One Barrio Family’s Gang War

As a former gang member, Ralph Rodriguez knew all about the code of silence. He understood the pay-back. He knew what could happen to rats who cooperate with police. He knew that when it comes to wars of the barrio, pity the fool who treads where he doesn’t belong.

Burdened with all that knowledge, Rodriguez had some serious thinking to do the night of Sept. 16 as he paced the corridors at AMI Medical Center of Garden Grove.

Two hours earlier, around 7:40 p.m., a full-size pickup truck with outsized wheels, running boards and a rack of lights on top had turned onto quiet La Bonita Avenue in Garden Grove and moved slowly down the street. As the pickup approached the house at 13882 La Bonita, it slowed to a near stop and turned off its headlights in the dusk. Two figures in the truck bed raised up and sprayed a crowd of about a dozen people with semiautomatic rifle fire.

In those fleeting moments of flashing violence on La Bonita, eight people had been shot. Two would die--Mike Navarro, 18, and 4-year-old Frank Fernandez Jr. The other six survived, although victim Richard Rendon later had his left leg amputated above the knee.

It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure this was a gang pay-back--the worst single drive-by shooting in Orange County history. Navarro and Rendon, among others at the house, were 17th Street gang members. A tree in front of the La Bonita house was painted with “17R,” meaning “17 Rules” in gang parlance. Six days before the shooting, a rival 5th Street gang member had been shot on a nearby street in Santa Ana. The word on the street was that 17th was responsible.

So the carnage on La Bonita was understood to represent the twisted justice of the street.

And as 32-year-old Ralph Rodriguez came to understand that at the hospital that night, where he had gone to console his cousin Frank Fernandez and his wife over the death of their 4-year-old son, he faced his own particular moment of truth.

First at the shooting scene, where he had been summoned by relatives, and later at the hospital, Ralph had picked up the names of the alleged four guilty parties. He was familiar with all four--he even considered one of them a friend.

Yes, he knew that gangs squared their own accounts.

But a 4-year-old baby?

And so as Rodriguez paced the hospital floor, he tossed around a question: Should he help police, or should he mind his own business, staying out of a murder that he hadn’t even witnessed?

To those of us who live in neighborhoods not surrounded by the threat of violence, perhaps Rodriguez’s responsibility seemed clear-cut. Help the police? Of course.

But Rodriguez, a baseball card dealer and father of four, wouldn’t have the luxury of deciding from a safe haven. His home on West 2nd Street in Santa Ana belonged not only to him, but, in a sense, to the 5th Street gang alleged to be involved in the shooting. That block was their turf. Indeed, when he had moved in three years ago, he approached a group of gang members across the street and told them he had been a 5th Streeter as a teen. He said he wanted no trouble with them. His only demand: Leave his son, then 9, alone. Mess with him, Ralph told them, and you’ll mess with me. Since then, a peaceful coexistence existed between the Rodriguez family and the gang.

That night at the hospital, Rodriguez cast his lot with the police, telling them he would cooperate in any way possible. As that promise turned into concrete action, as Rodriguez came to be seen more and more as a central figure by encouraging witnesses to break the code of silence, the reprisals that he knew would come bore down upon him. Over the next 2 1/2 months, the Rodriguez family’s lives were turned upside down. Things families take for granted--like passing by an open window in their home, strolling to the grocery store, leaving lights on past 9 p.m., sleeping at night, walking to school--would be disrupted. And as the threats to him increased, he answered with threats of his own, slipping temporarily back into a world of violence he claimed to have abandoned.

Their humble home was converted from a comfort zone into a war zone, with gang members trying to break them down--both with a bottle barrage and physical and verbal threats against him and his family. And for the longest time, Rodriguez said, it was a war they were losing.

By the time I met the Rodriguezes in April, threats against them had been made public. Time magazine had written how they had stood up to the gangs, describing their ordeal as a “citizen’s nightmare.”

During our conversations, conducted over three nights, Ralph and his wife, Isabel, had adopted a gallows humor about their experience. We talked in the living room with the front door open--better to see whether friend or foe might be approaching the house, Ralph joked. He advised me not to sit in the middle of the couch, because it would be in the line of gunfire from the street.

And while they were generally at peace, a strain of worry lingered. “You hear a lot of rumors on the street still,” Isabel said. “This weekend, we heard somebody had told one of the friends of my sister’s husband that, ‘If those Rodriguezes think it’s over with, it’s not--we’re just waiting for the right time.’ Hearing things like that really upsets us. I think it’s going to get worse when we start going to court.”

Four defendants are in custody in connection with the La Bonita drive-by--three adults and a juvenile. Two of the adults are scheduled for trial this week, the trial for the third is pending, and the juvenile’s hearing is set for July 11. All have pleaded innocent.

I had told the Rodriguezes I wanted to hear the details of their ordeal but also wanted to get a sense of what was involved in their decision to play not by the rules of the street, but by the rules of law. To an outsider, taking on the gang on its own turf seemed foolhardy.

Rodriguez didn’t disagree.

But so far, as he’s fond of pointing out, he’s lived to tell about it.

A Fateful Decision

Rodriguez didn’t set out to be a hero when police approached him that night at the hospital. Informing police of the 5th Street presence on his block, he asked that if police came to his home, it be done as anonymously as possible.

“I thought of all the bodies,” Rodriguez said. “I said if I could help, I’d help. I was also angry that the baby had died. I was still pretty calm. I think I was still in shock. It hadn’t really soaked in that what was really happening was reality.”

After talking to police, Rodriguez went home to watch the news of the shootings, not totally sure how involved he was. “At that point, I thought I’d help get the police some addresses (of the suspects) and that’s it.”

But whether from paranoia or instinct, Ralph was getting worried. Deciding it would be better to sleep near the front door, he set up a sleeping bag on the living room floor and left the front door open a crack. His plan was to sleep with one eye open. Isabel remembers wondering why Ralph was so worried, when he hadn’t even been involved.

Just before midnight, a police investigator telephoned, saying he’d like to come over in an unmarked car and go over some things. Ralph agreed; the officer came over but just chatted and didn’t even stay long enough for coffee.

Ninety minutes later, around 1:30 a.m., the phone rang again. Again, it was the police, wanting Ralph to go with them to Charter Hospital of Long Beach while they interviewed Inez Hernandez, Ralph’s cousin and one of the people injured by the gunfire.

On the way to the hospital, Ralph says, he exchanged only small talk with the two officers. “I was surprised they were talking to me about the case. I was getting the feeling I was becoming their middleman. I began to feel, ‘Wow, am I getting involved?’ I was getting to feel that I was getting sucked in.”

What did the cops want to know? “I think they wanted to know why I was helping. I said the baby was my cousin’s son. I think if the baby hadn’t died, I might not have gotten that involved. I might have said, ‘You’re the police; you’re on your own.’ But when an innocent baby is killed and another one is shot, that’s different. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere.”

Ralph drew the line even more deeply outside Charter Hospital, where a dozen or more 17th Street gang members or their friends had congregated. Knowing that male gang members probably wouldn’t talk, Rodriguez realized that the best potential witnesses were the young women at the house when the shooting occurred. But if the women said something, their boyfriends might come down hard on them. “It was the old ‘If we keep our mouths shut now, we can avenge his death at a later date,’ ” Ralph said.

“I felt a little funny when the cops let me out of the car. I didn’t know what they (17th Street gang sympathizers) would think of me. It was a little uncomfortable, but I knew at that point I had to make them change their minds about me and their opinion of the code of silence. So I talked to them, told them straight out they had to make the girls talk, if they really were Frank’s friends. I had to give them a nudge, because at first they didn’t want to say anything. “I said, ‘Let’s cut this b------- out.’ I said, ‘If you’re really Frankie’s friends, you’ll encourage the girls to talk and say what they know, because a true friend would want to see Frankie’s friends, you’ll encourage the girls to talk and say what they know, because a true friend would want to see these guys hung.”

Ralph insists the speech was spontaneous, not some prepared oratory. It apparently went over. “Something shocked me,” Ralph says. “They agreed. I was expecting static or for them to say, ‘Who are you?’ and, yet, they agreed with me.”

Shortly after 3, the police told Ralph they would take him home. But as they got off the Garden Grove freeway and headed for his house, it became clear they weren’t taking the direct route. Instead, they wanted to eyeball the four suspects’ homes. Exactly how the police got the names remains unclear. Rodriguez insists that although he had heard the four names at La Bonita, police provided him with them before he had volunteered them. Rodriguez theorizes that because he had encouraged survivors at the scene to cooperate, they may have given investigators the names.

A Restless Sleep

Over the next few minutes of relative silence and with the officers quietly taking notes, Rodriguez, sitting in the back of the unmarked police car, directed police to each of the suspects’ houses. They first drove by Robert Figueroa’s, allegedly on the passenger side of the truck. Then to Louie Valadez’s, the alleged driver and friend of Rodriguez’s. Then to the home of Roman Menchaca, one of the alleged shooters. Finally, two doors from his own house, it was the home of the 14-year-old, the other alleged shooter. “I was getting in deeper and deeper in quicksand,” Ralph said. He finally made it home about 3:30 a.m.

Ralph tried to get some sleep, but about 6 a.m., he was awakened by knocking on the door. Half asleep, he greeted the same two officers. They apologized but explained that because this was a double homicide, they didn’t want to waste time.

But this time, the investigators didn’t want to talk to Ralph; this time, they were interested in his two eldest children; Linda, now 13, and Ralph Paul, 12. The children, the police had learned, might have additional information. Ralph and Isabel, although wanting to shield them, knew what they meant. The officers made it abundantly clear, Ralph says, that the children didn’t have to talk to them. In fact, Ralph says, they were so nice about it that he would have felt guilty if the children hadn’t cooperated. But not at all comfortable about dragging their children into the morass, Ralph and Isabel decided to let them decide.

Ralph was blunt with his son: “I said if we talk, they are going to find out we talked. Fifth Street will find out. His immediate answer was, ‘Yeah, I want to talk.’ ”

Isabel was wary: “Even when he said yes, I said, ‘Are you sure you want to?’ I said, ‘Once you’re in, you’re in, you can’t get out.’ It kind of scared me. I said, ‘Look at what they’re capable of doing.’ I felt I was putting my son’s life at risk, but I thought his judgment was good and if he wanted to do it, we were willing to back him. He didn’t hesitate at all.”

The children’s information, primarily from Ralph Paul, was this: About an hour after the shooting, they told police, they had seen a pickup truck on the street while they were staying at their grandmother’s house. It matched the description of the truck at the La Bonita shooting, supplied by his grandmother, who had telephoned and told them to be on the lookout for it.

Ralph Paul, police said, was able to identify Menchaca from past experiences on the block. He also told police that he heard Menchaca yell, “We got them!” Thus, within 18 hours of the shooting, the Rodriguez family was getting deeply involved in a murder they hadn’t even witnessed.

By then, the information network that exists in Santa Ana’s gang neighborhoods already was cranked up. If you doubt there could be such a network, consider that Santa Ana has an estimated 65 gangs with 7,000 members. With numbers like that, news travels fast.

“We heard rumors that people knew we were snitching,” Isabel said. “We got calls on the phone. Friends were saying that we should have stayed out of it.”

That jarred the Rodriguezes. “We thought if all these guys know, we better watch out, because they might come around and do something,” Ralph said. “Now we were really beginning to feel that something went wrong.”

But nothing happened for more than two weeks. Perhaps their fears were unfounded, Ralph thought. Meanwhile, relatives of the dead were getting increasingly impatient. The police had names, they said. Why weren’t they acting?

“After the baby’s funeral, people started getting a little hotter,” Ralph said. “Everybody around here starting getting a little bitter that these guys were still free. A week went by and another week went by. People were saying, ‘The police know who did it, how come no arrests are being made?’ There was a growing sense that they were getting away with it.”

At 6 a.m. on the morning of Oct. 4, Ralph went outside to warm up his truck. The block had been closed off by police cars. Phone calls came from a few blocks away--police were doing the same thing there. On that morning--18 days after the shootings--police arrested the four suspects identified by the La Bonita survivors: Robert Figueroa, Roman Menchaca, Louis Valadez and the 14-year-old.

“That was a big sense of relief to a lot of people, to know that the police had finally done it and we finally knew they were not getting away with it,” Ralph said. He thought perhaps his family was off the hook. But by the time he was allowed to leave the block and go to work at 9 a.m., he was wary again. He told Isabel to be careful that day, just in case. He didn’t need to tell her. “From the day they arrested them, I knew we’d be in trouble,” she said.

That night, Ralph once again set up his makeshift encampment in a bedroll by the front door. Because he was building an addition to the house and had torn down the children’s bedroom, they had been sleeping in the living room. For this night, Ralph thought, they would be safer in his and Isabel’s room, so that’s where Isabel and the children stayed.

As darkness fell, traffic on their street became heavier. Rodriguez knew what it was: 5th Streeters cruising past his house. Like prey under the eyes of the predator, Rodriguez sniffed trouble in the air.

“We were usually in bed by 9, we always had the door open before we went to bed, we always had the lights and the TV on,” he said. “That night, we shut the door, the lights went off, the TV off and we sat here in the dark, looking out--from about 8 o’clock on. We didn’t want anyone to know we were sitting in here.”

I suggested to the Rodriguezes that that sounded paranoid. “It was not our imagination,” Rodriguez said. “You could feel it. We had a sense that something was going to happen that night. It was in the air. And it wasn’t our imagination, because something did happen that night.”

About 11 p.m., Isabel was in the bathroom, also in the dark, when she heard what she thought was a gunshot. In a panicked, half-muted shout, she called to Ralph: “Ralph! Ralph! Did you hear that? They’re shooting!”

Hearing no reply, Isabel shouted at full-decibel level: “Ralph!”

In his role of fearless protector, Ralph had fallen asleep. Isabel’s shout awakened him, and she told him what she heard. “Don’t go outside,” she pleaded, but he did anyway, with a 9-mm handgun given him by his cousin--a gun whose presence in the house had set off an argument between Ralph and Isabel, with her adamantly opposed to it.

Ralph went outside and saw someone running away from the side of the house. He recognized the person as Joel Delarosa, a 5th Street gang member he had known for years.

Deciding not to give chase, Ralph went to the side of the house, where he found a jar about the size of a mayonnaise jar, with a gasoline-doused rag in it. It had been thrown against the house--the sound Isabel heard--but hit the window frame and fallen outside. When it did, the flame extinguished.

‘Deeper and Deeper’

The assailant may have thought he was aiming it at Ralph and Isabel’s window. Instead, the four children were in the room, with 2-year-old Allan directly below the window.

“Fear started setting in,” Ralph said, “because I didn’t know how far this thing was going to go. But now I was angry. I said I could kill one of these guys for what they did. All I could think of was he (Allan) was on the other side of the window. What if it had gone through, what if if stayed lit long enough to pour gasoline all over him?”

Ralph went to work the next morning, but when he got home late in the afternoon, he saw several 5th Streeters across the street. “I saw red. I felt a numbness go through my body. I had so much anger from the night before, thinking what could have happened. Three weeks earlier they kill a baby, and now the same gang, in my eyes, almost killed another baby.”

Ralph got out of his truck and approached the crowd, most of them in their late teens or early 20s. He was livid. “I said, ‘I’ll take all of you on, you baby killers! You almost killed another baby!’ I was screaming, I was hysterical at this point. It was like I was saying, ‘I’ll beat your face in! You want to fight me?’

They said, ‘No, we don’t want a problem.’ I even grabbed one of them. I said, ‘You want to kill me, go ahead. I’ll give you your chance. But when you kill me, I’m taking one of you with me. Who wants to volunteer? We’ll go see God together.’ ”

Before walking back to his house, he left them with a parting shot: “I said, ‘If one of you guys messes with my family, if someone gets hurt, I’m gonna come mess with your family, and that’s the way it’s gonna be.’ I let it be at that.”

Half an hour later, Round 2 began. From a passing car, beer bottles were thrown onto the Rodriguezes’ yard. “It happened about three times that night,” Rodriguez said. “Every time, somebody would yell out, ‘We’re gonna kill you!’ ”

That began a pattern that continued for several days, Rodriguez said, but which eventually settled into a pattern of weekend bottle-throwing. The bottles never hit the house but often smashed on the ground outside the house. Cleaning up broken bottles in the mornings became a regular ritual.

Ten days after the arrests, the Rodriguezes were planning a trip to Riverside to attend an quinceanera, a 15th-birthday Latino celebration for one of his daughter Linda’s friends. Ralph had driven to the store to get something for the party when a car cut in front of him, forcing him to stop.

Joel Delarosa, the man Ralph said he recognized running from the house the night of the Molotov cocktail incident, spoke to him from the car.

Rodriguez said this conversation ensued: “He said, ‘Why’d you get involved? You could have kept your nose out of it and let the police and the boy’s father take care of it.’ He said, ‘You’re going to have to pay the price, because there’s a $3,000 contract out on your head.’ I said, ‘Since you seem to know so much about it, why don’t you try and collect it?’ He said he wouldn’t collect it because there were plenty of other people who wanted to collect on it.”

Isabel, after hearing the story, had had enough. “I said, ‘We’ve really got to do something. This is getting out of hand,’ ” she recounted. “I said, ‘We can’t go on like this. We can’t go on living like this. We’ve got to get some kind of help.’ ”

Tensions Escalate

By the end of October, Rodriguez had forbidden Ralph Paul and Linda to walk to and from school, fearing that the dirty looks they had been getting from gang members would take on a more hostile form. Instead, his mother drove them and picked them up.

And as the drive-by bottle-throwing continued on its pace of two or three nights a week, as the verbal threats continued, tensions began running higher in the Rodriguez household. “They would drive up and stop right in front of the house, rev up the engines and yell, ‘We’re gonna kill you!’ ” Ralph said.

Eventually, Isabel’s mother suggested they call a witness-protection agency for help. It would lead to their first meeting with Deputy Dist. Atty. Thomas Avdeef. A Santa Ana police gang expert said they were considering prosecuting under a law that prevents someone from trying to intimidate a potential witness. Rodriguez said he’d be willing to press charges.

On Nov. 4, a Saturday, Ralph Paul ran in the house and told his father that Richard Ramirez, an alleged 5th Street member who lived across the street, had tried to run him over as he was playing football. Had he not jumped out of the way, his son told Ralph, he would have been hit.

“I got the gun, I took a step for the door,” Ralph says. “Now I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to really kill somebody.’ ”

Isabel stopped him at the door. Ralph relented and went into the back yard and starting shooting into the air, in unrestrained anger. Then, he says, he ran into the front yard, screaming, “Now, you bunch of 5th Streeters, you want to mess with me?”

For Ralph, that was the breaking point.

Isabel also was losing her resolve. “I didn’t feel comfortable walking around with Allan in the living room. Every time a car came by, I wanted to grab him toward me. The kids weren’t allowed to walk to the store unless accompanied by an adult. The kids were robbed of a lot of privileges. If they wanted to play, we preferred that they play in the back yard. They always had to be brought in early. It was awful. There were a couple times when I told Ralph, ‘I think we should forget about the whole thing, drop out of it, tell them we don’t want to do it anymore.’ It was becoming an ongoing thing, it looked like nothing was coming to an end, and it looked like everything was getting worse by the day.”

That was the family mood on the day Ralph fired the gun. But things were about to get worse.

Full of frustrated rage, Ralph was in the front yard waving his gun. “I said, ‘Come on, you 5th Streeters, you want me, here I am, let’s get it over with, once and for all!”

No 5th Streeters showed up, but Santa Ana police did. The juvenile’s father pointed out Ralph to them and, within minutes, he was in handcuffs in the back of the squad car, to the obvious glee of about 20 or 30 derisive gang sympathizers. In the back of the police car, he was fuming. “I said, ‘You chicken----, son-of-a-you-know-what, you’re taking me away after I’m defending my family?”’

To the officer who cuffed him, he was equally hostile. “If one of my family gets killed, I’m gonna kill your f------ ass!” he says he yelled at the officer. “You’re leaving them with these animals?”

Reflecting on the moment, Ralph tells me now: “That was the low point. At that point, I completely gave up.”

Ralph’s bail was set at $10,000, and he was told he could be released by posting $1,000 bond and putting up the house as collateral. From a jail phone, he told Isabel to hold off until he could collect his thoughts.

At home, Isabel suddenly felt especially vulnerable. “They knew he was taken off. They knew we were here by ourselves. I knew I had to be on guard all night. There was no telling what they could do. I was here by myself, they knew Ralph was in jail. This would be a good time to get rid of us.”

Ralph was arrested about 6 p.m. and spent the next 14 hours in a detention cell, without being either booked or fingerprinted. As a result, he couldn’t be bailed out. He has two vivid recollections of that jail experience: trying to sleep sitting up on the concrete bench, and the cold baloney sandwiches the jailers served.

“I remember thinking, ‘This in no way, shape or form could be happening. This is not happening.’ But the reality was that it was happening. My concern was shifting from 5th Street to what would happen if I had to stay there much longer.”

He called Isabel again, but she told him that an investigator for the D.A.’s office had contacted her and told her not to bail Ralph out. Irene, the mother of young Frankie Fernandez, had complained to the district attorney’s office, asking how they could put Rodriguez in jail after all the harassment he had endured.

By late morning, Frank Lopez of the district attorney’s office had come to Rodriguez’s rescue, leading him out of jail and driving him home, in effect releasing Ralph on his own recognizance.

“Lopez told me, ‘That was a stupid thing you did last night.’ I said, ‘Yes, it was, but what do you expect? Do you know what’s happened to me the last month?’ He was understanding. He told me it was stupid, but he let it go at that.”

By then, Rodriguez was having increased contact with Avdeef, who apologized to Rodriguez for letting the situation get out of hand. Avdeef told him that he was still considering calling Ralph as a witness on the La Bonita shootings but that he was more certain that he would want Linda and Ralph Paul to testify.

Over the next couple weeks, as Thanksgiving approached, the harassing incidents had diminished, except for one night when, according to Ralph, a “bottle-throwing contest” commenced. The idea, he said, apparently was to see who could come closest to the house without hitting it.

Then, one night about 11:30, a man stopped his car right in front of Rodriguez’s house. “All he did was yell out my name and say, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ ”

Although he didn’t know the man personally, Rodriguez said he recognized him as Randy Martinez, the alleged 5th Street gang member who had been shot a week before the La Bonita drive-by. Rodriguez said 17th Streeters had assumed all along that the La Bonita shootings were a pay-back for Martinez’s shooting; Avdeef agreed that that is the working theory on the murder motive.

After Martinez yelled at him, Rodriguez called police. This time, they initiated a nightly patrol of his block.

A few days later, it paid off. “Randy Martinez pulled into (the father of the juvenile’s) driveway. I was outside. He looked over and I recognized him and he had a gun and pointed it at me and said, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ At that point, I thought I was going to die.”

Rodriguez called police. They arrived almost immediately.

This time, the gang members watched as one of their friends was forced in the back of a squad car. Later that night, Rodriguez said, Delarosa drove past the house and yelled out that he was going to kill Rodriguez. Again, Ralph called police.

A week later, Ralph got a phone call from Santa Ana police gang expert Rick Reese. The street network had already informed Ralph that cops had raided five suspected gang houses earlier that day. Reese had called to tell Ralph to be careful that night; that police, in addition to Martinez, had also arrested Delarosa and Ramirez. Authorities would charge all three with witness intimidation, Reese said.

The arrests proved the turning point. “I think these guys all of a sudden started losing the battle,” Rodriguez said. “Where for the last few months they had the upper hand, now all of a sudden things were turning.”

And now the obvious question to Rodriguez: Why not move? “I’ve been asked that and I have an answer,” Ralph said. “I was here before they were; I’ve been here (around the neighborhood) since I was 8 years old. For a long period of time, there was no gang here. Why should I move, or why should I be driven out?”

As the harassment seemed as if it would never end, Isabel said, she asked Ralph whether it was worth it: “I keep telling him, ‘Why are we going through so much? We didn’t actually see the crime. They aren’t harassing the other people who actually saw their faces. They’re not going through what we’re going through.’ ”

“Think about it,” Ralph says, repeating the answer he says he gave Isabel. “The answer is there. It’s pretty easy. We live here in their turf. It’s easier for them to come to us than for them to go down to 17th.”

Through it all, how did they hold up? “If I break down, it’s at work or something,” Isabel said. “I can’t let them (the children) see me break down in front of them. A couple weeks ago, my boss called me into her office and asked how things were going at home. That was all she had to ask me. I felt like such an idiot. I started crying and couldn’t get myself to stop crying. I cried for about an hour. She kept telling me, ‘It’s OK, go ahead and let it out.’ ”

Ralph said he had held up well, but Isabel qualified that. “You got to the point, you have to admit, where you said, ‘I can’t take this anymore; it’s really getting to me, the threats.’ ”

But for the most part, Isabel conceded, it was she who had the deeper misgivings, who once asked Ralph flat-out if they couldn’t just drop the whole thing. “That’s the time he told me, ‘Really think about Irene and Frank and the baby. If we’re going through what we’re going through, can you imagine what Frank and Irene are going through? Think of the baby; do it for him.’

“Because I did get to the point where I said, ‘I want out.’ I just couldn’t do it anymore. He said, ‘We’re going through hard times, but Frank and Irene lost a life. They lost a son.’ It’s not like we were doing it for ourselves; we were doing it for them.”

The four defense attorneys in the La Bonita case contend their clients were not in the truck that terrorized La Bonita Avenue. Not surprisingly, they aren’t very charitable to Rodriguez. “Mr. Rodriguez seems to have gotten a whole lot of publicity out of this case,” says William Morrissey, representing the juvenile, who turned 15 in April. “For an alleged non-witness, he (Rodriguez) has gone a long ways in this case.”

David Zimmerman, representing Valadez, says the entire process of identification of his client is suspect. “They have two eyewitnesses who are women gang members, who, it is my belief, saw nothing,” Zimmerman says. “I mean, this truck is going by, it is dark, this machine gun is going off, they’re shooting people in a crowd, everybody is ducking, people are dying, blood’s all over the place, bullets are all over the place.”

But why, I ask Zimmerman, would Rodriguez and the others get involved in a plan to identify four people, if they really hadn’t seen them? Could they really expect their stories to stick?

“It would make a lot of sense if you think about it in gang terms,” Zimmerman says. “What was this drive-by shooting? If this drive-by shooting is a war between 5th and 17th, that truck comes by and indiscriminately shoots into a group of people, doesn’t it? With a machine gun. It was spraying people. Now, isn’t 17th Street using the women (eyewitnesses) to indiscriminately get their pay-back by using the court system? In other words, (they’re saying) ‘We got somebody, even if we didn’t get the right person.’ ”

On the eve of the trial, the defense attorneys are battling at least two big problems--juries generally like eyewitnesses and they don’t like murders of 4-year-olds. Julian Bailey, a former deputy district attorney representing Robert Figueroa, says: “I’ve tried dozens of felonies and dozens of murder cases. The most damaging testimony is always eyewitnesses of an incident, and it’s the most likely to be inaccurate. Psychological studies of eyewitnesses all point up the inherent unreliability of it. Think how many times you walked through the mall and there was somebody you thought you recognized at a distance, and it turns out it wasn’t the person.”

Bailey suggested that it was Rodriguez who “is in large measure the reason for the testimony we’ve gotten from some people. He may be the one planting the seeds, so to speak.” C. Thomas McDonald believes Rodriguez was an active participant in a “fabrication” of who saw what on La Bonita last September. “Obviously, the witnesses have some humanistic and family feelings with regard to the baby’s death, which causes them not only to stretch the truth, but lie if necessary, in order to place blame on somebody. It’s also obviously a situation where there has been friction between these two groups of people for a long time.”

I asked Avdeef how solid the La Bonita case is. “I would say we have a decent case, a reasonable case. Certainly, if these witnesses are not credible and are making the story up, we don’t want to prosecute someone who’s wrongly accused. On the other hand, there’s been no evidence put forth that we have the wrong people.”

So far, no murder weapon has been recovered. “Sure, I’d like to have it,” Avdeef says. “That doesn’t mean we’re not going to get it.”

Will it come down to which gang thejury believes? “That’s why I told you, these are difficult cases,” says Avdeef, who handles gang homicides for the district attorney’s office. “You’re dealing sometimes--I’m not saying in this case--but victims in cases that I deal with are just as bad as the defendants.”

In addition to the star witnesses having gang connections, Rodriguez’s own past hasn’t escaped defense attorneys’ attention. Fourteen years ago, when he was 18, Rodriguez shot a man in the leg after he claimed the man was harassing his pregnant wife. Four years ago--and in what amounts to a supreme irony considering his involvement in the La Bonita case--Rodriguez was convicted of verbally threatening a witness who was going to testify against his father in an assault and battery case. Rodriguez’s record shows a 45-day sentence for the 1976 shooting and three years’ probation for the threat in 1986.

How important is Rodriguez in the La Bonita case? Avdeef’s reply: “He was the father figure in having people come forward. He was not a witness to the acts, but when he got involved, they (gang members) took it upon themselves to harass him, intimidate him. To them, they thought he was a very important witness. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have intimidated him.”

I mentioned to Avdeef that it was only after extensively interviewing Rodriguez that I became aware of his criminal record. “See what I mean?” Avdeef replied, “It goes back to (what I said) that these are not easy cases. . . . On the one hand, Time magazine makes him out a hero, you start making him out as a hero, then you find out, well, he’s not the white knight that appears on the surface.”

The Big Question

During the last extensive conversation with the Rodriguezes, I raised my doubts about the strength of the case. What if they’re acquitted?

“That’s our biggest fear,” Isabel says. “I just hope it’s all worth it. The only thing I have second thoughts about is what if we went through all this and they’re found innocent.”

“We have discussed that,” Ralph says. “We have told ourselves, ‘What if they’re found innocent?’ The only answer I have is, well, we can always move to Mexico.”

And what about his criminal record? Was he afraid that would affect his credibility?

“What was I supposed to do?” he said. “I was a criminal in the past, so I let a 4-year-old die needlessly and offer no help? Is that what people with criminal pasts are supposed to do? Do they say, ‘I have a record, so I’ll keep quiet and keep my nose out of it?’ Because if that’s what they’re supposed to do, I made a big mistake. At the time, I was trying to help. I wasn’t thinking of my own personal history.”

Rodriguez said he feels somewhat haunted by his past. “I didn’t ask for all this. I didn’t ask to be subpoenaed. I just tried to do something right. It was not something I planned. I never came out for one second and said I’m going to talk so I could be the good old American citizen. I just did what was right at the moment.”

On May 1, I telephoned Rodriguez again. This time, it was to ask his reaction to the news that Richard Ramirez and Joel Delarosa had pleaded guilty that morning to charges that they tried to intimidate the Rodriguezes. Delarosa was given two years in prison. Ramirez was given 10 months in county jail. The Randy Martinez case is pending.

Rodriguez hadn’t heard the news about the twin sentencings. “Wow!” he said. “That’s my first reaction, wow!”

Would he now be even more fearful of retaliation? “At the moment, it brings some joy that we’re going to get them off the street,” he said. “So, my first reaction is that I’m happy. I’m sure that once it soaks in, I might have some thought as to what might come out of this whole deal. I guess I haven’t sat down and thought if they really sentence them, what would happen. Having to put up with all the crap we’ve had to, this is the first positive thing that’s come out of the whole thing.”

The Drive-by Shooting Scene of Sept. 16, 1989 A pickup truck carrying several people suspected of belonging to the 5th Street gang in Santa Ana drove into Garden Grove neighborhood and opened fire on several members of the Fernandez family and their friends. Police believe the target of the assault was a man who reportedly belonged to the rival 17th Street gang of Garden Grove. Attackers in pickup truck turn on to La Bonita Avenue. Potential witnesses seated in cars parked on street. Mike Navarro,18, killed Inez Hernandez, 18, wounded, while seated inside car. Richard Rendon, 26, Anthony Carmona, 26, wounded. Jennie Hernandez, 21, wounded while seated in car. Frank Fernandez Jr., 4, killed, Irene Fernandez, 23, Christopher Fernandez, 2, wounded while seated in car.