Mayor Tells Residents to Report Gangs : Thousand Oaks: Officials tour the scene of a fatal drive-by shooting. Some neighbors refuse to open their doors.

Thousand Oaks officials on Wednesday walked along a street where a 20-year-old woman was gunned down last week and urged residents to reclaim their neighborhood by informing authorities of gang activity.

Mayor Frank Schillo and City Manager Grant R. Brimhall, accompanied by Ventura County Sheriff’s Deputy Randy Pentis, talked to about 10 residents as they went door-to-door along Houston Drive, where Jennifer Jordan was slain Friday night in the city’s first fatal drive-by shooting.

Jordan was shot in the head as she attended a birthday party in the 200 block of Houston Drive. She was an innocent bystander, the victim of an attack meant for two members of the Houston Hoods gang who were attending the party, investigators said.

Three people, two of them known to be members of a rival gang, the Small Town Hoods, have been arrested and charged with her murder.

Patrick Strickland, 22, of Thousand Oaks; Scott Kastan, 18, of Westlake Village; and Kirstin E. McLuckie, 19, of Chino Hills are being held in Ventura County Jail in lieu of $250,000 bond each.

Authorities said they have been unable to keep street gangs from frequenting Houston Drive and the small streets that intersect with it because residents are reluctant to report gang activity.

“The thing I heard from most people was, ‘We don’t know what to do,’ ” Schillo said after he and Brimhall distributed their phone numbers and that of the Sheriff’s Department station in Thousand Oaks along a two-block stretch of Houston Drive. The group then turned west on Vinton Court and continued the same routine.

“We’re asking them to get involved and to call police,” Schillo said.

The mayor said he also urged residents to contact the Sheriff’s Department about joining a Neighborhood Watch group in the area.

Schillo and Brimhall left their business cards and a flyer containing the Sheriff’s Department’s number on the doors of those who were not home or who would not come outside.

A few residents would not answer their doors, only to come out after the trio had moved farther down the street.

The officials promised those who would listen that authorities would respond quickly to reports of crime and would discourage gang members from loitering in the area.

An hour after the officials had toured the neighborhood, a public works crew was posting no parking signs on lampposts along an area of Vinton Court where gang members have been known to hang out.

One mother who asked not to be identified said she was frustrated by her 20-year-old son’s involvement in youth gangs.

“I sleep on the couch with a police scanner, because I’m terrified with what my son’s doing,” she said. “I report my son to police every time he turns around.”

The Houston Drive area is one of Thousand Oaks’ oldest and most racially diverse neighborhoods. Its residents include Latinos, blacks, Asians and whites.

The neighborhood has deteriorated over the past few years, residents say. There are gang monikers, including those of the Small Town Hoods and the Houston Hoods, on concrete block walls along Houston Drive and the surrounding streets. Gang graffiti on one wall has been painted over by city crews six times in the past year, a city worker said.

“This last year, the graffiti’s been a lot worse,” said Sandy Fajardo, 29, as she and her husband planted flowers along Vinton Court. The Fajardos, who have lived in the neighborhood for five years, said the shooting has given them second thoughts about their safety.

“I don’t go out walking anymore. It’s too scary,” Sandy Fajardo said. “I’m sick to death that something could happen close by.”

Mack Valance, 57, another homeowner, said he has never actively participated in the Neighborhood Watch group. But the shooting has convinced him that residents must take a stand, he said.

Valance said one of his sons was recently threatened by a gang member wielding a bat.

Long before the shooting, he said, many of his neighbors armed themselves against gang members. When they heard gunfire from the shooting in which Jordan was killed, two of his neighbors rushed out of their homes carrying guns, Valance said.

“I never felt intimidated before, but now I feel intimidated,” he said. “But we haven’t lost our neighborhood. We’re at a stage of the game where we can hold our own against them.”

Louis Angelini, 69, said he has watched the neighborhood decline over the past 15 years. He said the visit by city officials was long overdue.

“They wait until someone gets killed to do something about it,” he said of the gang activity. “They should have come before this happened.”