Marsha Jones Shoushtari went back to work on Tuesday, two weeks after her youngest child, her only son, died after being shot on Crenshaw Boulevard.
But she can't escape the unfinished business that homicides entail.
On Tuesday, police visited her office to return her son's cellphone, the "effects" of an 18-year-old. On Wednesday, she and husband Manochehr visited the cemetery to arrange for their son's burial; the coroner had just released the body.
Interactive map and database: The Homicide Report
Through it all, some part of her is trying to believe this might not be real. "He cannot be gone. This is crazy," she told her brother, when he called to check on her this week.
But it is real. And it's also crazy.
"It's like if you or I were driving up the street and being shot at," said LAPD homicide detective Sal LaBarbera.
Bijan Shoushtari was riding in a buddy's tricked-out classic Buick on a Saturday night when a car pulled up alongside and someone fired shots. Bijan was hit and died two days later at Cedars-Sinai. Neither Bijan nor the friends with him had ever been in trouble or had any affiliation with gangs.
"He could have been my kid," LaBarbera said. "Or yours. He was a very, very innocent victim."
So why are we not as outraged about the death of Bijan Shoushtari as we were about the death of Trayvon Martin?
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His family printed 500 programs for Bijan's memorial service last week, and the booklets ran out as quickly as the seats.
Westminster Presbyterian Church was packed. People crowded the balcony, lined the aisles, filled the hallways, parlor, and choir room and spilled down the front steps onto the sidewalk along Jefferson Boulevard.
I crammed myself into a niche that smelled faintly of marijuana, next to a teenage boy wearing a baseball cap backward and crying unashamedly. It was the sort of crowd where it didn't seem odd for a stoic old man in a yarmulke to help a sobbing young stranger, decorated with tattoos, settle her restless toddlers.
Bijan's oldest sister, Samantha Shoushtari, told me she was surprised by the turnout. "I didn't realize so many people knew my brother."
But it wasn't just her little brother they had come to mourn. They were grieving a loss of innocence; her family's and their own.
Bijan was captain of the football team at Hamilton High, but known more for his compassion off the field than his performance on it. At his graduation ceremony in May, he cartwheeled across the stage to exuberant applause.
He'd sung in the church choir since he was 3 and served as an acolyte through his teens. He was the self-appointed guardian of seniors, pushing their wheelchairs through the sanctuary and teaching them to use their cellphones and computers.
"By no means was he perfect," said Samantha, 26. He had an insatiable appetite for infuriating pranks. "But he was just the sweetest, sweetest person. ... He was going places and doing things. That's why it hurts so much."
The family has lived for 25 years just west of Crenshaw Boulevard and a few miles from where Bijan was shot, on a block of well-tended homes, where lace curtains flutter softly behind windows covered by bars.
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