The fact that Khaimov was slain has been hard enough for his neighborhood to accept. But the awful coda of his life has added to the soul-searching. Neighbors, it turns out, heard him dying—crying for help after being stabbed in the stomach—for more than an hour before anyone called the police.

Officials say several residents in Khaimov’s neighborhood, which straddles the cities of West Hollywood and Los Angeles, believed his moans were the sounds of a vagrant. Cars also passed by while he was lying next to the street, still alive, his head and one arm flopped over the curb.

“Nobody cared,” said his 26-year-old daughter, Olga, the youngest of his four children. “To think that people didn’t answer a man’s cries for help. . . . Even if it is a bum. So what? Call the cops. It’s a person, a human being."

The neighborhood has long fancied itself something of an urban tribe, where Russian-speaking Jews like Khaimov shared the narrow, leafy streets and the boxy apartment buildings with fixed-income seniors, club-hopping hipsters and young gays.

Within the last year or so, his neighborhood began to change. Indeed, some argue that no one should be blamed for failing to come to Khaimov’s aid because the neighborhood has been inundated with a gritty cast of lost souls—mentally ill and homeless people, junkies and prostitutes.

Liberal rationalization at its best, folks.

"Oh, we live in a bad area so naturally, it’s every man/woman for themself."

Blame the city, the government, the recession, the war, BushHitler...anyone but yourselves. Afterall, you’re just fun-loving hipsters and gays who are helpless to solve the complicated issues plaguing your neighborhood.

Walter Moore is certainly going to have is hands full in dealing with this level of inanity.

God help us.