Will Donald Jr. was 39 years old when he died on Tuesday, August 28, 2007, three days after a fight in the Manchester Square area of South Los Angeles. According to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, he died after sustaining blunt force trauma at 7710 South Denker Avenue. His death was ruled a homicide, and it is listed as a Los Angeles Police Department case handled by South Bureau Homicide.
According to the Los Angeles Times Homicide Report, Donald "suffered a broken jaw during a fight" at that address at about 10 p.m. on Saturday, August 25, said Det. Carlos Velasquez of the LAPD's 77th Street Division. At first his injuries did not seem life threatening. He was treated at California Hospital and sent home to recover.
Once he was home, he began to feel ill. He went to a Kaiser center in Baldwin Park for treatment. By then, the Times reported, "the swelling in his neck from the broken jaw was making it difficult for him to breathe." Doctors performed emergency surgery to help him breathe, and he suffered cardiac arrest on the operating table. He died at 12:06 p.m. on Tuesday, August 28, "and what had been an assault case became a homicide."
The Times account does not say who he was fighting with, how the fight started, whether it involved one person or several, or whether the other person was known to him. It also does not say whether the fight took place inside a home or on the street outside. A fight that ends with someone being sent home from the hospital may not have seemed serious to the people who saw it, and some of them may never have learned that the man who was hurt later died.
Beyond those facts, almost nothing about Will Donald Jr. has been made public. No obituary, memorial page or family fundraiser could be found for this story. Searches for his name are flooded by results about a well-known political family, which has made his own story even harder to find.
Manchester Square is a small residential neighborhood in South Los Angeles, made up mostly of modest single-family homes and small apartment buildings on quiet grid streets. Denker Avenue runs north and south through the area. It is the kind of neighborhood where many families have lived for decades and where people tend to know who lives on their block.
Homicides in Los Angeles fell steeply in the late 2000s and early 2010s, yet many killings from those years were never solved. A death that began as a fistfight and ended on an operating table three days later received only a short entry in the Homicide Report.
No arrest, criminal charge or court case connected to the death of Will Donald Jr. could be found in news archives or public records. More than 18 years later, there is no public sign that anyone has been held responsible. Anyone who was on South Denker Avenue on the night of August 25, 2007, or who knew Will, may hold information that could help detectives. Even a small detail, such as a name overheard, a vehicle seen nearby or a conversation remembered, can help detectives move a case forward. Anyone with information can call the Los Angeles Police Department at 877-527-3247 or leave an anonymous tip with Crime Stoppers at 800-222-TIPS.
