Lily Burk, the 17-year-old Oakwood student who was found slain late last week in downtown Los Angeles, was the daughter of a longtime friend, Greg Burk, the former chief of the copy desk at the LA Weekly, and his wife, Deborah Drooz.

I didn’t know Lily. But I have an 18-year-old daughter. The very idea of losing such as her has put me and my friends who are talking about it this morning in a place beyond heartbreak.

One friend, Martin Kelley, father of two daughters himself, said that he sat down at his piano and played a song of Greg’s he’d once learned — Greg was the leader in the 1970s and ’80s of the absolutely extraordinary L.A. punk band Dred Scott — because playing a song was all he could do. The song, I think, was “Wouldn’t You Be Amazed.”There is nothing else we can do, except to send our love out to Greg and Deborah.

Go to Larry Wilson’s Public Eye