A Dirge of Discouragement : Mother of Youth Who Wrote Gang Peace Treaty Can’t Afford Funeral

In the fall of 1986, a 17-year-old youth who called himself Do-Man--”because,” an acquaintance recalled, “he said he was a man who does things”--drafted a peace treaty in a heartfelt attempt to stop gang killings in his South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood.

Lee Johnson received a moment’s fame for his effort, but little more.

Today, the killing continues unabated, and Johnson’s body lies in a funeral home, his mother unable to pay for his funeral. When he collapsed and died two weeks ago--he had suffered from sickle cell anemia, but the precise cause of death has not been determined--Do-Man was just another disillusioned young man in South-Central.

“He had put his neck on the line,” his mother, Lois Jean Johnson, said Monday. “And at the end he just felt alone. No one was at his side to help him.”

Her son liked to call himself a reformed Crip. In 1986, he was working in a summer job program sponsored by Community Youth Gang Services when an idea struck. Johnson and a handful of other former gang members, youths who had been enemies on the street but who now worked side by side, discovered that they had become friends.

“He said,” recalled Leon Watkins, a former CYGS official, “ ‘If we can get together here, we should be able to get together anywhere.’ And I said, ‘Why don’t you write it down?’ ”

He wrote what was in his heart, according to Watkins, who said the youth wanted to be a counselor and help young people. Johnson drafted a peace treaty between the Crips and Bloods, warring gangs in South-Central. And within a few weeks, the declaration of peace and mutual respect between gangs had a dozen signatures and nationwide attention.

The publicity created problems for Johnson with gang members whom he had once called his brothers. When newscasts mistakenly referred to him as a gang leader, said Watkins, it angered Do-Man’s compatriots on the streets, who said he did not represent them.

“All heck broke loose,” Watkins recalled. “He got beaten up, his mother got threatened, his house got shot up . . . (Friends) deserted him. He told me guys he was running with turned on him. He didn’t know who to trust.”

Became Disillusioned

Watkins said Johnson became disillusioned when he did not get a full-time job through the CYGS after the treaty signing: “All he wanted was to work . . . (but) after they wouldn’t hire him, (he) said he was just sick of it, that he did everything he was supposed to do.”

According to Steve Valdivia, executive director of CYGS, the agency did its best to find full-time jobs, although that was not one of the services offered at the time.

“We do the best we can to place them, but it’s not that easy to place former gang members,” Valdivia said.

Johnson’s mother said her son eventually put aside other schemes he had for combatting gang violence and got into trouble with the law. He did some jail time, she said, but she does not know why.

Final Dilemma

And two weeks ago, he collapsed in his front yard and died a couple hours later at a hospital.

His mother now is left with a final dilemma.

Do-Man’s body has been in a South-Central funeral home for a week, awaiting burial. She said she does not have the $1,862 needed to bury him. She promises there will be a funeral, but she doubts that the gang members and gang counselors who knew her son will attend.

It doesn’t matter, she said.

“All I know is I’ll be there.”