Battle Fatigue : Manuel Velazquez’s 10-Year Fight Against Gang Violence Takes a Heavy Personal Toll but He Refuses to Give Up

Maybe it was one too many bullets whizzing past his head that finally got under his skin. Or maybe it was the list of dead kids that Manuel Velazquez carried everywhere, reminding him that his failures are marked with tombstones.

Velazquez, a soft-spoken, round-faced man who has worked on the front lines trying to prevent gang violence in the San Fernando Valley for 10 years, still is not certain what caused his world to start falling apart.

But the 31-year-old workaholic gang counselor remembers the exact moment when he became another victim of the ongoing street warfare in Southern California.

That his wound turned out to be self-inflicted made it no less painful.

“It hit me, ‘I’m going to have a heart attack,’ ” he recalled thinking two years ago outside a Carlos Santana concert in Santa Barbara. Sweating profusely and suffering from vertigo, a racing heartbeat and wildly fluctuating blood pressure, Velazquez was convinced his life was ending. But all he could think about was how he was spoiling the concert for his wife and friends.

It wasn’t a heart attack. But it wasn’t until months later that Velazquez found out the malady was mental, not physical. He said his condition was diagnosed as anxiety attacks, sometimes as many as a dozen a day, which battered him so severely that he became reclusive and began to avoid the work that once consumed him.

At his lowest point, Velazquez contemplated suicide. He had the method all worked out. All he had to do was get in the middle of a gun battle some night.

“I was hoping to die on the job,” he said in an interview at his apartment in the Sylmar foothills. “I didn’t care anymore.”

Velazquez works for the Community Youth Gang Services Project, an elite, if not highly paid, group whose members have dedicated their lives to being mediators on gang turf. Their job is not to solve crimes, but to open channels of communication with gang members.

Cruising the mean streets at night, they try to prevent violence. If it does occur, they often are the first to know why. Without guns or badges, they have only the authority of their own street savvy, yet they have won the respect of police and gangs. But the fact that they know those who kill and are killed leaves them vulnerable.

“In war, they have a term for it. They call it battle fatigue,” said Steve Valdivia, Velazquez’s boss and the executive director of the gang services project, which employs 86 counselors and other workers on an annual budget of $2.6 million.

“Manuel takes the death of young people very personally,” Valdivia said. “There are a lot of good people I fear for in relation to the toll this job takes. They have to maintain a level of objectivity.”

But that always has been difficult for Velazquez. The son of a Mexican immigrant, he grew up in Pacoima and San Fernando. Even in his youth, there was rivalry between neighborhoods in the two cities. He often found himself in the middle.

“I talked a lot of guys out of beating each other’s brains in,” he said.

After high school, Velazquez enrolled at Cal State Northridge and helped set up in 1980 a landmark gang peace conference to deal with surging gang violence. The conference drew 1,500 gang members to the campus to sign a peace treaty, which lasted 18 months.

Out of this increased concern about gangs came the Community Youth Gang Services Project. Jointly funded by the city and county, it serves as a link between the justice system’s enforcement apparatus and the communities where the gangs live.

Although Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates last year lauded the agency for making “a significant contribution to our crime-prevention efforts,” the agency budget has not kept up with the size of its job. In 1981, with 351 homicides and 25,000 gang members throughout Los Angeles County, the budget was $2.2 million. Last year, there were 90,000 gang members and 692 homicides, yet the gang services project budget has grown only 18% in a decade.

Velazquez went to work for the agency shortly after its inception and quickly became consumed by his job. “I had to know everything,” Velazquez said. “If I got a call of a drive-by shooting, I spent the rest of the day finding out why he did it, and what the neighborhood was going to do about it.” He regarded it as a challenge to find out before the police the inside story of a crime on his beat.

The relationship with the police was a strictly defined one. Velazquez let authorities know if trouble was brewing, and if a particular neighborhood was involved. But he never divulged suspects’ names, for his own safety.

His police scanner was on 24 hours a day and on most Friday and Saturday nights he cruised high-crime areas in the Valley, checking out parties and gang hangouts. On Sundays, he attended the funerals of kids he had tried to keep in school. He would stand to the side, seething, while the dead boy’s buddies wrote graffiti on the casket.

“You want to reach in the casket and slap the kid,” he said.

Velazquez first gained recognition in a lengthy 1986 New Yorker magazine article about several of the gang services experts. After the story came out, Velazquez was deluged with calls from reporters and from movie producers seeking insight into gang members.

It was an eye-opening experience. One incident ended bitterly when he kicked a writer for a well-known movie about gangs out of his car when the man asked him to provoke a gang fight for the writer’s delectation.

The fame was a boost to his ego and only increased his obsession with work. “My pride has gotten me in trouble a lot,” he said.

On the job, Velazquez had several techniques for dealing with incipient trouble. First, he tried to cool heads, sometimes by jiving with the kids, other times by reminding them of past incidents in which other gang members had died over similar misunderstandings. He would consult a handwritten list he had painstakingly compiled with the name of every gang victim, his nickname, the date of his murder and how it happened.

Many of the young gang members didn’t even know the history of their own gang. Thus, Velazquez’s stories were not only informative but also carried the subtle warning that there was little glory in dying for a gang that would quickly forget your name.

Sometimes, he could not stop the violence. “Kids are pulling out guns, knives, crowbars,” he said. When that happened, he and his partner would channel the violence by urging each gang to appoint one of its members to fight a representative of the rival gang. After a few wild punches were thrown, the counselors would break up the fight, take each participant aside and assure him that he had the best of it.

Velazquez talked animatedly about the heady feeling of defusing a dangerous situation. “When you know you’re doing it, you can reach out and grab the barrel of a gun. You can say, ‘Homeboy, you don’t need this.’ ”

Sometimes, though, they don’t listen. Velazquez estimated that he has heard bullets fly by his head on more than a dozen occasions.

The job began to control his life. The list of dead kids was always nearby. Even when the agency organized a beach trip for gang members, he stayed home in the Valley, reasoning that someone had to “stay here at the fort.”

The downhill slide began two years ago. He and his wife, Anne-Marie, drove to Santa Barbara with friends to attend the Santana concert. He slept during the drive, and when he awoke and got out of the car, the world started spinning.

“I felt like somebody grabbed me, shook me upside down and dropped me,” he said.

He spent the concert in a medical tent and later endured a barrage of tests. At various times over the next few months, he was thought to have a heart condition, multiple sclerosis and nothing. He couldn’t sleep, lost weight and began snapping at his wife and two children. But he kept up his work schedule.

Then came the day a year ago when he broke down and started sobbing uncontrollably. A frightened Anne-Marie drove him to the hospital. He broke down again in the emergency room, humiliated but unable to stop crying.

The doctors suggested that he see a psychiatrist. This time, he put aside his stoicism and entered therapy. Velazquez said his therapist has diagnosed his symptoms as an anxiety disorder linked to his feeling of responsibility for things he cannot control.

Velazquez has taken at different times the antidepressant Prozac and the tranquilizer Xanax. The drugs have eased his symptoms, but he gets irritated by the side effects, which leave him feeling lethargic and make it difficult for him to draw. He is a talented muralist who has done work on city housing projects.

Today, Velazquez is struggling to recover. He has cut back his hours and no longer works the streets as much. One friend said he thinks that Velazquez might be burned out after seeing so many kids die. The gang services project’s Valdivia said he supports Velazquez but has urged him to take some of his heart out of the job.

Anne-Marie, whom her husband credits with helping him through his darkest period, said she would never ask him to leave his job, “but I would like to see him grow.” She calls each afternoon just to see how his day is going.

For his part, Manuel Velazquez remains committed to getting back on his feet and to helping kids. Although he says he still has four or five attacks a week, his outlook is slowly changing. “I told myself if you’re going to help kids the rest of your life, you’ve got to get your act together,” he said.

His therapist has ordered him to keep a record of his attacks. A chart posted on the refrigerator in the small apartment shows he had an attack on April 3 that he ranked as a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. At one time, they were mostly 9s.

But the pain still lies close to the surface. An incident that haunts him occurred at a party on Nov. 8, 1988. He was talking to a boy named Alex Rivera, telling him that there is no reason for neighborhoods to be fighting each other. “He saw where we were coming from,” Velazquez recalled.

The next night, Alex tried to stop a gang fight and was stabbed to death by his own gang.

“We should have been there,” Velazquez said. “We reached this one guy to help him see the light and he got stabbed.”

Then he paused. “I’m learning to accept I cannot be everywhere,” he said.