1 Bullet Joins, Shatters Lives of 2 Mothers : Slaying: Pasadena shooting left one man dead, one in jail and two women wondering what their sons did to deserve such a fate.

“Wake up, mama.” The cry jolted Alice Rhodes from a restless sleep July 22. There was pounding on the door of her Pasadena apartment. Jimmy’s been shot, her daughter-in-law screamed, in the head.

Rhodes, 45, a round, motherly woman who comes from a family of Pentecostal ministers, dressed quickly and rushed to the emergency room of Huntington Memorial Hospital. By the time the doctors allowed her to see him, 22-year-old Jimmy Wilburn, her youngest child, was dead.

A white sheet covered him to his chin, and a white bandage was wrapped around his head. Rhodes touched his chest. She remembers how it still felt warm.

“I don’t know how to explain it to nobody, how I feel on the inside,” she said. “A very dear life was taken from me. That life came from my body. He was my friend, my son, my baby.”

Three days later, Sherry Peterson, 48, a tall, stoic woman who works as a paralegal, called the detective bureau of the Pasadena Police Department. She had heard that officers were circulating a photo of her son as a suspect in the shooting.

Convinced there had been an error, she invited police to her small rented home in Monrovia to clear up any misunderstanding. The next morning, three plainclothes homicide detectives arrived with an arrest warrant and, at gunpoint, dragged 21-year-old Michael Peterson away.

Although Peterson could face a life sentence if convicted--the trial is tentatively scheduled to begin Monday () in Pasadena Superior Court--his mother is convinced he will come home. In his bedroom, his clothes hang neatly in the closet as if he never left.

“We can’t figure out what he’s still doing in jail,” she said. “You go to sleep thinking about it, and you wake up thinking about it. I imagine it’s much like what the mother of Jimmy Wilburn is going through. I’m sure it would make her furious to hear that. But it’s totally devastating when you know he’s innocent and nobody believes you.”

In the poor, minority neighborhoods of Los Angeles County, this was as close to a routine murder as they come--just one of nearly 500 homicides attributed to gang members since the beginning of the year.

Two more African-American men were added to the bleak tally that has made murder the leading cause of death for young black males in this country, and that in California, shows one of every three black men in their 20s behind bars, on probation or parole.

“These things cannot be considered routine,” said Donald Wheeldin, a longtime activist in Northwest Pasadena and a member of the local Black Male’s Forum. “It’s taken a terrible toll on the community.”

Women like Alice Rhodes and Sherry Peterson do not show up in the statistics. But to anyone who flips through old Polaroids at Rhodes’ dining room table or gazes at the lace-framed portraits hanging in Peterson’s living room, it is clear their lives will never be the same.

Although these two women are of very different backgrounds, each tells a similar story of hope, sacrifice and regret. Rhodes, who is black, and Peterson, who is white but whose son’s father is black, both came to California in search of a better life. Each struggled to raise her children in Pasadena without the help of a father at home.

And no matter what the truth turns out to be, each woman insists her son did nothing that summer night to deserve such a fate.

The 9-millimeter bullet that brought them together was fired with the kind of indiscriminate fury that has become a daily occurrence.

Jimmy Wilburn was sitting with some friends on Del Monte Street at 3:20 a.m., waiting for a ride home. His mother says he liked to go there to play dominoes. Officers say he was at a gang hangout, home to members of the Pasadena Devil’s Lane Bloods.

Michael Peterson, according to the police report, had a reputation on the streets for shooting Bloods. His mother says her son was home asleep that night; Peterson himself says nothing, on his lawyer’s orders. Officers say he was seen in a blue Nissan Maxima holding his thumb and index finger in the shape of a “C,” the sign for the rival Crips gang.

As the car cruised past, four or five shots exploded from the driver’s side. Everybody, except Wilburn, seemed to duck or scramble for cover. One of the bullets lodged in the left side of his brain.

Detectives give only the standard police line that both victim and suspect were “associated” with local street gangs. “They don’t carry membership cards,” said Sgt. Monte Yancey.

Alice Rhodes and Sherry Peterson say their children knew members of gangs, but never joined.

“Jimmy was a black boy in a black neighborhood with black friends, but that doesn’t make him in no gang,” Rhodes said. “It certainly doesn’t mean he deserved to be killed in that way.”

Peterson said: “When you grow up in Pasadena and you’re black, you know kids who end up being gang members. You go to school with them and you play football with them. Michael didn’t stop being friends with them just because they were in a gang. But that doesn’t make him a gang member.”

Alice Fay Rhodes was 9 months old in 1946, the year she, her mother and grandparents rode the train from Texas to California. Her father, a plumber from Dallas, never made the trip.

They eventually settled in a big wooden house on Lincoln Avenue in northwest Pasadena. Her mother, an elementary school teacher, was a hemophiliac and sick much of the time. Her grandfather, a strict but caring man, was head deacon at the Divine Guidance Church of God and Christ.

She remembers the smell of homemade cakes baking in the kitchen and the prayers before bed with her two younger sisters, both now ordained ministers. As a teen-ager, she tried out for cheerleader at the almost all-white Pasadena High School, but figures she never really had a chance.

“All girls dreamed of being a beauty queen or a cheerleader,” she said. “But there was nothing dark at P.H.S. during that time. It was just something I wanted to do. I was brought up in a religious family that taught me all people were the same.”

In 1963, she enrolled at Pasadena Community College, where she took some courses in psychology and thought of being a teacher. But two years later, she found herself stuck at home, married and pregnant. Her first child was born in 1965, the next in 1966 and, by the time the third came in 1967, Rhodes was separated and raising them on her own.

That’s when she met LJ Wilburn, a feisty, free-wheeling North Carolina man who, by his own admission, had already fathered eight children by three different women. Twenty-two years her elder, he worked a forklift at the loading dock of a South Los Angeles picture-frame warehouse.

“I wasn’t looking for anything,” Rhodes said. “I didn’t love him, and I told him that. Then one day, I found out I was pregnant. I could have killed myself.”

Their baby was named Jimmy, a skinny, bowlegged kid with a gap-toothed grin. Rhodes worked hard to provide for him--assembling radio transistors, buffing metal airplane parts, doing inventory at a delicatessen and, her job for the last six years, caring for patients at a home for the developmentally disabled.

Wilburn helped with money every now and then, but kept his distance. “I wouldn’t have been no good man for her,” said Wilburn, now 67 and retired. “I was upside down back then. I liked alcohol, and I liked a bunch of women. I’d have had to change my life, and I didn’t want to do that.”

Their son grew to be a beefy, linebacker-sized man who loved karate movies, tropical fish, old soul music and a vivacious 19-year-old drugstore cashier named LaTasha Adams. They had three children together and planned to be married next Valentine’s Day.

There were signs, however, that his life was unsettled. He worked three years with his mother as the night caretaker at Halcyon House, but had dropped out of high school and was toying with joining the Navy.

Although his family said he had never been in serious trouble, court records show he was sentenced to three days in jail for receiving stolen property in 1986. And he still hung around an old group of friends who, his sister acknowledges, “consider themselves gang members.” He talked about moving to Oregon, some peaceful place far enough away to make a fresh start.

“Jimmy wanted what I couldn’t give him growing up--a home and family,” said his mother, adding that she was moved from Pasadena by the district attorney’s Victim-Witness Assistance Program after the family was threatened last month.

“I worked so much that I just think he needed somebody, a male figure maybe, to help motivate him, to say, ‘Hey, Jimmy, you can make it.’ ”

Sherry Alice Peterson was raised in solid brick house with a slate roof in Garden City, Long Island, a conservative, upper-middle-class community 30 minutes east of New York. Her father, a postal worker for 40 years, was chairman of the local chapter of Citizens for Nixon. Her mother, a former Department of Motor Vehicles clerk, was said to be a descendant of Mary, Queen of Scots.

At home, she says she was encouraged to be independent, think for herself and tolerate others. But she still remembers the time when they were visited by two black women who worked as maids at a home along her father’s mail route. Instead of opening the door to them, she recalls, her parents went into a back room and hid.

“You would never have heard the word ‘nigger’ in our house,” she said. “But underneath that, it was like, ‘You better not bring one home.’ ”

After Sherry graduated from Garden City High and briefly attended a teacher’s college, she traveled to Turkey, where she met a U.S. Air Force telecommunications specialist--a black man named Charles J. Peterson Jr.--and married him.

Sherry and Charles Peterson returned to the United States in 1965 and had four children. Life with Pete, as she called him, was romantic and adventurous at first. Staying with his family in inner-city Detroit, she was a novelty to her new brother-in-law, who, she said, slapped her white thigh just to see it turn red.

But soon after arriving in Los Angeles, where she worked in the admitting room of County-USC Medical Center and he as a technician for a paint company, their marriage began to erode. Part of the problem was Michael, their second-oldest child and only son, who she says was hyperactive and had a learning disability.

His mother remembers him as a constant whirlwind, climbing on the furniture, spilling milk in everyone’s lap and pulling out the chair just before people sat down. When his favorite program, “The Six-Million Dollar Man,” came on the TV, he could only make it to the first commercial before bouncing off the walls.

His father, who had been raised by a Ford assembly worker, was a strict disciplinarian and held Michael to a high standard, calling him his “Big Man.” When Michael was 7, his mother decided she would be better off raising the children on her own.

“My dad was very hard on Michael,” said Melissa, 23, his older sister. “He’d say things like, ‘Don’t be a punk, don’t cry to your mother.’ If she gave him a hug, he’d say, ‘Don’t hug him, you’re going to make him a sissy.’ It hurt Michael a lot. He needed to be shown feeling.”

His father, now living in Las Vegas, could not be reached.

At school in Pasadena, Michael won attention as the class clown. He squirted his teacher with a water pistol, rode his bicycle down the stairs and managed to get himself suspended dozens of times. His mother says that when Michael was 12, she placed him in The Sycamores, a home for problem boys in Altadena.

Michael ran away and was caught stealing so often that administrators finally returned him to his mother. At 16, he was sentenced to five years in California Youth Authority for stealing a car.

While in jail, he learned word processing, earned his high school degree and grew into a tall, dashing young man who dressed in preppie-style clothes, listened to rap music and flashed his moves on the basketball court. When he was released in May, 1989, he found work at a title company, was married briefly and fathered a son.

“He was never some monster with fangs and a tail running around,” his mother said. “It was always just annoying, immature stuff. But when he needed help, all they ever did was send him home. I did the best I could with what I had.”

In Pasadena Superior Court last month, while lawyers engaged in pretrial motions, Sherry Peterson and Alice Rhodes sat in the hallway, barely noting each other’s presence.

“I try to stay away from her,” said Peterson, dressed in a stylish purple pantsuit, her gray-streaked hair carefully coiffed. “She gets out of control, crying and yelling and screaming at me about how my son killed her son. . . . I come from a family where you cry into a bath towel before you let anyone see your tears.”

Rhodes, wearing a bright floral blouse and green skirt, stared nervously out the sixth-floor window.

“She’s so cool,” Rhodes said. “So professional. I guess I am emotional. But I’m not trying to act no way. Sometimes I just cry.”