LAPD Finds no Motive in Fatal Glassell Park Shooting

The Los Angeles Police Department is viewing neighborhood surveillance cameras and pursuing leads on matching get-away vehicles in which two men and a woman fled after the fatal shooting this past week of a Glassell Park resident, according to LAPD Northeast Division Capt. Jeff Bert.

James Marcus Howe, 42, was killed in what the LAPD is calling a random shooting on the 4400 block of West Avenue 42 near the border of Eagle Rock. His wife was seriously wounded in the shooting and hospitalized. The couple had moved into the neighborhood just some months ago along with their six-year-old son.

Bert said the LAPD considers the shooting to be random because there does not appear to be any motive for the murder.

“The victim does not have any rap sheet,” Bert said, explaining that the absence of any significant crime history behind Howe suggests, for example, that his murder was not retaliatory.

For its part, the LAPD does not have any significant leads so far. “We have theories, but nothing we can [publicly] state,” Bert said, adding that Howe and his family were renters in the area.

Asked if the house in which they lived was owned by a police officer, as a neighbor has told Patch, Bert replied that he had heard about that but could not confirm it.

Asked what caliber of handgun was used in the shooting, Bert said he was not at liberty to say. “The only people who would know that would be the suspects and the P.D. [police department],” he said.

Bert also declined to say if police investigators had found any bullet casings on the crime scene.