San Gabriel Valley Hears the Shooting : Gangs: From Pasadena to Pomona, drive-by violence has exploded across the suburban landscape. But numbers don’t tell the whole story.

The tiny yellow house near the Pomona railroad tracks was to be Marie Rodriguez’s refuge from gang life.

The month before, she and her two young children had gone to stay there with a friend, leaving behind her husband and, she hoped, the violent rivalries that have plagued the city for generations.

But on the morning of Feb. 13, as the 23-year-old snack bar employee was helping clean house, she discovered how difficult it is to flee a war in which anyone can be considered fair game.

In a scene played out nearly every day somewhere in the San Gabriel Valley, a car passed slowly by, a gang name was shouted out and several rounds from a shotgun were pumped into the bungalow. The apparent target: a rival gang member who had come over to offer use of his vacuum cleaner.

Instead, the lead pellets tore into the head of Rodriguez’s son, Daniel, a Little League baseball player who had celebrated his seventh birthday just weeks earlier. Also hit was Olga Perez, 23, the friend who had given them a place to stay. Perez survived but Daniel died after four days in intensive care.

“I left . . . to get away from this,” Rodriguez said as she waited that first night in the hospital. “I just want it to stop.”

From Pasadena to Pomona, Altadena to Claremont, drive-by shootings have exploded across the suburban tracts east of Los Angeles.

In cities where gang attacks were rare 10 years ago, the drive-by reached record proportions in 1989. Pasadena, for instance, was so hard hit that officers for the first time began keeping a daily tally of the shootings, the only San Gabriel Valley police department to do so.

By year’s end, the number had reached a staggering 108--at least a 50% rise over the previous 12 months.

In many other communities where long-standing gang rivalries had fizzled over the last decade, the drive-by returned with a vengeance. Baldwin Park logged 68 such shootings last year. The Industry area, including La Puente and Valinda, had more than 50, and tiny San Gabriel recorded 11.

To a large extent, those figures reflect a rise in gang activity throughout Los Angeles County, where gang-related homicides have gone up 23%, from 452 murders in 1988 to 554 in 1989.

But numbers alone don’t tell the story of what happens when bullets fly indiscriminately, turning innocent bystanders, both young and old, into victims.

Although drive-by shootings are usually intended as retaliation against rival gang members--not as random violence--someone other than a rival gang member gets hit 20% to 50% of the time, according to various law enforcement estimates.

“Basically, they’re not very discriminating as to who they shoot,” said Pasadena Police Sgt. Monte Yancey. “And they don’t seem to have much of a conscience.”

As a result of drive-by shootings in 1989, a middle-aged Monterey Park woman was hit in the face by stray shotgun pellets while waiting for a bus, a 35-year-old Pasadena man was wounded as he stood in line next to two gang members at a hamburger stand, and three young Pomona men, ages 20, 18 and 17, were killed on a street corner, allegedly by gang members upset that they wouldn’t join the gang.

A 12-year-old Rosemead boy was shot in the leg and thigh as he chatted with a friend in his driveway. Two high school football players from Baldwin Park were wounded, allegedly by gang members who mistook their car for that of a rival. And 21-year-old Michael Carrillo, a former San Gabriel resident who had moved to Missouri, was killed by shotgun blasts to the face and chest last September during a visit back to the community where his parents still live.

Carrillo was not a gang member, police say, but had been outside talking with old friends on a street that another gang considered rival turf.

“Just another case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said San Gabriel Police Detective Kenneth Butler. “He wasn’t even dressed like a gangbanger. He was wearing these little shorts and could have easily fit in with a bunch of kids at a party on Huntington Beach.”

Things were not like this before.

Those who work closely with gang members say there has been an erosion of respect in recent years, a willingness to commit violent acts that even hardened gangbangers had previously considered unacceptable.

The reasons, say counselors and probation officers, include a new generation of smaller cliques that don’t play by the rules of the older gangs, and the emergence of immigrant gangs from Mexico and Central America without ties to the traditions of longtime Chicano gangs.

In addition, they point to the lawlessness engendered by the growth of the rock cocaine trade and a general sense among many of these youths that the line between right and wrong has been blurred by politics and warfare around the world.

“They see viciousness, duplicity and stealing all around them,” said Mike Duran, director of specialized youth services for the Los Angeles County Probation Department. “You tell me where people are honest with each other. The kids pick up on all these negatives and closely emulate them.

“It’s almost to the point of having to go back and retrain these guys,” Duran added. “Tell them, ‘Go ahead, be a gang member but . . . have some respect for yourself and people around you.’ ”

In Pomona, many look back to an April 3, 1987, shooting at Holy Cross Cemetery as the point at which things took a turn for the worse.

Four people, including two girls, were wounded when rival gang members opened fire on a crowd of several hundred mourners who had come to bury a young man gunned down in a drive-by shooting the week before.

Two months later, four more people were wounded when a gunman fired into a crowd of youths who had gathered in a park to view a movie promoting alternatives to gang violence.

As disturbing as those incidents were, 1989 ended up as Pomona’s most violent year ever, with 44 murders. Nineteen of the victims were killed in drive-bys, which numbered more than 100.

“If they kill a baby, they don’t care,” said Lt. Chuck Brantley, who works in the sheriff’s anti-gang program, Operation Safe Streets. “They feel no remorse. They’re doing what they were brought up to believe is right. In their own minds, they’re soldiers.”

Others, however, say the emotions are more complex. The fatal shooting last month of 7-year-old Daniel Rodriguez, for instance, troubled many people in the Cherrieville community, home to the gang member suspected of committing the murder, said Rudy Gutierrez, who grew up in the neighborhood and now works with high-risk youths at Fremont Junior High School in Pomona.

“Nobody liked that Daniel got hit,” Gutierrez said. “Some might not say anything, because they’ve been conditioned to think, ‘Well, he just got in the way.’ But they’re still human. They still hurt.”

He applauded the mother whose 16-year-old boy is suspected of the shooting for turning her son in to police the next day. “I thought that was pretty noble, myself,” Gutierrez said. And he praised the boy, whose name was not released because of his age, for accepting her rule.

But police rarely get that kind of cooperation. Drive-by shootings are among the most difficult crimes to solve, officers say.

Even if there are witnesses, many are afraid to testify for fear of retaliation. And if gang members are wounded, even critically, they frequently refuse to provide police with any information about their assailants.

“There’s been times when a guy’s been shot and he’s in the hospital and we’ve explained to him, ‘You may die,’ ” said Baldwin Park Police Lt. Michael Bennett. “And they always say, ‘I’ll take care of it myself, or if I don’t live, my home boys will take care of it.’ ”

It is a culture, though, that has left many San Gabriel Valley communities untouched. More than half a dozen cities in the region had no drive-by shootings last year, including San Marino, South Pasadena, Arcadia, Irwindale and La Verne.

To be sure, a few towns not known for major gang problems did suffer from drive-bys, including Monrovia with a dozen, Claremont with five and Glendora with one.

But, for the most part, the shootings were limited to low-income neighborhoods with large minority populations.

They are the kinds of neighborhoods where most gang members reside and the kinds of neighborhoods where most victims, whether from rival gangs or not, also live and die.

“What happens is these gangs stereotype their victims,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Dennis E. Ferris, who handles hard-core gang cases at the Pomona courthouse. “To them, any young black or Hispanic male in a rival neighborhood is fair game. You might say these guys are as much racists as anyone else.”