Emotional Scars Torment Wounded Santa Ana Child

Even before a bullet tore through the living room wall of his house and traveled through his young body, Carlitos Alvarez had been frightened by gang violence in his neighborhood.

Now, two weeks after being shot during one of Santa Ana’s bloodiest weekends, the 8-year-old is home from the hospital, having barely escaped permanent physical injury.

Emotionally, though, he may never be the same.

When nightfall comes, Carlitos does not want to sit in the room where he was struck by the bullet, which police believe was fired from a passing car. He won’t say why, but he will tell his family that it is time for everyone to go to bed, especially his younger brothers and sisters.

Nightmares disturb his sleep. And as he tosses and turns, he mutters out loud as if in pain, according to his mother, Reyna Alvarez. During the day, he is quiet; quieter than she remembers him ever being.

“The doctor says he is fine,” Alvarez said last week, “that he is recuperating very quickly, but that he is traumatized. . . . He is very sad, and he isn’t as he was before.

“But that he is even alive,” she added, “that is so much already.”

School psychologists and others who work with gang prevention programs say the scars of violence can remain forever. For children who are victims, it is important that adults in their lives help them work out their fears and anxieties.

“The nightmares won’t go away overnight,” said Tony Borbon, director of the gang prevention program operated by Turning Points Family Services. “It’s not like the bullet that pierced the child and entered and exited his body right away. The harm is spiritual and mental. Only time and attention will heal that.”

Schools throughout the county have programs to encourage children--as young as elementary-school age--to stay out of gangs. Teachers try hard to equip them with decision-making skills and self-confidence to stand up to gang peer pressure and help them cope with the accompanying fear.

“It is difficult for some children,” said Cathy Makin, principal of Santa Ana’s Spurgeon Middle School. “Especially when you’re 8 years old--what have you done? You just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

“You can’t just forget this after a week or two. It will take years to get over it. I would put a lot of pressure on the parents (of Carlitos) to seek some sort of help for him.”

Alvarez said that when Carlitos went for his last checkup after being wounded, the doctor gave her the telephone number of a psychologist. But she is waiting to see how much her son’s medical bills will be before calling. She has, however, phoned her pastor, who has promised to visit.

Officials at the Santa Ana Unified School District, which Carlitos attends, said that when the boy returns to classes, he will be referred to a school psychologist or someone else if he appears to need help readjusting.

It will be up to Carlitos’ teachers to judge whether other children also need counseling, as did the classmates of 9-year-old Nadia Puente, a 4th-grader at Santa Ana’s Diamond Elementary who was abducted and murdered last year. In that instance, the district sent over a team of counselors to help the children deal with their grief.

Laura Rydell, coordinator for Santa Ana’s school psychologists, said no counselor has been requested yet for Carlitos’ class. When one child asked what had happened to his classmate, the teacher allowed the children to talk about the shooting. She used it as an opportunity to tell them about the harm that gangs can bring, Rydell said.

The one to worry about, Rydell said, will be Carlitos. The kinds of thoughts going through his head about this injury, she said, are not the same as if he had been hurt, say, playing catch.

“Something violent has been done to him, and he’s not going to feel safe,” Rydell said.

“I think there are a lot of children at Santa Ana who don’t feel safe. But everybody is working on it. We know it’s not going to go away unless we work on it and fix it, and I think good things are happening right now, with so many programs working together to deal with this.”

Along with school counselors, there are community-based programs working in tandem with the schools and the Police Department to help parents and children understand that they do not need to tolerate violence in their neighborhoods, Rydell said.

Carlitos, a nickname the child goes by because an uncle Carlos also lives in the family house on West Lingan Lane, at first spoke very little when visited by a reporter last week.

He wore a small bandage on his back, near his right shoulder, covering an inch-wide hole that the bullet made after passing through the wall and the couch where he sat watching TV on the night of April 23. Another bandage runs across his stomach, where the bullet exited just left of his navel, still with force enough to pass through another wall and bruise the shoulder of an aunt asleep in bed.

For the reporter’s visit, he was dressed in blue shorts and a pajama top, with Batman slippers on his feet, and sat round-faced and shy, flashing an easy smile.

When he walked, he kept his head down, complaining that the pain in his right shoulder makes it difficult to hold his head high.

When asked whether he remembers what happened to him that night, he shook his head no. But slowly, drawn out by conversation on other topics, he began to recount the shooting.

“When they shot me, I didn’t hear anything,” Carlitos said.

“You didn’t feel it when they hit you?” his mother asked gently.

He shook his head.

“Did it hurt?” she continued.

“I felt the blood coming out of me and I was crying,” he replied. “When they (paramedics) tried to put the mask on me, I said no. At the hospital, when they tried to put something on my head, I shook my head so they wouldn’t do it. I was crying.”

“The nurses said you were saying, ‘abuelita, abuelita,’ ” his mother reminded, explaining that he had called for his grandmother.

At one point, Carlitos’ little brother Gabriel, 3, came up to him, and they spoke about his watch, which has Mickey Mouse on the face.

“My cousin has been to Disneyland, and she told me all about it,” Carlitos said cheerily. “She took pictures, and she showed them to me, pictures of her with Mickey, of her with some little cars, of her with all the characters from Disneylandia. My mother said we will go there too after I am well.”

For five days, the wounded boy had been at UCI Medical Center in Orange, and every night except the first, his grandfather or his mother stayed with him.

“I love my grandmother very much,” he said. “I also love my mother a lot, and my grandfather I love a lot too.”

Carlitos has been in the United States just two years, since he and his grandparents joined his mother, who had come here several years before. Because he has spent much of his early childhood with his grandparents, he is close to them. Besides Gabriel, he has a 2-year-old sister, Isabel, and a baby sister, Yvette, born just seven days before Carlitos was shot.

Since the shooting, Carlitos said, “I dream about many bad things. . . . About monsters.

“At the hospital, I had dreams about monsters and about what happened to me. I couldn’t sleep very well. I was awake all the time except when morning came, and then I would sleep.”

As Carlitos spoke with the visitor, the house bustled with activity. His grandmother was cooking. His stepfather was in the back, cleaning the yard. An uncle was getting ready for work. An aunt sat and listened to his conversation. His brothers and sisters played around him, and cousins came and went. The five-bedroom house is home to about 15 family members and others.

In the last 13 months, family members say, the household has fallen victim to several other incidents of gang violence. Two other family members have been wounded by gunfire in separate incidents, and a few months ago a homemade bomb was thrown through a sliding glass door--but didn’t explode.

Police said the latest bullet, the one that went through Carlitos, may have been a gang retaliation. A few months ago, a 15-year-old cousin was arrested in connection with the killing of a gang member.

Carlitos, who likes playing with toy cars and reading books, seemed not to know much about that when asked whether he knows who shot him.

“No. I think one was a cholo who was following another one, and they shot each other, and maybe one of the bullets came in here,” he said.

Classmates from school have written him stacks of get-well cards. Carlitos went to get them from his room and came back with a shopping bag of blue, pink and purple pastel colors brimming with the toys his mother had given him at the hospital. Inside were the 91 cards and letters that students at Jackson Elementary School wrote, some in English and some in Spanish. They are colorful, with drawings on construction paper, or on white paper with dinosaurs sketched by felt-tip marker. Most are cheery, with entreaties for Carlitos to get well soon. A handful are more thoughtful--and telling.

“Dear Carlos: I want you to get well soon. I think about you a lot. . . . How is the food in the hospital? Good, I hope.”

“Dear Carlos: . . . If it happened to me, I could be just like you. I hope the guy that shot you pays the price. . . .”

“Dear Carlos: We love you very much. Every night, I think of you. Carlos, I know that you are suffering, but you will be back to school soon. Carlos, we are very sad that you are not with us at school. . . .”

“Dear Carlos: I hope you get better soon. I pray to God that this doesn’t happen to the rest of us.”

One card said simply on the front: “Get Well Soon,” and then the word gangs is circled and crossed out.

“Is that a good greeting, or bad?” his mother asked.

When told that such a marking means that the writer does not like gangs, she said she doesn’t, either.