Girl’s Gang Friendship Is Fatal

It started off innocently enough. Martha Navarette, 17, a bubbly Hollywood girl who worked hard on her basketball dribble and dreamed of going to college, borrowed an older cousin’s car to buy ice cream on Sunset Boulevard. An obedient teen-ager, she promised to return promptly.

Navarette got her ice cream cone, but minutes later, authorities said, she became the 100th victim this year of street-gang violence in greater Los Angeles, shot to death April 10 with two other Latino immigrant teen-agers in what police term a “coldblooded execution.”

A Fairfax High School junior sent to Los Angeles nine years ago by Ecuadorean parents who wanted her to have an American education, Navarette was not a gang member. The two youths killed alongside her as they sat in her cousin’s car were with a gang, according to investigators. Navarette knew them well enough, friends said, to give them their final ride to Hollywood Boulevard.

In many city neighborhoods where gangs predominate, such acquaintances are an inevitable fact of life. Teen-agers who do their best to avoid becoming gang members often find themselves making friends among boys and girls who have gang affiliations.

“She knew of people who were in the gangs,” said Douglas Rivera, 17, a fellow student at Fairfax. “Who doesn’t in this part of town?”

It is a fatal relationship that should be avoided at all costs, said Fairfax High Principal Mike O’Sullivan. “We have to effectively stop this idea that it’s OK to be friends with gang members,” O’Sullivan said. “In their own way, kids have to stop associating in any shape or form with gang members. They think they can live a double life--study hard in school and be friends with gang members. It just doesn’t ever happen.”

According to police, the events that led Navarette to her death started when she and an unidentified girlfriend were met on Sunset by three male acquaintances--all alleged gang members--after they stopped for ice cream. The three boys asked for a ride several blocks north to Hollywood Boulevard. Navarette complied, said police.

At Hollywood Boulevard and Bronson Avenue, the carload of teen-agers stopped to allow one of the boys to make a phone call, investigators said. As they waited near the pay phone, a passerby believed to be on foot shouted a gang slogan at one of the three boys. One of them replied with a slogan.

Enraged by the reply, the passerby, a 16-year-old member of a rival gang, chased after Navarette and the three boys, according to police. The four teen-agers piled into her Chevrolet El Camino, parked at a service station on Hollywood near Bronson. The gunman was right behind them. He shot each of them in the head.

Navarette was taken to Queen of Angels-Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead. Two of the boys, Roberto Orozco, 17, and Carlos Flores, 15, died in the car. The fourth teen-ager, Alexander McLellan, 16, was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he is in critical condition with a bullet wound to the head. The friend who bought ice cream with Navarette was unhurt.

The suspect in the shootings, whose identity is apparently known by police, is a male juvenile, said Los Angeles Police Lt. Brad Merritt, a detective with the department’s West Bureau CRASH anti-gang unit. Merritt declined to reveal the suspect’s name because of his age. When the youth is apprehended, Merritt said, authorities will seek to try him as an adult for the triple homicide.

In the flats of Hollywood, working-class apartments and bungalows sandwiched between movie studios and television stations, residents who have long grown used to the city’s numbing statistics of gang violence described Navarette’s death as an unfair act of fate.

“When the news came out that she died, they said it was a gang thing,” said Rivera. “But she was no gang member. She didn’t deserve that. For her, it was home to school and school to home. That’s it. That was her.”

Added Fairfax girls co-basketball Coach Michelle Sheesley, who oversaw Navarette’s season as a point guard on the girls’ junior varsity team: “She was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Who knows why?”

According to Margarita Navarette, who lived with her husband and her cousin Martha in a well-kept bungalow near Melrose and Western avenues, the teen-ager wanted to make something of herself.

“She was always studying,” Margarita Navarette said. “She used to say, ‘I’m going to study hard, go to college, get a job and pay you back for all you’ve done for me.’ And I told her she didn’t have to pay me back. Just go to school and get good grades. That’s all I ever asked for.”

Greg Keeling, a Spanish teacher at Fairfax, said that the student, a native Spanish speaker, could have easily ignored much of his class’s tedious homework. Instead, Keeling said, Navarette “worked hard, very hard.”

She planned to study computer science in college and was preparing application forms for entry to several Southland colleges, among them USC, UCLA and UC Santa Barbara. Several days after her death, information forms for her upcoming Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) arrived at the family home.

Navarette seemed equally determined when she joined the junior varsity team as a sophomore. Only 5-foot-2 inches, she sat on the bench during most of her first year because she lacked control in dribbling. To improve, said Coach Sheesley, she “stayed after school to work.”

The hard work paid off. Last season, Navarette became starting point guard on the junior-varsity team. Although they suffered through a 2-20 record, Sheesley said that Navarette’s determination and cheery smile kept the team together.

“She pretty much carried the team,” the coach said.

If there was one thing Navarette was warned not to participate in, it was the neighborhood’s street gangs. Margarita Navarette told her cousin to stay away from them.

“If they say ‘Hi,’ say ‘Hi’ back--and that’s it,” Margarita Navarette repeatedly told Martha. “ ‘Don’t run around with them.’ And she didn’t. She never gave me any trouble.”

Yet, because of the close contacts that occur each day at school and at home among gang members and unaffiliated teen-agers, it was not surprising, friends said, that Navarette agreed to give a ride to the neighborhood boys who were also gang members.

The youths came, as Navarette did, from immigrant families who had settled in the Hollywood area, where housing is cheap and menial jobs as gardeners, dishwashers and handymen are easily found.

Flores’ family moved several times in the Hollywood area in the last two years since they arrived from war-torn El Salvador, according to former neighbors. Orozco’s family also based themselves in Hollywood after moving there at some point in the last six years from the Mexican town of Sahugayo, a community of about 30,000 in the western state of Michoacan.

Orozco dropped out of the 10th grade and was working as a dishwasher, according to friends. Flores’ educational history is sketchy, but friends--who declined to allow their names to be published--said the Salvadoran spent more time on the streets than in class.

“(Flores) was always hanging with ‘Lefty,’ ” said one teen-ager, dressed in the Raiders’ black garb favored by some gang members in Hollywood. Lefty, Merritt said, was Orozco’s street nickname.

Orozco and Flores “had previous contacts with police officers,” said Merritt.

Anti-gang detectives said the two boys apparently were associated with a Latino gang that has been feuding over territory with several rival groups. Among these rivals, investigators said, is a Lennox-based gang that has been trying to move into Hollywood, East Hollywood and Silver Lake. The suspicion among neighbors is that the fight for supremacy over these areas was the root cause of the killings.

Neighbors said that the two boys killed with Navarette may have been associated with gangs, but they did not deserve to become part of the city’s ever-spiraling gang death toll.

“Sure, those boys were gang members,” said Luisa Martinez, walking to her modest home near Paramount Studios. “You could see them hanging around at night. But what violence . . . this is no way to live. That’s no way to die. Even they did not deserve that.”

Meanwhile, Margarita Navarette, the older cousin, was left to mourn the loss of the black-haired girl with the infectious smile. At a recent memorial service, she sobbed uncontrollably as she lingered over the casket.

‘My pretty little girl,” the cousin lamented. “My pretty little girl. Why are you dead? Why?”