Slain Youth Wasn’t Allowed to Be Neutral

Now and then, David Williams, 18, and his brother Daniel, 16, would try to get a straight answer: Why us? they asked the gang members who challenged them almost every day. Why were they targeted? Why were they always pressed to name a gang affiliation as they tried to walk to and from school?

“What is it?” David, 18, recalled once asking his tormentors. “Is it my clothes? Is it that you guys are just bored? You see me so often I’m like your little brother; why do you do this?” He never got an answer. And this week, more than a month after the murder of his younger brother Daniel, a center and power forward on the Washington High School basketball team, David was still seeking answers.

Los Angeles police announced a $25,000 reward Thursday for the killer of Daniel O’Neal Fitzgerald. At 3:45 p.m. Aug. 23, he was walking to a store to buy potato chips when a gang member on a bicycle approached him in the 600 block of West 104th Street and demanded to know his gang affiliation, according to Det. Donovan Nickerson.

Daniel responded that he didn’t belong to a gang, and kept walking. The bicyclist circled back, challenged him again and killed him with one shot.

Daniel was not a gang member, police said. “He believed in himself,” said his father, John Gardner, crying at the news conference Thursday. “He had no problems with anyone. He was working hard for what he wanted, and he truly believed he was going to pull his family up.”

But although Daniel and David were single-mindedly focused on school and on getting out of the neighborhood, David said, the neighborhood wasn’t going to let them go without a fight.

The brothers negotiated a gantlet of threats wherever they went, David said, an experience typical for many young men in the neighborhood around 104th Street and Hoover Street where they lived.

Theirs was the burden of trying to stay neutral where young black men are not permitted to be neutral. The two boys adopted a variety of strategies: David was a soft-spoken negotiator, who sized up each situation carefully, tried to gain allies where he could, and fled when he judged it necessary.

“I don’t want to endanger my family,” he would explain patiently to gang members who questioned his neutrality.

Daniel, nearly 6 feet 3 and muscular, tended to attract more attention -- and more aggression, his brother said. He more often adopted the pose of a fighter, trying to stand down those who threatened him or blithely ignoring them.

Some measures were second nature. David described how he and his brother nearly always wore white T-shirts and black pants to avoid appearing in gang colors. Each had a mental map of South Los Angeles -- places where one gang territory ended and another began, the areas they had to avoid. At night, they never left the house.

Close since childhood, David and Daniel had a goal. They had moved frequently as children, living for a time with a relative. Ensconced at last with their father, they were eager to take advantage of their newfound stability. They talked out a plan: They would do well at Washington High School and get out of South Los Angeles -- through the military or, in Daniel’s case, with luck, through basketball.

David had a been a football player. But as the boys grew, he saw that his younger brother was sprouting in height and displaying ever more talent for basketball. So he abandoned football to work out with Daniel and help their plan succeed. Listening to Daniel practice free throws late at night in the backyard, David thought how he admired his younger brother, who seemed to excel at things and to have so much drive.

By their late teens, David was the smaller of the two, with a retiring manner and a tendency to speak with his shoulders drawn forward and in a voice so soft as to be barely audible.

He said the harassment he and Daniel endured began in junior high. He recalled his first initiation to it: He had innocently mimicked a gang member. A group accosted him: “You must be from somewhere,” they said. “You must BE somebody.” There it was: the importance of being from somewhere. David wasn’t from anywhere, and he felt scared.

Later, there were small and large confrontations. Some guys once threw a soda at Daniel. Gang members would repeatedly ask the brothers, “Where you from?” even though they saw them every day.

David had a tool box of coping mechanisms. Sometimes gang members would stand in a row, blocking the sidewalk in front of him.

“You try not to stare too hard at someone and you stay calm,” he said. “You tell them your situation, then you step around them off the sidewalk, and keep walking, and don’t look back.”

But Daniel “was more of a target because of how he looked,” David said.

Sometimes he would fight them, other times not. He was more careless, David said, less inclined to be intimidated.

Worried, David counseled his brother to take more heed: to keep changing his route to school and avoid the small store on Century Boulevard. He worried that Daniel kept walking the same streets, lost in thought about basketball and oblivious to danger.

Shortly before he was killed, Daniel came home and told David he had been confronted by a group that had pressured one of their number to threaten Daniel. Daniel recounted the obvious fear in his challenger’s face. He sensed that his adversary didn’t really want to fight, but was afraid to back down. The confrontation escalated to shoving and then to a fight.

Another time, Daniel was picked on by a gang, even though a rival gang member dressed in colors -- a seemingly more logical target -- stood nearby. It was another lesson: Sometimes being neutral can make you a target, David realized.

As David talked Thursday, his father listened with a look of dismay. He had never heard many of these stories, he said. The brothers didn’t like to tell him, David acknowledged. They didn’t want to worry him, he said.

If one of the brothers was going to be killed, David said softly, he always thought it would be Daniel. Asked why, he said, “Because he was on his way to the top. And it always happens to people who are doing something with their lives.”

Their father said his priority now is to find enough money to move David and two siblings, ages 4 and 7, to a safer neighborhood. But there seems to be nothing affordable, he said.

He recalled how he had tried to dissuade Daniel from joining the Marines because he feared the boy might be killed in Iraq.

“I wonder now, though; he might have had a better chance,” he said. “At least in Iraq he could have had a gun and would know who the enemy is.”