Slain Youth Wanted to Avoid Trap of Gangs

Whenever she hears that someone has joined a gang, Sister Leticia Gomez said she always tells the youth: “You’re messing up. You’re giving your mother and me only three options: visiting you in jail, seeing you in the hospital or taking you to the cemetery.”

Sister Leticia was at the cemetery Tuesday, burying the latest in a lengthening list of victims of gang violence.

Alvaro Rojero, 15, an eighth-grader at Fremont Junior High School, was the latest victim, murdered last week in a drive-by shooting in front of his home.

In three years of community work in Pomona, Sister Leticia said she has attended so many funerals of gang members and their victims that she has lost track of the exact number, but “it must be 27 or 28.”

Alvaro was not a gang member, Sister Leticia said, but like many youths from his neighborhood, he was on the verge.

In recent weeks, she said, he had been attending weekly meetings of a youth group that is an offshoot of Concerned Parents, the program that Sister Leticia runs in Pomona. Concerned Parents is sponsored by Soledad Enrichment Action, an organization founded 20 years ago in East Los Angeles to combat gang violence.

Last week, Sister Leticia took 22 boys and girls in the youth group to the state Youth Authority prison in Chino to hear inmates talk about gangs and crime.

Alvaro was one of several youths who said afterward that he was “not going to get into that trap,” she said.

Three days later he was dead. A 13-year-old friend with him was wounded by bullets fired from a passing truck as they were standing in Alvaro’s driveway.

They were shot, police said, in retaliation for an hours-earlier gang shooting across town, although neither boy was a gang member.

Sister Leticia spoke at Tuesday’s funeral Mass at Sacred Heart Catholic Church. She urged his family and friends to accept Alvaro’s death as a message to stay away from gangs and violence and asked that his death not be avenged.

“In Alvaro’s name,” she pleaded, “forgive the person who killed him” and take comfort in the knowledge that Alvaro “fought a good fight, but God has called him to a better life.”

Then, at the end of the Mass, she sang “Vaya con Dios” while young pallbearers carried Alvaro’s coffin out of the church as family members trailed behind, sobbing.

Alvaro was one of eight children in a family that came to the San Gabriel Valley from Mexico about five years ago, settling first in La Puente and then Pomona.

Sister Leticia said she met Alvaro shortly after the family moved into a small duplex on Park Avenue in a neighborhood associated with one gang. She said someone had painted a gang sign on their building, and she warned the family of the danger that their house could become a target. She said the father quickly painted over the sign.

After the funeral, family and friends gathered at the house to console the parents and remember Alvaro.

Sister Leticia said Alvaro was known to his friends as a boy who could “always pull a smile out of a frown.”

Arnold Sandoval, 14, and Alfredo Acevedo, 13, who were with Alvaro when he was shot, said Alvaro had a talent for making his friends laugh.

They said it was just an ordinary weekday afternoon when they were standing with Alvaro in his driveway, joking and making plans.

“We were talking about what we were going to do Friday,” Arnold said. “We were going to go to the movies. That’s where everybody hangs out.”

Arnold said he had his back to the street when he heard a truck behind him. “I turned around because I heard them slow down,” he said. “I wanted to see who it was. . . . Before I could say anything, they started shooting. I jumped out of the way.”

Arnold escaped injury. Alfredo is walking on crutches. Alvaro was rushed to Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center, but died in surgery.

Arnold said his close call has made him nervous, but he doesn’t expect more bullets right away. “It’ll calm down because nobody will be out because cops will be all over the place,” he said. But he has no doubt that gang violence will occur again in his neighborhood. “It won’t stop,” he said.

In her Soledad Enrichment Action office in Pomona, Sister Leticia seemed equally discouraged. Looking at a wall of snapshots of boys and girls at various happy occasions, she said some of those youths are now dead and many are in jail.

“It’s a losing battle,” she said.

But, then she noted a small victory. Since July, four boys have renounced their gang affiliations and are doing very well. “I hope others will have the courage to say, ‘I want to do that, too,’ ” she said.

“I think that if we journey with these youngsters long enough,” she said, “something good will happen. Maybe one out of 50, but it’s still worth it.”