Case Of Los Angeles Father Charged With Killing Son For Being Gay Is More Complicated

LOS ANGELES, CA - When a prosecutor announced last week that he had charged a Los Angeles man with murdering his son for being gay, the case got all the national attention you might expect, all the outrage it deserved and the kind of universal condemnation of the father that gels almost instantly only in particularly brutal or hateful crimes.

Never mind that judgment was passed by those with no real knowledge of the case beyond the prosecutor's homophobic father kills gay son theory.

The father's name is Kalil Issa, who is 69, and his son's name is Amir Issa, shot dead at 29. When police arrived at the family home in North Hills, they found the son's body and arrested the old man. They found another victim, too. It was Rabihah Issa, who investigators determined had been stabbed to death well before the shooting.

Los Angeles Times reporters Peter Jamison , Cindy Carcamo and Matt Stevens dove into the case, and pubished an intriguing article over the weekend based on information from law enforcement agencies and interviews with the Issa family's neighbors. What they found suggested that the case is not as simple s portrayed but rather a complex and long-brewing mix of drugs, mental illness, homophobia and extreme family dysfunction that came to a jolting, and maybe even predictable, end.

Read The Los Angeles Times story here.

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