When someone brought up the incredibly high crime rate of blacks, the learned response was what could one expect after such attempted police genocide? It was asked on tests in universities. And those who did not know this answer failed.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Gerd Mueller was buried with a closed casket. The funeral home had attempted to resurrect the left side of the old face but the wax rebuilding where her eye had been proved too difficult with old flesh. They couldn't turn in the folds in wax to build up her old cheek. It looked too young for the immigrant from Germany.

So they shielded everyone's eyes from what the muggers had done, and when the casket was brought from the church to Our Lady of Angels cemetery there was a large cortege. And this surprised Mrs. Mueller's daughter because she did not know that her parents knew that many people, especially men in their thirties and forties. And a few of them who asked questions.

No, her parents had left nothing. Oh, there was a safe deposit box that held only a few bonds. Trinkets. That's what one mourner said he was looking for. Trinkets. Old German trinkets.

And the daughter thought this was shocking. But what was really shocking in today's world? So a buyer wanted to do business at graveside? Maybe that was his thing? And she longed for the days when some things had been shocking, because her heart hurt fiercely and she thought of the old woman dying alone and how frightening it had been to visit her parents after the neighborhood had changed.

"No bloody trinkets, damn you," she yelled.

And that day, wreckers began taking down the apartment building where the Muellers had lived.

They moved in with an armed escort of federal marshals, each over six feet tall and karate trained. They sealed off the street. They built armor-plated barricades. They carried truncheons. The old walk-up building was taken down with surgical precision brick by brick, and the debris left the area, not by truckloads, but in large white trunks. With padlocks.