At the end of poorly lighted hallways, the girls’ rooms are packed with metal bunk beds; the walls are covered with Winnie the Pooh, Cinderella and Christian messages.

The girls living at the Delhi Girls’ Home represent the complicated relationship Indians have with adoption. Their families, who are from a mix of Christian, Hindu and Sikh backgrounds, were unable to care for them and sent their girls to the Christian faith-based home for a chance at a better life.

In legal terms, the families never relinquished their legal parenthood; the girls can never be adopted by another set of parents. But they gave away their say in how the girls would be raised. By placing them in a group home, the parents have effectively forfeited their girls’ rights to a conventional family.

In 2010, about 5,700 children were legally adopted in India, an increase in almost 300 percent from 2009, according to the Central Adoption Resource Authority, the country’s official body for adoption. But to view that spike in total adoptions as a sign of government success would be misguided, said Vinita Bhargava, a prominent scholar on the country’s adoption networks.

Juxtaposed with the number of orphans in the country, estimated at 20 million by SOS Children’s Village, an international nongovernmental organization, the government response to changing attitudes toward adoption has been sluggish. Only recently has formalized adoption started to take off in India. Previously, informal inter-family adoptions were the norm.

In this predominantly Hindu society, where one’s social designation and caste are vitally important, “borrowing” a child from one’s relatives guaranteed that the parents knew its origins.

In major cities such as New Delhi, upper-middle-class childless couples are overcoming entrenched ideals of caste and creed to look outside their extended family for adoption. But the trend has yet to reach India’s rural pockets. Not every region in India has access to an official adoption agency, explained Mohan Rao, a professor of social science at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

“We do not have enough institutions that can deal with this issue,” Rao said. “We have such a huge country — with so many problems facing the country — that this has been something that has in a sense fallen off the radar.”

Bhargava agrees: “The demand for adoption now is so high, but there aren’t enough babies who are legally free for adoption.”

Although families can come and visit, in many cases they don’t. One girl hadn’t seen her brother in five years. Biju Thankachan, who runs the place, doesn’t bring up their families or their past lives unless he has to — it’s too painful, he said.

As attitudes toward adoption change, and agencies and other structures improve, families might shift away from institutionalizing children in homes and put them up for adoption instead. But Bhargava contends that it’s inaccurate to say India has an “orphan problem.”

“There may be millions of destitute children. There may be millions of neglected children, but they’re not legally free for adoption,” she said. “We may be poor, but we’re not necessarily saying, ‘Take our children.’ ”

Emily Frost and Benjamin Gottlieb reported on the story with a grant from the Knight Foundation.

NEW DELHI (InTheFray.com) — On a sun-kissed Saturday morning in March, Rahul Kumar whips through a squalid Delhi neighborhood, his ashen buttoned-down shirt tucked into his dress pants and his thick black hair gelled back from his forehead. He is headed to the Sanskar Centre, a bare, one-room school run by a Christian nonprofit in the city’s Shahbad Dairy slum. Every day, Rahul walks to the schoolhouse for his lessons, the best education to be had for many of the district’s poor migrant families.

Just twelve years old, Rahul is already a leader among the neighborhood children, who flock to his side as he walks, eager to embrace him. Though short for his age, he has an outsized ambition: one day, he says confidently, he will dance in Bollywood’s biggest productions. But first, Rahul says through a translator, “I need to get a job to help my family. I need to study hard.”

Rahul’s family moved to Delhi from northern India several years ago, lured by the prospect of a better life. But the situation for Shahbad Dairy’s 100,000 residents is overwhelmingly grim, their opportunities circumscribed by severe, endemic poverty. While some parts of the district enjoy government support — a public school, a maintained latrine, a health care center — most of the slum’s inhabitants live in jhuggis, or slum dwellings, without running water or proper sanitation. A thick expanse of garbage and sewage surrounds the slum and is patrolled by scavenging children and feral pigs alike.

“[Shahbad Dairy] has the dynamics seen in every ghetto or slum,” says Alfred Gnanaolivu, special projects director for Cooperative Outreach of India (COI), the Christian group that runs Rahul’s school. “You have turf warfare. You have the influence of drugs and alcohol … Unfortunately, the main victims are the children.”

A nongovernmental organization, COI works extensively in Shahbad Dairy’s slum blocks, offering clean water, food, and education to local families. Children account for 50 percent of the district’s population, Gnanaolivu notes. That’s where COI — along with the hundreds of other faith-based NGOs operating in India — can have an impact: educating the children of impoverished families that are neglected by the Indian government.

But like many NGOs working in India, COI has a slant. It provides the 500 children enrolled in its schoolhouse an education — but with evangelical undertones. Young boys and girls recite Christian hymns during class, not conscious that they are being indoctrinated. Their faith-driven education is reinforced by COI’s pastoral care workers, or religious counselors, who help the slum’s families with their economic and personal problems using a Christian form of therapy. COI says this “results in transformation of the communities.”

While Shahbad Dairy’s families — most of which are Hindu and from India’s lower or scheduled castes — are aware of the Christian sculpting, they believe that COI is giving their children a better chance at life. And as their relationship with their Christian benefactors deepens, some families are even converting.

“Very often, children are lured in the name of providing [a] good education,” says Chandan Mitra, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) representative in India’s upper house of Parliament. “They don’t understand very often why they have become Christians until they are older.” Religious conversion is banned in many Indian states, but the laws are “violated frequently,” Mitra adds. (In Delhi, conversion is legal.)

Of course, proselytizing Indians is not a new phenomenon. Christianity has existed in India for centuries, and Protestant missionaries have been working in Delhi since the early eighteenth century. Today, Christianity is India’s third-largest religion, with approximately twenty-four million followers.

What is different today is the growth of a politically independent, economically powerful India, a rising nation of a billion-plus people that has become more comfortable asserting its culture. In India (and Indian America) today, there is a willingness now to question the outside influences that for many years were tolerated as the price of doing business. Meanwhile, India has become home to roughly a third of the world’s poor, according to World Bank data. As a result, the country is a magnet for humanitarian aid organizations, many of them Christian.

The conversion of destitute Indian families to Christianity enrages many Indians, and on blogs wild accusations fly that Christian NGOs are committing “culture murder” in India. Mitra — whose Hindu nationalist party is one of India’s two major political forces — takes a more evenhanded stance. Christian NGOs may be indoctrinating children with Christianity, he says, but they are also educating and feeding an entire community that would otherwise remain overlooked.

For its part, COI believes that its religious message helps break down some of the barriers that keep Shahbad Dairy’s residents in poverty. “The caste system has dehumanized human beings,” says Ramesh Landge, COI’s executive director. “We need to help these children, give them a reason to live, and provide them with a childhood.” Among “the few hundred families that have adopted our changes, our teachings,” Landge adds, “we’ve seen success.” He notes that before COI began working in the slum, none of the children had birth certificates, making it nearly impossible for them to enroll in government schools.

Donald Miller, a professor of religion and sociology at the University of Southern California, points out that the evangelical Christian organizations working in India today tend not to fit the colonial-era stereotypes: brazen missionaries coming over to save souls by any means necessary. “Conversion by these groups is more often a side effect as opposed to a direct, manipulative attempt to indoctrinate people,” says Miller, who studies the social ethics of religion. It’s not that they don’t want to see conversions take place. But today’s faith-based humanitarian work, particularly by evangelical organizations, “has much more language about partnership and shared goals,” he says.

Before it was a slum, Shahbad Dairy was cattle country, settled by a Hindu Haryana community of dairy farmers. In 1987, the Indian government ceded a small parcel of land to the local inhabitants to build slum dwellings. Today, most of the shanties in Shahbad Dairy are illegal. Their occupants are immigrants from across India, who left their villages to find work in the sprawling city of Delhi, India’s second largest.

Rahul’s family is originally from Uttar Pradesh, a state about 500 miles to the north. His mother, Reena Kumar, supports the family by extracting the iron from automobile tires to sell as scrap metal. Asked why she moved to the slum, far from her ancestral homeland, Kumar’s response is simple: “To survive.”

The Kumar home in Shahbad Dairy amounts to four scantily constructed shacks, which house Rahul, his mother, and five siblings. A lone television is mounted in the master bedroom, powered by stolen electricity patched in from a nearby power line.

Back from school, Rahul navigates the Indian airways to his favorite Bollywood channel. His brothers, sisters, and friends pack the tiny room, waiting to watch him perform the dance steps.

Gnanaolivu watches the children with a smile. The work that his Christian group is doing, he says, will give children like Rahul much-needed opportunities, so that one day they can achieve their dreams — in Bollywood and beyond. “If they can be given that direction and sustained love … then we can save them.” In the end, it still comes down to saving souls.

For the last 15 years, Mongia and his team of 120 Delhi-based volunteers have thrown themselves in a battle that pits India’s billon-dollar meat industry and growing underground beef trade against Hindu traditionalists keen on preserving the holy status of cows.

“The cow is our mother, it’s our duty to protect her,” said Mongia, who monitors and raids hundreds of stores, butcher shops and slaughterhouses suspected of carrying, selling or slaughtering India’s blessed bovines. “We do this because we believe in what the cow represents in our country, our culture and in the Hindu religion.”

This year, India will displace the United States as the world’s third largest beef exporter, behind Brazil and Australia. In just the first half of 2012, India exported $1.24 billion worth of meat, and a 30 percent growth in revenue from 2010 exports is projected by the end of the year, according to a U.S. Beef Export Federation study.

While the bulk of Indian exports is buffalo meat bound for Middle East and Southeast Asian markets, the growing middle class in Arab countries has sparked a new craving for cow beef. The rise in demand could make India the world’s king beef exporter by 2013, according to USDA estimates.

But as India continues its struggle for economic and political dominance in South Asia, there is concern that Hindu-mandated bans on beef could hamper the industry’s future growth, particularly in states like Kerala and West Bengal where the practice is legal.

Relied on by generations of Indians for tilling fields, dairy products and dung fuel, the cow is regarded by Hindus as gau mata, or maternal figure, and has had a long-standing central role in India’s religious rituals. Those religious attitudes, however, are viewed by some Indian business leaders as a major hindrance to commerce.

“Cow beef could be a very lucrative business in India,” said Dr. S.K. Ranjhan, the director of Hind Agro Industries Limited, who believes that religious attitudes may stand to change once the extent of business opportunities are realized. “I think five-to-10 years from now, people won’t be so scandalized by the sale of cow beef.”

The majority of India’s 24 states outlaw the slaughter of cows except under extenuating circumstances: to stifle contagious diseases, prevent pain and suffering, medical research, etc. And several states — including Delhi and Rajasthan, among others — ban the sale and slaughter of cows altogether.

The strict laws against cow slaughter in the majority of India’s provinces have forced the lucrative cow beef trade underground. An estimated 1.5 million cows, valued at up to $500 million, are smuggled out of India annually, which some analysts say provide more than 50% of beef consumed in neighboring Bangladesh.

“When you consider just how much money is made from underground cow smuggling, it becomes clear that not only is there a huge amount at stake, but a huge demand that butchers and slaughterhouses are catering to,” said Dr. Zarin Ahmad, a fellow at the Centre de Sciences Humaines in New Delhi, who has extensively studied the work and trade among India’s butcher communities.

Working with Mongia’s enforcement team is Parmanand Mittal, a cow-advocacy lawyer who works from a home-office on the outskirts of Delhi. Throughout the day, Mittal fields a stream of phone calls — tipsters who have caught wind of illegal slaughterhouses and owners of gau shalas, or cow sanctuaries, concerned with unexpected expenses associated with new rescues.

In Mittal’s office hangs a painting of Lord Krishna — one of the most revered divinities in Hinduism— with his arm resting affectionately on a white calf. While Mongia’s crew breaks up the slaughterhouses, Mittal builds a legal case for prosecution. His backlog of casework extensive, Mittal says.

While there might be money to be made from adding cow beef to current exports, India would incur costs elsewhere, Mittal says.

“Cows have long been the source of fuel, manure and fertilizer, among other things. These animals are revered because they’ve played a large role in the welfare and livelihood of all Indians,” Mittal said. “Take away the cow and the repercussions will be huge.”

This piece was produced for CNN.com with Arezou Rezvani and Elise Hennigan.

“They didn’t accept my marriage,” said Mr. Jain, whose family practices Jainism, an ancient Indian religion that emphasizes non-violence. “They asked me to walk out of the home without anything… without even a toothbrush.”

Ashok Jain left his parents’ home in New Delhi 34 years ago with nothing but the clothes on this back. His marriage to Neena, a Bengali Hindu, tore his family apart; his parents, completely baffled by their son’s desire to marry outside his Jain religion, disowned him. He would not see his parents until his son’s first birthday, five years later.

In a traditional Indian marriage, partners are arranged for children by their parents, often at very young ages. The idea of wedding for love — let alone outside of one’s community — is seen historically as taboo. But Mr. Jain’s story of breaking conventional attitudes toward marriage constitutes a growing trend in India’s urban communities that rejects arranged marriages as the only acceptable union.

“The more important thing which spoke to me — above love and all that — was that I had to live for my own identity,” Mr. Jain, who works as a tour guide based in Delhi, said. “I wanted to stand on my own two feet and do what was right, regardless of any social pressure.”

A Complex System of Class in Castes

Strict laws concerning marriage in India are fortified by caste, a complex system of social stratification indigenous to the subcontinent. The system is demarcated by four major groupings, known as the varnas, and further stratified into subcastes or jati.

Mr. Jain’s family is from the third caste, known as the Vaishyas, which make up the merchant class of India. His wife, on the other hand, comes from a Brahman family, the highest caste.

“Surprisingly, the resistance came from my family, even though I was marrying up, so to speak, and she was marrying down,” Mr. Jain said.

Ashok and Neena met in Buenos Aires in mid-1970s while both of their fathers worked in India’s foreign service. At first, their families accepted Ashok and Neena’s friendship because, “we needed a fourth person for bridge,” Neena joked.

But when things became serious, Mr. Jain’s family, which he describes as more traditional, became very reticent to the prospect of them getting married. The thought of ripping apart their families forced the two to separate.

“We had decided that she would go her way and see boys and I would go my ways and see other girls,” Mr. Jain recalled. “We agreed to call each other when we decided to get married to someone else.”

After numerous failed attempts by their parents to arrange a marriage for each of them, Ashok and Neena decided to forego tradition.

“When we made the phone call, I said ‘I’m not getting married to anybody’ and she said the same thing,” Mr. Jain said. “And so we said, ‘What the hell?’”

Back in Delhi, the two wed at an Arya Samaj temple, a small sect in Hinduism that, among other progressive ideas, denounced the caste system in 1978. Unlike the typical Indian wedding, which boasts hundreds of guests and lavish party decor, Ashok and Neena’s marriage only included a few close friends; their wedding attendance, or lack thereof, would later exemplify the first few years of their lives together.

“Looking back, I was satisfied with whatever we had,” Neena, who works in Argentina’s New Delhi embassy, said. “It was hard to bring the kids up alone, especially the first year with my eldest son. Not having anyone to help me out, the frustration at times of taking care of our kids… that was hard.”

Intercaste Marriage in Rural and Urban Areas of India

In Mr. Jain’s India — which he describes as urban, educated, and modern — intercaste and interfaith marriages are becoming more commonplace. His two sons married sisters from the same Punjabi-Hindu family, and his close friends are made up of those who have either married outside of their faith or have progressive ideas about marriage.

“But my India is not the real India,” Mr. Jain said. “Changing norms, changing traditions, breaking traditions. This is not happening for a large part of the country.”

While India continues to modernize rapidly, more than 70 percent of the country’s 1.2 billion people still live in rural areas. Attitudes toward intercaste or interfaith marriage in these rural areas continue to be traditional.

“Intercaste marriage is confined mostly to society’s elite,” said Sohail Hashmi, a writer and historian living in Delhi. “In [India’s] major cities, if you fall in love with someone from the wrong caste, it’s not so bad. But in rural parts of the country, marrying outside your caste could spell banishment or, in extreme cases, death.”

The killings Mr. Hashmi references stem from well-known horror stories in Indian khaps, or social councils in rural villages.

A common afterthought in an interfaith or intercaste marriage is the identity of the couple’s children. In a society that places great importance on one’s caste and religion for the purpose of identity, the children of interfaith marriages run the risk of being ostracized by society.

But that was never a concern for Mr. Jain and his two sons. When asked what his children’s caste or religion is, he responded emphatically, “No caste. No religion.”

“If you were to break it down, I’d say geographically I’m from Delhi but do I follow religion? No, I don’t,” said Sunny, Mr. Jain’s second son. “I had a very secular education as well, so until the end of high school I never really gave this a thought about ‘who is who’.”

When asked how he self-identifies, Sunny, a 30-year-old software entrepreneur, replied with a smile, “I don’t.”

Despite all turmoil associated with Ashok’s decision to marry outside his community, he admitted he now holds a more favorable opinion of arranged marriage.

“There have been cases when young people have come to my wife and I and said, ‘Oh uncle, you did this… so let us know what do you think?’ I tell them that it is not an easy decision, but it’s your decision,” he said.

“You have to decide what you want, decide what is right and wrong… and then, you have to face the baby.”

Mak, 72, has lived in his four-walled “coffin home” overlooking the city’s Wan Chai neighborhood for the past decade. His entire living space is no bigger than a twin-sized bed, and has just enough room for him to sit up.

“No one wants to live here, but we need to survive,” said Mak, who works as a janitor at the nearby Times Square. “It’s a step up from being on the streets.”

Nicknamed coffin homes for their physical similarities, the 15-square-foot enclosure is just one incarnation of the city’s distinctive low-income housing alternatives. Others include the city’s cage homes, which resemble livestock coops.

Twenty tenants in Mak’s building share a communal bathroom that doubles as a shower. Hallways are clad with slapdash wiring and bad ventilation — and bedspaces are stacked atop one another like kitchen cupboards.

“There’s a stigma about those living in these places. People think that it’s because they are lazy, but that couldn’t be further from the truth,” said Sze Lai San, a social worker based in Hong Kong. “Sometimes their jobs just pay very little despite their long hours and hard work, or they just fall on hard times.”

And Mak is no exception. A Hong Kong native, he went bankrupt after a series of unsuccessful ventures in finance and now makes barely enough to cover his rent — around $150 a month.

He is now among the 1.2 million Hong Kong residents who currently live in poverty, according to a government advisory group.

“I can skip meals, ignore the dirt, bedbugs and stuffiness, but the biggest problem we have here is safety,” Mak said. “There have been close calls over the years. We’re stacked like sardines, and there are no regulations. We’d all be dead if a fire were to start.”

Knee-deep in debt, Mak refused to give his full name, fearing that creditors may learn of his whereabouts.

Despite the conditions, Mak’s bedspace is one of many similar facilities licensed by the government. According to a city ordinance, any flat with 12 or more bedspaces for individuals under rental agreements must obtain a special license.

But according to an e-mail from Home Affairs spokesperson Elain Chu, “the Ordinance was not formulated to prohibit or illegalize bedspace apartments” and only mandates that rented apartments meet current fire and safety codes.

The reason being that living conditions are “determined by various factors, such market situation, economic environment, personal financial capacity [or a] personal choice and so on,” Chu said.

For Sze, the “coffin home” phenomenon is the result of an urban perfect storm: a combination of skyrocketing real-estate prices and arguably the biggest wealth gap in Asia.

A 2011 survey by Savills — a real estate company based in the UK — found that the city’s top end properties sell for a confounding $10,550 per square foot.

But even the second-tier properties are around 40% more expensive in Hong Kong than in other global cities like London, New York or Moscow, the report found.

Hong Kong: A property boom you can feel

“Hong Kong has gotten more and more wealthy, but these people have been left behind,” she said. “A dweller once said to me, ‘I’m not even dead yet but I’m already living in my coffin — four walls and nails’.”

Sze — who has handled cases similar to Mak’s for more than 16 years — said coffin dwellers pay a larger percentage per square foot for their homes than they would for high-end properties. She said that in the past year, the rent for coffin homes has increased by roughly 20 percent.

“There are some very backward practices that should not be happening in Hong Kong,” Sze said. “People in low-income housing need more rights. They shouldn’t be living on the edge.”

Sze said more than 300,000 people in Hong Kong are currently waiting for public housing. And although the average waiting time is three years, many wait in cramped spaces, like coffin homes, for as many as 10 years.

Living in a cage in Hong Kong

Through Mak’s eyes, there are two Hong Kongs: The one seen through his only window, personified by the glitz and glamour the city is famous for. And the one inside, that has allowed less fortunate citizens to fall through the cracks.

“It’s not that the H.K. government can’t help people like me who are part of the low-income society and need help,” he said. “It’s that they don’t want to help people like us and solve problems like this.”

But early Sunday morning, Medina awoke to gunshots in his front yard and ran outside to find Nava  on the sidewalk, choking on his own blood, and another friend bleeding to death nearby.

“There was blood everywhere, on the steps and everything,” said Medina, a 20-year-old Exposition Park resident. “I looked and saw my friend just twitching. I felt his heart, I hugged him, and he was gone. He was holding my arm, and I just felt him let go. My shorts, my stomach, my arm, they were all covered in blood.”

He had desperately tried to save his friend’s life. Following a 911 dispatcher’s instructions before the first paramedics arrived, he had cut off Nava’s shirt and pumped on his stomach. Days later, as he talked about that night, Medina pulled out the tiny silver scissors from his jeans pocket. He has been carrying them since Sunday morning.

Alfonso “Junior” Nava, a 26-year-old Latino, and Diego Garcia, a 25-year-old Latino, were killed early Sunday morning, Feb. 13 outside Medina’s home in the 1800 block of Leighton Avenue in Exposition Park.

“We suspect that it is gang-related,” said Det. David Garrido, with the LAPD Southwest Division homicide unit.

A third victim, Alfonso Richards, was shot in the chest and arm and taken to California Hospital Medical Center in critical condition. Richards was released Wednesday, according to Det. Linda Heitzman, an investigator on the Nava-Garcia case.

The suspects — described as two African American men in their mid 20s — walked up to the men, who had just returned from a party, shortly after 1 a.m.

Nava was shot in the head as he was talking to his girlfriend on his cellphone, neighbors said. The bullet passed through the phone. He died at the scene, according to the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.

With Nava bleeding on the sidewalk, witnesses said the gunmen chased Garcia up the front steps of the one-story house, shooting him in the chest. Garcia collapsed in the rosebushes and Medina said he heard the assailants shoot Garcia again. Garcia later died at a hospital, according to the coroner’s office.

The gunmen ran away, witnesses said.

As the sun set Tuesday evening, a group of  friends gathered at Medina’s home, mournfully staring at candles that lined the sidewalk. Some had placed bottles of Corona at the memorial; others had placed cigarettes, magazines, a bottle of Patron and photographs of the victims. Beside the rosebush where Garcia collapsed, a much smaller cluster of candles burned – not too many, Medina said, because they didn’t want the bushes to catch fire.

Many in the group questioned whether there was any connection between the shootings on Leighton Avenue and a quadruple homicide two days earlier.

Medina said Nava, Garcia and other close friends knew the victims in that case, three brothers — Luis Jimenez, 26, Angel Jimenez, 25, and Anthony Jimenez, 24 — and their cousin Martin Haro, 25. The four were fatally wounded while standing in the backyard of a Willowbrook home Sunday afternoon.

Ray Lugo — the investigator in charge of the Jimenez-Haro case for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department  — said he compared notes on the cases with the LAPD Gang Homicide Division investigator and is “really confident” they are not related. None of the homicide investigators provided further comment on the ongoing investigations.

Medina said the Jimenez family and his friends used to hang out together in his father’s repair shop, where Medina, Nava, Garcia and their group of friends often spent time.

In recounting their friendship, Medina repeatedly referred to Nava as “Fat Boy,” an intimate nickname reserved for only a select few friends. To everyone else, he was simply “Junior.”

The pair often worked together — everything from sweeping the floor in the repair shop to fixing their cars while listening to music.

Medina said he sensed trouble about a month ago when he saw an unfamiliar vehicle slowly roll down the street in front of his house. Suspecting the occupants to be gang members, he called the Police Department and requested that an officer investigate. He was told that cruising alone was not cause enough to dispatch a police officer.

One month later, he angrily asked: “Does somebody have to die for a cop to show up?”

Medina said he believes the authorities were callous in their response to the shootings outside his house. He said that it took emergency responders more than 20 minutes to respond to the 1 a.m. shooting. And although the police left the scene around 3 a.m., Medina said Nava’s body was left on the sidewalk until 9 a.m., when coroner’s officials showed up.

”Normally, when the victim expires on the scene, there is a rather lengthy process that goes on and the body can’t be moved,” Heitzman said, when asked about Medina’s account. “In this particular case, we didn’t leave the victim laying out to look at. He was covered.”

Coroner’s officials did not say when Nava’s body was picked up. They explained that typically their office gets a preliminary call from police notifying them of a homicide and then another call when the body is ready to be retrieved.

Nava lived just two blocks from where he was killed in a home where his friend Garcia also had stayed for about five years. On Tuesday night, the house was packed with siblings, in-laws, cousins and children. While a soft glow of light stretched from the door frame out into night, the rest of the neighborhood was largely dark and empty.

Garcia had lived with the family for the last five years, but was private about his family and personal history, except to say that he was from Mexico.

“My mom considered him to be a son,” said Paula Solis, 24, one of Nava’s sisters. “He was always working, never used drugs or drank [alcohol]. He didn’t even drink soda.”

Eustolia Jimenez, 19, Nava’s youngest sister, said her brother phoned home 30 minutes before his death to ask if she or their mother were hungry.

“He was always happy,” Jimenez said. “He was very social, and had friends of all types, ages and races.”

Nava was a tattoo artist and used “everyone as his canvas,” said brother-in-law Manuel Balderas, 30. Jimenez agreed, saying that “he loved expressing himself in art.”

This was the first homicide in Exposition Park in nearly six months; the last reported killing was on Sept. 28.

The LAPD’s Garrido said the last year has been relatively quiet in the Southwest Division.

“We haven’t had any gang feuds that have evolved into a war between rival gangs.” Garrido said. He said it remained to be seen whether the double homicide would reignite gang tensions in the area.

Residents said the scene of the crime is in Rolling 30s territory, a Harlem Crips-affiliated group, with the 18th Street gang controlling a nearby corridor. Medina said that members of the Rolling 30s stopped by his house the morning after the killings to say they were not involved.

Although police described the killings as gang-related, Jimenez’s little sister said that her brother was not a gang member. She is not the only one to say so; many gathered in Medina’s front yard to pay their respects  also said Nava was not in a gang.

For Medina, who said he was the one who’d been in trouble when they were younger, there was a deep sense of injustice.

“I thought I was gonna be the first one to go,” Medina said. “They got the wrong guy. They always get the fools who don’t do ” stuff.

Squaring off against incumbent Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva of the Democratic Party is Pheu Thai party leader Yingluck Shinawatra, whose party is leading by a narrow margin in pre-election polls. Yingluck is also the sister of ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who faces a warrant for his arrest on terrorism charges related to last year’s protests.

Thaksin now lives in exile. His lawyer said the charge “violates logic, law and any claim of hopes for reconciliation.”

Tensions between the two political factions, which reflect deep divisions within Thai society, erupted last year, with protests against Abhisit’s government leading to a military crackdown, in which more than 90 people were killed and hundreds injured.

After the riots, the Thai government pledged to work toward a process of national reconciliation to heal these class and political divisions.

But just who wins Sunday’s vote is far less important geopolitically than whether or not the results are accepted, according to Ernest Bower, Southeast Asia program director for the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

The main regional players — the United States, China and Thailand’s neighbors from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) — will be watching the outcome closely, knowing that further unrest in what has historically been one of the most stable countries in Southeast Asia could affect the balance of power.

“The best outcome for the U.S. and the region as a whole is that there is an election, that the Thai people agree that it was run fairly and that all parties accept the results,” Bower told CNN.

The fear, or “unhappy scenario,” as Bower put it, is if a party wins, and the other side does not accept the result, either by rejecting the election results or the process itself.

Just days before the election, Army chief Prayuth Chan-ocha dismissed what he called “rumors” that the military would stage a coup in the event of a Pheu Thai win.

“Thai democracy is healthy, but its enemies are many,” said Michael Montesano, a researcher at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.

“There is no question that if Thailand is able to let its democracy prevail — to become a country that is ruled by its elected parliament — that it will have an important effect in the long term.”

Read the top 10 strange moments of election

One major effect will be on its relationship with the United States. As Washington’s oldest treaty ally in EAST Asia — dating back to 1833 when it was known as Siam — Thailand remains a key security ally of the United States, its third-largest single country trading partner after China and Japan.

Thailand is also one of the five founding members of ASEAN, the economic and political body representing 10 nations — and 600 million people — in Southeast Asia.

With China’s growing economic power and maritime assertiveness in Southeast Asia, a bitterly divided Thailand comes at an “extremely bad time for the region,” Bower said. Additionally, the deadly Thai-Cambodia border dispute around an ancient temple has further undermined ASEAN cohesion, he added.

“That in turn undermines a strong ASEAN able to send messages to China, most notably now the South China Sea.”

In recent weeks, there have been reported incidents between Chinese patrol boats and Vietnamese and Philippine survey ships, raising tensions in disputed waters where China has estimated untapped oil that could be second only to Saudi Arabia’s.

From the U.S. perspective, ASEAN provides a regional architecture that would make China “play by the rules,” Bower explained. Such a plan is contingent “on a strong and compressive ASEAN,” he added.

“With an unstable Thailand, this is undermined.”

China, on the other hand, prefers not to negotiate with ASEAN and prefers bilateral negotiations, Bower said. “From a very Machiavellian point of view, China has not indicated that it supports a strong Thailand. But Chinese policy says they do support a strong ASEAN economically.”

Another observer, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, said that Thai democracy stands at a crossroads.

“If the Thai elections on July 3 lead to genuine democratic rule, and that becomes the basis of government administration in Thailand, this would reinforce the trend that Indonesia has set toward democratization.”

On the other hand, he added, “if the election results are usurped, and Thailand ends up with a kind of managed democracy, this would fall into the hand of China.”

Read a Thai political blogger’s opinion on the need to vote

Montesano disagreed that any Thai election outcome could pose a threat to ASEAN. “ASEAN is so divided and so weak diplomatically that I don’t think China has any particular fear of ASEAN.”

“The real stakes here are whether Thailand can finally begin to get its politics right, so that it’s not weak, so that it’s not a less and less attractive destination for investment.”

See a timeline of Thailand for the last 10 years

Lief Eskesen, chief economist for India & ASEAN at HSBC, said the elections are not anticipated to have an impact on the ASEAN economies.

“The interesting thing about Thailand is that there have been these political tensions issues for a while. Despite that, it hasn’t really deterred investors from coming in,” he said, crediting sound economic stewardship, a good business environment and less red tape than in Indonesia and the Philippines — fellow ASEAN democracies.

“The greatest risk to growth related to the elections is for Thailand itself,” he said.

The rooftop is managed by local entrepreneur Osbert Lam, who spends his afternoons amid the rows of planter boxes teaming with long beans, tomatoes and herbs that occupy his urban farm.

Juxtaposed with the Hong Kong skyline, his rooftop stands out like a dab of verdant paint on a canvas of concrete, and is just one of the growing numbers of farms sprouting atop the city’s skyscrapers.

“There are a lot of empty, leftover rooftops that could easily be transformed into fields,” said Lam, who started the Eco-Mama rooftop farm just six months ago.

For just $15 per month, Lam rents out toolbox-sized planter boxes to businessmen, elderly couples and families alike, and even runs horticulture classes. He uses imported soil from Germany to fill his planters and lets the humid, subtropical climate do the rest.

“I found that the veggies loved the environment on my rooftop,” Lam, a 50 year-old father of two, said. “Here, there is good sun from the South, good air from the East and we’re above the crowded streets.”

And that’s precisely the premise behind urban farming: integrating farming practices into the urban ecological and economic systems. This is done through direct interaction with the urban environment and incorporating resources, such as using organic waste for compost or utilizing portions of urban structures for farming projects.

Lam’s farm — a humble 2,000 square feet — is one of an estimated 300 urban farming projects that now occupy Hong Kong’s high-rises, joining the broader, global movement of food sustainability projects in densely populated urban settings.

“Twenty years ago, locals thought that the soil here was dirty,” said Simon Chau, founder of the Produce Green Foundation, which manages Hong Kong’s first urban farm in Tsuen Wan. “Now, after 20 years, people have started to realize that it is rewarding and meaningful to grow something themselves and to eat it.”

But unlike the burgeoning urban farms of New York, Tokyo and Taipei, the city’s budding urban agriculture movement continues to run into problems as it tries to expand, according to architecture and engineering professor Sam Hui of the Hong Kong University.

“If we really want to see the maximum benefits of urban farming here (in Hong Kong), we have to create more rooftop farms,” said Hui, whose research focuses on sustainable agriculture and green roof use.

Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, with roughly 7 million residents living in an area of just over 400 square miles, according to government census data.

The population density makes it difficult to have urban farms anywhere other than on the rooftops of the city’s soaring skyscrapers, Hui said. The city also has strict guidelines on development, allowing just 25% of the land to be built upon.

Urban agriculture’s growing pains

Aside from the logistical challenges of planting crops in a city void of open space, many of Hong Kong’s urban agriculture pioneers are frustrated by the local government’s lackluster support toward urban farming.

Chan Choi-hi, a member of the Hong Kong district council, said the Hong Kong government must do more to build a viable urban agriculture policy.

“There is no policy, no vision (and) no idea of how to do urban farming in Hong Kong from the government. It’s not even in the agenda,” Chan said. “So first of all, we are trying to push this idea from an economic angle.”

The economic angle, Chan said, may be the only way to convince top government officials to invest time and resources into bolstering Hong Kong’s nascent urban farming movement.

But according to the numbers, that argument has proved to be a tough sell.

Farming makes up just a fraction of Hong Kong’s current GDP and employs just 4,700 Hong Kong residents, less than one tenth of a percent of the population, according to Hong Kong’s Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD).

The government has set up roughly 30 urban farm plots across the territory, but many are found in the middle of highways or in remote locations of the city, rendering them both unattractive and inconvenient for residents, Hui said.

Although a submitted statement to CNN by the AFCD said that they encourage “leisurely farming,” support and services “are primarily geared for income-earning or food-producing local farmers.”

The movement, therefore, has taken longer to catch hold in Hong Kong.

Outside of convincing politicians, Chau said Hong Kongers themselves have historically been resistant to the idea of farming as a suitable pastime.

“It is the lowest of our traditional caste system. In traditional Chinese culture, if you’re good at nothing else, you work on the farm,” Chau said. “Also, Hong Kong is a very money-minded place… land is also very expensive in Hong Kong, so people don’t spend time worrying about growing their own food.”

In light of the many challenges facing urban agriculture in Hong Kong, Lam is optimistic that his vision of a megacity capped with green gardens will be realized.

“I believe you can build a community of rooftop farmers here in Hong Kong,” Lam said. “We can be very mobile, farming on rooftops across the city.”

Saray lay in a pool of her own blood for more than 12 hours after being shot in an Arlington Heights apartment because nobody wanted the police around asking questions, witnesses said.

When police did come, they were met with silence.

LAPD homicide Detective John Jamison said a 17-year-old Latina “basically confessed” on Feb. 21 and was arrested in connection with the killing. Her name was not released because she is a juvenile. Jamison said she is a resident of Los Angeles.

“Once the shooting occurred, everybody left the location,” Jamison said.

The apartment, at 1307 3rd Ave., was rented to a woman who “wasn’t home when the shooting occurred inside her apartment,” Jamison said.

The known facts, provided by the Los Angeles County coroner, are few: Rivas was shot in the left eye with a small-caliber gun. The bullet exited through the back of her head.

Saray’s body was discovered by the renter of the apartment, Maria Elena, and her 18-year-old son. They walked to the nearby station to report the crime. Emergency workers forced open the locked door of the rundown 1970s-era apartment complex and found Rivas’ body on the floor. No one was in the second-story apartment.

Police detained Elena’s son, Thomas, for questioning and kept him in custody for 48 hours before he was released without charges, Jamison said.

Although officials suspect that gang members are involved in the incident, Jamison said he would not label the crime “gang-related.”

“It was kind of a party,” although at the time of the shooting only three girls were inside of the apartment,  Jamison said.

“Based on interviews in the investigation, I don’t think that it was an accident,” he added.

Several witnesses say that the shooting happened around 3 p.m. on Feb. 19., but police say they believe Saray was shot the following afternoon.

Residents who said they witnessed the aftermath of Rivas’ death spoke to reporters on the condition that they not be named, saying they feared retribution.

“[The police] came and had a lot of questions. They asked who was living in the apartment, they asked for the papers of everybody who lived there,” recalled the superintendent of the complex. “And another question, ‘Did anybody know what happened?’ Everybody said, ‘No no, no.’ ”

Witnesses said no one knew anything about the victim. Neither did Los Angeles Unified School District officials, who said they had no record of her attending school for the last two years.

One tenant noted that the building’s one-room apartments are not insulated.

“You can hear everything in this building,” he said. “So, of course people heard it. It’s just that no one wants to talk. No one wants to be targeted.”

The owner of a nearby business, who also asked not to be identified, said the area is normally tranquil. She says she often works until 3 a.m. and then walks the three blocks to her home alone. Outside of people from other neighborhoods tagging nearby buildings with graffiti, she said, she had never spotted trouble before.

However, another resident of the complex says a gang, the Harpies, controls the block on which the slaying happened.

The next block? Controlled by the Crazy Riders. A few more blocks, and Mara Salvatrucha territory begins.

“I just feel bad for the girl,” Elena said in a phone interview. “I want to move on. I don’t want to think about it.”

Case in point: nearly two years ago Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa pledged to make Los Angeles a coal-free city by 2020, but little progress has been made.

Romel Pascual, deputy mayor of environmental issues, acknowledged the lag.

“That commitment is still there,” Pascual said. “The goal is still there. How quickly we’ll get there, I suppose, is the biggest issue.”

Right now 76 percent of the electricity provided by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is generated from coal and natural gas, according to the mayor’s office.

The DWP, the largest city-owned utility company in the country, supplies power to 1.45 million customers annually, with roughly 40 percent of L.A.’s energy coming from coal-fired power plants. To put that in perspective, L.A. burns about 12,000 tons of coal every day and more than 4 million tons per year to generate electricity, according to the Sierra Club-backed Beyond Coal Campaign.

“We aren’t on track because there is currently no plan in place,” David Graham-Caso, associate press deputy for the Sierra Club, said. “There was no schedule laid out. There was a date and an end goal, but no concrete plan.”

L.A. owns shares in two out-of-state coal plants – the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona and the Intermountain Power Project in Utah – which released a combined total of more than 36 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2006, according to the Beyond Coal Campaign’s website.

Late last year the DWP released an integrated resource plan or IRP addressing the city’s current coal consumption.

Included in the IRP was a stipulation to sever ties with the Navajo Generating Station by 2014, which would reduce the DWP’s emissions by 10.5 million metric tons – equivalent to removing 350,000 cars from the road.

But the IRP suggested 2027 as the planned split from the coal power plant in Utah, the year DWP’s contract with the facility expires.

Speaking at a Sierra Club-sponsored Beyond Coal Campaign event at USC in March, Pascual boiled down the delay in taking coal out of the LADWP’s grid to the highly contentious topic of electricity rates.

“We all want the renewables and the jobs associated with green energy,” Pascual said. “But when we talk about rates, it’s a horrible conversation.”

Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said the absence of a concrete plan to reduce L.A.’s coal consumption stems from a lack of urgency within the city.

“The potential is more than there,” Brune said. “But the political will… we haven’t seen the political will translate to actual kilowatts on the ground.”

Graham-Caso said pollution from coal plants plays a role in four of the five leading causes of death in the United States – heart disease, cancer, stroke and chronic lower respiratory disease.

“What people don’t understand is that from these plants, we produce carbon pollution, mercury, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, which causes haze,” Graham-Caso said.

Because of the geography of the Los Angeles Basin and adjacent San Fernando Valley, the area is predisposed to atmospheric inversion, which reduces air convection and holds on to smog, making the region especially pollution-prone.

Opponents of the mayor’s pledge are concerned about skyrocketing utility rates.

“To get off of coal by 2020 would be a financial disaster,” said Jack Humphrerville, owner of Recycler.com and a writer for CityWatchLA.com, pointing to the assumed cost of using alternative energy sources such as solar and wind to power L.A.

Humphrevile said the city could not rely on solar and wind-generated power to meet the base load demand – or the minimum amount of power DWP must make available to its customers – for all of L.A.

Additionally, the city would incur a huge penalty if it were to opt out of its contract with Intermountain Power early to meet the mayor’s 2020 deadline.

Without Intermountain, Los Angeles would need some kind of backup plan. “You can’t predict the wind and you can’t predict the sun,” Humphreville said.

However, weaning L.A. completely off of coal would actually reduce utility rates in the long term, Mark Bernstein, acting director of the USC Energy Institute, said.

“Outside of the human argument – where renewable energy is good for humanity and the environment – it makes sense from an economic standpoint,” Bernstein said.

Although the IRP could pave the way for L.A. to rid itself of coal-generated power for good, the new California law may also force the city to shake its coal habit.

“We need to be as aggressive at wanting this,” Pascual said, “as much as those who don’t want us to succeed.”