For Even the Hardest, Death Has Bitter Sting

“Bullets don’t know names or ages. Someone could come up and shoot us right now. And what did you do to deserve to get killed? “

--Michael Harris as he warily watched traffic pass Friday through a busy South-Central Los Angeles intersection.

The six men were standing outside a taco stand on Normandie Avenue, the smell of fresh Mexican food mixing with the stench of automobile exhaust. Earlier that day, Frank Langston, 16, had been gunned down across the street as he used a pay telephone. The men were braced for retaliation.

“This is a gang-infested area, so it is commonplace,” said Michael Harris, a gold crucifix dangling from his left ear. “He was a Blood and this is a Crips neighborhood. That is like a volcano waiting to erupt.”

Langston was just one of three teen-agers shot and killed in Los Angeles County late Thursday and early Friday in what police described as gang-related violence. Two other youngsters--a 14-year-old girl and a 7-month-old baby--also were wounded by gunfire.

Death on the streets has become a fact of life in many parts of Los Angeles, but when young people die, even some of the toughest street warriors say it hurts. In the Cherryville barrio of Pomona, gang members with cherry tattoos on their forearms sucked cigarettes and nursed bottles of beer Friday as they cursed their cross-town rivals.

Jesus Gonzales’ blood was splattered across the black asphalt outside a pink stucco house on Newman Street. Gonzales, 18, was killed as he sat with several friends at the edge of a small rose garden under a lemon tree. One friend was critically wounded, as was the friend’s 7-month-old son.

“If it don’t go one week without a shooting around here, something is wrong,” said a lifelong resident of the neighborhood who identified himself only as Jesse. “But there are supposed to be rules. These are not gang members. These are cowards. Gang members with class know you don’t shoot at someone with a baby.”

Around the corner, an elderly woman in a bright floral dress and thick glasses sobbed at her front gate as she lamented the loss of yet another Cherryville homeboy. Grandma, as she is known to neighbors, said four of her own grandchildren have been killed in gang fights. She keeps fresh flowers and a Madonna figurine on the sidewalk across the street where another Cherryville teen-ager was killed in December.

“There are no more boys here anymore. They are killing them all,” she said, waving a butcher knife she had been using to chop onions. “People don’t even talk to each other about it because they are so afraid. We need help. Please help us. I wish someone would help us.”

About 40 miles away in the heart of Florence, a 12-year-old boy skipped down 87th Street, waving a thin strip of yellow plastic tape that police had used the night before to keep away onlookers. A 16-year-old girl, who was three months pregnant, had been shot and killed while she hugged her boyfriend in a driveway near Hooper Avenue.

The 12-year-old had been up the street watching a film crew shoot a movie when he heard there had been a shooting near his house. “When I came home she was still breathing, but then she died,” he said. “She was all of our friend.”

Several local gang members stood watch at the edge of the driveway, carefully eyeing unfamiliar cars that turned onto 87th Street from busy Hooper. It was a familiar ritual--here, in Pomona and in South-Central Los Angeles. Shootings were nothing new. Neither was retaliation.

One of the gang members, wearing a Los Angeles Kings cap and a beeper on his belt, said he was “weirded out” by the the girl’s death, but that he already had his mind on tomorrow.

“It will be coming out again, but it won’t be on this side,” he said. “We don’t get along with nobody around here. This is our area.”

A green snack truck, smeared with graffiti, pulled up in front of the house. The youth in the Kings cap bought a Coke and a bag of corn chips. His buddy never took his eye off the street. The driver turned on the truck’s music box to lure more customers.

For a few short minutes, 87th Street swelled with the sounds of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”