A 24-year-old man has been arrested in the fatal shooting of Mickey Cooper, the younger brother of former Los Angeles Lakers player Michael Cooper. Mickey, 64, was shot in the pre-dawn hours of 18 November at Washington park in Pasadena, California, according to a Pasadena police department press release. Two days later, police arrested Aaron Miguel and booked him for assault with a firearm in an unrelated incident; as police investigated they say they found evidence tying the 24-year-old to Cooper’s slaying and amended his charges to include murder.
Cooper’s death comes after two other shootings in north-west Pasadena, a majority Black and Latino area that has long borne the brunt of Pasadena’s gun violence burden. On 29 October, a man was shot and critically injured at Washington park and less than a week earlier on 23 October, 26-year-old Cecilio Hernandez Ramirez Jr was shot and killed a five-minute drive away from the park where Cooper lost his life.
“It’s terrible and horrendous that people in these poor areas are dying,” said Yvonne Trice, a crime victim advocate whose 38-year-old son, Monte Russell, was shot and killed in a Pasadena barber shop parking lot in August 2015. There have been no arrests in Russell’s death.
In the years after her son’s killing, Trice founded A Mother’s Voice, a support group where the parents, siblings and children of homicide victims throughout Los Angeles county can share their stories and work toward healing together. She says that the killings of her son and most recently Cooper are the result of broader inequities throughout the majority-white city, where the median household income is nearly $90,000 – more than the national average, according to the most recent census estimates.
Despite the wealth, areas such as north-west Pasadena have been neglected by local lawmakers who have added police patrols and gunshot detection technology to the area, but fail to address the root causes of violence such as poverty and unaddressed trauma, Trice added.
“Behind the city of roses, there’s a lot of death,” she said. “They have all this money, but it’s not cleaning up the area. They have all these toys, but we’re getting killed left and right.”
A community hearing is being planned to discuss the most recent shootings in the park, according to Pasadena Now.
