Tara Correa-McMullen played a gang girl on the show, “Judging Amy.” In real life she was just like any other 16-year-old girl.
But she had big dreams. She was just a kid who happened to love Hollywood. The rare and remarkable thing was that Hollywood loved her, too.
Tara became a regular on the TV show and before that, won a part in a major motion picture called “Rebound.”
What kind of crossroads? It seems as if Tara’s head got turned from the glamour and glitz of the Hollywood world to something darker…. something much more dangerous.
When Tara first moved to Los Angeles with her mother, seeking a better life, they lived in inexpensive hotels. She went to the local high school where she met her closest friend Maurice Tipton.
Then, talking about acting dreams, Tara was plucked out of nowhere and cast in a Martin Lawrence motion picture. She played the only girl on an all-boys basketball team. It happened when her mom was working in a casting agency.
Nor was that first part any kind of fluke: Tara had real presence on camera. And very soon, this was 2004, she won another part in a primetime Emmy-nominated TV show, “Judging Amy.”
Amy Brenneman played a juvenile court judge who believes she can help save Graciela, a gang girl played by Tara. In one scene, Judge Amy orders Tara to hug her mother, instead of paying a fine for the knife found in her backpack.
Meanwhile, in real life, Tara’s real mother, Devra, finally found an apartment where Tara had her own bedroom. New to Los Angeles, how could she have known? There are some neighborhoods in this vast anonymous sprawl that in daylight, only looked bright and safe.
Tara’s new home was in such a place where, at night, the dark side emerged. It was a neighborhood where Tara could easily pick up the local verbal patter with the same skills that made her a natural on the set. But this neighborhood was gang territory.
She was so good that the “Judging Amy” writers decided to put her in several more episodes.
But Maurice, who still treasures a lock of Tara’s hair, noticed a change. He says she started hanging out in real life with the kinds of charactersshe played on the set.
And then Devra discovered that her 15-year-old daughter had taken up with a known gang member, 10 years older than Tara and with a prison record. Tara also started gang banging herself.
She was hoping the police could find a reason to arrest him and get him away from her daughter.
Attorney Gloria Allred, representing the family, says Tara was not a gang member but was trying to save someone who was.
When Tara missed Maurice’s birthday, he worried that she’d crossed a dangerous line. He saw the evidence the next day.
“And she showed up the next day at my front door, and she had on all red, and her face was kinda beat up. And she told me she had got put on the gang the day before. And she had it tattooed on her chest right here,” her friend, Maurice, said.
Helen Shaver remembers that day as though it had just happened.
“She showed me her tattoo that she just got. She’d gotten it the night before. She said she was really tired because she had been up all night. And it was quite a prominent tattoo right there above the heart of letters and numbers,” said Helen Shaver.
Then Helen told Tara they had written more episodes for her.
Tara told Helen she didn’t want to do it anymore. She didn’t want to be on a TV show.
When Helen pressured Tara to promise she would show up, the answer took Helen’s breath away.
Shaver said, “This young woman sat there in a group of adults, and she said, absolutely clear, ‘I can’t promise that. Because I don’t know. I might be dead.’”
But Tara did show up even as her real life, like the character she played, was spiraling out of control.
In those last episodes Tara, playing Graciela, is in the back seat of a car during a drive-by shooting. When the victim dies, Tara’s character is charged with homicide. Amy’s character wants her tried as a juvenile, not as an adult.
But she loses. Tara’s character, Graciela, is sent to prison where she is killed by a rival gang.
A few months after that last episode aired, Tara was with her boyfriend at an apartment. It was close to 6 p.m. on October 21, 2005. Suddenly, there was a hail of bullets, three people were hit in what police described as a “walk-up gang-related shooting.”
She was hit five times. She died at a hospital less than 3 hours later. She was only 16.
When Amy Brenneman got the news, sadly she wasn’t surprised.
Amy Brenneman said, “I just thought, ‘Oh, they got her. They got her.’ You know,this is the normal course of events that she would die this way.”
People had let themselves hope that the sheen of their Hollywood promise would save Tara. But they couldn’t compete with her real life.
The killer, Damien Watts, was charged with Tara’s murder. He was eventually sentenced to life in prison.
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