Outside the Los Angeles home where Cork-born Bishop David O’Connell was shot to death last Saturday, the yellow police tape that has been there all week was leavened by white roses, a visiting choir and tears.
What was more unusual for a pavement wake were the impromptu joke-telling sessions as mourners recalled the humour that for nearly half a century had characterised the Irishman, known simply as Bishop Dave.
There was his rambling fable about a chicken and a pig arguing over breakfast, to illustrate the difference between interest and commitment, or the quip he made at Mass during the height of the Covid-19 crisis.
The pandemic, he told his congregation, had “exposed all the old divisions – the struggles, the hostility, the madness. And that was just between the bishops!”
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And there were one or two jokes about his beloved Guinness, parish regulars recalled: “That was Bishop Dave – he liked a beer at Kelley’s pub almost as much as he liked spinning a yarn,” said George Alameda, a neighbour on the tree-lined Janlu Avenue, where the bishop’s house was known for its garden statuary replicating the Stations of the Cross.
“But that did not hide the truth that Bishop Dave was a champion for those he felt were wronged. He stood up against his bosses too. That is the man we are going to miss.”
The largely Hispanic community of Hacienda Heights, a quiet community 20 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, is still traumatised and confused by the brutal murder.
And so, too, are the police. Although they have charged Carlos Medina (65), the husband of the bishop’s housekeeper, with one count of murder, they admit they do not have a motive.
The bare facts do not seem to be in doubt: On Saturday, February 18th, an intruder entered the $1 million suburban home owned by the Roman Catholic diocese of Los Angeles, found its lone occupant, David O’Connell (69), in his bedroom and shot at him five times. His body was found hours later by a church colleague worried that the bishop had missed a community meeting.
Early claims that there was a row between the two men over money, as little as $20 in overtime owed to Medina’s wife, have been discounted as “inconsistent” by police.
They are still investigating whether Medina was suffering from a mental disorder – there have been reports of past methamphetamine issues and increasingly erratic behaviour in recent weeks. His wife has left the family home in Torrance, south Los Angeles.
There have also been suggestions that Medina felt O’Connell had failed to give him or relatives enough support in an ongoing battle with the US immigration services.
The latter claim, if substantiated, would come as a surprise to the many families of Hispanic origin that O’Connell had fought for over the years, finding rent money when they fell behind or spelling out visa applications for visiting relatives. These were the people he felt most close to, O’Connell said more than once, in his four decades of church service across Los Angeles parishes.
Bishop Dave was a peacemaker who had a passion for serving those in need while improving our community. My heart grieves after learning of the murder
— Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna
O’Connell was born in Brooklodge, Glounthaune, Co Cork in July 1953, and studied for the priesthood at All Hallows College in Dublin before being ordained to serve as an associate pastor in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in 1979.
He returned to Ireland frequently, but made it clear that he felt he had more opportunities in the United States. He felt his “life mission” was working with the disadvantaged poor in the wealthiest region of the United States.
He kept his strong Irish accent even when speaking street Spanish, which was described as enthusiastic rather than perfect.
The “tall fellah” with a big grin and a long arm – useful when he would join in scratch basketball games on Saturday mornings near his home – was, said admirers, untainted by church scandals and willing to clash with church leaders in public. That was one reason, he admitted, that he was surprised when Pope Francis promoted him to auxiliary bishop responsible for 66 parishes across eastern Los Angeles in 2015.
O’Connell first made headlines for reaching across racial lines during the 1992 Rodney King riots, an uprising following the acquittal of white police officers accused of beating a black man to near-death, when he persuaded some protesters to return stolen goods back to owners.
“It was righteous booty for some people, what they saw as compensation for ill justice, and I understand their anger, but for shopkeepers it was the difference between staying open or leaving the community,” he said afterwards. “And we needed those store owners to stay in our poorest areas.”
In the wake of the Rodney King disturbances, the priest set up a Hope in Youth campaign which raised $20 million (€18.9 million) a year to help teenagers escape from the “ghetto life” of crime at the height of the crystal meth epidemic in the mid-1990s.
The programme has grown into “O’Connell escape clubs” where young people can get away into the mountains and plan alternative futures.
In the 1990s the priest became involved in mediating bitter disputes between LA hotel owners and their workers who were trying to unionise for the first time, a struggle he compared in sermons to David and Goliath. According to union leaders, he visited the homes of nervous Catholic workers encouraging them to join up.
If this is what a Catholic hospital does to a Catholic priest, what are they doing to the workers?
— Bishop Dave
In 1998 he intervened in a long-simmering labour dispute in local Catholic hospitals, quoting a 1981 encyclical called On Human Work by Pope John Paul II which backed worker rights to organise.
When O’Connell tried to visit the hospitals, he said security guards hustled him out and took the names of workers with whom he spoke. Later he was accused of infringing on patients’ privacy. He spoke in the pages of the Los Angeles Times, asking: “If this is what a Catholic hospital does to a Catholic priest, what are they doing to the workers?”
This experience deepened his commitment to economic justice, he said, listening to “people’s pain” as they shared stories from their grim lives in the underbelly of the American dream. “Many times, we think we bring God to the people. But, actually, they bring God to us.”
The Los Angeles diocese is known as a relatively liberal organisation, but O’Connell raised eyebrows when he called for priests to be allowed to marry and handing over more power to lay people to hold priests and bishops accountable for their actions.
He was a key mover in a group of rebel priests who, in 2002, publicly challenged the diocese decision to close offices that served prisoners and gay communities – especially as the cutbacks closely followed the building of LA’s massive $190 million Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angeles.
“We think it goes against our values that we are supposed to speak for as a church,” O’Connell told local media. “I am hearing from south Los Angeles priests who are very concerned about cuts to detention ministries. It affects a lot of families in our area, and is vitally necessary.” He added that then-Cardinal Roger Mahoney had offered rational responses to the priests’ statements but he “didn’t feel the pain”.
Mahoney’s successor, Archbishop Jose H Gomez, shared O’Connell’s passion for economic justice and immigrant rights so his later years grew less turbulent but no less busy. He organised caravans of food aid to help children south of the Mexican border, collected and distributed clothing for LA’s burgeoning homeless population and restored vandalised churches. “I understand the violence which can lead to a burned church: it is a challenge for the modern church to find an alternative to that anger,” he said.
He also continued to promote an agenda of social change, akin, said some critics, to firebrand politician Bernie Sanders, whose aims are moderate by European standards but controversial in the United States. O’Connell said: “The first words of God to Moses were: ‘I’ve seen suffering by people in Israel and I mean to do something about it.’ That’s what we preach these days.”
He was a good man who died for no reason, except maybe for the demons inside a sick hea
— Mourner
More than 5,000 miles from Hacienda Heights, O’Connell’s death has been felt in his birthplace with the Bishop of Cork and Ross, Fintan Gavin offering sympathies and “prayerful support” to the O’Connell family and to his colleagues in Los Angeles.
In the wake of the killing Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna took a rare step on social media to praise O’Connell as a peacemaker who “had a passion for serving those in need while improving our community. My heart grieves after learning of the murder.”
Flags will be flown at half-mast at Los Angeles County offices until the funeral, which takes place next Friday at the Cathedral of the Angels. It will be preceded on Wednesday by a memorial service at John Vianney Catholic Church in Hacienda Heights.
There are 400 murders in Los Angeles every year: most pass unremarked, but days after the shooting of Bishop Dave, the question of who and why continues to roil the city.
As one mourner outside Bishop Dave’s home said on Thursday: “We know about killings for money, or for sex, whatever. But this makes no sense. He was a good man who died for no reason, except maybe for the demons inside a sick head.”