Gunshots in the Night--A Reporter’s Fear Is Realized

We’re taught as reporters not to get too close to the people we write about. Maintaining distance is considered the best way to stay objective. But in 20 years in this business, I can’t think of anyone who’s affected me the way the Ralph Rodriguez family did.

That’s why I had such an angry, vile reaction when one of our reporters called Saturday morning and said there’d been a drive-by shooting Thursday night at Rodriguez’s home in Santa Ana. It was the call I had feared would come someday.

“Their daughter was hit in the face,” she said, but even before saying in her next breath that she wasn’t seriously hurt, I got that desperate feeling you get when you realize some forces are beyond your control.

Over three lengthy interview sessions last April, I spent several hours in the Rodriguezes Santa Ana home, talking to them about the threats and harassment they had already received from gang members after Rodriguez’s role as a central figure in the case against other gang members in the LaBonita Avenue drive-by shooting the previous September. That shooting left two dead--a teen-ager and the 4-year-old son of one of Ralph Rodriguez’s cousins.

By the time I met the Rodriguezes, the family already had withstood personal threats, accentuated by barrages of beer bottles thrown in their front yard and a Molotov cocktail thrown at a bedroom window. Ralph’s son was nearly run over in the street, and Ralph was stopped on the street by a gang member and told that a $3,000 contract had been put out on him.

So, the thrust of my original story was simple: Rodriguez had incurred their wrath by breaking the “code of silence” and encouraging witnesses to the drive-by shooting to cooperate with police in testifying against 5th Street gang members. That cooperation eventually would lead to the convictions of four people, including a juvenile who lived two doors away from Rodriguez.

But the story was more complex than that. Rodriguez lived in the middle of 5th Street gang territory. As a former gang member himself, Rodriguez knew he was inviting potential danger on himself and his family by becoming so integrally involved in the case against the alleged assailants.

That’s what spawned my admiration and respect for Rodriguez. I wondered how many other people would have done that. I wondered if I would. I had to conclude that I probably would not.

Rodriguez is not a flawless human being; he never said he was. In fact, he and I had a rather heated conversation when I learned belatedly that he had a criminal record. “What was I supposed to do?” he said angrily in that conversation. “I was a criminal in the past, so I let a 4-year-old die needlessly and offer no help? Is that what people with criminal pasts are supposed to do? Do they say, ‘I have a record, so I’ll keep quiet and keep my nose out of it?’ Because if that’s what they’re supposed to do, I made a big mistake.”

That kind of argument made it difficult not to develop some warm feelings for Ralph and his wife, Isabel.

Part of it was that they were open and engaging, even in the face of the dangerous game they were playing. They seemed to be operating not out of reckless bravado, but out of some sense that civic duty demanded they help out.

But I was also affected by their four children, the two eldest of which, Linda, then 13, and Ralph Paul, 11, would often sit in the living room and listen to our conversation. I have vivid recollections of Linda sitting on the floor, a beautiful, polite girl of 13 listening to her father’s retelling of the harassment the family had endured. I got to know the kids a little and Ralph said Linda was hoping to be the first woman to play in the National Basketball Assn.

That’s the same room where she was lying sleepily Friday night when at least two gunshots were fired at the house. One broke a window; the other penetrated the drywall and hit her in the cheek. The damage was repaired with nine stitches.

I called Saturday to see how she was doing. She answered the phone, and I was taken aback at how calm she was. “You seem less upset than I am,” I told her.

“I was scared at first,” she said. “But maybe with everything that’s happened, I’m just so used to it.”

In the few months since the trial for the drive-by shooters ended, I’ve occasionally thought about the Rodriguezes. I’ve probably discussed their story more with friends than any I’ve ever covered. I’ve told those friends about my fears of a retaliation against them. My grimmest theory was that one of the children would be shot at on the street as a pay-back.

There’s nothing very profound to say about the shooting Friday night. It sounds pretty hollow to call it an outrage.

Sure, it reaffirms my worst fears that lawlessness has an inevitability to it that a civilized society can’t fully stop. But what worries me most is that maybe I’ve become as hardened to the probability of violence as the Rodriguez family.

Ralph and I had the same kind of conversation Saturday we had had many times before.

Of course, he is angry. This is the third of his four children who has been in harm’s way since the whole mess began unfolding a year ago. “We’ve had so much support since it happened, it’s incredible,” Rodriguez said. “Yet the one thing that keeps running through my mind is that people say, ‘If there’s anything we can do, just let us know.’ But there isn’t much they can do for us.”

Maybe this will satisfy the blood lust, I said. “I don’t think it will end,” he said. “The rumor on the street today--of course, you always hear rumors afterwards--is that they were going around saying, ‘We did it, we did it, but we didn’t do the job right.’ ”

Ralph and I talked often months ago about how vulnerable his family was. He seemed resigned to it back then; I just felt a range of fairly useless emotions, like anger and frustration and helplessness. They’re the same ones I feel today.

You can’t reasonably expect the police to catch the shooters. They don’t have much to go on.

So you’re left with just a sinking feeling that the forces of evil sometimes prevail.

Make no mistake--Ralph Rodriguez can take care of himself. He’d gladly go to any neutral site and slug it out with any 5th Streeter they wanted to bring out. He’d probably be willing to take on two or three of them at once, if that’s how they wanted to settle this thing.

But they won’t do it that way.

It’s much easier to fire into his living room and then wait for the morning paper to see if you happened to kill anyone.