Slain Youth’s Mother Speaks Out : Gangs: Objecting to perceived apathy about the deaths of their members, she describes her son’s conflicting allegiances to family and the streets.

As a religious woman, Micki Camacho believes that all human life is precious. But as a mother who has lived in the midst of gang violence in Santa Ana, she also knows that society sometimes takes a more skeptical view. It anguishes over some deaths, shrugs at others.

Last Sept. 16, the utter truth of that slapped Camacho in the face when her 18-year-old son, Mike Navarro, was shot to death along with 4-year-old Frank Fernandez Jr. on La Bonita Avenue in Garden Grove. Six others were wounded in the hail of bullets fired from the back of a slow-moving pickup truck.

Gang violence often is avenged in the streets, not in court. But within three weeks of the La Bonita drive-by shooting, the single worst incident of gang violence in Orange County history, four suspects--one of them a juvenile--were in custody and charged with first-degree murder. All four have pleaded not guilty.

The arrests brought some solace to Camacho, but it wasn’t lost on her that there may never have been arrests if the 4-year-old hadn’t been killed. Had the only victim been Navarro, a 17th Street gang member, police and prosecutors agree that his murder likely would have been “paid back” by a retaliatory shooting.

Camacho, a widow who uses her maiden name, accepts that. But she won’t accept the notion that her son, known as “Smokey” to his friends, was some sort of non-person, some litter of the streets that simply got swept away by urban violence.

“He used to confide so much in me. Most gang members don’t,” Camacho says. “My son was a gang member. I admit that. They don’t want their parents to know exactly what’s going on or what’s happening, but Mike wasn’t like that. I think I’m about the only one who’s said ‘My son was a gang member.’ I understood it, I knew it, I was against it, I wouldn’t back him up, and I tried to give him advice and make him change.”

Before the suspects were picked up, Camacho asked a police officer why no arrests had been made. “He says, ‘Well, it’s taking time. But there will be an arrest because of the baby.’ I said, ‘That’s true; because of the baby, I’ll get justice for Mike.’ He said, ‘You have to admit, the baby was an innocent little angel, whereas Mike was no angel.’ I said, ‘OK, Mike was no angel, but he wasn’t a common dog. He had a life. I don’t care what you think, but nobody has the right to take a life away,’ ” Camacho relates.

The officer apologized, saying he hadn’t meant it like it sounded.

While not justifying her son’s gang involvement, Camacho says he was not the ogre that people might associate with gang members. His bedroom, which she has left intact, sports pictures of his younger brother and sister and a collection of stuffed animals that he accumulated over the years. Photo albums show him playing in a small swimming pool with his little brother and in various other clowning roles.

Her son, who had grown into a 200-pound man, was especially vulnerable to his mother’s teasing, during which she would make light of his size by trying to play kissy-face with him. He would playfully tell her that he was too old to be kissing his mother, but sometimes he’d relent. At other times, he’d tell his girlfriend on the phone that he had to take a break to massage his mother’s aching feet.

Navarro, whose father died in 1988, left behind a sister, Emerald, 7, and a brother, Richard, 6. “A lot of times Mike would just come in and we’d start talking out of the blue,” his mother, 42, says. “Maybe he’d be on the phone in his room or watching TV. I used to sit right here, this same table, and talk to my son about the old days, tell him about what it was like when I was a teen-ager. He used to say ‘Gee, Mom, that sounds really great, everybody getting along.’ And I’d say ‘It’s ridiculous. I don’t understand why you guys (in various gangs) are so against each other.’ ”

Asked why her son was lured to the gangs, Camacho answered: “He used to tell me lots of times, ‘Mom, we’re here to protect the neighborhood.’ I said, ‘You don’t have to protect the neighborhood. We don’t need protection. Understand that.’ ”

She acknowledges that to outsiders, the gangs’ rationale sounds phony. “But to them, it’s real,” she says. “They mean it; they really mean it. It’s their sense of reality.”

In the last month of his life, Camacho says, there were signs that her son was growing out of the gangs. He had gotten a job. When he was laid off, he got another one. He enjoyed bringing home a paycheck.

“He’d talk about the kids,” Camacho recalls. “He’d talk about Emerald. He’d say how she was getting older and when she has her 15th birthday, he wanted to be there to dance the first dance with her. There were times when he and my little boy, they’d be in his room and he’d take his little cars. Mike would say ‘Richard, bring your toys,’ and they’d sit down on the rug and play cars. Mike would tell me, ‘Mom, I wish I was young again. I wish I was little like him again.’ ”

But moments like those were only pleasant interruptions in the real-life world Navarro had gotten himself into. He was a proud 17th Streeter. So proud that he tattooed himself heavily and wrote his name on walls on 17th Street turf. A wall at Newhope Street and Hazard Avenue sported “Smokey 17th.” “One day we passed through there and it was crossed out,” Camacho says. “He told me, ‘Look, Mom, they crossed out my name.’ I said that it didn’t mean anything, but I didn’t stop to realize when they cross out a name, it means death.”

The shooting spree on La Bonita, in which two suspects allegedly fired from the back of a pickup truck, generated intense publicity because of the death of young Frankie Fernandez. Gang members and sympathizers who normally do not cooperate with police agreed to testify against the four suspects. Their lawyers say that police have arrested the wrong people.

Testimony in trials for two of the four, Louis Valadez and Robert Figueroa, may begin as early as this week. A trial for a third man, Roman Menchaca, is pending. A hearing for the juvenile, now 15, is set for July.

Since the shootings, Camacho has tried to persuade her son’s friends not to avenge his death. She has also tried to explain all this to her other children.

Emerald has written several letters to her dead brother, sealing them before anyone reads them. She still keeps them in the house, with hearts on the envelopes and inscriptions like “I Love You, Mike.”

Little brother Richard, always admonished by Mike about avoiding gangs, also had problems. “One day about a month after the shooting,” his mother says, “he was sitting there . . . and out of the blue he says, ‘I hate them. I hate them.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ and he said, ‘I hate the guys who did that to my brother.’ ”

A forklift operator, Camacho says she’ll try to attend the trials as her job situation permits. When asked if she is looking for vengeance or justice, however it comes wrapped, she replied:

“It’s really not vengeance, because they’re not going to bring my son back, no matter what. They think they hurt him. Yes, they hurt him, but you know who they really hurt? They hurt us. Because they sent him to a beautiful place, much better than here. As far as I’m concerned, in a way, they took him out of his misery from always watching behind his back to see who was going to get him.”