It was the first and only murder in Silver Lake that year.

I picked up the phone at our house in Sacramento, where I was serving my third year in the California State Assembly. My wife Danielle saw my expression change. “What’s wrong?” she asked. I didn’t want our 3-year-old daughter, Elliana, to hear, so I quietly mouthed the news to Danielle: “My sister says Dad is dead.”

My sister had gone to visit our dad and found him slumped over in a chair. It made no sense.

At 78, my dad, Joseph Gatto, was in perfect shape. He had been genetically tested and had many of the markers of a centenarian. A woman from his ancestral hometown in Italy had lived to 112.

“There may be a wound, but I can’t tell,” my sister said. “And he’s cold to the touch.”

The EMTs who arrived after my sister called an ambulance found my dad unresponsive, with a little blood coming from a gunshot wound to his abdomen. The cause of death was likely murder, and the killer was at large.

That was the beginning of a waking nightmare that continues to this day. What I’ve discovered since that evening is that violent crime, a murder investigation, the LAPD, and the law itself look very different when you’re a policymaker versus when you’re a family member of a victim.

It is an education in politics and the limits of power that I wish I’d never had.

The murder took place on November 13, 2013. There were no usual suspects to round up. My father had no enemies. Every weekday until he retired, he would get up at 5 a.m., drive to his job as a teacher at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, plan his lessons, and work a full day. On many evenings, he’d come home, change clothes, and go work at Dodger Stadium. He began there selling peanuts and ended up managing a concession that sold ice cream and other snacks. He worked all 81 Dodger home games and all the special events like concerts. With most Dodger games ending around 10 p.m., he’d get home very late, well after I was in bed. On Saturdays, he had a third job, teaching at a college of design.

After he retired, he volunteered for the Democratic Party, gardened, and made jewelry.

Joseph Gatto holding his eldest granddaughter. Photo courtesy of author.

His home, the home I grew up in, was safe. The Los Angeles of 2013 was relatively peaceful. There were 251 murders reported that year, a 40-year low.

When I arrived at his house the following day, November 14, one of the first things I asked the LAPD detectives gathered there was whether they thought my father’s murder was political. You can’t be in politics without making some enemies, and I certainly had my share.

The police politely listened to my concerns, then cut me off. “If someone wanted to object that hard,” one of them said, “they would’ve just killed you.”

I wasn’t prepared for what came next. The detectives used the opportunity to lecture me on Sacramento’s criminal justice policies. They probably made some good points. But I’m not sure that lecturing a family member of a murder victim, eyes red from lack of sleep and tears, was appropriate—no matter who I was.

When I was in office, I used to have a simple litmus test for how a government agency treated the public. If, for example, the DMV treated me like shit when I set their budget, I knew they must treat the general public much worse.

When my father was killed, I was the fourth or fifth most powerful elected official in the state. I was directly in touch with the chief of police just hours after my sister found my dad’s body. My dad, too, had a roster of former students who were now well-known musicians, artists, and actors. “LACHSA lost one of their legends last night in a senseless act of violence. RIP Joseph Gatto, visual arts department founder and a great guy,” singer Josh Groban tweeted after the news broke.

So, his case was “high-profile.”

If a prominent elected official, with strong media ties, whose murdered father was beloved, elderly, and prosperous, got treated this way by police personnel, I wondered, how must they treat other families?

In the years to come, the detectives often made my wife and I feel like nuisances, when all we wanted was to contribute to the investigation. I felt, at times, like the detectives might have been so intransigent, so inflexible, and so unimaginative precisely because I was well-connected. For example, I often ran into my friend, then-Mayor Eric Garcetti, at events. “How’s your dad’s case coming?” he would ask. Just being honest with him would often trigger a shitstorm, rolling downhill, through the ranks of the LAPD. I knew no one liked getting nagged by their superiors. But what was I supposed to do? Lie?

As the investigation into my father’s death stretched on, I heard stories from other victims’ family members, like a young woman who told me her son was killed by gang members because they thought a girl liked him. Everyone in her community seemed to know who killed her son, but the police never seriously investigated, and the young woman became suicidal at the lack of progress.

Today, after 10 years of false starts, false hopes, and a very long investigation of a cold case, I’ve come to see all the warts and quirks of a system I was once tasked with overseeing.

The rise of DNA testing, for instance, has changed the culture of investigations. If you chat with many DNA-reliant modern detectives, you may wonder how crimes were ever solved before the advent of this technology. But murder clearance rates have actually gone down in the era of DNA testing. During the first several years of my father’s investigation, I felt as if the LAPD was both too reliant on technology leading to a break, yet didn’t understand how new advances could help us obtain a lead.

Then there’s the media, which some detectives view with hostility and suspicion. But for families waiting for answers, the media could be a helpful partner, informing our communities that people need their help. Throughout these terrible years, I’ve sometimes gotten the impression that many departments interpret coverage around unsolved crimes as an indictment on them, when, in reality, it’s just desperate family members seeking the media’s help to keep interest in their cases alive.

The community, too, can be better engaged to help. For example, we suspected a car burglar might have been the person who killed my father, and we know a local community member saw his face clearly, but she has not stepped forward—perhaps due to a fault in outreach. We also know of others who had information relevant to the case who were never interviewed by the police. The police also largely limited outreach to the English-speaking community, which doesn’t cut it in today’s Los Angeles.

In L.A. today, just over half of murders go unsolved. It’s basically a coin flip as to whether those who took your loved one’s life will be brought to justice. And it’s not because these criminals are masterminds—but because the work isn’t getting done right.

More than a decade has now passed without a break in my father’s case. It’s easy to lose hope, but I refuse to. My dad never gave up—he fought his way out of poverty, fought to get an education, fought to raise us right.

Just last year, in a conversation with a detective, I learned he may have even tried to fight off his assailant. That would be consistent with who he was.

So I’m going to continue to fight, too—to keep his memory alive, bring his killer to justice, and improve the criminal justice process for other victims’ families, who are too often left feeling unheard and forgotten by the system.