Garden Grove, Santa Ana Violence : Neighbors Await Next Spasm of Gang War

Thirteen years ago, Robert Rendon’s brother was murdered in a gang shooting on Rosita Place in Garden Grove.

Last week, around the corner on La Bonita Street, Rendon’s 26-year-old son lost a leg in another drive-by shooting.

“We’re strong people, but this takes a lot out of you,” said Rendon, 54, a carpenter who grew up and raised eight sons in the neighborhood, which straddles Westminster Avenue--also called 17th Street--and includes a few blocks of both Santa Ana and Garden Grove.

As a child, Rendon ran barefoot through orange groves. Then the trees were replaced by small stucco and wooden houses, and the 17th Street gang started claiming the streets. In the last decade, Rendon has seen those homes defaced by the gang’s graffiti and laced with bullets.

Last weekend, Rendon’s neighborhood erupted in violence: two killed, including a 4-year-old and a teen-ager, and six wounded, Rendon’s son among them. While authorities are calling the shooting one of the worst outbreaks of Latino gang violence in county history, it is also only the latest incident in a decades-old cycle of intermittent turf warfare that barrio residents and police alike have been unable to stop.

“We want to see peace,” Rendon said. “I wish we could do something about it. But that’s like me hitting the lottery.”

Anthony Balandran, Rendon’s half-brother, was 24 when he stopped by a friend’s house on Rosita Place for a beer. That was 1976, and the term “drive-by shooting” hadn’t entered the American lexicon.

The triggerman later confessed he “had a score to settle and that he wanted to shoot down some people at 17th Street,” court documents show. The intended target wasn’t there and lived to testify, but Tony Balandran died.

“He wasn’t a gang member, and neither was my son,” Robert Rendon said.

A week ago Saturday, Richard Rendon, 26, had stopped by a La Bonita Street home to pick up some friends and head out to a drive-in movie--”Lethal Weapon II.”

“I told him, if you go, watch out, because sometimes Friday they come shoot there, sometimes Saturday they come shoot there,” said his mother, Petra Rendon, 53. “He even told me, ‘Don’t worry Mom, I’ll be all right.’ ”

When the gang arrived at dusk bearing assault rifles, 4-year-old Frank Fernandez Jr. and 17-year-old gang member Miguel (Smokey) Navarro III were killed, and Richard Rendon and five others were wounded.

Although 13 years separated the attacks, they are both believed to have been carried out by members of the rival 5th Street gang.

Less than a mile to the south, on the turf that 5th Street claims, Virgil Coursey watches television at night with a newspaper on his knees. But the news hardly occupies his attention. He merely uses the paper to cover the .357 Magnum he keeps nestled on his lap.

When the 17th Street gang comes “mad doggin’ “--looking for trouble--on 5th Street, it matters little that Orange County suffers only about a dozen gang homicides a year, contrasted with 452 last year in Los Angeles County. Coursey and his wife dive for cover.

Traditionally, most Orange County gang killings take place in the barrios of Santa Ana, a city of 230,000. Almost half of its residents are Latino, many of them second- and third-generation Mexican-Americans.

Gangs have warred in Santa Ana and other cities in Orange County with deeply rooted Chicano populations--such as La Habra and Fullerton--for decades. As the gangs have become better armed in recent years, residents say, their violence has intensified.

Former members of both gangs interviewed last week said the 17th Street gang has existed in various forms for at least 30 years. The 5th Street Rulers surfaced about 20 years ago. One 5th Street gang member, who declined to be named, said the feud between the two gangs began about 15 years ago, when a 17th Street member was repeatedly stabbed in a brawl at a party on 5th Street.

But it was the 1976 drive-by shooting in which Tony Balandran was killed that cemented the enmity between the two gangs, he said, beginning a cycle of hits and pay-backs that broke out again last week.

Bad Blood Before

“There was bad blood before, but after that it really got bad,” the gang member said.

“Everything started after what happened at my brother’s,” agreed Gloria Zamora, 49, sister of Joe Zamora, whose home was the site of the 1976 attack. “After that, he moved out. He said he didn’t want his kids growing up here.”

But Joe’s sister, Anita Zamora Fernandez, married and stayed in the house on La Bonita Street where she was born. It was outside her home that her 4-year-old grandson, Frank Fernandez Jr., and Smokey Navarro were killed.

Despite the history of gang violence, the slaying of a 4-year-old boy came as a shock.

“Gang members deserve everything they get,” said the wife of a former gang member. “But when it comes to innocent little kids who get shot for no reason, that’s different.”

In both the 5th Street and 17th Street neighborhoods, there was an eerie quiet last week. Some people found it more menacing than the gunfire they say they hear nearly every weekend.

“It’s too quiet,” said Kandy Kirker, 17, pointing past her 16th Street home to the spot where young men and women usually meet.

“It feels like something’s going to happen,” said her mother, Margaret Kirker.

A few blocks south in the 5th Street neighborhood, residents were bracing for retaliation by the wounded 17th Street gang.

Two days after the killings, a 40-year-old mother of two put her 5th Street house in escrow and started packing to move to Riverside.

“I’m leaving while we’re all still alive,” the woman said. She said she was afraid to give her name.

On Thursday, Irene and Frank Fernandez buried their 4-year-old son, Frank Jr., on a hilltop in Orange. After the funeral, two dozen relatives drifted in and out of Anita Fernandez’s battered stucco home in the 17th Street area.

They sat in a tiny living room whose smudged plywood walls were covered with three generations of baby pictures and Catholic icons and talked about how life in the Santa Ana barrios had changed.

Old-timers fondly recalled the late 1930s, when zoot-suiters came from all over Orange County to the El Rancho Alegre dance hall on the corner of Euclid and 17th streets and settled any differences outside with their fists.

More Peaceful Days

Their children, now in their 30s and 40s, talked about more peaceful days when knives still outnumbered guns and shootings were a one-on-one affair.

One of Frank Jr.’s uncles, who said he ran with a gang until he married at 18, insisted that the police could keep young gang members and younger would-be gang members off the street if only they wanted.

“They used to pull me over on a Friday night, lock my butt up,” said the 33-year-old man, “just to keep me off the street. I would say, ‘What’s the charge?’ They’d say, ‘We’ll drum something up on the way over.’ And Monday morning they’d let me go.”

While the veteranos spoke of stopping the violence, the dead boy’s 19-year-old aunt, Irene Fernandez, talked of the 17th Street gang’s revenge.

“Nothing can stop them,” the slain boy’s aunt said. “What they (5th Street) did, that was no respect. They did it with family around. They should have done it where there was no little kids.”

What if the 17th Streeters kill another child when they take their revenge?

Irene Fernandez stared back defiantly.

“I hope it’s one of theirs,” she said.

Phyllis Cabrera keeps five sleek Chevies parked alongside her 5th Street house.

The 1931 truck is a prized antique. The ’65 looks like a tribute to the glories of American auto-making.

Cabrera keeps them there to stop bullets.

An ordinary Saturday night brings 5th Street Rulers out into the street to “kick it”--hang out, play loud music and drink beer. At such times, residents say, rival gang cars are liable to appear without warning, “mad doggin’ ” down Euclid Street with guns drawn. Sometimes they barrel down 5th Street, fire off several rounds, and make a screeching, 90-degree turn onto Maxine Street.

Smokey Navarro, killed in last weekend’s shooting, barely escaped 5th Street vengeance during one such escapade three months ago, according to several families who said they witnessed the incident. When Navarro tried to negotiate the 90-degree turn, the axle on his Toyota Celica broke, and he and two friends were forced to abandon the car and flee, neighbors said.

Using crowbars, baseball bats and steel pipes, the 5th Street Rulers pounded the Toyota into scrap metal.

Phyllis Cabrera claims the 17th Street gang shot her nephew, “Speedy,” in the stomach two weeks ago, a charge the 17th Streeters deny. Police said they are looking into several recent shootings as possible triggers for the Saturday night drive-by spree that killed Smokey Navarro.

Bullet Ended Dream

Cabrera said Speedy had planned to join the Army, but a bullet still lodged two inches from his heart has ended that dream.

“I would say, ‘Mi hijo, if you do that, I would be the happiest person around,” Cabrera said.

Next door to Cabrera’s Spanish-style home, 71-year-old Virgil Coursey shows a visitor three fresh bullet holes in the aluminum siding on his stucco house. Another bullet had pierced the screen of a room where his grandchildren sometimes sleep, hitting an old sewing machine.

His barbecue grill, left outside, looked like a sieve.

“Not a weekend passes without shooting,” said his wife, Ruby. “When it happens, we fall on the floor.”

The 70-year-old woman demonstrated her technique for bellying down, arms cradling her face. They usually dive for cover in the den, she said, because it offers the best protection.

Coursey won the land for their house in a poker game 40 years ago, when a losing player offered to trade the plot at 5th and Maxine streets, sight unseen, for $500. Back then, Coursey said, it was a safe neighborhood. Now, he tells the story of a Vietnamese family who packed up and moved the day after their house was fired on by gang members.

Still, the Courseys refuse to leave.

“It’s really too difficult to start all over again at this age,” he said.

The fence across the street is smothered with gang graffiti. It proclaims: Controla Varrio Calle Cinco Rifa. Fifth Street Gang Rules.

It starts with a murmur and builds to a howl, the praying and weeping at Marty Cruz’s Wednesday night Bible study class in Santa Ana. Cruz, 33, once belonged to the 17th Street gang. Now a Pentecostal, he is trying to counsel young gang members to get out.

Cruz started with the gang at 12. Beer. Tattoos. Dope. Later, Kool cigarettes laced with PCP. When things got “hot” on the Garden Grove side of the line, the gang brothers would move over to Santa Ana.

Cruz was 17 when a friend was paralyzed from the waist down in the 1976 drive-by shooting that killed Tony Balandran.

“He went to Vietnam, he made it through, and then he comes back and gets shot in the back by some kid,” Cruz said.

Protect His Son

It wasn’t until he became addicted to cocaine and found himself sleeping in his truck that he found Jesus, says Cruz. Now, he wants to shield his 12 year-old son, Marty Jr., from the temptations of gang life. “My son doesn’t know anything about gang-banging,” Cruz said.

But at the boy’s school, Doig Junior High in Garden Grove, the High Times gang makes its presence known, he said.

“They’re just young kids, man, but they already have an attitude,” Cruz said.

Some of the young gang members, he said, are the children of drug dealers and gang members he once knew.

Cruz’s Bible study group leader, Ralph Fuentez, 33, said the F-Troop gang he once belonged to was every bit as violent as today’s gangs, just not as well armed.

“We were one of the violentest ones,” he said. “We thrived on it. We lived for that. We were going to get attention, one way or another. We were going to get respect.”

Fuentez had been out of the gang for years when he turned to the church for forgiveness, because, he said, “I felt guilty.”

Richard Rendon’s shattered leg was amputated last week at Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center. When Robert and Petra Rendon returned to the 16th Street home after visiting him Wednesday, they sat in their living room and wondered aloud how anyone could fire point-blank into a crowd.

“These kids, they don’t have a family, they don’t understand,” Robert Rendon said.

Like the Coursey and Fernandez families, the Rendons say they will not move, despite fears that the violence will begin anew as soon as the extra police patrols disappear from the streets.

The Rendons’ home, which Robert Rendon remodeled himself, is peaceful and immaculate. Outside, the lawn is perfectly trimmed, and flowers and trees are blooming behind a chain-link fence. He pointed down the block to where some gang graffiti had recently been painted over.

“We just want people to know that all the people in this neighborhood, we’re not bad,” he said. “We don’t like this garbage.”