Lessons a Young Boy Teaches

Fran Thomas keeps thinking about the kid, the sad, somber, sweetness of him, the potential he had, the sensitivities he possessed.

She sees him in class troubled by the tragic romance of Romeo and Juliet, and remembers his stunned expression after watching a film that included black children being killed in South Africa.

“Why’d that have to happen?” she recalls him asking in the kind of stricken tone incredulity stirs. “Why’d they have to die?”

He was a boy who cared deeply about others, Thomas says, even if they were only ill-starred lovers in a Shakespearean drama.

“If you taught for 20 years,” she says, “you’d only meet one kid like him, a kid who touches your heart, a boy you can’t forget.”

His name was Julio Moran.

Thomas taught him language arts in a juvenile probation camp. She doesn’t know why he was there. Juvenile records are sealed. While she could have found out what his offense was, it wasn’t important to her.

Unlike most of the inmates, Julio never bragged about what he did to get there. He took no swaggering pride in confinement.

“All the kids at Camp Miller are troubled,” she said the other day in her Malibu home. “They aren’t the hard-core ones, the killers or rapists. They’re more often than not the victims of circumstances.”

Julio was born in El Salvador. His father died in the cross-fire of civil war, and his mother brought them to America, hoping for a better life.

That dream ended two months ago. Julio Moran, age 17, was shot dead by plainclothes Los Angeles police officers who fired 18 rounds at him from their semiautomatic weapons. He was unarmed.

What has bothered many, including at least one of the journalists who covered Julio’s death, was the manner in which the killing occurred.

Julio had a sweat shirt wrapped around one hand. No one knows why. The cops thought it might conceal a gun. The boy was moving toward them, and when he ignored their command to stop, they fired.

Once, twice and then again, again, again, again, again . . .

His mother, a housekeeper, was devastated by her son’s death. He was never a gang member, she said. He was never a bad kid.

A reporter who covered the case agrees.

“My sense,” he said, “is that Julio was a good kid in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Parts of L.A., he added, have become a free-fire zone.

“Cops figure that any kid in a car late at night in a specific area is automatically a gang member,” he said. “How many have been killed for brandishing nothing more lethal than a towel, a sweat shirt or a pen?”

When she read of Julio’s death, Fran Thomas was at first stunned then bitter.

“I cried for a whole weekend,” she wrote me recently. “I wish I could know why it was necessary to shoot an unarmed kid 18 times when he had no weapon at all.”

She says the number 18 as though it’s a devil’s curse, snapping it across the room. Then she sighs, emptied by the violence of her own emotion.

“I wrote you because I just don’t want Julio to be remembered as a mad dog shot down in the street. There was another side to that boy.”

It was that point Fran Thomas wanted to address: In kids such as Julio there are redeeming qualities that ought to be given opportunity to grow.

“If only,” she said, “we could take them out of their own neighborhoods and put them on a farm in Nebraska. . . .”

Thomas taught 2,000 boys while substitute-teaching at Camp Miller. She had them read Shakespeare to improve their language skills and watch movies to develop a sense of the larger world.

She found that one of their biggest fears was being sent home again. They knew violence waited there.

“We can’t imagine how bad it is for them,” she said. “One boy said it wasn’t just a question of guns being fired at night. They go off all day. It’s like living in Lebanon.”

Julio, she says, worried mostly about his mother facing the dangers that surrounded her own home.

“He was that kind of boy, more concerned about others than about himself. There was a goodness to him that never should have died in the streets.”

Thomas understands the peril policemen face. A sweat shirt could conceal a weapon. Cops don’t live cat’s lives. They die only once.

What bothers her are the number of bullets fired and the sweetness of the life they took. Julio, she says, perished in the cross-fires of war, much as his father had, and his death was just as purposeless.

She won’t forget him. And she’s hoping, by filling the empty spaces in his life, by fleshing out his goodness, that at least one boy’s death on the mean streets of L.A. will not pass unnoticed.