He Had a Dream--but It Died on the Violent Streets

Alex Rivera, gunshot victim, was buried Tuesday in East Los Angeles. It was a simple graveside ceremony. Several hundred friends and relatives of the 16-year-old laid white carnations on his wooden coffin. His mother, sobbing, draped herself over the casket. His classmates hugged one another. Tough young men fought back tears.

In a sense, the scene was sadly common. Day after day, the city’s cemeteries absorb young victims of street violence. What made this burial different was not how the victim had died--gunned down on a freeway. What made it different was how he had lived.

By all accounts, Alex Rivera was a youngster who had taken extraordinary measures to escape a troubled home in the barrio. At age 13, he moved out and created his own life, moving into a tiny room behind a pet shop in Bell Gardens. Above his bed was a picture of his mother. Beside it was a knife he kept in case of intruders.

Alex attended Bell Gardens High School, and his teachers said that his 3.1 grade point average would have qualified him for college. He was a captain of the junior varsity football team, slotted to play linebacker on the varsity next season. He was elected sophomore class president. He shied away from gangs, preached against drugs. And he was fond of quoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Alex told people he had a dream--it was the vague stuff of teen-agers, changing society, practicing law, something important--and they believed he would attain it.

“Our lives will never be the same because (God) has touched us through Alex,” the Rev. Samuel Fernandez of the La Puerta Albierta Church in East Los Angeles told the mourners. “Yes, a young man . . . yes, a short life. . . . But also a full life.”

Said Alex’s uncle, John Huerta: “You’ve got one Alex in a sea of gang-bangers and drug addicts, striving to climb up the ladder of success and be a good person. And then somebody comes and snuffs out that life, snuffs it out just like a cigarette.”

Huerta and others said Alex was a role model for other kids, a quiet young man with a square jaw and a strong build. He was so disciplined that some of his friends called him “the marine.” And in fact he wanted to join the Marines as a way to become more a man, and also to finance his education.

Alex’s death has left people in East Los Angeles and Bell Gardens stunned and baffled. Sheriff’s deputies, who initially believed the shooting may have been gang-related, said Tuesday there is no evidence to support that theory.

“I think that he was an innocent victim,” Deputy Russell Uloth said. “There were no weapons in the car. . . . There is no evidence to indicate that any of them were gang members.”

According to authorities, the shooting occurred at 2 a.m. Monday, April 16.

Alex and five friends had been driving through Bell when another car carrying two men pulled alongside. Manual Albarran, a 17-year-old friend of Alex’s who was with him when he died, said the occupants of both vehicles “exchanged looks” while stopped at a red light. The occupants of the other car--a red Chevrolet Camaro--said something inaudible. Alex and his friends then drove onto the Long Beach Freeway. The Camaro followed.

“We didn’t even know they were following us,” said Albarran. “We were just talking. We heard the back window shatter and the sound a gun makes. We all ducked down.”

When Albarran and Alex looked up again, another shot was fired. This one hit Alex in the head. “He started screaming,” Albarran said. “I was holding him in my arms and I was telling him not to scare himself, that he was going to be all right.”

Alex died at County-USC Medical Center.

The death deeply troubled John McNichols, student activities director at Bell Gardens High School. McNichols said he and teachers who knew Alex had no idea that he was living on his own. He said he wished Alex had had someone to answer to, someone to make sure he was not out on the street at 2 a.m. on a school night.

“I get angry when I think about it because it didn’t have to be that way. There should be somebody that a 16-year-old needs to answer to,” he said.

If Alex had anyone to answer to, it was George King, a 57-year-old welder. The two met in 1984 at the First Southern Baptist Indian Church, where King ran a youth group called the Royal Ambassadors. At the time, 10-year-old Alex lived with his family in Bell Gardens. King recalled that the group was taking a trip to Death Valley, but that Alex didn’t have enough money to go.

“He came over to the church and he told me that he didn’t have $10 but he would help me around the church,” King said. “He worked with me one day and I told him that he had done $10 worth of work, he can go. But he didn’t go home.”

King said Alex rarely ate at home, and that “home” kept moving around, wherever Alex’s mother happened to be at the time. Alex spent part of the time with his mother, who eventually settled in East Los Angeles, and his grandmother, who lived in Bell Gardens. But as he grew older, he found himself frequently in King’s company.

Together, he and Alex established the pet shop where Alex lived. King said it was a way to give the boy some income and stability. “His mother was always on the go,” King said, “so there was no security.”

Although the youngster was being torn apart by troubles at home--troubles that his mourners said were fueled in part by substance abuse within the family--King said Alex was rarely unhappy.

“If it had been me,” King said, “I would have been despondent half the time, but Alex never seemed affected by it.”

“He didn’t let it tear him down,” said Carlos Escalera, another close friend. “He always said since he knows he doesn’t have something to lean back on, that he has to do everything twice as hard as everybody else. He said that if he didn’t give it his best, it was not worth doing at all.”

Alex’s mother, Kathleen Huerta, described her son as the man of the family, an independent boy to whom she often turned for advice. His father did not live at home.

Huerta admitted that King provided a stability for her son that she could not.

“ ‘Punkin’ clinged to George,” she said. “When he met George he was real happy. It was security, love, respect. . . . He didn’t want to be from, like, a broken home or nothing.”

So eventually, home for Alex became the G&A; Pet Shop (for George and Alex), a nondescript two-room place on busy Eastern Avenue. King kept it open from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. each weekday and said it barely broke even. Alex was given most of the profits.

On Monday afternoon, King visited the pet shop for the first time since Alex’s death. The boy’s room was exactly as he had left it. His football letter sweater was folded neatly on the dresser. Five pairs of sneakers were lined up against the wall. His tapes--Marvin Gaye, the Beastie Boys, Milli Vanilli--were strewn about on the speaker top.

King said he was not sure what to do with Alex’s belongings; he wants to keep the pet shop going, and maybe donate profits to a fund established in Alex’s memory.

Alex’s death has caused King to re-examine his own life: He said it prompted him to propose marriage to the woman he has been living with, and to apologize to his stepdaughters for not spending enough time with them.

His voice choking, King told how he intended to remember Alex: as a young boy, goofy and friendly and in need of love, and as a strapping young man, bursting through the pet shop door, his fists raised, quoting his boyhood idol.

I have a dream! Alex would bellow.

“I think,” King said, “he had a dream.

”. . . They killed somebody really important out there--somebody that really would have amounted to something.”

Just who “they” were, police investigators said Tuesday, remained a mystery.

Free-lance writer Eric Shepard contributed to this story.