The Killing of a Son Leaves Two Mothers in Torment : Street violence: One woman is devastated by the loss of her youngest; the other is shattered because she believes her 21-year-old is innocent and shouldn’t be in jail.

“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 in the head, her daughter-in-law screamed.

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

“I don’t know how to explain it . . . how I feel on the inside,” Rhodes 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 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.

“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,” Peterson said. “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.”

Women like Alice Rhodes and Sherry Peterson do not show up in the statistics that chronicle the rising tide of violence in many of Los Angeles County’s low-income communities. But they are part of the trail of victims.

Each tells a similar story of hope, sacrifice and regret. Rhodes and Peterson 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.

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 friends on Del Monte Street at 3:20 a.m., waiting for a ride home. His mother said he liked to go there to play dominoes. Officers said he was at a gang hangout where members of a Bloods sect gathered.

Michael Peterson, according to the police report, had a reputation on the streets for shooting Bloods. His mother said her son was home asleep that night. Peterson, on his lawyer’s orders, says nothing. Officers said 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, scrambled for cover. One of the bullets lodged in Wilburn’s 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 said 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.”

In Pasadena Superior Court last month, while lawyers argued 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.”