Homicide Charity: “I really do feel hopeless”

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In a city criticized for self-absorption, you might think that those who toil selflessly would be rewarded.

They aren’t.

Consider the Rev. Ferroll Robins, above. She is the head of the nonprofit Loved Ones Victims Services, formerly Loved Ones of Homicide Victims, an organization that provides grief counseling for people whose family members are murdered in the Los Angeles area.

It’s not a job for the weak. Ask any police officer, detective, trauma surgeon, or prosecutor in this city: Nothing is harder to deal with than grieving families of the murdered.

Families who scream when notified that their loved one has been killed. Families who remain mute through bewildering proceedings, politely offering thanks from behind blasted eyes. Families who call detectives for years on end asking about languished cases.

Loved Ones Victims Services focuses exclusively on this difficult work, an island for the grieving, an organization that wades into the messy aftermath of homicide when everyone else seems to want to look away. Among charities, Loved Ones is ‘the only one I know of’ with this mandate, said Capt. James Craig of LAPD Southwest Division--the reason its link is on this site.

Fingerprint smudges inside Loved Ones’ Culver City offices offer a clue of what such work is like: The paint is sullied by a parade of clients who have quite literally staggered in, bracing themselves on walls to avoid collapsing from grief.

Robins is the force behind Loved Ones. She stepped in in 1993 and eventually took over the organization. She has given much of her adult life to it, scrambling for funding year after year, always on the brink of closing.

For years, the group has struggled to get so much as a single, tiny, community-development block grant from the city of Los Angeles. The city freely doles out such grants to scores of arts organizations and service groups of all stripes. But not for homicide. Loved Ones went at least three years without a city grant before its recent move to Culver City.

Few in private charities seemed to hear the plea either. Foundation money was so hard to come by that Robins eventually took the word ‘homicide’ out of the name of the organization. It seemed to creep people out. Robins would call organizations about grants, and hear an uncomfortable silence on the other end of the line when she started talking about it.

Loved Ones did get some small grants. Among the foundations that have helped it are the Weingart Foundation, and those of Northrop Grumman, Farmers Insurance, and Kaiser Permanente. But it remained mostly dependent on a single federal Victims of Crime fund grant. With a staff of four, a small office, and a $175,000 annual budget, simply paying the rent was never easy.

Over the years, Robins regularly postponed payment of her own salary. Staff moved on after short stints. There were Hollywood millionaires right up the freeway from where young people were being torn apart every night in front of horrified relatives. But Robins became more and more convinced that people just don’t care.

She had been working for Loved Ones nearly a decade when, by bitter coincidence, her own brother Joseph Paul was murdered in a random shooting in South Los Angeles.

For months and years afterward, she vowed to take a break from Loved Ones. The burden of ministering to the grieving while being submerged in her own personal grief was breaking her down. ‘There are so many times I wanted to walk away. But then, who is there for the families?’ she said.

She never did take that break. She is toiling just the same today as then, still trying to get grants, trying to pay the rent.

This year, Robins turned 50. Behind her are years of emotionally pounding work. Before her are unpaid bills and a seemingly endless struggle that leads nowhere. She is single, her parents are aging, her father is ill, and things are no better for Loved Ones. She is exhausted, and sounds it. ‘You lose patience on so may levels,’ she said. ‘You are constantly being beaten down.’

She is talking about making the organization online, or running it out of her house. ‘Next year we will have to make a decision,’ Robins said.

Stories of altruism rewarded are popular and comforting. But Robins has begun to believe that the truer story is altruism as a path to lonely ruin.

‘You start looking at your bills, your livelihood,’ she said. ‘It forces you to make a decision. You do all this helping, but if I get put out of my house, no one is coming to my rescue. That’s what I began to see.’

‘I really do feel hopeless,’ she said. If the wider world ‘doesn’t care about these people, why am I sitting here...getting older?’

A few years ago, this reporter wrote a story about Loved Ones’ inability to get support. Virtually the same story could be written today.

In that story, former O.J. Simpson prosecutor Chris Darden praised Loved Ones and suggested it was depressing ‘to think the community won’t support it.’

It seems Los Angeles doesn’t.