Fed Up With Gangs, Mothers Fight Back

When the prosecutors and police and even a judge showed up one night last week to honor a new community group tackling the Harbor area’s gang problems, the group’s president, Dee Wigginton, couldn’t help herself. She cried.

It was just a year ago, Wigginton figures, that her only contact with that sort of crowd would have been in a courtroom or a jail. A year ago, she was still doing cocaine, sometimes heroin. A year ago, she was on parole for grand theft.

Now, in the dining room of La Chispa restaurant in San Pedro, she was standing face to face with the city attorney of Los Angeles and accepting a proclamation. The local police captain was presenting her group a check for $500 from local businesses. And at every table there were well-wishers.

It was a remarkable night for Wigginton. And a remarkable night for the group, Mothers Against Gangs Support Services.

The Los Angeles Police Department says there are 502 street gangs in the city, with about 40,000 gang members in all. Many of the gangs are older than those found in the Harbor area. Many are larger. But in recent months, none have been more violent.

It was a surge of violence--daily drive-by shootings that would soon lead to a gang killing--that got the mothers in Wilmington talking in April. As Chris Luna remembers it, some mothers from both the east and west sides of town were trying to assure a truce at Easter. And the more they talked, the more it became clear that the mothers could get results if they got together.

Around the same time, Dee Wigginton also was talking with her sister, Jeanie Balbuena, about the violence that had rocked Wilmington, Harbor City and San Pedro. Her sister wondered aloud whether anything could be done. She asked, Wigginton recalls, what might happen if a group of mothers in the area banded together to stop further bloodshed.

After one strategy session at a local recreation center, the first meeting of Mothers Against Gangs, a name suggested by one ex-gang member, was held on April 2 at Mahar House, a community outreach center in Wilmington. Ten mothers showed up and they agreed, Wigginton said, that something could be done.

“We all agreed it starts in the home,” Wigginton said.

A few were skeptical, she said, that the parents of gang members or kids headed for trouble would do anything more than they had already done. And it was not as though some parents hadn’t already tried to turn their kids around.

But neither the pleading nor the punishment was working, the mothers said, because sometimes the problems were too big for one parent to solve. And just as often, parents were too inclined to deny the worst about the kids, including their own.

“We’d all had that denial because you’re brought up to feel that you have to protect your kids,” Wigginton said. “But it gets to the point where you have to ask yourself if you’re protecting your kids or protecting yourself from the truth that you have problems.”

Wigginton, like some of the other mothers, knew the problems firsthand.

Until last fall, Wigginton admits, most of her life had been a mess. A gang member at 15, she spent six years in and out of prison. Four years ago, her husband overdosed on heroin. Even then, she continued using drugs.

Finally, last October, blood infections brought about, in part, by years of narcotics addiction almost killed her, said Wigginton, a mother of three.

“It took me almost dying to see what my life had been,” she said last week. “I finally realized I had to change.”

Although Wigginton’s personal story is dramatic, so are those of other mothers who belong to MAGSS. There are mothers who have lost sons to gang violence. Mothers who still fear that could happen. Mothers like Chris Luna, whose home in East Wilmington looked like a battlefield one night two years ago.

Driving back from a weekend trip with her husband, Luna saw a crowd massed on her front lawn and neighbors warned her away. “They told me, ‘Don’t go there. There’s been a shooting,’ ” Luna recalled.

Her son, she soon found out, was not among the casualties of the drive-by shooting. But her best friend’s son and a next-door neighbor were dead. Five more people were wounded. “There were bodies all over the street,” she said.

Luna was no newcomer to gang violence. Growing up in the Ramona Gardens housing project in Boyle Heights, she learned about gangs as a teen-ager. And as an adult, she has worked as a crisis intervention counselor for agencies that include the Los Angeles County Community Youth Gang Services Project.

But nothing has prepared Luna or the others for what has been happening recently on the streets of Wilmington, Harbor City and San Pedro. In the last two months, at least half a dozen people have been killed, and dozen more injured, by drive-by shootings that are so common, police say, that some aren’t reported unless someone is injured. The victims have often, but not always, been gang members or would-be members.

The shootings include at least two aimed at officers patrolling at Dana Strand Village, a housing project in Wilmington. Police think the shootings were prompted by the death of a young gang member who choked on a small bag containing cocaine. Some gang members thought police did not do enough to save their friend.

After one patrol officer was grazed by a bullet outside Dana Strand, MAGSS held an emergency meeting at Luna’s home. “We have to get the word out to stop the shooting while we find out what happened,” Luna said.

One of the mothers, Sylvia Hernandez, saw some of what happened at Dana Strand that night. And it was decided that she and several others would go out to the projects the next day to find out what they could. If the police were wrong, they wanted facts, not rumors, Wigginton said. And no one wanted a war with the LAPD.

The next morning, half a dozen mothers walked door to door through the projects. They asked questions. They told residents what they knew. They didn’t have all the answers. But they helped to calm nerves.

After only four months in existence, MAGSS has already drawn the attention--and support--of city and county officials, local agencies and the community. That much was clear even before the group’s first installation dinner last week.

Beginning with 10 members, the group had 25 at its second meeting in April. Then 100 at one gathering in May. At last count, 52 women were paid members of MAGSS, whose membership fee is $2 a year. “We’re poor mothers,” Wigginton jokes.

The group, she said, is a cross-section of mothers who have known, or fear, the effect of gang violence on their families. Some have lost children who were in gangs. Others have children in jail for crimes. And others have children who are wanna-bes--kids who could become gang members unless someone convinces them otherwise.

And that, according to MAGSS and its supporters, is where the group has helped.

“We have found that gang members listen to their mothers. Mothers are very important symbols. And what MAGSS has pointed out is that some mothers are nurturing gang members rather than doing something to stop them from criminal activity,” said Capt. Joe DeLadurantey, Harbor Division commander.

“These people know what they are talking about,” DeLadurantey said. “They come from reality. They come from a frame of reference that few organizations do.”

The group helps parents recognize that they have a problem with their children. Once the denial is gone, Wigginton says in a letter describing the group, “then we are there to counsel the parents and the child, refer them to services available in the community, be there at the hospital if there is a shooting, and hopefully not too often, at the mortuary when it gets that far.”

Some mothers throw away their children’s gang clothes, insist that they return to school or turn them over to a probation officer. If a child won’t listen, Wigginton notes, “jail is better than the grave.”

Early on, MAGSS members met with DeLadurantey and made it clear they were ready to tackle the problem of gang violence--on their own terms but in cooperation, when necessary, with the police. And DeLadurantey assured them he would support them.

That sort of understanding did not come easily at first. As Chris Luna explained recently, “A lot of us have always been anti-police. I was brought up that way in the projects. But Captain Joe has accepted us in a way that makes us feel there is hope.”

DeLadurantey was at last week’s dinner. So were plenty of others, including Los Angeles City Atty. James Kenneth Hahn, who said the city’s efforts to combat gang violence may hinge on groups like MAGSS.

“They have changed the focus from the martyred mothers syndrome, where they were the victims, to a more assertive position,” Hahn said. “Theirs is the kind of group that I believe will make a difference. Because we’re on the outside trying to get in and deal with gangs, and they’re on the inside. They already know how to reach the children,” he said.

Wigginton knows that is true in many cases. She also knows that sometimes it is not.

Only hours before the dinner, for example, she was in a Long Beach courtroom with the mother of a 15-year-old as he appeared in court on charges of stealing a car and possessing marijuana. The teen-ager, already shot twice in gang incidents, was expecting, like every other time, to be released to the custody of his mother.

But after the judge set the trial date, the boy’s mother spoke up. She told the judge she couldn’t handle her son anymore. She said her boy might be better off in custody until his trial. She said she wanted her son to live.

The judge ordered the boy held in Juvenile Hall.

“It was hard for her. She was crying,” Wigginton said. “But I told her she had to be strong, that she had to love him enough to quit making excuses. Otherwise, he will continue the way he is and end up in some drive-by.”

That possibility, of seeing their children dead or in jail, of watching them commit a crime or become a victim, is what is drawing more mothers to MAGSS.

“We’re not about a bunch of talk. We’re tired of talk,” Wigginton said. “We’re tired of losing kids. We’re tired of going to funerals.”

They have been to too many.

At the recent emergency meeting, after they talked about the drive-bys, the mothers discussed another consequence of the gangs. It was not a battle over turf or a drive-by shooting. It was a young woman from Wilmington who, police say, was shot to death by her strung-out teen-age boyfriend.

The family of 27-year-old Patricia Florencio, the mothers knew, could use help paying the $1,400 for the girl’s funeral. Quickly, it was agreed that MAGSS would sponsor a carwash to help pay for the funeral. “We don’t always have the money to bury our dead,” Santos reminded the group.

As the girl’s mother and sister thanked the gathering, everyone rose for a prayer. “We ask you to help us, Father God, to help the guys before they go out and get killed,” said Irene Campos, a gang specialist with the Community Reclamation Project.

“We’re going to continue, Father God,” she said, “so there will be no more tears.”