The Horror Hits Home : Urban Gang Violence May Seem Like a Distant Woe. Until It Strikes in Your Hometown. And Wrecks the Lives of People You Love.

The call jolted me awake at 4:15 a.m. Something was terribly wrong.

Only bad news comes in your sleep.

My mother was on the line in tears, trying to explain the senseless violence that had stricken my sister, Julia, and brother-in-law, Eduardo.

They were just one street from home when they had stepped into a den of devils.

Eduardo, my mother sobbed, had been fatally shot in the chest by suspected gang members in a terrifying night attack that my sister, miraculously, had survived. What had begun as a night of laughter, a celebration of my sister’s 34th birthday, had ended with tears.

And the sorrow would not stop.

Soon, I would go home to San Antonio to hear my sister re-create the 15 minutes of horror that she and her husband had experienced in three encounters with six or more teen-agers believed to be members of The Wrecking Crew. They call themselves that because they wreck houses and cars. And they also wreck lives.

I would walk the steps Eduardo took where he was gunned down. I would see for myself--on the pavement where he fell--the bloodstained outline of his head, shoulders and torso. Later, I would organize a memorial service and lay a wreath on that spot.

I would witness how my sister’s life had been shattered, how she can’t sleep at night because of the recurring nightmare that awakens her--her husband’s bloody arms reaching to hug her one last time.

I would see the fear etched on her children’s faces; they were afraid that someone, maybe a gang member, would sneak into their house and snatch them from their beds.

I would hear my sister tell the awful story over and over again--how she felt like a hunted animal running for dear life in the streets of my Texas hometown.

My sister’s world was spinning out of control. She was physically and emotionally hammered. Her face was ashen and puffy; her eyes were sunken and she could barely lift a glass of water to her lips. She didn’t know what to do next, whether to stay home or move out, whether to live in fear or face the challenge of confronting those fears. Adding to her pain, frustration and anger was knowing that the person who killed her husband was still out there. Somewhere.

It was at a July 4 picnic five years ago that Jesus Eduardo Garcia Sanmiguel danced my sister’s heart away. Julia, her two young children (from a previous marriage) and my mom had gone to Rosedale Park in southwest San Antonio to enjoy a Tex-Mex music festival.

During the next three years, their romance flourished. And my family readily accepted him because of his kindness toward my sister and her children, Julie, now age 13, and Lorenzo, 10.

Eduardo, a Mexican native, was the youngest of seven children. He had been in San Antonio since 1980 and worked many jobs--earning much more than the minimum $4 a day he was paid in Mexico. Regularly he sent money, along with small gifts, home to his parents.

He had been managing a meager life in San Antonio, sleeping on the floor of a sparsely furnished apartment shared with five other Mexican men, using rolled-up jeans as a pillow and his coat for a blanket.

Several times--before Eduardo gained legal status--he had been deported.

But, like his friends from his hometown of Sabinas (near Laredo) who sought their dreams in San Antonio, he would just return with more vigor and determination to make a better life for himself. This despite the often unkind treatment endured at the hands of employers, and sadly, sometimes of citizens.

Because of my sister’s friendship with this man from another country, another culture, she showed him that San Antonio was a beautiful city with caring people.

“I wanted him to know that not everyone stereotyped him or his people as ‘wetbacks,’ ” my sister said. “He was a decent, hard-working man. His dream was to become a naturalized citizen.”

And to marry my sister.

On Dec. 29, 1987, Eduardo and Julia exchanged wedding vows in English and Spanish at the county courthouse, my sister’s children--in their Sunday best--present at the ceremony. Soon, Eduardo sent for his folks to meet his bride and the stepchildren he loved as his own.

Eventually, my sister and the kids made a trip to Eduardo’s hometown--about 300 miles away--in a dented 1976 Buick Skylark, a clunker given to him in exchange for a month of repairs to an elderly man’s house.

“They were inseparable,” said my younger sister, Becky, whom Eduardo affectionately nicknamed Chata, meaning tiny one. “They did everything together, even if it was to go get gas in the car or buy a newspaper. And they loved taking the kids to the drive-in.”

Eduardo, who never made it beyond the seventh grade, was a man of many self-taught trades: carpenter, cement finisher, auto mechanic, yardman. Often he had more work than he could handle.

But he was grateful for that, he told me during a visit home four months ago. There were always bills to pay. The kids needed new sneakers, the Skylark--his idea of success in the United States--needed new upholstering and my sister had her eye on kitchen gadgets.

Before he died, the kids got their shoes, he and my nephew re-upholstered the Skylark in blue tweed and Julia got her blender and Crock-Pot.

Everyone who knew Eduardo also knew about the dream house and furniture he bragged about building one day. With his hands he would construct beds, tables, cabinets with beveled glass doors. The house would have four bedrooms, a huge kitchen and a big garage for the Skylark.

He could see it all.

But he never would because of some vicious teen-agers and a single shotgun blast.

When I arrived home to help my sister, she had lost her voice. My mother told me it was from the screaming and hysteria Julia had experienced for almost a week after Eduardo’s death. Her grief and guilt, because Eduardo was killed on her birthday, had left her emotionally exhausted.

But finally, after four days of communicating with a pad and pen, Julia got her voice back, and we went to the street where she and Eduardo were stranded that night.

My sister and her husband, and several of their friends, had been celebrating at a neighborhood night spot less than a mile from their house. They were driving home with another couple, friends who suddenly got in an argument and pulled the car to the side of the road.

Julia and Eduardo, back-seat passengers, didn’t want any part of it so they got out, thinking the argument soon would be settled. But moments later, the driver--a woman--sped off, leaving my sister, brother-in-law and the driver’s boyfriend to walk home.

“We didn’t want to call anyone for a ride because it was so late already,” my sister said. The $1 in Eduardo’s pocket was not enough for a cab. Their stranded friend, who lived nearby, was headed for home and promised to return to give them a ride. His parting words were “I’ll be back,” my sister said.

But he never returned. So Julia and Eduardo walked. They were unafraid because the street was well lit, and besides, they were in their own neighborhood--a low-to-middle-income, mostly blue-collar community.

They were almost home, less than a 20-minute walk.

Then, out of nowhere, danger struck.

“Suddenly two boys--one behind Eduardo and one behind me--came up to us,” my sister said.

“One of the boys hit me on the hip and I began yelling.”

A police officer nearby heard my sister.

“I told the officer, ‘We’re just walking home.’ And I remember the officer said, ‘OK, go on. Keep walking. Go home.’ And we kept walking and those two teen-agers remained there with the officer,” my sister recalled.

The officer then drove away; he was dispatched to a major accident, which proved to be a prank call, followed by a disturbance, both in the area. But before he left, according to police reports, he told the two boys to take a different route home.

They didn’t.

“Eduardo and I could hear them laughing at us, making fun of us, saying that the officer didn’t do anything to them,” my sister said.

She and Eduardo picked up their pace. They were too scared to look over their shoulders. They kept walking, now faster, hand in hand.

They turned onto an unlit street hoping to outsmart the teen-agers whose voices had faded. They were a few streets from home.

In the darkness, two other teen-agers emerged.

In Spanish, in gang lingo, they asked Eduardo:

What’s happening? Where are you two going?

Eduardo replied:

No, nothing’s happening. We’re just walking home.

The youths started a fight, punching Eduardo as my sister looked on, horrified. When the teen-agers realized they were no match for Eduardo--a 160-pound, 5-foot-8 man--one youth whistled five times, fingers in his mouth, gang style.

“The whistles were a code, a signal for somebody in that gang to help those guys,” my sister said.

She and Eduardo ran wildly for their lives in a neighborhood maze of blocks, alleys and barking dogs.

More whistles echoed loudly in the streets.

My sister felt trapped with no place to escape as she ran past fenced front yards with locked gates. She tried to get the attention of a motorist by waving her purse.

“The car did stop,” but her legs were paralyzed with fear and she couldn’t move fast enough to ask for help, she recalled.

“Eduardo said, ‘Let’s turn here on this street!’ and I was thinking maybe he wants us to hide behind a bush.”

Then, he handed her a rock.

“He told me, ‘If they come near you throw this at them!’ ”

She could see a stick or a board in his hand he had picked from a trash pile.

Terror-stricken, my sister ran to a house. She busted the latch on the gate with the rock. “With that rock, I pounded and I pounded on the door, hollering, ‘Please, please call the police! Someone’s after us! Please help!’ ”

Lights switched on, but the woman on the other side of the door was too scared to open it.

Suddenly, my sister’s desperate screams were silenced by the thunderous sound of a shotgun blast.

“Eduardo!” she called out and ran to the street.

Her husband lay on his back, bathed in blood, his shirt sucked into a hole in his chest. He slowly raised his arms, which then fell to his side. His eyes closed. His breathing slowed.

Police officers patrolling the neighborhood heard the shot, raced to the scene and called an ambulance. As Eduardo was rushed to a nearby hospital, my sister rode with him, praying all the way.

Meantime, the officers interviewed neighbors who, from their windows, witnessed the shooting. They told investigators that two teen-agers came at Eduardo, encouraging him to fight. Eduardo took two steps toward them and apparently saw one of the teen-agers holding a sawed-off shotgun. Neighbors said Eduardo tried to knock the gun out of the teenager’s hands with the board he held, but the youth pulled the trigger. The teen-agers fled.

At 3:55 a.m., Sept. 24, Eduardo Sanmiguel, 27, was pronounced dead at Wilford Hall Air Force Medical Center.

Twenty minutes after Eduardo died, my mother and I were weeping on the phone.

As a former police beat reporter for a newspaper in San Antonio, I had covered countless violent crime stories and spoken to devastated families about their victimization. Now, unbelievably, my family was the victim. And, Eduardo, another statistic for police.

Now, I no longer felt exempt from danger.

None of us should.

In Los Angeles County, two people a day are killed in gang violence, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office reports. Half of them are innocent bystanders like my brother-in-law.

Last year, 342 people were killed by Southland gang members, who number as many as 70,000 in 600 separate Latino and black gangs.

This year, the death toll is expected to rise to 550 or more.

Nationally, gangs--fueled by the emergence, easy accessibility and low cost of crack cocaine--are fast becoming prevalent in cities once considered safe. Identity, protection and economic resources are other reasons youth--most of whom are dropouts, unemployed or from a dysfunctional family--join gangs.

The tragedy that struck my family knows no boundaries, has no limits. Disgust, helplessness and anger has engulfed me.

I am enraged at my sister’s friends for abandoning Julia and Eduardo, infuriated at the police for not ensuring their safety.

But most of all, I am mad at the boy who murdered Eduardo and devastated my sister’s life. I am mad at his parents. I am mad because he and other teen-agers who hang out in gangs make us hate them.

My family wants justice. We just may get it, though it will take time.

A 15-year-old Latino was arrested four days after I arrived in San Antonio. The district attorney’s office wants the teen-ager legally certified as an adult so he can be tried for murder. If that happens, he will be indicted and the case will go to court. It could take eight months or more before that happens.

But witnesses, my family and I are willing to wait for our day in court.

For now, my sister and her children rest a little better at night. So, too, do neighbors who have united in a crime watch group started after Eduardo’s death.

Like respectable, hard-working people everywhere, Julia and Eduardo’s neighbors simply want to live in peace--to be able to sit on a front porch without fear of taking a bullet from someone inside a passing vehicle, to leave home after sunset and not return to find televisions and videocassette recorders ripped off, and to sleep at night without being awakened by loud whistling and the thought of marauding youngsters outside their doors.

Courage has replaced a community’s fears.

And my sister’s.

“I was scared to come home,” she said after returning from burying Eduardo in Mexico, where she stayed with her in-laws for a week. “But we don’t want to live in fear.”

So she decided, at least temporarily, to stay rather than pull the kids out of school. And, bravely, she has returned to work as a substitute teacher in the same school attended by the suspect, a student she had taught.

We’ve made arrangements for various members of family and friends to stay at my sister’s home in the evenings until she moves out of the neighborhood--we hope in the next few weeks--and starts a new life elsewhere.

Still, it’s the nights that are the scariest. She fights the sleep. And the tears.

One late night, while I slept on a foam mattress on the floor next to my sister’s bed, I heard her weeping.

Days before, she had told me that she wanted to be strong for the children.

“If I cry, they cry and I don’t want to upset them,” she said. “I have a lot of feelings that I want to bring out because I am so angry and hurt. I want to holler and scream and pull my hair and beat my face and just cry.”

So she held back the tears until she could weep in private.

And, silently, I cried with her.

I remembered my mother sitting in the living room, staring out the front door, crying for Eduardo, for my sister. “I wish it had been me,” my mother said.

I remembered my sister, Linda, suddenly bursting into tears as she cooked because she knew Julia’s life without Eduardo would never be the same.

I remembered talking to Eduardo’s father, Concepcion Sanmiguel Gonzalez, a retired music teacher. The 70-year-old man fought back tears as we spoke on the phone about his son’s death.

“We’re frustrated because we cannot be there to know what is going on,” he said. “My son did not deserve to die this way. But the saddest thing of all is that whoever took my son’s life, could have had a friend for life.”

He was right.

Eduardo had no foes, only friends.

Even now, in death, he has united strangers to take a stand for what they believe is right.

Despite her loss, my sister has found some comfort in knowing Eduardo’s death is changing a community faced with a formidable fight: to reclaim its streets.

My sister also is moving on with her life.

She has let go of photographs of Eduardo she clutched to her chest. Slowly, she has stopped talking about imagining Eduardo standing by the stove or hearing the jingle of the Skylark’s keys.

Slowly, she has accepted that there will always be an empty place at the table, that her partner in dominoes will never return, that the funny guy who watched cartoons with the children is gone forever.

“I know I have to be strong because that’s how Eduardo would have wanted it,” she said. “I sit here and think, ‘My God, what am I going to do?’ And then God gives me the answer. I must go on with living. Life has to go on no matter how painful it is.”