March Takes Stand Against Gangs, Drugs : Southeast’s Residents Aim to Reclaim Area

The street corners are cluttered with drug dealers. The sidewalks are the turf of gang members. The schools and the parks and the playgrounds carry the ugly marks of gang graffiti. The yards are strewn with the litter of syringes, needles, glass and trash.

And bullet shells.

In Southeast San Diego, where five separate drive-by shootings left six people dead and six wounded last week, honest citizens fear the criminal has claimed their community.

But to fight back, they marched 200-strong Saturday morning, carrying signs and cardboard coffins and lifting song into the air through the heart of the neighborhood they yearn to save.

They marched out the door of the Urban League, 4261 Market St., and down the five blocks to a green expanse in Mount Hope Cemetery.

They were black and brown and white, rich and poor, community leaders and mothers on welfare. Yet their message was one.

Ramona Starr lost a friend, 17-year-old Anthony White, a performing arts student who was walking to school last April when he was felled in a drive-by shooting.

“Anthony was a good student,” she said. “He had excellent grades. He was very popular. He was on his way to school, to catch a bus to go to school, and he was killed instantly.”

35-Year Residents of Community

Peter Apostol is a small, 80-year-old man who with his wife raised their children in this community--their home for the past 35 years. But Apostol lives only three blocks from one of the drive-by shootings this week. His home is now a prison. He cannot leave at night, fearful for his wife, fearful for himself.

“I’m scared, but what can I do?” he asked. “I own my home, but I cannot sell it. We cannot move.”

J. V. Levett is raising two sons, now 13 and 7 years old. He brought the boys to the march so their eyes could see that there is hope beyond drugs and gangs.

“I must channel their interests into positive sources,” their father said. “I must show them we can combat the hurt created by gangs and drugs.”

At police headquarters, the hurt from gang warfare and drug dealing can be charted like the crime statistics stamped on a police blotter.

Lt. Bill Howell, a supervisor in the police gang detail, said a new team of uniformed officers and undercover detectives hit the streets in June after a spate of drive-by shootings prompted community demands for more police enforcement.

The police plan was to randomly stop suspected gang members walking the streets, to warn them of the dangers of their life styles, to urge them to change their ways. Howell said the effort is working.

Community Support

“When we’re out there talking to these punks, the community shows us their support,” he said. “People in cars will drive by and wave and smile and give us the thumbs-up.”

He said the detail has contacted more than 3,000 people, 75% of whom claimed to be gang members. He said 55 arrests were made, four vehicles impounded, and more than $1,000 has been seized.

“And lots of guns,” he said. “We’ve taken a lot of guns off the streets.”

He said police have not linked the shootings this week to gang activity, and detectives instead theorize that the drive-by gunfire may have been just random activity that began with over-excited Halloween revelers.

Gangs Despised

How long will the street police continue their anti-gang enforcement? “Forever,” Howell said. Like the community he works to protect, he despises his enemy.

“Gang members are like cockroaches,” he said. “They’re a bunch of small-time punk hoodlums. I mean, it doesn’t take a real brave man to lean out of the window of a moving vehicle and shoot at women and children.”

Capt. Jerry Sanders at the Southeast area patrol, said, “I, too, really hope this thing can get turned around.”

To illustrate the desperation of the situation, he told this story:

“About a month ago, I was out riding in the afternoon, and I noticed what I thought was a drunk in a parking lot at 38th and National. The guy had been shot in the head. It was 3 o’clock on a Friday afternoon and there was a crowd standing around the body. And the crowd included little kids.

“So I can empathize with the feelings of the parents about the safety of their children. Kids are inquisitive and curious, and I’d hate to see anyone become hardened to these kinds of things at such a young age.”

Back at Mount Hope Cemetery, the marchers gathered around the 23 cardboard coffins, painted black and attached with paper skull-and-crossbones drawings. Each coffin represented each drive-by murder victim this year.

The group prayed and sang, and there were speeches.

Mayor Maureen O’Connor and Councilman Wes Pratt unveiled a plan in which elected officials will stand on street corners and show their support for the community and their disgust for the gang violence.

A group of police officers was cheered and applauded when Herb Cawthorne told the crowd that while individual officers “make mistakes and misjudgments from time to time, that doesn’t come close to the number of times each day that they risk their lives for our safety.”

And Cawthorne, president and chief executive officer of the Urban League of San Diego, encouraged the community to march every Saturday as long as the drive-by slayings continue.

“We’ve got to do more to take back our community,” he screamed, his voice rising over the noise of traffic on Market Street and the jumbo jets approaching Lindbergh Field from above.

“When you see your friends who couldn’t come here today because they wanted to play basketball or because they wanted to watch Notre Dame or because they had something else to do, you tell them you were here and that you’re going to be here the next Saturday somebody gets killed.”

Tells of Hope

In the crowd, Betty Wells, mother of three, said that like the emotion that the name of the cemetery invokes, there is hope for those who live in her community. She raised her children to be drug-free and safe on a block where other parents could not or would not draw their teen-agers away from the lure of gangs and drugs.

“I’ve never had a problem, thank God,” she said. “I got involved with my children. I went to their Little League games. I watched over them. And I’ve lived right smack in the middle of all the peer pressure that causes youths to be gang members and sell drugs.”

So there is hope, too, for all of her community, as the Rev. George Walker Smith noted when he led the marchers in a closing prayer.

“Let us liberate our senior citizens, our children and all our citizens from this degradation of fear,” he said.