The Streets of L.A.--Life and Death for Children

On the South Los Angeles street where Claudette Ku lived, mothers took their children out for a stroll under the searing morning sun Wednesday, just as they do every morning--just as others were doing several miles east, past the house in Lynwood where Jonathon Fabian lives.

Like ducks in a shooting gallery, the children of Los Angeles always come out--to walk with their mothers and play and ride. Some die. Each month, the toll of Los Angeles’ dead and wounded children rises, pushed ever-upward by gang gunfire and parental abuse.

On Wednesday, the family of Claudette Ku, a 13-year-old girl fatally shot in a gang-related shooting, prepared to select a coffin. At Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, relatives kept vigil by the bedside of 2-year-old Jonathon Fabian, critically shot in the abdomen by three teen-agers as he played near his house. In West Los Angeles, a man was in police custody for allegedly beating his 3-year-old son to death. And in Municipal Court, a divinity student was being arraigned for strangling his 3-month-old child and taking the body to his wife’s workplace.

But on Vermont Avenue, at 82nd Street, where Claudette Ku lay on the sidewalk dying the night before, children were at play again Wednesday morning. Luis Garza-Ruano stood in his doorway and watched while mothers came out and strolled with their babies--past wood-shuttered windows, graffiti-smeared porches and alleys strewn with mattresses, wine bottles and old boots.

It seemed an unconscious act of defiance, this urge to get the children out into the sun--as if all the horror and grief that welled up in two more households had failed to mar one of the simplest pleasures of family life.

A sunburned woman walked by Garza-Ruano, carrying her little girl over her shoulder. An older girl scampered behind them, whirling an empty pop bottle and chattering to herself. There were children strapped into strollers, children carrying infants, children peeking out of doorways and alley gardens and cluttered markets.

“Something like this, you wonder why people ever take their children outside the house,” Garza-Ruano said. “But you have to take them outside, right?”

The night before, a few feet from his living room door, Claudette Ku was shot once in the head as she sat in a car at a red light with her boyfriend and another companion. On Wednesday morning, Garza-Ruano left his wife, Marta, and 2-year-old daughter for a moment in the doorway (“You hate to look away, even for a second,” he said) and walked to the corner where paramedics placed the girl’s body on a stretcher. The sidewalk had been swept, but a lipstick tube dropped by the dead girl was lying near the curb.

“I hear the shots and I look out,” Garza-Ruano said. “I look and I see the blood. Poor girl.”

Garza-Ruano’s 7-year-old son, Alexander, heard the shots too. After the crowds left and the police and the paramedics took away the victims and the empty car, the father tried to explain it all to his son.

“He couldn’t sleep much last night,” the father said. “He ask me, ‘Do the children die?’ I say, ‘Yeah.’ I tell him when he gets older, he better be careful, stay away from the pandillas (gangs).”

Those are the kinds of warnings that Frederick Williams, 13, hears every day from his mother and father. On Wednesday, Frederick heard the warnings again, 12 hours after their neighbor, 2-year-old Jonathon Fabian, was shot while he played on a toy in front of his family’s house in the 4000 block of Platt Avenue.

“He don’t go nowhere now , “ said Frederick’s mother, 33, a U.S. Census employee who declined to give her name. “If (Frederick) wants to go roller skate or go see ‘Robocop’ at the movies, I drive him. This boy will not join a gang. This boy ain’t gonna be in the line of fire.”

The houses on Platt Avenue are low-slung stucco dwellings. They have small squares of lawn, driveways and gnarled oaks--and a sense of well-scrubbed comfort that has long disappeared from the street where Claudette Ku died.

Frederick and his mother happened to be in the emergency room at King Medical Center Tuesday night when paramedics brought in their 2-year-old neighbor. Frederick, there for treatment of cold sores and a fever, at first failed to recognize Jonathon.

“They were rolling him through the hall and he went right past us,” Frederick said. “His eyes were open, but he didn’t say anything. When we got home and the neighbors told us what happened, we realized who he was.”

“Thank God he’s still alive,” Frederick’s mother said. “I looked at my babies this morning and I was thankful they were all healthy and well. All you have to do is look into those faces to know how terrible it would be if that boy didn’t make it.”

Hugh and Janet Lee live next door to the Fabians. They are childless, but they, too, felt for Jonathon.

The Lees, who work as letter carriers for the U.S. Postal Service, have long thought about having a baby. But the morning after their young neighbor was shot outside their kitchen window, the Lees wondered if having a child was the right thing to do after all.

“I mean, how do you bring a child into this world?” Hugh Lee asked. “You can’t protect the children. You see these people let their kids go off to the park . . .”

”. . . And you wonder,” interjected his wife, “if they’ll come back alive.”