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For the last three years, no homicides have occurred in a remarkable patch of South Los Angeles. Measuring a mile wide from Hoover Street to Halldale Avenue and stretching from 73rd to 85th Street, it is an island encircled by the harsh realities of life in the urban core: One cannot walk a block outside its borders without coming across the site of a killing from the last three years. The odd calm of the area is more striking when compared with a same-sized tract a mile directly to the south. There, on the grid of streets between 101st and 112th streets, 28 people were slain in the same time period. It is one of the deadliest neighborhoods in the county.These two starkly disparate realities were detected as part of The Times' ongoing effort to chronicle every homicide victim in Los Angeles County each year. On its website, the newspaper today launched a new version of the Homicide Report, which now allows readers to view the locations of homicides on maps, as well as analyze killi...

Eric Zamarripa, 38, gang-related shooting was the first of three in Echo Park and Highland Park that left two people dead and one injured. A suspected gang member was detained Monday in connection with the three shootings, as the Echo Park neighborhood where two of the shootings took place remained shaken.“It’s horrific,” said Susan Borden, 60, who has lived on Echo Park's Valentine Street for almost 30 years. “The fact that there were no innocent victims is amazing.”Borden and Chavez, 33, said the area has changed in recent years with more affluent people, young singles and trendy coffee shops moving in and with some Latino families, which had been there for decades, moving elsewhere. Chavez moved to Echo Park from Jalisco, Mexico, with his family when he was 17 and said it was “very, very rare” to have white people in the neighborhood in the 1990s. He said he began noticing the demographic shift about six years ago.The area used to be much more violent than it is now, Borden and ...

The Tuesday started as a fight between detainees from rival gangs and spread to the detention center's outdoor yard, said Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Nearby sheriff's stations sent additional deputies to separate the detainees. The brawl was diffused "within minutes" after tear gas was used, said sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore. Fights among incarcerated gang members periodically break out at state jails, prisons and immigrant detention facilities, sometimes sparking riots. The federal Department of Homeland Security contracts with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department to staff and manage the Mira Loma Detention Center in Lancaster, which holds about 900 detainees who are in the process of being deported or awaiting resolution of their cases in immigration courts. Ten detainees were treated for injuries, including two who suffered serious head injuries. Sheriff's officials will evaluate how Mira Loma...