The last time I saw her is the way I want to remember her. She was happier than I had ever seen her in the nearly 10 years we had known one another. And she could laugh out loud when her friends at the Times kidded her unmercifully, saying she was leaving the paper and moving to Jamaica “to get her groove back.”

It was great to see Andrea Ford laugh.

Her friends often worried that joy had been too long absent from her life. But the prospects of a new life and a new love unlocked the laughter in her throat.

So we all said our farewells and kept abreast of her life there by reports from anyone who visited her. There were also calls from her to various writers at the paper.

She married. She and her husband adopted a year-old girl. She made jewelry.

And before we knew it, two years had passed.

Then came last weekend with news from Detroit that arrived like a blow to the heart.

Andrea Ford had died. She was 49.

I wrote her obituary. After it appeared in the Times on Sunday, my phone began to ring. Several calls each hour from voices distorted by shock. As many calls came from her news sources as from her former colleagues at the newspaper.

They had so many questions. And I had so few answers.

How long had she been ill? What treatment had she sought in Jamaica? Why did she not return home sooner for treatment?

Her brother and sister in Detroit told me that she had called them two weeks earlier, saying she had to come home for medical treatment. She had an infection of the pericardium, the sac surrounding the heart. Two days after she arrived, she was dead.

Andrea Ford was outspoken, confrontational and relentless in challenging anyone she felt was twisting the rules of the game—or making them up as they went along. Her sources and her colleagues may have loved her or hated her, but they could not ignore her.

Andrea was a former board member of the National Assn. of Black Journalists, and she was absolutely uncompromising in her advocacy of ethnic diversity in the newsroom. Moreover, she was always challenging editors on how the paper covered minority communities—insisting that we could do a better job, especially on stories involving police.

She covered some of the biggest trials in Los Angeles this decade, and her face became familiar to national television audiences with her regular appearances on “Larry King Live” during the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

I remember getting calls from friends around the country who were so impressed by her appearances and the perception she showed in her analysis during each day’s developments. So was I. In some respects I thought her presence on television had more impact that her work in print, and I would not have been surprised had she accepted an offer to go over to the electronic side of this business.

She went to the West African nation of Ghana with a group of Crenshaw High School students in 1996, chronicling their weeklong visit. One night, after being separated by sex, the students spent one night in a dungeon where slaves had been held before being shipped to the Americas.

“In the dungeon, the girls and women–most of them African American–come face to face with the pain of the past,” Ford wrote. “Tears begin to flow even before the start of a ceremony designed to help them relive the shame and terror of captivity. They cry, many will say later, because suddenly they realize how their ancestors must have felt.”

She was also a passionate advocate for the less privileged, even the despised. I remember one night being a part of a group debating late into the night the gang violence then wracking Los Angeles. Opposing views flew around the room with the penetrating power of some of the weapons gangbangers used to terrorize the streets.

After nearly talking herself hoarse doing verbal combat with those who challenged her position, she commented: “There is one thing we have to remember. These are our children.”

Not everyone in the room shared that view, but no one doubted her sincerity in expressing it.

Some of us used to wish that she could learn to drive herself in more than one gear. Her toughness seemed to take a toll at times—a toll that left her heavy with unseen wounds from her many battles.

But there were also times—admittedly relatively few—when she would show another side. Then a voice emerged in her writing that I always thought separated her from mere wordsmiths. I once took on a labor of love by publishing an occasional paper called ACCENT/L.A. Andrea was one of several colleagues at the Times who contributed pieces.

I would read her work and ask her why she did not let that sensitive side surface more often. She only smiled. Then I would remember that she was using her African name in the pieces for ACCENT, and maybe she didn’t mind being sensitive or vulnerable as long as no one knew it was Andrea Ford.

I don’t have any of those reviews to draw on for this piece, but there is a line from an obituary on her that ran in the Detroit Free Press. She was reporting a story about juvenile homicide and came upon a youngster with a gun outside a school.

“He stood there motionless in the bright chill, as if poised to begin a dance,” she wrote.

There was passion and anger and courage and combativeness in Andrea Ford.

There was also poetry.◼︎