Anti-Gang Battle Cry : Crime: A member of a Santa Ana task force responds to the three weekend shootings by launching an organization to unite local families against violence.

An outraged community activist stepped forward Tuesday to announce that he is forming a grass-roots group to combat the kind of bloody gang violence that swept through the city over the weekend.

Michael Salgado, 28, a member of the Mayor’s Task Force on Neighborhood Policing and a lifelong Santa Ana resident, said he and his wife, Veronica, have launched Parents Against a Gang Environment to bring local families together in a search for solutions.

“Too many kids are dying and the future of Santa Ana is dying with them,” Salgado declared.

As police investigators scrambled for leads in three weekend shootings that killed two people and seriously wounded two others, including an 8-year-old boy, Mayor Daniel H. Young embraced a draft of recommendations from the task force on policing, which calls for more gang investigators and an additional city attorney to prepare anti-gang ordinances.

“The recent rash of violence has been tragic,” Young said. “We have to beef up (the Police Department’s) gang detail and increase support in fighting these gangs.

“This tragedy has affected the whole city,” Young continued. “It’s discouraging and depressing and we have to respond as aggressively as possible.”

Gang experts from the Orange County district attorney’s office say the weekend killings have already made 1990 the county’s worst year for gang-related homicides. Although prosecutors on Tuesday were unable to provide a precise number, the county’s 22 police agencies and the Sheriff’s Department reported that at least 16 killings--the same as last year’s record--are due to gang activity.

Santa Ana Councilman Richards L. Norton agreed Tuesday that more gang officers should be added to the city’s 351-member Police Department.

“We have so few cops on the streets, these gangs think they can run the whole show,” Norton said. “We have to go back on the John Wayne approach and show these gangs they aren’t on top.”

Manuel Pena, chairman of the Hispanic Affairs Advisory Committee to the Police Department, described the recent rash of gang violence simply as “terrible.”

“We’re shooting our own people,” Pena said. “We need to become more involved in what’s going on. The community has to realize it’s our problem and we can’t let someone take care of it for us. That’s not letting the police off the hook, but we’ve got to pull together.”

The Mayor’s Task Force on Neighborhood Policing, with 19 members including Salgado, was formed last year to examine problems caused by drugs, homelessness and deteriorating neighborhoods, as well as by gangs.

But the task force’s primary recommendation is to add more positions to the police gang detail. Four investigators are currently assigned to the unit, which keeps watch over an estimated 60 gangs with 7,000 gang members, according to officials.

The task force also called for hiring a ninth deputy city attorney to write laws that would require parents and first-time gang offenders to attend counseling, and hold parents of gang members financially responsible for the actions of their children.

“We’ve had parents keep on denying that their children are in gangs,” Young said. “We need the parents to confront children to get them out of the gangs.”

Salgado, a member of the task force’s gang subcommittee, said he decided to try to organize parents after hearing about last weekend’s violence.

“I realized there was nothing here in Orange County which would help the problem,” said Salgado, father of two children and a resident of a gang-plagued east side neighborhood. “It’s about time somebody did something.”

Orange County social service officials applauded Salgado’s action.

“I think it’s a great idea,” said Colleene Hodges, supervising probation officer for the county’s gang-violence suppression unit. “For these people living in Santa Ana, they’re going to need to band together and do something to make a statement to their kids.”

Vickie Plevin, a human relations specialist for the Orange County Human Relations Commission, said a solution to the gang problem can only come through shared responsibility among those who come into contact with children.

“The community, the schools and the parents have to work together because no one part of that equation is going to solve the problem,” Plevin said. “It has to be everybody.”

Plevin added that the horror of the area’s gang problem really struck home for her upon hearing about 8-year-old Carlos Alvarez, who was shot in a drive-by attack on his West Lingan Lane home Sunday night and remained in serious condition Tuesday. According to the boy’s mother, he had lived in fear of gang violence for much of his young life.

“Just thinking of a little 8-year-old living with that kind of fear breaks your heart, and what does he get for his fear but a bullet in his stomach,” Plevin said.

Salgado said his parents group will be patterned after Concerned Parents in East Los Angeles, which organized 15 years ago when similar gang violence broke out in Latino neighborhoods there.

The number of gang shootings dropped off after neighborhood mothers began confronting and talking with gang members, said Helen Sanchez, a founding member of Concerned Parents who is employed in the California Youth Authority’s gang violence reduction project. Sanchez explained that Latino children, whether gang members or not, tend to retain respect for their mothers, if no one else.

“We still have gangs, but they’re not nearly as violent as they used to be,” Sanchez said Tuesday. “I hope Santa Ana can have similar success.”

Salgado, who works as a warehouse supervisor, said he is calling on parents of both gang victims and current gang members to join in weekly meetings at his home. The forum will encourage parents who have lost children to gang violence to share their pain so that other parents can learn to avoid similar tragedies.

Among other things, Salgado said, parents can help by being careful about whom they let their children associate with, and by making sure that their children stay off the streets at night. In both of last weekend’s fatal shootings, the victims were teen-agers out past 10 p.m.

Salgado said parents can also look for warning signs that their children are involved in gangs. Notice, he said, if they start wearing gang clothing or flashing hand signs that show gang affiliation.

Salgado said that when he was looking recently at his daughter’s yearbook from Grant Elementary School, he was saddened to see pictures of several children making the hand signals of neighborhood gangs.

“These children have no choice but to see gangs (because) we’re in the heart of gang territory,” Salgado said. “But I want them to know there’s another kind of life out there besides these criminals.”

Times staff writers Davan Maharaj and Maria Newman contributed to this report.