The Heavy Price of Doing Right : Justice: Key witness in gang murder case knows he and his family may never be safe.

Hours before guilty verdicts were announced Tuesday in the trial of three youths blamed for Orange County’s worst gang attack, Ralph Rodriguez sat in his living room, saying he would never again step forward as a witness to a crime.

“We’ll never be the same,” Rodriguez said. “The truth is, we’ll never be safe.”

Since he decided last year to cooperate with police after his cousin’s 4-year-old boy was cut down by gunfire in the bloody gang pay-back, Rodriguez’s life has been turned inside out.

Friends and family members of the defendants have threatened to kill him, his wife, Isabel, and their four children. He doesn’t allow his kids to play out in the open much anymore. His own past as a convicted criminal--which he has spent years trying to live down--was dragged out by defense lawyers when he testified for the prosecution. And now that the case has concluded, police protection will no longer be as close at hand.

As the wheels of justice dragged on in these last few months and the threats continued, Rodriguez said, it dawned on him that no matter what the outcome of the trial, he would still have to live in a world where the rules of the street call for retaliation and violence against those who turn against their own.

But by afternoon, after the verdicts were read in Harbor Municipal Court, a tearful Rodriguez appeared to have changed his mind.

When Louis P. Valadez, 28, and Robert P. Figueroa, 21, were found guilty of two counts of murder and 11 of attempted murder--a third defendant, Roman G. Menchaca, 19, was convicted only of conspiracy--Rodriguez hugged his cousin, Frank Fernandez, and Fernandez’s wife, Irene.

“Right now, I say, yes, I would do it all again,” Rodriguez said. “I don’t know about later.”

That Rodriguez’s emotions have ranged from anger to regret to grief for his cousin’s loss is a reflection of the complexity of the case itself.

Since the night of Sept. 16, when individuals in a red pickup truck drove through the La Bonita neighborhood, spraying bullets at a crowd, the tale has been one full of ironies. Perhaps the biggest is that while Rodriguez himself was not even an eyewitness to the shootings, he somehow became the centerpiece of the case against the youths.

Rodriguez, himself a former gang member once convicted of intimidating a witness, chose to help police in spite of a deep-held tradition among some in his barrio that those involved in disputes should be left to settle the score on their own. He eventually helped persuade those who did witness the shooting to come forward and tell what they had seen.

“Ralph and Isabel helped so much,” Irene Fernandez, the mother of the dead 4-year-old, said Tuesday. “If it weren’t for them, we probably wouldn’t have gotten a guilty verdict.”

But for Rodriguez, the last few months have been a test of his beliefs in what is right and what is wrong, of the rules of the street he once subscribed to, and of the lessons he wants to teach his children.

“You think it’s not hard,” he said, answering a question with a question. “You think living in the middle of these gangs isn’t hard?”

Prosecutors claim the defendants, all associated with the 5th Street gang, were retaliating against the 17th Street gang for an earlier shooting in which defendant Valadez’s nephew was a victim. It was part of a long battle over which gang could claim the neighborhood.

But it was Rodriguez’s neighborhood too. His parents live across the street from him. A few doors down, he says, live other gang members. Valadez was his friend. And nearby lives the father of another defendant, a man who used to ask Rodriguez for help when he had car problems.

“How do you think me and him are going to get along in this neighborhood if I helped put his son away?” Rodriguez asks.

The county’s Victims-Witness program has offered to help the Rodriguezes move from the neighborhood by providing them with a security deposit for an apartment, and first and last month’s rent. Rodriguez laughs at the offer.

“I could do that myself,” he said. “That’s no help. I’m a homeowner.”

A few years ago the family bought a dilapidated house across the street from his parents’ home on West 2nd Street. It was in dire need of improvements, which the family has been making, little by little. But in its current condition, he said, he doubts he could sell if for even as much as he has put into it so far.