Drive-By Killing Unites Two Mothers in Torment : Violence: The son of one is gunned down; the other’s will stand trial for murder.

“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 Tuesday 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 each 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.

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 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, has said 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 have given 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.”

Earlier in life Jimmy Wilburn was a skinny, bowlegged kid with a gap-toothed grin, family members said. But over the years, he 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 acknowledged, “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.

“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 Peterson remembers her son Michael as a constant whirlwind, climbing on the furniture, spilling milk in everyone’s lap and pulling out the chair just before people sat down.

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 diploma 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 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.”