His music silenced forever

On the night of Aug. 16, Michael Pena stood outside of his family’s Mid-City apartment complex with some friends.

A gunman emerged from a car and began shooting.

Fleeing, Pena tripped and fell in the complex’s grassy commons, witnesses said. The gunman pointed his gun at others, then stood on Pena’s legs and fired several bullets into his back.

Pena died several hours later. He was 17.

Los Angeles police still have no suspect or motive in his death.

But Pena had been living a dual life, family and friends said.

He had been a drum major and lead trumpeter in the city’s best high school marching band. He was a priest in the Mormon Church’s Aaronic priesthood for young men.

Pena also was a high school dropout with a long career as a dedicated tagger. His nickname -- “Once” -- was spray-painted on walls, buses and freeway underpasses.

Pena’s is a story of a talented young man struggling between two worlds and whose poor decisions may have cost him his life.

“We can choose our actions,” said Joseph Larnyoh, youth leader of the Mormon Church’s Adams Ward in Los Angeles, “but we cannot choose their consequences.”

Pena was the son of Salvadoran immigrants. His father is a truck driver; his mother a housewife who is nearly blind.

The family lives in a small apartment building in Mid-City. Felipe Pena is the only father in the 11-unit complex who lives with his children.

The oldest of two teenage boys, Michael was a handsome kid, whom others remember as immediately likeable. But in class, he could be disruptive and talkative. He was not a good student.

“He was just sure of his raw energy and innate talent and his zest for life,” said Hardy Edwards, an English teacher at Los Angeles High School, which Pena attended. “He had a core energy that was as vibrant as anyone I’d ever met.”

Pena’s life at school revolved around its band.

The Los Angeles High School marching band is the most dominant in the city. At a school with few other successes, it has won the city’s Division 1A band championship 17 years in a row, and often places first or second in regional competitions.

Pena distinguished himself in it.

He had taken up the trumpet and drums in band class at Mt. Vernon Middle School and worked hard at mastering his instruments.

“Class was over at 3:30. He would stay until 5:30, staying all the time just practicing with the music teacher,” said Andrew Paredes, a friend and fellow band student.

Arriving at L.A. High, Pena impressed other students with his tone and ability to read music. As a sophomore, he was elected the band’s assistant drum major -- a position of leadership and responsibility. He held the post for two years.

Linda Dawkins, a neighbor, remembers many mornings hearing the tones of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” or “The Star-Spangled Banner” coming from the Pena apartment.

“He’d do improvisations, melodies in his head,” Dawkins said. “I could hear him and his father playing music together.”

Allan Valladares, a trumpeter who had been in the high school band a decade earlier and returned as a brass-section instructor, pushed Pena to practice more. “He was able to play stuff that most guys would have to work at,” Valladares said.

Baptized in the Mormon Church at age 8, Pena attended the church’s Adams Ward with his father and brother, Phillip. At age 16, he joined the church’s Aaronic priesthood for young men. As a priest, Pena could perform baptisms, bless the sacrament and make family visits to teach the gospel.

“The side we opened to him -- that spiritual side, where he looks outside of himself to find out who he really is -- it touched inside of Michael,” said Michael Bolingbroke, the ward’s executive secretary. “He loved those people he was around. It was genuine. It wasn’t fake.”

But even at an early age there were signs of trouble. By the time he joined the priesthood, friends and teachers said, Pena had been tagging for years.

“He even came into the class with hands painted. It’d still be fresh,” said Christian Beas, a tuba player in the L.A. High School band.

Once, his father caught him with spray-paint cans and a razor blade, often used to tag bus windows.

“He said, ‘I don’t do it on the walls or the houses.’ I didn’t believe him,” said Felipe Pena. “I said if I see someone doing that to my house, I shoot the son-of-a-gun.”

Pena’s 10th-grade history teacher, Kevin Glynn, remembers a kid who was smart but a poor student, who talked a lot about tagging and marijuana. By the end of the year, Glynn had written off Pena.

“I said, ‘Just ditch. Let me work with the kids who want to be here,’ ” Glynn said.

Then, at the high school band’s June concert that year, Glynn was astonished when his student stood and took his trumpet solo.

“I said, ‘Oh, my God. It’s Michael,’ ” Glynn said. “He played so well that I sort of forgave him all the other crap because I could find a way to talk to him. At least I could talk to him about music and the trumpet.”

In his senior year, Pena decided not to run for drum major.

He failed to complete enough credits for graduation, and in December, he dropped out of school. Pena began hanging out with other kids in his apartment complex, many of whom were dropouts and smoked marijuana, his father said.

He got a job at the Mormon Church’s Deseret Industries, part of the church’s welfare services. But after working a few days, he quit.

Friends said Pena’s life took a turn in spring when he joined a tagging crew called US, which some said was bent on creating a name for itself.

Recently, several US members traveled to Las Vegas and San Francisco to tag walls, said one youth associated with the group who asked not to be identified. During another outing, a member of the crew hung by one hand from a ledge 50 feet above the 101 Freeway near the Cahuenga Avenue offramp while he painted the crew’s initials on a wall with the other.

“The point of graffiti is to get known, to have your name everywhere,” said Brandon Vernon, a friend and former band-mate of Pena’s. “They used to go out all the time, like four times a week.”

Pena joined US as the tagging world was changing, as crews have come to more closely resemble gangs, police said. Some have violent entrance rituals and territorial feuds.

“It’s elevated to what they call ‘tag-banging,’ ” said Det. Jane Kiley, gang supervisor at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Wilshire Division. Increasingly, Kiley said, tagging crews are armed while vandalizing and have turned to other crimes such as robbery, burglary and car theft.

Police have stopped differentiating between gangs and tagging crews, although that’s not the case among gangs.

“A lot of taggers’ enemies are the bigger gangs, like MS13,” Kiley said. “We acknowledge them as a gang, but if you talk to any gang member, they’ll say no.”

Mid-City is a jungle of tagging crews and feuding gangs. L.A. High has more than 20 tagging crews, some students said.

But those who know US said the crew, although aggressively tagging, was not looking for gang-like trouble, and neither was Pena.

“He got caught up by the crime that we’re all afraid of,” said William Correa, a former tagger and now a record producer who knew Pena. “It came around and got a person we all cherish.”

Pena was buried at Rosedale Cemetery in Pico-Union. His friends held a car wash to help his parents cover expenses.

Bolingbroke, the ward’s executive secretary, conducted the service. And brass-section instructor Valladares played “I Remember Clifford” -- a jazz standard and ode to Clifford Brown, another trumpeter who years ago died young.

In band, Valladares said, “We work together, play together, hang around and eat. We become a family. The guys, I’m pretty sure they feel like they’ve lost a brother. I do, too.”

Felipe Pena didn’t know many of the youths at the funeral. Michael’s tagging friends wore R.I.P. T-shirts -- with his photo bordered in blue spray paint and below it his nickname, “Once.”

The elder Pena said he regrets that his job as a truck driver prevented him from attending more of his son’s band competitions and for not moving the family from the Mid-City apartment complex. There, in his view, his son fell in with bad friends and bad habits.

His “Once” taggings on neighborhood businesses are mostly painted over.

“I think he got it from ‘Once upon a time.’ He said, ‘It’s like, just once, not twice,’ ” his father said. “Once upon a time there was Michael Jeffrey Pena, who was a very good musician, very nice boy, who was going to be popular, famous. Now he’s dead.”

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sam.quinones@latimes.com