2 Guns, 2 Deaths, 2 Grieving Families : Adrian and Luis, Not Members of Gangs, Still Became Victims

Adrian Barajas didn’t smile much for a child of 10.

Oh, he loved his family and his friends and his art. But he hated violence and gangs and the cruelty he saw inflicted on others in his neighborhood, in the shadow of Dana Strand Village, a housing project in Wilmington.

His mother, Odette Fortier, remembers how Adrian would stand up to other kids on his block when they picked on a disabled boy who was a neighbor. “Adrian didn’t want to fight, but he’d stick up for the boy,” she says.

But as sensitive and smart as he was, Adrian, like any boy his age, couldn’t resist looking at the gun his 13-year-old cousin found last Saturday in the cousin’s apartment at Dana Strand. The .357 magnum belonged to the cousin’s older brother, a gang member.

The two young boys also found a bullet and loaded and unloaded the gun. Around 2:20 p.m. or so, the telephone rang and Adrian’s cousin answered it. Adrian asked to see the gun. And as it was passed, the gun went off.

In an instant, Adrian was dead.

Officially, Adrian’s death is considered an accident. But to his family and friends and police, it represents something more.

For the gun belonged to a gang member. And the gang member is not the one who died. Someone else did. Someone innocent.

Less than 12 hours after Adrian died, Luis Navarro was gunned down on his 21st birthday by a gang member. The shooting took place a few blocks from the San Pedro house Navarro grew up in, the house where friends, some of them gang members, were celebrating his birthday with a party.

Neither Adrian nor Luis wanted any part of the gangs or the mayhem. Adrian said so often to his mother. So did Luis. But they both had family or friends in gangs. And last weekend, that was all it took for both of them to die.

“The same message keeps coming up that even if you are not a proclaimed member of a gang, you can be a victim,” says Los Angeles Police Capt. Joe DeLadurantey, who commands the Los Angeles Police Department’s Harbor Division.

In the first seven months of this year, just before Adrian and Luis died, 11 other people were killed in gang-related violence in the Harbor Division. By comparison, only five gang-related killings were recorded for the same period last year.

And sometimes, as with Adrian, the numbers do not tell the whole story.

“His death will never show up as a gang-related killing, but the atmosphere is more than likely what created the circumstances that led to the tragedy,” DeLadurantey says.

Dee Wiggington, president of Mothers Against Gangs, is more blunt.

“I want the gangs to realize what they’re doing to their families. Without realizing it and having a gun in the house like that sets these children up to die,” she says.

On Wednesday, police arrested Adrian’s 17-year-old cousin for owning the gun.

Odette Fortier does not want to talk about her nephew. It’s hard enough thinking about how his gun was the one that killed her son.

“I just wish people would stop. Adrian always hated the violence,” says Fortier, 39. “Maybe the gun wouldn’t have been around if so many people weren’t so angry, so vengeful.”

Those people, she says, include the gang members Adrian never wanted any part of. “He told me he was never going to be in a gang, never going to use drugs. He was really adamant about it,” Fortier said tearfully, sitting in the living room of her home in Wilmington, three blocks from where her son died.

“He’d say, ‘It’s not right, Mom.’ ”

Adrian cared a lot about what was right and wrong, according to his family and those who knew him at Hawaiian Avenue Elementary School.

“He was a quiet, introspective child. A bright boy who was good at problem solving,” remembers Principal Tommye Keenan. “And he had good insight into his own feelings, more than you would expect from a child his age.”

The feelings emerged in Adrian’s art, the drawings and the paintings he cherished. “The times he smiled were when he did his artwork,” Keenan says.

“When he smiled, he was a completely different boy. There was a radiant look on his face,” she recalls. “It was like the sun coming out.”

Adrian’s dream was to be an artist. “He was a great little artist,” Keenan says. “He was able to express himself in ways that he was reluctant to do with words.”

If his family had its way, Adrian would have been an artist. If things had been different, the whole family would have moved away to a safer neighborhood, says Fortier, who has two other sons.

“If I had the money, I’d be gone,” says Fortier. To Oregon or Northern California, she says. To any place where the streets are not taken over by gangs and criminals.

“But every place is like that,” her oldest son, Steve, 21, tells his mother as they talk in the family’s living room.

Steve’s rage over his young brother’s death first turned to thoughts of retaliation. But, just like Adrian, he rejected that idea.

“I felt like I should take revenge, but it’s not right,” he says. “It’s not going to make anything better.”

Instead, he and his family are making arrangements for a funeral that has not yet been set. Instead, they have set up the Adrian Barajas Fund, P.O. Box 3911 Gardena, 90247, to help pay the $3,000 they’ll need for the funeral. Instead, they are thanking others who have come to share in the grief over Adrian.

“I can’t believe how many people are reaching out to help,” Adrian’s mother says. “It makes me remember the world is not all ugly violence,” she says.

Still, it’s hard to forget that violence and how it took away Adrian.

“I can still see the police and the yellow tape” Fortier says, remembering her arrival at Dana Strand last Saturday.

No one told her anything at first, Fortier says. Then, she told one stone-faced policeman she was Adrian’s mother.

“The officer was trying so hard. He was not saying anything. But I saw it in his eyes that it was my baby that was shot,” Fortier recalls.

“I miss my baby.”

Over the years, Luis Navarro had a lot of nicknames. But they were not the names common to the streets, names like “Loco” or “Solo” or “Sniper.” No, Navarro’s nicknames were endearing.

As a kid, they used to call him “Baby Huey” because he was always big and chubby for his age. And when he grew into manhood, there were new nicknames. One friend called the likable 6-foot-1 former ship worker “Gentle Bear.” And the girls, charmed by his rugged good looks and dimples, called him “Luscious.”

Navarro especially loved that nickname. He loved the attention from women. “When one of his mother’s friends called on the phone and asked, ‘Who’s this?,’ he’d say, ‘You know, the most handsome one in San Pedro,’ ” remembers Debbie Gonzalez, a friend of Navarro since childhood.

That was Luis. A little vain, perhaps. But friends and family remember him as good-hearted and friendly, a young man who never went looking for trouble.

The north San Pedro neighborhood in which he grew up is not the toughest around. But it’s rough enough. And Luis dropped out of San Pedro High School two years before graduation, deciding he wanted to get a job and make money.

His last job, at a Terminal Island shipyard, ended three months ago when he was laid off. But even then, Luis never ran the streets, according to those who knew him.

Instead, Luis always stuck close to the San Pedro home he shared with his widowed mother, Yolanda, and older brother, Martin. During the day, he’d sleep a lot or run to the store for his mother or her friends. At night, sometimes all night, he’d plunk himself down before the television set, watching shows or playing Nintendo.

With plenty of friends and time between jobs, Luis was always available to others, close friends and family say. “He was like everybody’s older brother,” one friend remembers.

So many considered him family that he was soon to be godfather to two young children. Luis also had a son of his own, a 1-year-old boy also named Luis. But the boy and his mother moved to Montana months ago when, friends say, she was offered a good job.

Luis stayed in San Pedro.

“He was always at home,” his mother says.

Last Saturday night, he was still close to home, celebrating his 21st birthday with a party at a neighbor’s house. About 40 or so of his friends showed up for the party, held in the neighbor’s back yard.

Shortly before 1 a.m. Sunday, Luis and a friend left the party to buy cigarettes. They jumped into his car and headed toward Gaffey Street.

En route, a car pulled alongside Luis’. The other car, authorities say, carried several gang members from outside of San Pedro and one of them yelled out the name of their hometown. A moment later, a gang member opened fire on the car carrying Luis and his friend.

“They never saw it coming,” says LAPD homicide Detective Tom Lange.

Luis, shot once in the side, tried to control his car as it continued down the street. But he couldn’t, passing out seconds before it crashed into a parked car just blocks from his home.

His friend ran back to the party for help. A witness to the accident called police. But by the time Luis arrived at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, he was dead.

Why the gang members picked Luis is unclear. There were some San Pedro gang members at his party, but they, like everyone else, were in a back yard, out of sight. One theory is that he was mistaken for someone else who was dating a girl from the other gang’s hometown. But that notion is dismissed by Luis’ family and friends.

“Those guys were just out looking for someone to kill,” says Martin.

As he continues to investigate the case, Lange says this killing, like others involving gangs, may just be random. “It doesn’t take a lot to motivate these gangs to violence,” he says.

In the end, why Luis was murdered doesn’t matter as much to his family and friends as the fact that he’s gone, that his killers must be found.

“I just want them to pay for what they did. I want them to do time,” says Martin, who says he and his family want police, not friends, to solve the killing.

“I don’t want anyone to take this into their own hands and get hurt,” says Martin.

“I don’t want another mother crying,” his mother adds.

Luis will be buried today after an 11:30 a.m. Mass at St. Peter’s Catholic Church in San Pedro.