Sharing the Pain

Loretta Thomas-Davis spent Wednesday morning carefully ironing the white graduation gown that her daughter will wear only to her own funeral.

Later that morning, Thomas-Davis endured the task of talking to dozens of reporters who had camped out on her front lawn since last week, when a suspected gang member gunned down Corie Williams, 17, as she rode a bus home from Centennial High School in Compton.

“Some day, each and every one of you are going to lose someone that you really, really love,” Thomas-Davis told them softly, firmly gripping the hands of her aunt and cousin as tears fell freely down her face. “And it hurts. It hurts. It hurts.”

Less than a week after her daughter was caught by a bullet intended for an alleged gang member riding the same bus, Thomas-Davis was drained. Her body shook as she tried in fewer than 30 minutes to sum up her feelings about gang violence, the police and the 17 years she shared with Corie.

The 42-year-old mother, an elementary school plant manager, has two other daughters, 23 and 9, and a 7-year-old son. The cameras’ bright lights glared and the cluster of microphones amplified her words into an odd echo inside her cousin’s small South-Central Los Angeles living room.

She broke into tears as she told how Corie’s hard work and determination had brought her so close to what would have been her greatest triumph: graduation. When authorities vainly rushed Corie to the hospital with a bullet wound in her neck, she had her graduation garb order form in her pocket.

“This is very, very difficult for me,” Thomas-Davis said, crying. “That was my baby. That was my baby.”

Later, after most of the reporters left, she looked through her daughter’s senior class pictures and talked about the events her daughter had been eagerly awaiting.

Corie already had a date for the senior prom, Thomas-Davis said. She announced last fall that she would delay her lifelong dream of going into the Army and first obtain a college education. Corie talked about entering the medical profession. She was not ready to be a wife or a mother, she told her mother; she believed there would be plenty of time for that later.

“She said, ‘Mama, I’m going to stay with you until I’m 30,’ ” Thomas-Davis said, laughing. “That was a joke, kind of.”

The only thing her daughter loved almost as much as her friends was music--all of it: the current popular rap act Bone Thugs--N--Harmony, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke.

“People sang from their heart then and they tried to get a message out to people to love one another,” Thomas-Davis said of the older school of music. “That was important to her.”

At the news conference, the family urged the community’s assistance in finding Corie’s killer. After all, Thomas-Davis said, no parent could be ignorant of a child’s gang involvement.

“I don’t think any parent cannot know if their child is a gangbanger,” Thomas-Davis said. “Each and every parent should take some time--I don’t care if it’s five minutes--and sit down and talk to their child. In five minutes you can learn a lot.”

None of her children had ever been in trouble, she said later. The principal at her daughter’s school told Thomas-Davis that she never got a chance to know Corie because as the school’s disciplinarian, she never had any interaction with the dutiful student.

“I had a good baby,” Thomas-Davis said. “Corie wouldn’t come home from school, drop her books and run around the streets like I see other children do.”

Basil Kimbrew, a member of the Compton Unified School District board, also announced the creation of the Corie Williams Scholarship Fund, which each year will go to a Centennial High School senior who is pursuing a college education.

“Corie Williams was our hero in the Compton Unified School District,” Kimbrew said, echoing Bill Cosby’s characterization of his son, slain the same day as Corie.

The class pictures Thomas-Davis leafed through showed a slim, smiling girl with glowing skin and bright, slightly upturned eyes that match her mother’s.

In each picture--one with Corie in pearls and an off-the-shoulder black faux fur, another in a white T-shirt, one posed in cap and gown with her arm resting on a giant “97,” her graduation year--Corie brimmed with confidence. “She’s thinking, ‘I did it,’ ” Thomas-Davis said quietly.