Tiny Victim of Drive-By Shooting Is Buried; Retaliation Feared

As more than 100 friends and relatives stood on a hilltop at Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in Orange on Thursday and gazed at 4-year-old Frank Fernandez Jr.’s small, silver casket, the boy’s mother leaned her head against her husband’s shoulder and wept.

Gently, he stroked the back of her neck.

“They’re taking it real hard,” said one of the baby’s aunts, who would not give her name. Frank Jr. was killed Saturday in a Garden Grove drive-by shooting that police have called one of the worst incidents of gang violence in Orange County history.

His mother, Irene Fernandez, still bore visible signs from the attack--a heavily bandaged arm--as she buried her son Thursday. Another son--2-year-old Christopher, who was also wounded in the attack--wandered at her feet during the service, the bandages on his chest covered by his shirt.

Thursday evening, about 120 friends and relatives gathered at the Westminster Mortuary Park and Cemetery for the wake of 17-year-old Miguel Lorenzo Navarro III. Navarro, a member of the 17th Street gang, was also slain Saturday when, according to police and witnesses, members of the rival 5th Street gang opened fire with automatic assault rifles on a few carloads of people about to go to a drive-in movie.

To prepare for Navarro’s funeral, his friends had special black sweat shirts printed. In the Old English-style script that gangs use when they spray-paint their monikers on walls and stores, Navarro’s friends had printed on the sweat shirts a tribute to their dead chum: “In memory of homeboy ‘Smokey.’ ”

During his sermon, Father Ed Poettgen of St. Barbara’s Catholic Church in Santa Ana, said he did not believe that the two deaths were God’s will.

“People make their own rules up about where they can and can’t shoot,” he said. “It’s not God’s rules.”

A funeral Mass for Navarro will be celebrated today at St. Barbara’s at 9 a.m., followed by burial in Westminster Memorial Park.

All told, two people were killed and six were wounded in the attack last Saturday.

In its wake, Santa Ana residents who share their neighborhood with the 5th Street gang believed responsible for the attack have braced themselves for a counterattack, and the mayors of Santa Ana and Garden Grove have called for a renewed effort to curb Orange County gangs.

The tension that has gripped both the 5th Street and 17th Street neighborhoods since the shooting was also apparent in the Holy Sepulcher Cemetery on Thursday. One cluster of mourners discussed the shooting in hushed tones, while young men with stony expressions stood near older men who wept.

One by one, mourners covered Frank Jr’s. casket with white and blue blossoms, then lined up to hug Irene and Frank Sr. One woman bent over to kiss the heads of the two surviving children--Christopher and his 6-year-old sister, Julieann.

As the crowd began to leave the cemetery, a woman asked the baby’s grandmother, Anita Fernandez, whether police were patrolling outside her home in the 13000 block of La Bonita Street, where the shooting took place.

Anita Fernandez said a police car has been parked on her corner each evening since the shooting.

“It’s not now that they should watch, but later,” the woman said. “What a nightmare.”

In an interview after the funeral, when friends and relatives gathered in the tiny, weathered stucco house where Anita Fernandez has lived for 41 of her 49 years, the grandmother of six said she worries that her home may once again become a target.

“For now, I know they will do nothing about it,” she said. “But once they see the police are not patrolling, that’s when I think something might happen.”

“My son is taking it hard,” she added. “He said he won’t be coming here again.”

She said the family has left matters in the hands of the police. But other family members questioned why police had not made an arrest in the shooting, which took place at dusk Saturday and was witnessed by a number of people. Without an arrest, they said, young members of the 17th Street gang are likely to retaliate soon.