Hummingbirds hovered silently as they homed in on the bird-of-paradise plants that provide them with a tasty breakfast. Overhead, the constant high-pitched tone of single-engined light aircraft sweeping through the skies was a noisy reminder of the metropolis of Los Angeles which lay just twenty miles to the south. 12 August 1993 was a scorchingly hot day in the San Fernando Valley. As temperatures nudged into the low hundreds, a hazy film of smog hung over the vast basin that is one of the largest suburban developments in California.Right in the centre of the valley lies the much-varied city of Van Nuys. Split in two by the valley’s busiest airport, Van Nuys is a mish-mash of comfortable, detached, single-storey homes in the south, and scruffy, tightly built apartment blocks in the north, some of which have become breeding grounds for many of southern California’s most notorious street gangs. Most weeks, police find themselves examining the corpses of at least one victim of a gangland shootout.
