Aftermath of a Freeway Shooting : One Year Later, Teen’s Family and Friends Still Pay the Price of Her Death--in Grief, Fear and Feelings of Helplessness

In a city of millions, Raquel Orozco was a random target.

The four bullets that claimed her life could have hit anyone--or no one. But they found her on the Long Beach Freeway. The shy, quiet 16-year-old fan of Christian rock bands probably never really knew what happened. And to this day, no one really knows why.

Raquel was buried a year ago Saturday, but her family and friends in East Los Angeles still pay the price of her death--in grief, fear, anger and feelings of helplessness. Their gestures of homage--the tree on her grave last Christmas, the birthday party for her in January--are telling signs that her absence leaves a gaping hole in a web of hopes and dreams.

For them, the aftermath of Raquel’s murder has no end. Every drive-by and freeway shooting, every gang fight that claims an innocent victim, is a needle-sharp reminder that life does indeed hang by a thread.

Even before her daughter, the youngest of her four children, was killed, Raquel’s mother, Irma Vasquez, remembers, “When I used to hear of things happening to kids, I always used to say, ‘Oh, I pray for that mother, that father, those parents, because I could never go through that.’ I used to say, ‘I don’t know what would happen to me if I lost any of my children.’ ”

It was between 11 p.m. and midnight. The four friends were returning from a birthday party in Pomona for Yolanda Varela, then a student at Cal Poly Pomona and the girlfriend of Cameron McNeil, 20, an electrical engineering student who was driving the 1966 Chevrolet Impala. Varela, who just turned 19, was sitting on the right in the back seat, talking happily with her friend, Juliette Duran, 20.

Raquel had agreed to ride up front with McNeil, because Juliette and Yolanda had not seen each other for a while and had much to catch up on. Raquel went out that evening at the invitation of Juliette, a cousin who had been living with Raquel’s family since her mother’s death in 1985.

Beyond Their Neighborhood

Raquel’s half-brother, George Vasquez, a Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy, says the excursion was the first time his sister had ventured very far beyond their neighborhood on a social outing.

After changing from the Santa Monica Freeway to the Long Beach Freeway, McNeil said, he was traveling south and had just gone by the Gage Avenue exit at 60 m.p.h. when “I think we pass a van. I just look at them and he drops back and comes back up. It’s a dark-colored model, maybe a Ford. I hear a bang, bang, bang, bang and I can see the holes opening up (in the passenger door).”

Duran, 20, a Bell resident who works for a mortgage company, said her instincts came into play immediately.

” . . . I heard some shooting, so I got scared and I grabbed Yolanda’s hand and we both ducked,” she said. “I knew there was shooting going on but I didn’t know where. So then, when I lifted up my head I noticed my cousin Raquel, her head was tilted back. And I looked at the windows and they were shattered and I knew that we got hit, so I knew that she got hit.”

Varela, a resident of Lynwood and now a student at Mt. San Antonio College, recalls being “a little fuzzy-headed” that night because she had “about two beers” at the party. But what she remembers is clear enough.

“We were just having a good time, laughing and making jokes,” she said. “Raquel was sitting in the front seat. All I remember is the glass shattering on the passenger’s side. I was sitting right behind Raquel. It was like a popping sound and I thought somebody had hit the car with a BB gun. After that I remember Juliette was screaming because she knew what had happened. I didn’t know what had happened. She (Juliette) started screaming and I was trying to be real calm about it. I was trying to (talk) over her yells because she was screaming loud.

“I was telling Cameron if he could either just stop or pull over and stop and he kept driving off the freeway. We got off on Florence Avenue and we turned into the restaurant (Nelson’s Coffee Shop) . . . What I remember next is just me sitting alone in the car with Raquel. Juliette and Cameron had gotten out.

“I just sat in the car with Raquel and I still didn’t realize what had happened. I thought the glass might have hit her face when it shattered. I thought she was just crying because she hurt her face. (She was) moaning and I didn’t know what was going on but I was trying to comfort her anyway. I was right behind her. The whole time I was right behind her and she just kept telling me it hurt but I didn’t realize what hurt. She was moaning and telling me she wanted her brother George and she wanted her mom and it just hurts. And I was telling her I know it hurts. . . .”

McNeil’s impressions of the shooting are perhaps the most vivid.

From the first, it seemed unreal. “I couldn’t connect. I kept asking why is this happening,” he said. “ . . . It was really strange to see the bullet holes opening up as they went through the door.”

McNeil didn’t realize he was wounded until after he had pulled off the freeway, he said. But he remembers feeling “a big punch in my side.”

Once off the freeway, a distraught Juliette Duran dashed into the restaurant.

“All I remember is running into the restaurant, screaming and yelling,” she said, “and people were staring at me and I felt, like, real awkward. So I told them I need to use the phone and I called my aunt (Raquel’s mother) and she screamed and I started to panic more.”

After she was off the phone, Duran remembers a waitress saying, “ ‘Let’s go out and see if this is true.’ So I ran out there and she (Raquel) was all full of blood. She was wearing a jacket and it was all full of blood and I’m looking at her and she’s all in pain . . . And I stood there for a while, looked at her, but I got more hysterical and they put me in the police car.”

Juliette’s call to the Vasquez home came after both Raquel’s mother and brother had gone to sleep.

“When I got the phone call, me and my mom kind of picked up the phone at the same time,” George Vasquez, 25, said. “My cousin started screaming and when she finally made some sense--that Raquel had been shot--my mom kind of got hysterical. . . .

“Then a police sergeant from the Bell Police Department got on the phone and he gave me terrible news. I told him who I was, I told him who I worked with and he said, ‘Look, I’ll be straight with you, I think it’s a 187, which is a murder.”

Since Raquel Orozco was murdered, Los Angeles has erupted with last year’s furor over freeway shootings and this year’s outcries and controversies over gang violence. In each of these spasms of crime and public outrage, the glare of publicity was incandescent.

But Raquel, who sometimes called herself Rachel, nicknamed herself Rokki and who used her father’s last name, died almost unnoticed, a day after she passed the state driver’s license test. In the brief news accounts of her slaying, the event was treated as an isolated incident. No link was made between her killing and some large, sinister pattern of urban violence.

The Schurr High School 10th-grader was hit by four of six bullets fired from a dark-colored van late on Friday evening, Feb. 27, 1987, according to Los Angeles County Sheriff’s detectives. She died at 3:28 the following morning on an operating table at County-USC Medical Center.

There are almost no clues in the case, Sheriff’s Department detectives say. Bullet fragments from a gun firing .30 carbine ammunition were recovered from the car and from Raquel’s body. Another bullet still is lodged near McNeil’s spine.

The only description of the van, given by McNeil, is that it was dark in color, possibly brown and possibly an older model Ford. However, sheriff’s investigators have strong suspicions that the shooting was--freakishly--gang-related. McNeil’s car, with its tinted windows and lowered body looked like a gang car, said Richard R. Rogers, a recently retired sheriff’s homicide detective who investigated the killing. And that, he said, may have been enough to trigger the killer’s impulse.

In the first six weeks of this year 50 people died in gang-related incidents in Los Angeles County, a record pace that would outstrip by far last year’s record 387 killings in the county. During last summer’s spate of freeway shootings, five drivers and passengers were killed or injured in 50 incidents of violence on Southern California freeways.

Following Raquel’s murder, the Sheriff’s Department issued a public plea for information but no witnesses ever came forward.

“It seemed to us that we stood a fairly decent chance of somebody seeing the flash when the rifle fired but we didn’t get a ripple. . . We were in the tubes even before we got started,” Rogers said.

At the hospital, George Vasquez entertained a brief moment of hope that his sister, with three bullet wounds in her back and one in her hand, might live.

An emergency room doctor told him, “We were worried about your sister at first, she was out but we brought her back, she came back and she opened her eyes, she held my hand. We finally got something going on her. She’s up in surgery and all we can do is wait and hope for the best.”

The possibility that Raquel might survive was short-lived, however. “When the doctor came out (from surgery) I could see the look on his face,” Vasquez said, “ but my mom had that hope in her eye.”

Irma Vasquez, 49, is bitter that she never saw her daughter alive that night. “We just waited there and waited until it was too late.”

Even then, the waiting wasn’t over. The family was not allowed into the hospital’s morgue until about 8 a.m., more than four hours after Raquel died.

“And then when I saw her, it was so hard because I couldn’t touch her because there was a glass between us,” her mother said. “She looked like she was asleep. She looked like a little baby. She looked like a little angel asleep.”

George’s recollection of that bleak morning is more graphic. “I remember they still had one of those tubes sticking in her mouth, I guess to get oxygen down there,” he said. “What made it so horrible was that was like the last time we saw her looking the way she did. . . . When we had the funeral, the wake and everything, they had done an autopsy on her and it had disfigured her and it didn’t look like her and it was real hard.”

Hundreds of people--students, teachers, friends of the family--came to the services for Raquel on last March 5.

“We had the rosary the day before the funeral and the mortuary was jam-packed,” George Vasquez said. “It was standing room only. People couldn’t even get inside, they were standing outside.”

In the days and months after her death, those in the car with Raquel that night endured moments of fear and paranoia.

Cameron McNeil, released from the hospital after a couple of days, sometimes peeped out windows, suspecting the presence of mysterious watchers. He bought another car, selling the Chevrolet as soon as it had been repaired.

Both Yolanda and Juliette still become nervous when a car draws alongside on the freeway--especially at night. And both tell of sudden bouts of unfocused anger, of snapping at family members and friends over trivial irritations.

There are times, though, when Juliette knows precisely the object of her anger.

“When I see cholos (gang members or those who look like gang members) I get this burning right here in my chest because I get angry,” she said. “So when I see cholo cars and stuff, it’s like, you know, I can’t go and shoot them, I can’t think of doing that but I get angry when I see those type of people . . . Sometimes, all of a sudden, I’ll trip off and I’ll get all upset and I’ll be angry. Sometimes I’ll be quiet and I won’t talk to anybody. I find this emptiness inside me, which is weird. I don’t find myself the same person anymore.”

Although she still cries when she talks about her daughter, Irma Vasquez says she has found--if not peace--a kind of equilibrium.

“I was angry but I’m very close to God and I just wanted them to find them so they wouldn’t hurt somebody else,” she said. “I didn’t want vengeance, I didn’t want anything like that. . . .When I told the priest they never found who did it, he said, ‘Don’t worry, God knows.’ So since then, I’ve come about this, you know, leaving it in God’s hands. I told George yesterday, ‘Maybe God didn’t want us to find out because it was going to be too hard on us. We were going to feel more anger, more hate, and I don’t want to feel that because when I die I want to go with Raquel.’ ”

Raquel’s brother has found solace in his faith, too. But the sheriff’s deputy has a sterner vision of divine justice.

“The Lord’s going to do his justice,” he said. “It’s going to be His court and His ruling and these people are going to have nowhere to hide. They’re not going to be able to hide behind any technicalities. There aren’t going to be any lawyers defending them, so I’m just going to let him do his work.”

Last week a dozen white roses decorated Raquel’s grave.

Irma Vasquez didn’t know who put the flowers there but she wasn’t surprised. On her almost daily visits to Resurrection Cemetery near Monterey Park, she often finds anonymous tributes to her daughter, she said, and is glad that others still are moved by the memory of her and of her fate.

Raquel was “a good daughter,” she said, who “always” went with her to church on Sunday. When there was a dispute in the family, Raquel used her faith to work things out, Vasquez added.

“If she and her sister would have an argument and I would get mad at them, she would always go to her room and she’d write to God,” she said. “She always did. She gave me a letter she wrote to Him about understanding why I was upset. I have that letter and I read it over and over because in it she writes that she knows when we die we all go to heaven. She wrote that six weeks before she died.”

Once she and Raquel had a disagreement over what kind of music Raquel should listen to, she recalled.

“She liked heavy metal but I didn’t like her to listen to heavy metal, so I said I would let her listen to some as long as she listened to Christian music,” Irma Vasquez said. “She liked this group Stryper (a Christian rock band) so she compromised with me.”

In Raquel’s old room a poster of the band Stryper is still pinned to the wall and her tombstone carries a verse from the Old Testament book of Isaiah from which the group derived its name.

Sitting in the living room of her home the other day, Irma Vasquez showed pictures of her daughter, photos that produced a stream of memories.

“She had braces,” she said after looking at one snapshot, “she wouldn’t want to smile, she’d cover her teeth. She was real particular about her hair. She might be saying, ‘Oh no, but my hair is messed up in that one.’ ”

Raquel was especially close to her brother, who often presented her with pets, sometimes strays, her mother said.

“She always loved animals. She wanted to be a veterinarian just so she could take care of animals,” her mother said. Once a dog George brought home got sick and Raquel “would sit out there in the back and hold it like a little baby,” she added. “She just cried when it died. She just loved animals. That’s how I think of her in heaven, taking care of probably the animals or taking care of little children.”

Although thoughts of Raquel are constantly present in her life, her mother said some times are especially poignant,

Last Christmas, for instance, she kept a promise she had made to Raquel.

“She had told me the last Christmas she was with us, ‘I wish we had a green Christmas tree with white doves,’ and I go, ‘Oh, maybe next year,’ ” Vasquez said. “So last year I put a green Christmas tree with white doves out at the cemetery.”

And on what would have been Raquel’s 17th birthday Jan. 31, there was a special ceremony held by family and friends, her mother said.

“For her birthday I bought a big birthday cake and we sang to her there . . . I took the cake to the cemetery and we sang ‘Happy Birthday’ and I gave everybody cake.”