Equal Opportunity: Murder Charges for Gang Girls

Gabriela Maldonado is 16, pregnant and charged with murder. The victim was a 16-year-old boy killed from a shotgun blast to his face. A drive-by.

Police say it was gang warfare, in La Habra, on Lincoln’s birthday.

Gabriela’s friend, Emilia Ceniseros, 17 years old, is charged too. Murder. Ditto for Gabriela’s brother, Edward. He’s 17.

Marcos Damian, just old enough to legally buy a beer, is down for murder as well. The one police say pulled the trigger, Gabriela’s boyfriend is still on the loose. He’s 19 years old. Cesar Vasquez is his name; he has a tattoo of a spider on his elbow.

If you don’t know these people, you may be saying, “So, what?” You have read about gangs before. You know that to them, life is bargain-basement cheap. You know enough to try to stay out of their way.

If you can figure out who they are, that is. Which you figure must be pretty easy to do.

It isn’t.

At least not for me. Not anymore. And I’ve seen a lot of kids, of all kinds.

Tuesday morning, I was at Juvenile Court, in the city of Orange. The kids they brought in from detention in Juvenile Hall were in handcuffs, linked by steel to the boys beside them. They all wore navy blue T-shirts, loose navy blue pants and sneakers, black or blue. There was one girl.

Mostly the charges were burglary, car theft, assault, hanging with a gang, or violating the terms of this program or that.

Some of these kids looked like toughs, others like they just needed a haircut and some self-respect. One blond boy on the end turned his head toward me across the aisle, sized me up, and started to talk.

“My daughter just turned 6 months old,” this boy told me. He seemed very proud.

Then all these kids were gone, and the marshals brought in the children that prosecutors want to try as adults.

Here were Gabriela and Emilia, two girls going where others have not yet tread. Drive-by murder. Just like the guys. It’s the first time anyone can remember that a local girl has so been charged.

Of course, this is not L.A. That’s what cops and prosecutors keep telling me so that I might keep gang violence in perspective. As in, it could be much worse.

Except that gangbanging in Orange County is still pretty big time.

“It used to be that a drive-by shooting with an injury was news,” says Deputy Dist. Atty. John Anderson. “Now you have to have a murder with a pregnant girl involved to make the news.”

Anderson was kidding, sort of. He knows the joke is not that big.

Many people have become blase about gang warfare. It’s been a long, long time since we realized that it’s not just happening someplace else.

So now there’s a new twist: gangbanging girls, eager to prove they are not the weaker sex.

“What really sets this case apart in my mind is the involvement and the degree of sophistication of the girls,” says Detective Cliff McPhail, the La Habra Police Department’s authority on gangs.

He is talking about Gabriela and Emilia, the girls I saw smiling and chatting in Juvenile Court. Emilia is tall, dark-haired, with a heavy build. Her face is acne-scarred. Gabriela looks softer. Her skin is smooth. Her hair, dyed a reddish-brown, was swept into a ponytail at the crown.

“The ones that really concern me are the low-profile ones, the meek and mild-looking ones,” McPhail says. “They’re usually the confident ones. The insecure ones are the ones who really dress down, who really look like gangsters.”

Teresa Maldonado, the mother of Gabriela and Edward, was in court too. Gabriela’s court-appointed attorney told Teresa Maldonado not to talk to the press. This mother believes that her kids are innocent: not perfect, but not bad.

In the courtroom’s back row was the family of the 16-year-old boy who was slain, Leo Arthur Huicochea. Leo’s hands were still in his pocket when he died, in an alley behind an apartment complex, alone at night.

His home was in Huntington Beach. He was in La Habra visiting a friend. Police say that Leo wasn’t a gangster but that he knew some kids who were.

“He was a nice boy,” says Leo’s father. The words barely come out, then he says them again. Tears slip from the corners of his eyes.

“Everybody was in love with him,” he says.

The court hearing Tuesday was pretty routine. The attorneys for the defendants asked the judge for more time to get to know their case, to get to know the kids.

So now it will be next month before the judge rules on whether the nature of their alleged crime makes Gabriela, Emilia and Edward adults.

A grim milestone, however, has already been crossed. “Equal opportunity” is what Detective McPhail calls it: girl gang members with all the rights, privileges and obligations of the boys.

McPhail says the trend in La Habra started within the past five years. He says 60% of the city’s gang-related crime--everything from vandalism to assault and on up--can be traced to the girls.

“At times,” he says, “I just have to sit down and shake my head.”

It’s happening elsewhere, of course, although the degree doesn’t appear to be as high. In Santa Ana, the cops says a more traditional gang structure means that girls are still mostly hangers-on. And in Garden Grove, police say the violence level of the Vietnamese girl gangs seems to have tapered off in the past year.

Still, the La Habra case sounds new alarms. “I always said it was a matter of time, that they would progress,” says Sgt. Frank Hauptmann, who until two months ago headed Garden Grove’s Asian gang unit. “They went from fists and high heels to knives and guns. It’s only a matter of time before it begins to explode.”

All of which, from a sociological perspective, is interesting. I suppose.

Gangster girls no longer content with a support role are charging to the front lines. Perhaps, even as I write this, doctoral research is under way.

But from my perspective, all of this is really too close, too scary, too real. Pregnant 16-year-old, baby-faced, charged with drive-by murder.

No, it doesn’t make for much of a joke.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.