Vicious Circle : Decades-Old Gang Warfare Plagues Residents of Orange County Barrios

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

Earlier this month, 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 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.

The Sept. 17 shooting left two dead and six wounded, Rendon’s son among them. While authorities are calling it 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 that 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.

Richard Rendon, 26, had stopped by a La Bonita Street home on Saturday, Sept. 17, to pick up some friends for a drive-in movie--”Lethal Weapon II.”

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.

Santa Ana Barrios

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 Sept. 17.

“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 the 5th Street neighborhood, residents brace 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.

Last 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 Catholic icons and three generations of baby pictures, and they 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.

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 wanna-bes off the street if only they wanted to.

Weekend Incarceration

“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. Cabrera keeps them there to stop bullets.

Next door, 71-year-old Virgil Coursey shows a visitor three fresh bullet holes in the aluminum siding on his stucco house. His barbecue grill, left outside, looks 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.

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.

Narrow Escape

Smokey Navarro, killed in the Sept. 17 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.

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

Richard Rendon’s shattered leg was amputated last week at Fountain Valley Regional Hospital. When Robert and Petra Rendon returned to the 16th Street home after visiting him one day last week, 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 Rendon 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.”