Boy Shot Down in the Street; It Was No Contest

Rafi Pereda worked hard for his muscles.

He kept his weights next to the TV set at home, pumping iron and watching his heroes on the Saturday morning wrestling shows. And when he beat a kid--a bigger kid--in a fistfight, he noted it on his calendar at home: “March 7. Got into fight with another guy, 8:30.”

It upset his girlfriend, Sonia Morales, who had tried to break it up. So Rafi promised Sonia it would be his last fight. It was.

The Tuesday night set-to that killed Rafael Pereda, 16, was no fight. It was a slaughter.

Five bullets is what the boys across the street counted. They hit the ground when they heard the shots fired from a handgun wielded by somebody in the Chevy that sped away. When they looked up, Rafi Pereda was dying in the Wilmington street.

At least one bullet pierced his chest, at about the spot where he sometimes wore a medal he won in track. Another bullet, his mother said, cut through his hand as he threw his arms up in a last fighter’s pose to ward off the shots.

Rafael Pereda was walking home Tuesday night from Holy Family Catholic Church in Wilmington, from the second night of a weeklong Lenten youth dialogue.

Headed for Home

He had not stayed for the whole two hours, and he was halfway home and crossing McFarland Avenue when the car pulled up and someone blasted him. His neighbor, Saul De la Mora, 14, ran across the street and called Rafael’s name, but he was already near death. One hand lay in a fist on his chest.

As far as police or family or friends can say, Rafael Pereda had nothing to do with any of the gangs that divvy up the turf of Wilmington. Three young men have been killed there in the last three months.

“It looks like he was just a victim,” Detective Kim Wierman said. “We can’t find anywhere where he was a gang member. He was walking home from church. It appears that some gang members drove by and shot at him, thinking he was possibly an East Side Wilmas gang member.”

Their graffiti--EAST SIDE WILMAS GANG!--screams in yard-high white letters across a patch of asphalt a block from where Rafael Pereda died.

Rafi was the second of Rafael Sr. and Alicia Pereda’s six children. In the room he shared with three other siblings, the shelves were full. So he had pestered his mother to put up a shelf in the living room to display his cross-country trophies and plaques and medals.

They cannot think why it was their son. There are bad cholos who fight and carouse in the park up the street, but his father, shaking his head, said that “of this, we don’t know any truth, why it happened . . . nothing, nothing. You can’t manage to understand it.”

Sure, Rafael “liked to fight, but with the hands,” and then over “personal things,” said his father, and always after school. Maybe he sulked when his father, a construction worker, made him toe the line about going out a lot. He wouldn’t always talk to his parents about his problems, his mother lamented, but he behaved himself.

They bought him the telescope he asked for last Christmas, and he took it outside at night to stargaze. He helped build the doghouse for Spike, their German shepherd, and decorated it in red, with the masks of comedy and tragedy, and wrote under them, “Smile now” and “Cry later.”

He especially liked his drafting class. “He liked school,” said girlfriend Sonia, 14. “Sometimes I would bitch (about school) and he’d tell me not to.”

At the corner where Rafael died, and where the blood still lay in dark patches on the road Wednesday, some local girls were talking about all the kids they know who are dead.

“Rafi, he knows everybody--he’s like a good kid, not the guys who go around shooting people. . . . He didn’t get into no drugs, went to school every day, went to church,” said Denise Anderson, 15.

She has lived around here much of her life, and knows that if someone comes up and asks you where you are from, you are wise to answer, simply, “Nowhere.”