Covering injustice to Carmona makes the ending hard to take

I need to write something about Arthur Carmona’s death -- it comes with the territory -- but it’s taking a while.

Lots of false starts.

My first thought was that if he had to die young, which he did last weekend in Santa Ana, I’m glad it came as he was running away from trouble.

That’s how police described it, but they’re still investigating. Yes, he was “fleeing the fight on foot,” according to a police spokesman, but it was 4:30 in the morning, and the fair questions are: What led to the fight, and what was he doing up at that hour?

But why speculate? What’s known so far is that Arthur, who turned 26 this month, was run down by someone in a pickup at a mobile home complex and police are calling it a homicide.

What’s also known, at least to me and his family and close friends, is that he was in the fight of his life in recent years. More exactly, it was a fight for his life, as he tried to shelve anger and disillusionment and figure out his place in this society.

Lots of young people deal with that, but very few had Arthur’s handicap: Five days after his 16th birthday, while walking down a street in Costa Mesa at 4:30 in the afternoon, he was stopped and questioned as a robbery suspect.

From that afternoon, he spent the next 2 1/2 years behind bars, the last several months at Ironwood State Prison in Blythe. In August 2000, on the eve of a hearing to see if he deserved a new trial, the Orange County district attorney’s office asked that charges be dropped. Arthur, then 18 1/2 , was freed from the rest of his 12-year sentence.

Freed, sort of.

He was a young man lost. He had missed his last two years of high school, and his friends had moved on. His junior and senior years were spent trying to survive incarceration and in remaking a personality -- widely described as shy and occasionally goofy -- into one that was harder and tougher so he wouldn’t be vulnerable to what prison takes from you.

With Arthur (L.A. Times style is to call him Carmona, but that feels too impersonal for me today), a lot of it for me is echoes and remembrances. His story gets me emotional.

I stepped into his world in 1999, several months after his conviction but while he was trying to get a new trial. I threw myself into the case and came to believe his conviction was wrong. I wrote a dozen or so columns over the next 18 months and raised questions about the strength of the eyewitness identifications and the utter lack of physical evidence connecting him to the crime.

Along the way, a key witness phoned me to say she now doubted her testimony. A juror who said he was the last holdout confided that he’d always doubted Arthur’s guilt. A second juror also said she believed she was wrong to convict.

Eventually, the L.A. law firm Sidley & Austin jumped into the case pro bono and wrote a compelling appellate brief that led to Arthur’s freedom.

In court the day the judge ordered his release, Arthur’s mother, Ronnie, sat two rows in front of me. I didn’t know what was in the offing until she turned around and silently mouthed: “He’s free.”

Her words, coming 16 months after I’d met her and started looking into his case, gave me the quivering lip. Recalling the moment now gives it to me again.

Now Arthur is dead, and the emotions come back. When you lobby in print for someone and spend hundreds of hours trying to go over everything in your mind, you obviously grow attached to your subject. I used to joke with Arthur and his mother that I was only “95% to 98% convinced” of his innocence, and they’d chide my lack of faith. I remember talking more than once, post-midnight, to one of his attorneys as we replayed the facts of the case.

The day of Arthur’s release, he gave me the first interview, in accord with Ronnie’s long-standing promise.

He was upbeat as he ate carnitas, tortillas and beans for lunch at his grandmother’s home in Santa Ana. He thought his release might be a dream, he couldn’t believe he was breathing free air, he thanked his supporters, he wanted to get on with his life, he didn’t think his years lost would leave scars.

He was wrong.

I interviewed him 2 1/2 years later, when he turned 21. Friendly but pulling no punches, he talked of the problems in reentering society. Prison hardened him, he said, and that only deepened his disillusionment with the justice system, which, he said, should never have prosecuted him. He knew anger wasn’t good, but he couldn’t repress it. When I asked if he was optimistic, he said: “I wish, but that’s not how it goes. For me, at least.”

I next saw him 3 1/2 years later, in November 2006. I went up to North Hollywood to hear him speak to a group of people on wrongful convictions. Though not a natural public speaker, it was an avocation he’d come to enjoy, having spoken at seminars and state legislative hearings. I wrote the next day that he was “on the comeback trail,” appearing more upbeat and hopeful than on his 21st birthday.

“I’m still angry,” he said that night, but not with malice. He had the same soft-spoken cadence he’d had when I first met him as a 16-year-old in jail. “Certain things tick me off,” he said, “and it’s probably always going to be there.” Oddly enough, he refused to direct it at cops or prosecutors. “Just at what I had to go through,” he said.

I talked to Ronnie on Monday. I expected bitterness and anger, but got neither. Perhaps more so than Arthur, she had railed at the system in recent years.

“He had just barely started to open up to things that happened to him behind bars,” she said. “To me, the way I saw him was that he was at a peaceful point in his life. I figured, maybe down the road, maybe a little bit more healing. . . .”

Arthur had recently enrolled at Santa Ana College and was interested in becoming a firefighter, she said. “He did his homework,” she said, with amazement. “He did his homework!”

The anger never left him, she said. “The goal for him was to vindicate himself,” she said. “He felt that once he did that and it was proved he told the truth, his life was going to be good. I told him, ‘Arthur, even if you do that, there’s not a guarantee that everyone is going to accept that.’ ”

At Arthur’s lowest moments, Ronnie said, when she thought he was making bad choices and jeopardizing his freedom, “he’d say: ‘I don’t care. I’m still in prison. Don’t you understand that?’ ”

But those moments were rarer in recent years, Ronnie said. In recent months, she said, she felt he had “turned the corner.”

They say there’s peace in death. For Arthur and his family’s sake, I hope so.

I don’t feel peace. With Arthur’s life unfolding but ending prematurely, I flash back to the image that has always pained me: that of a 16-year-old kid walking down the street, not knowing that his life was about to change forever.

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Dana Parsons is a columnist for The Times’ Orange County edition. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.

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Back story

Beginning in 1999, Orange County edition columnist Dana Parsons wrote about a dozen columns on Arthur Paul Carmona’s arrest and conviction for robbery, culminating in Carmona’s release from prison after his conviction was overturned in 2000. After Carmona’s release, Parsons wrote several more columns on the case and updates on Carmona’s life.