Good Life and Gang Life: It’s a Thin Line

The halogen street lights blanched the dark brown wall of a downtown Santa Ana supermarket, turning it into an eerie shade of pale gray. The quarter-size pits that peppered the cement block were unmistakable.

They were bullet holes.

“Will you look at that,” Police Sgt. Bill Scheer whispered as he inspected the damage, his squad car idling nearby. “There’s another one!”

Suddenly a chill came over us. We were in the middle of gang territory.

“I think we’d better get out of here,” Scheer said as an understandable wave of vulnerability washed over us. We jumped into the warmth of the black-and-white and drove off. I stared out the window at the graffiti-stained walls, wondering about the thoughts of the teen-ager who was hit in the back with a bullet during an attack at the supermarket just days before.

Welcome to the beat of the Santa Ana gang unit, where on an almost daily basis the officers deal with the grim aftermath of adolescent vengeance wrought through the barrel of a gun.

The boy was critically wounded by local gang members who caught him scrawling the name of a rival gang on the wall. He should have known better. The wall didn’t belong to him.

It didn’t belong to the supermarket either. It belonged to the street gang that to a large extent controls the lives and pocketbooks of those who live and work in their territory.

The gang unit wants to take the wall back. And the city. But they know the job is Herculean. I realized it that night when I looked into the eyes and the baby faces of the gang members who were stopped and taken into custody during that long night in a squad car last month.

As one of two police reporters for The Times Orange County Edition, my job is to stay in contact with local police agencies. Many times, it means writing the daily crime story--from Santa Ana. And if it is Santa Ana, then probably the story will deal with gangs. Last week alone there were four shootings, one of which left a 14-year-old boy dead.

The names and the streets on which their bodies are found invariably become blurred. But that night with Sgt. Scheer, the faces were clear.

Sitting manacled on the well-worn benches in the police substation, suspected gang members reacted with aplomb, almost a practiced nonchalance, as gang unit members asked them a battery of questions about gang affiliation and probation status.

They were about the same age as my two sons. That scared me.

Almost all of them had records. Many of them had not reached high school yet; some of them will be dead before they have the chance to make decisions about their adult lives.

I tried mental exercises, replacing their faces with the faces of my own kids. I tried to put myself in the shoes of these young gangsters’ parents. How would I feel? How would I deal with the phone call from the police department informing me that I had to come down and pick up my child?

As I loitered around the police station, I watched parents file up to the front desk. Their smiles were pasted on their faces, resignation shone through their nervous eyes. Many of them had made the trip to the station before and knew what awaited them.

I don’t know if I would act any differently.

Santa Ana is not alone. New Year’s Eve in Placentia was marked by a rumble that left an innocent man dead. Anaheim, Stanton, La Habra, even sleepy San Clemente and San Juan Capistrano have all been hit with gang-related violence in the recent past.

Last week, state Attorney General Dan Lungren met with police chiefs who gathered at the Disneyland Hotel.

I asked him what the major problem was that local law enforcement officials around the state will face this decade.

“Drugs and gangs,” he said without hesitation. Not high-tech or white-collar crime. Not organized crime.

Drugs and gangs.

When I get home from a long day of writing about crime, I see my sons doing their homework, fixing their skateboards, talking to their girlfriends. I breathe a sigh of relief. Everything seems normal.

But then I recall the interviews with the bereaved. The ones who die, the ones with the baby faces, are also doing those things. It’s like they have one foot in normal adolescence and the other in the grave. Something tipped them to the wrong side.

And like other parents in Santa Ana, Anaheim, Mission Viejo or San Clemente, I often wonder aloud. Can it, will it, happen to my own?