Air Pollution to Gun Violence

By Adam Mahoney with photographs by Damon Casarez

For Daniel Delgado, the Fourth of July marked a turning point in 2020. It was the first holiday after COVID-19 had kept much of America locked down. In nine days, he’d be entering his 20s. He planned to spend his birthday relishing the Arizona sun with friends, but in the meantime, the holiday offered him an opportunity to be celebrated by family and friends, surrounded by love and human connection — things that had been hard to come by that year.

He spent the day at his aunt’s home in the Los Angeles harbor area neighborhood of Wilmington, California. His parents, Sonia Banales and Roberto Delgado, and his large extended family remember laughing, grilling ribs and setting off fireworks.

Shortly after midnight, as the celebration died down, Delgado left the house to drive a few friends home. He never made it back.

About 2 a.m., Delgado was shot and killed in the only place he ever called home, a small corner of Los Angeles tucked between the largest port in North America and the largest oil refinery in California. He was one of at least 160 people in the U.S. who lost their lives to gun violence that weekend. The exceptional deadliness of Independence Day weekend is one of the few American norms that the pandemic did not disrupt.

In the 20 months since Delgado’s death, his family has found little solace and fewer answers as they grapple with what happened that night. They’ve expressed disillusionment at the social support available to them—; the police have not discovered a motive or firmly identified a suspect.

“We know that he didn’t deserve to die like this,” said Banales, Delgado’s mother. “It hurts so badly.”

“Every time I call [the police] they say, ‘I’m working on another case. I haven’t had time to work on Daniel’s case,’” she added.Banales claims that the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has suggested to her that Delgado’s case has suffered due to “budget cuts” spurred by the historic protests against police violence the summer Delgado died. (Although the LAPD’s budget was cut by $150m in 2020, it then grew by $213m in 2021, making it the city’s largest police budget in history.) LAPD press representatives did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication of this article.

Wilmington community members are no stranger to early death and the social inequality that drives it. The neighborhood is located in the Los Angeles City Council District 15, home to the most federal public housing projects and federally regulated toxic sites of all the city’s 15 districts. The port in its backyard contributes to 1,200 premature deaths annually; the air pollution from the refineries on its soil and trucks on its streets contributes to 4,100 premature deaths across southern California; and a lack of green spaces, jobs and safe housing contributes to the zip code’s five most populous census tracts being less healthy than 93% of the state, according to the California Healthy Places Index.

Read the entirety of the story at the The Guardian.