Forever an Outsider : Some called the Martins the ‘perfect family,’ but their 17-year-old son felt estranged and isolated. He turned to ‘Disco Boys’ and drugs for solace and found only a violent death.

Craig Martin stood in an empty culvert 10 feet under the San Bernardino Freeway in Rosemead, drew a small knife from his back pocket and scraped at the pool of dried blood that had spilled from his brother’s body 10 days earlier. He gently held the flakes in the palm of his right hand, raised them to his nose. Then he looked up, wondering about the degradation that had brought him there, the detachment that allowed him to remain.

“Here I am touching my brother’s blood. It seems so crazy. But when it happens to you, you don’t even think about it. You become crazed.”

He had gone there to see for himself, stepping down into a maze of drainage canals that snake beneath the western San Gabriel Valley, a subterranean world spray-painted with the graffiti of gangs, hard rockers and teen-age lovers.

Down here everything seemed so muffled, he said, voices lost in the relentless pounding of tires on freeway girders overhead. Ba boom. Ba boom. Ba boom. “I hear those cars and trucks passing over and I wonder if he thought that was the sound of death,” 20-year-old Craig said. “That’s what bothers me the most, that he must have known death was coming.”

Scott Martin, 17, died in Rubio Wash, in the bowels of the freeway, less than a mile from home. He had been shot seven times in the head by unknown assailants sometime between June 12 and June 15--the day his body was found by teen-agers walking along the concrete wash. He was wearing new white Reeboks--a gift from his brother--a nice gray sweater and a mouthful of braces. Drug paraphernalia had been strewn about his body.

If his appearance suggested a comfortable middle-class background, the manner and place of his death certainly hinted at something darker. Sheriff’s homicide detectives are saying very little about the case, except to confirm that he had a drug problem.

But the Martins--fearing that investigators will write off Scott’s murder as a drug deal gone awry--have visited and revisited the murder scene over the past three weeks, searching for clues and some assurance that he did not live his last moments in terror. They have left there with only questions, unsure why or exactly how a shy, troubled boy whose family escaped the barrios of East Los Angeles a decade ago could become ensnarled in a world of drugs and violence they thought they had left behind.

Before his death, Scott confided to friends that he had never felt a part of his family. He said they wanted him to be someone he wasn’t. They excelled in sports and school and blended nicely into a neighborhood of Anglos. His parents were both Latino (the family name was once pronounced Mar- teen ), but he was the one who looked it. His skin was darker, he spoke in street slang and, although he was a natural athlete who stood 6 feet 3, sports did not stir him. Instead, he fell in with a group of Latino boys whose parents had also come to the suburbs seeking prosperity. Scott followed the example of these friends, “Disco Boys,” who grew up in broken homes, dropped out of school and abused marijuana and cocaine.

Soon, the Martins were struggling to win the mind and spirit of a son who lied and stole from them to buy drugs. They attended counseling sessions and joined a parents’ support group before becoming so frustrated that they kicked him out of the house and changed the locks. He moved in with his grandparents. A month later, he was dead.

“If you can reach one kid, if his parents will sit him down with the newspaper and he reads this and says, ‘Hey, this can happen to me,’ then that would make the whole thing worth it,” said Ray Martin, 48, the father. “It’s too late to help Scott. . . . Maybe you can help someone else.”

Ray and Pat Martin left the impoverished barrios of East Los Angeles in 1977 for what they regarded as the promised land, a quiet neighborhood in the community of San Gabriel. Craig, their oldest, became a high school football star and later played at Glendale Community College. Carrie, 14, the youngest, was voted to the junior varsity cheerleading squad.

Ray, an estimator for a carton manufacturer, and Pat, a junior high school library clerk, spent much of their free time playing slow-pitch softball and coaching girls’ and boys’ baseball teams in the Rosemead Youth Assn. One year, Ray served as vice president, coach and umpire. Pat became treasurer of a local education foundation and a member of the junior high booster club.

They were, as more than one friend recently put it, the “perfect family.” But beneath the burnished exterior--beyond the spacious two-story home with a swimming pool, the living-room case filled with sports trophies, the collection of exotic birds and groomed poodles--their lives were consumed with the private turmoil of a middle child on drugs.

The barrio, Pat Martin said, was never far behind.

“We used to live up on a hill in El Sereno, and every night you’d see and hear the gangs and the shootings,” she recalled. “It wasn’t the kind of place we wanted our kids to grow up in. So we moved here, with its open spaces and nice neighborhoods. We thought we had gotten away from it all.”

‘Started Withdrawing’

“I think we did everything you’re supposed to do to control the situation,” her husband said. “It’s hard to say when we lost him. Somewhere in there he started withdrawing. He wouldn’t take to the discipline. He wouldn’t even bat an eye when we took away his privileges. He just didn’t seem to care. And that was the most frustrating part of all.”

The seeds of trouble, his parents now concede, were evident as early as the second grade when Scott began showing problems with reading and language. He was kept back the next year on the advice of a counselor who said he was maturing slowly. In the fifth grade, he was enrolled in a special program for problem readers.

“That year, for the first time, he really looked forward to school. He was doing well in the program and was really cheerful,” Pat Martin said. “He did so well that they mainstreamed him the next year.”

But outside the protection of a special program, he foundered. He grew more shy and hesitant, as if a less-than-perfect performance would expose him to ridicule.

“He took the longest time learning to ride a bike,” his father recalled. “I finally had to push him down the street one day as he yelled and screamed. Craig would get on the bike, fall off, get on again, fall off. When Carrie learned to roller-skate, she broke her arm and was back on skates the next day. But not Scott. He didn’t like to make a fool of himself. He liked to blend in with the crowd.”

Scott was 14 when poor attendance and grades first alerted his parents to the possibility of marijuana abuse. A year later, his school performance dropped so low that a teacher confronted the Martins with his suspicions.

“As a parent, there were so many things I had been denying,” Pat Martin said. “ ‘Scott? Not Scott.’ All of a sudden I had to see that yes, it could be Scott. Yes, it’s there.”

Private World

She said her son began retreating into a private world, distancing himself from the sports that had played such a big part in their lives. When he was 14, Scott quit organized sports altogether, preferring instead to spend time with friends or his pets. He collected and trained parrots and cockateels and bred pigeons in the backyard. Only occasionally did he accompany the family to a game.

“He just didn’t seem to belong with them,” said Wayne Viloria, a close friend. “He didn’t feel comfortable competing with his brother and sister.”

“He looked up to his brother,” said another friend, David Pedroza. “He used to tell me that his brother had everything going for him. He tried so hard, but he couldn’t be the same. That’s when he started getting into drugs.”

Only Three Choices

But other friends and family reject the explanation that Scott turned to drugs simply because he could not live up to what he perceived as lofty expectations. They attribute his problems, in part, to a lack of choices for many Latino youth, a pressure from peers and society to fit into neatly prescribed roles. One of the manifestations, they say, is a dropout rate that approaches 50% for young Latinos, a figure corroborated by several area high schools.

“You are either a ‘Cholo,’ a ‘Rocker’ or a ‘Disco,’ ” Craig Martin said. “You can’t be a Mexican who is nothing.”

Scott identified closely with the disco life style, according to friends, rejecting the cholo image as lower class. Cholos are more apt to belong to gangs and carry weapons, according to members of both groups. And their dress is distinctive: crisp white T-shirts, khaki pants cut off just below the knees, long white tube socks and martial arts slippers.

This contrasts sharply with discos, who dress in slacks and nice shirts and wear their hair closely cropped on the sides, long in the back. They prefer liquor and cocaine to pot and LSD. And they frequent “D. J. parties” organized by teen-agers who own elaborate sound systems and promote the parties by handing out thousands of flyers.

Pedroza, who belongs to the Telesis D. J. Club, which recently held a three-day bash at members’ houses that netted $600, said Scott encountered the same pressure he feels.

“If you don’t hang around with the crowd, you’re nobody,” he said. “It’s feeling wanted. I’ve met all of my friends at D. J. parties. None of them go to school. They all dropped out at 15 or 16. And none of them work. We just party all the time.”

What had been a mostly private matter suddenly became public when school authorities discovered a small quantity of marijuana in Scott’s locker last year. He insisted that it was a friend’s, but no one believed him. After a meeting with school officials and police, he was released to the custody of his parents. Pat Martin said the incident had a cleansing effect, bringing everything out in the open, removing the last residue of doubt.

They enrolled Scott in a vocationally oriented program in El Monte in hopes of separating him from undesirable friends. And they sought the help of other parents, joining a support group that met weekly at Rosemead High School. Parents shared ideas on what mixture of reward and punishment might nudge their children in the right direction.

But none of the ideas from the support group seemed to move Scott, his parents said. In April, his mother found marijuana in his bedroom, a departure from his practice of never bringing drugs into the house. He began lying habitually and stealing money and jewelry that were left in the open.

His friends said they always knew when Scott had stolen something from his parents. He would call and whisper a secret signal. “He’d say, ‘Guess what? I just koo koo kooed,’ ” Pedroza said. “He’d tell me: ‘When my parents get paid, I get paid.’ ”

Pedroza said Scott never sold drugs. But he and other friends disputed the Martins’ contention that their son abused only marijuana. “We did coke a lot. He liked to do big lines,” Pedroza said. “He said it helped him forget his problems.”

Crying Out for Help

Pedroza’s mother, Betty Godinez, said Scott was crying out for help. She recalled meeting a stoned and rambling Scott at a liquor store last year. “I asked him what was wrong, and he said he didn’t want to live anymore. ‘People just want me to be what they want me to be,’ he said. I told him to hang in there. ‘Just watch, things will get better.’ He told me I didn’t understand.”

“I see the same thing with my David,” said Godinez, who is taking her son to a counselor. “They’re using drugs as a way of telling us, ‘Listen. Something is wrong.’ ”

But other friends and relatives said Scott sent out different signals, those of a shy, gentle boy who dreamed of becoming a veterinarian or forest ranger, who doted over his birds and performed odd jobs around the house with meticulous care.

Martha Mireles, 18, said she will never forget Scott hovering and standing guard over her at school after her boyfriend moved away last year.

‘Loyal and Shy’

“He promised Wayne (the boyfriend) that he would watch over me, and he did. He was very loyal and very shy. He was the only one of Wayne’s friends who wouldn’t automatically walk in the house. He would stand at the front door and talk unless he got a formal invitation inside.”

Debbie Chavez, 18, said she got to know a whimsical side to Scott during slumber parties at the Martins’ house after girls’ softball games. At 3 in the morning, she said, Scott would tiptoe downstairs from his bedroom and wake her up with a touch to the chin, a spot overly sensitive because of a childhood injury.

“We would sneak out and go swimming or climb on the roof and just watch the stars and talk,” she said. “He would always talk about his mother. It bothered him that they weren’t close and he blamed himself. He told me he was troubled, but that’s all he would say.”

On May 17, Scott’s best friend, a 17-year-old Rosemead resident, was arrested and charged with the robbery and murder of Bernadette Riley, a 77-year-old Rosemead woman. Friends said that the youth, who will be tried as an adult, owed Scott $300 and that Scott had called the youth’s father a few days before demanding his money. Police have not implicated Scott in the killing.

But whatever tenuous balance had been reached in the Martin home was upset by the news of the Riley killing. His parents said they felt Scott needed to spend some time away from home. The logical choice was his grandparents’ home in East Los Angeles, where he could live with family but still be on his own.

“He wanted to spread his wings out,” his mother said. “He wanted to be able to make his own decisions without us being on top of him.

“I’m afraid we were just too overpowering for him,” her husband said. “All of us are talkers and all of us are opinionated. He was just overwhelmed to the point that he withdrew.

“I could see him getting through this stage and in maybe a year or two he would look back and say: ‘Gee, remember all the trouble I gave you guys?’ ”

Vincent Martin said his grandson returned home from Valle Lindo Continuation High School in Rosemead about noon on Friday, June 12. He took a shower, ate some lunch and told his grandparents that he was spending the night with a friend, Martin Romero. The two boys would sell fruit at the swap meet Saturday, and he would be home that night.

Vincent Martin gave his grandson two $20 bills for work he had done around the house and drove him to a bus stop on Valley Boulevard near Lincoln Park. It was the last time he saw him.

But Romero said he and Scott never met that day. He expressed confusion about the swap meet story because he and Scott had never planned such an outing.

“He told me he was going home to get some money and that he would be back Friday night because there was a party at a hotel in Rosemead,” Romero said. “That’s the last I heard from him.”

Ray Martin said his son was street-wise enough not to run into trouble by accident. He thinks Scott was taken by force to the concrete wash by people he knew.

“I saw the splatter of blood on the concrete wall. I wanted to know exactly what my son went through,” he said. “The thing that eats at me is that he died alone and I wasn’t there to help.

“If I had known and I was within a distance to be there, I would have been there. And they would have had to kill two Martins that day.”