
recovered no such weapon.6
Fifteen is a difficult age for most girls, particularly for one growing
up without her mother or father and coming of age in South Central in
the early 1990s. Certainly Latasha, or ’Tasha as friends and family called
her, had a family that loved her. Her grandmother Ruth had risked a lot
to take in Latasha and her two siblings when their mother Crystal was
killed and their father disappeared. Her aunt Denise also was in the
home with her. Latasha had the support, comradeship, and affection of
her cousin Shinese and the rest of the Harlins clan in Los Angeles as
well. Still, her short life had been hard and painful. The toll it took
showed—Latasha seemed something of a loner and often was very quiet.
But no one expected her untimely death or the alleged reasons Du gave
for it. The Harlins family has never been able to understand why Du
thought Latasha had a weapon in her backpack with which she intended
to kill the shopkeeper.
“’Tasha was just very quiet and very shy. She didn’t hang with many
people. And she was hard, you could tell. You didn’t mess with her. She
was like in her own world,” a friend from her middle school recalled.
JonSandy Campbell also remembered that she, ’Tasha, and two other
girls, Tunisia and Sandra, would spend their lunch time at Bret Harte
Preparatory Middle School talking about clothes, boys, and especially
music. “She was a good dancer. Her favorite group was BBD [Bell Biv
Devoe]. . . . We were all kind of outsiders, you know. I came to the school
new that year so I didn’t know anyone; but she had been there. We got
together because we were both alone and very quiet.”7 JonSandy realized
that Latasha too was an outsider, but she never really understood why.
She had no idea that Latasha’s mother had been killed a few years earlier,
and that she had never emotionally recovered from the loss.

’Tasha never talked about her family or any of her problems—

none of that. We were just silly girls, sitting around talking
about music, gossiping about people at the school, you know
how girls talk. She didn’t think she was pretty, but I thought she
was cute. She was dark complexioned. She always wore her hair
6 The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins

the same way—bangs in the front, two braids up the side, bangs
in the back. She would always look up at you through her bangs.
I used to tell her that I liked her cut [slanted] eyes. She wore the
same kind of clothes every day—blue dickies, a white T-shirt
and a black hoodie, always the black hoodie, and black LA Gear.
That was the thing. Gang bangers wore clothes like that, but she
wasn’t in a gang. She just hung out with us.8
Bret Harte, located on South Hoover between 93rd and 94th Streets,
just a couple of blocks from where Latasha died, included grades sixth
through eighth. The school could not boast of high academic standards
or even moderate standardized test scores, but Latasha was successful
there as both a student and athlete, running track and placing on the
honor roll. She also had friends and success outside of middle school. At
the local Algin Sutton Recreational Center, Latasha was a member of the
drill team. She also worked as a junior camp counselor during the
summer of 1990.9 After their two years together at Bret Harte, JonSandy
and the other girls went to ninth grade at Washington Preparatory High.
’Tasha went to Westchester High located in a middle-class enclave, some
distance from the Harlins’s home. As an honor student at Bret Harte, she
had the choice to attend a high school other than the one closest to her
residence. Her family chose Westchester for Latasha and her cousin
Shinese because it was a better school academically and they hoped to
prepare the girls for college.
The transition between middle school and high school for Latasha
could not have been an easy one; she lost most of her middle school
friends when she did not follow them to Washington Prep. Moreover,
Westchester was a much more rigorous academic environment than
Bret Harte. But perhaps more important, in terms of her outlook on life,
behavior, and relationship to her family and other members of her social
world, Latasha soon would be 15. Like many girls her age, ’Tasha was
struggling to find herself, to test life’s waters, to push against its personal
and institutional boundaries. A girl at heart, with the body of a young
woman and an edgy attitude, she was a complex blend of naiveté and
maturity, strength and vulnerability, celebration, anger, and heartbreak
all wrapped up in a facade of quiet street savvy. The heartbreak came
when her mother Crystal was shot and killed six years earlier. The anger
 ’Tasha 7

was part of the trauma of her loss, but probably began earlier when Lata-
sha lived in her parents’ home, a home menaced by domestic violence,
drug use, and petty criminality. It certainly was not a life anyone who
knew and loved Latasha, or anyone who was an ancestor, would have
wanted for her.

Migratory Paths: Leaving Violence and Injustice Behind?

The Harlins family’s migration from the Deep South to East St. Louis
and then on to Los Angeles was part of a migratory trend of African
Americans that extended generations back, at least to Latasha’s maternal
great-grandparents. Like the vast majority of blacks who lived in the
Black Belt of Alabama and Mississippi, Ruth Harlins’s ancestors had
been enslaved. Ruth’s great grandfather, Squire, also known as Sammy,
was born around 1867 in Mississippi, but according to census data,
Squire’s father, A. Hollands, had been born a slave in North Carolina in
1830. As a free farmer during the Reconstruction era, A. had married
Millie, who also was from Mississippi and whose slave father had been
born in South Carolina. During the antebellum period, Millie and A.’s
fathers had, no doubt, like so many others, been sold or transferred
from the upper South where tobacco, cotton, and rice was the slave-
holder’s mainstay to the lower South where “cotton was king.” By 1880,
A. and Millie resided in Horn Lake, Mississippi, and worked as either
tenant famers or sharecroppers. Their son Squire lived and worked with
them. When Squire later married Cora, the two had several children,
including Ruth Harlins’s grandmother, Luella.10
By 1920, the family’s name had changed a few times—from Hollins
to Hollans to Hallins. Many enslaved blacks chose new surnames upon
emancipation in 1865. Ruth’s family’s name changed much later, prob-
ably as part of a typical evolution that reflects both developing literacy
skills and accents. Luella, who was literate, and her family lived and
worked as farmers in Sunflower, Mississippi.11 Fondly called Lula,
Luella later married Ed Thomas. She had a son before marrying—
Emmett (a.k.a. Ernest). Emmett was Ruth’s father and Latasha’s great-
grandfather. Ten years later, Lula and Ed Thomas, still farmworkers,
moved to Bethany in Pickens County, Alabama, with their two sons Ed
and Ben as well as Emmett, who was then 18.12