Living Without Jamee : Crime: Mother of 13-year-old girl killed in a gang ambush three years ago is striving to come to terms with grief. Talking with victims of violence and the victimizers helps.

The day she buried her 13-year-old daughter, Charlotte Austin asked a friend to photograph the child lying in her casket.

“I didn’t know why,” Austin said.

But later, when she was invited to speak to young prisoners, suddenly she knew.

She stood before them and told the story of Jamee. How her only daughter was riding home from the store with a friend when their red Pontiac was riddled with bullets, killing both girls. How Jamee’s hands were so shattered by the gunfire that Austin had to buy gloves to cover them for the funeral.

Then she passed out photographs of Jamee. “Ooh,” the boys murmured. “She’s pretty.”

The last photograph was of the child in her casket. “They wanted to put it down, but I told them, ‘No. You look at that. That’s the last time I saw my daughter.’ ”

And the boys cried.

It will be three years since Jamee was killed, a crime that riveted attention in a city where violence is common. The girls’ youth and the senselessness of the act distinguished their deaths from others--gang members, looking for the sister of a drug dealer who double-crossed them, sprayed the wrong car with gunfire. The trial of the six people accused of the killings begins Monday. For Austin, it will be the last step in a long, painful, but courageous journey.

Many times she thought she might lose her mind. Some nights she still wakes up, her throat tight, tears running down her face. She does not remember the dream. Only that it was of Jamee.

But determined not to submit to the paralysis of grief, she has confronted her tragedy in ways that amaze those who know her. She has faced young gang members in an effort to save them and those they might later victimize. And she has relived the horror of her child’s murder with others who have lost their children to violence, letting them know they are not alone.

She must keep going, for the sake of her living children, and for Jamee. “I just take a deep breath,” she says, “and take another step.”

For Austin, a single mother, it is difficult to understand what went wrong when she tried so hard. Her worst fears always had been for her teen-age son, Corey.

“OK, Corey, you’ve got this walk,” Austin would tell her oldest son when he went to school. “You’ve got to go through the Bloods territory and the Crips territory. Don’t wear blue shoe strings. Don’t sag your pants. Don’t wear T-shirts and khakis.

“I had no inkling, no idea, it was going to be Jamee.”

The Monday after Mother’s Day, 1988, Austin let Jamee ride to the store with girlfriend Latonjyia Nikki Stover.

Nikki, 18, and Jamee had grown to be like sisters in the short time Austin and her family had lived in the working-class neighborhood bordering Vernon and Western avenues. Austin left a small apartment in Watts for a three-bedroom house with a front and back yard. “It was to get something better for them,” she said. “The house was perfect. Each kid had his own room. It was home.”

Jamee wrote a letter to her grandmother that day and made an entry in her diary. Then she walked into Austin’s room to ask if she could go to the store. She had been grounded, but Austin let her go anyway.

“She was so loving,” Austin said. “She kissed me and she said, ‘I’m sorry for the way I’ve treated you, and from now on I’ll be a good girl’. . . . And she went to the store.”

Austin remembers what happened next with agonizing clarity--when Jamee left, where the girls stopped, how many times each was shot.

The girls drove to a store at 46th Street and Western Avenue. Jamee mailed the letter and they made a quick stop at Hungry Harold’s for a burger. They drove off down 46th Street, turning onto St. Andrews Place. Then, two carloads of gang members pulled in front of and beside the girls’ car. Jamee was shot nine times, Nikki, 15.

Austin was cooking dinner when a neighbor girl came running to the front door.

“Nikki’s been shot!” the girl screamed, “and the other girl in the car--I don’t know if she’s your daughter--they look like they’re dead.”

The five men and one woman believed to have planned and committed the murders were caught almost instantly. They are facing 13 criminal counts, including kidnaping, sexual assault and murder with special circumstances in the slayings of Jamee and Nikki and other crimes. Five would be eligible for the death penalty if convicted--the largest number of defendants to face such punishment at one time, according to the deputy district attorney prosecuting the case.

But the speedy arrest did little to relieve the anger. Somebody gave Corey a gun. “I had to beg and plead with him,” Austin said. “I said ‘you don’t know who did it. You’re just going to make another victim. Like me.’ ”

It got so she couldn’t stand the house on Vernon. She closed Jamee’s bedroom door. But the stuffy smell that crept through made her open it. She tried to make Corey sleep there to fill the space. But the emptiness never went away.

She would avoid St. Andrews Place, but it didn’t work because she knew why.

Eventually, Austin joined the Loved Ones of Homicide Victims, a support group for people who have lost family members to violence. She began private therapy to cope with her pain and attended group sessions with other members. Slowly, she began to heal.

First, she had to conquer the guilt. “I beat myself up. ‘Why didn’t you make her stay home? ‘ “ she said. “ ‘Remember that whipping I gave her that day? She shouldn’t have gotten that.’ ”

“If I’d have known she had such a short time here with me,” Austin recalled telling herself, “she would have known no pain.”

But one day she realized, “Those things were a part of her life and they had to happen.”

Austin’s sons have dealt with their pain in different ways. Corey will not discuss Jamee’s murder. Derris, 3 at the time Jamee died, talks about it constantly.

He fears riding in cars. “And I can’t make him wear anything red,” she said, referring to a gang-associated color.

Last year, Derris’ kindergarten teacher called Austin in tears. The boy had told his classmates how much he missed his sister. The children set about trying to get him to Heaven and back to visit her.

“They said, ‘We’ll hold your hands and you can go. But how do we get you back down?’ ” Austin said.

Still, Derris is often her comfort. He comes to her in the middle of the night when he hears her crying. He accompanies her to the cemetery where his job is to clean off Jamee’s grave. And sometimes he asks a haunting question.

“Mama, why’d you let her go to the store?”

Norma C. Johnson was at home when she saw the news flash that two girls had been shot near the corner of Vernon Avenue and St. Andrews Place. She contacted Austin, prepared to fulfill her duties as a victim assistant coordinator for the city attorney’s office. Austin wanted to know if Jamee’s face had been destroyed. Johnson went to the morgue to find out.

“Here was this beautiful . . . young lady with these beautiful braids. She looked just like Nefertiti. And she was dead,” said Johnson as she sat in the church rectory that is home to Loved Ones of Homicide Victims, which she co-founded. “It tore me up. All I could do was hold her hand.” The private, nonprofit organization has grown from about 20 spouses and relatives living in South-Central Los Angeles to about 300 people from throughout the county.

Johnson has made Austin a special concern. She helped Austin pick out Jamee’s casket and plans to go to court with her every day of the trial.

It is what Jamee and Nikki’s murders represent that saddens Johnson the most. How the web of violence saps so many in the community of their potential.

Jamee “could’ve been a judge. She could’ve been a doctor. But we’ll never know.

“You’ve got two groups, the victims and the perpetrators, and the end result of the two is neither can contribute to anything because one is dead and the other’s in jail.”

Austin has tried to change that.

She began speaking at the California Youth Authority’s Fred C. Nelles facility in 1989. Many of the youths remembered reading about Jamee in the newspapers and were curious to meet Austin.

“I talk straight to them,” she said. “I came from the same community, some of the same schools. I went to Crenshaw High, I lived at 87th and Hooper, on 6th Avenue--all over. They can’t give me that excuse that it’s where they come from.”

She tells them they are stupid for killing over turf they do not own. She also tells them that she loves them. “Look at you,” she says to one. “You’re a pretty black boy. What are you doing here?”

One 20-year-old man said he will never forget the pictures of Jamee. “I couldn’t go to sleep because it would be on my mind,” said the convicted drug dealer. “I would have these visions of her daughter in the casket. I still think about it. It changed me. I’m no longer gang-affiliated.”

Some ask Austin, “How can you come talk to us when we’re the same kind of people who did this to your daughter?” She tells them, “it’s because you’re someone’s child, and I love you.” There are other reasons. “I have two (more) kids, and maybe their shooters are in this group.”

But Austin cannot always be so strong. One Saturday morning, as she prepared for a meeting of the Loved Ones, she was tearful. She had recently found Jamee’s baby blanket, pink, like Jamee’s funeral casket.

“I was going to give it to her when she had her first child,” she said.

Eight people sat on mismatched couches as the meeting began. One woman shared an interpretation of a parent’s heartbreak.

The grief, she said, is like a bright light, blinding when tragedy is new. But in time, the light recedes. It still hurts to look, but it is more bearable.

Austin knows the pain will never go away completely. And now there is fear. Fear she feels when she walks into the downtown courtroom where friends of her child’s accused murderers stare at her and mouth silent words in her direction.

At times it seems she is twice a victim. The system has made her feel like a nobody, making decisions without her, taking its time bringing the suspects to trial.

“They have so many rights,” Austin said of the accused. “Well my child had rights. She had a right to go to the store. She had a right to ride in a red car.”

The trial is the only chance for justice, Austin said. And she will rise at 1 a.m. so she can go at work early and be there to see justice done in the afternoons.

Jamee would have been 16 March 30.

“I planned to give her the best Sweet 16 party anybody could ever want. That was something I never had,” said Austin, tears in her eyes.

Jamee was 5-foot-7, starting to discover boys, and borrowing her mother’s clothes when she died. “I often wonder what she would have looked like, how she would have been acting. She was so awkward and clumsy then,” Austin said with a laugh.

Sometimes, she looks for her. “If you see a group of girls walking down the street, you’re always looking to see if one of them favors her. She’d be in Crenshaw (High) by now. She’d have been in the 11th grade.”

Twice a month and each holiday Austin goes to Inglewood Park Cemetery. Every year Jamee gets a Christmas tree.

For what would have been Jamee’s 15th birthday, Jamee’s cousins and friends joined Austin at the cemetery. “We took a cake, candles, balloons. And we sang happy birthday.”

They did the same this year.