Farewell for Youth Slain in Project

On Thursday, they buried Smokey.

The homeboys and homegirls of Ramona Gardens filed past his metallic gray coffin, laid a rose or carnation on top and struggled to hold back tears that seemed antithetical to their street-tough demeanors.

Oldies played on a portable tape deck. Someone held up a small Mexican flag. Then they lowered 19-year-old Arturo Jimenez, dressed in his favorite blue and gray Pendleton shirt, into the freshly dug ground.

“They’ve said many things about the people of Ramona Gardens,” the Rev. Juan Santillan, priest of St. Lucy’s Catholic Church, said in Spanish to the nearly 200 people gathered at Resurrection Cemetery in Monterey Park. “But this is proof of our brotherhood, proof that our people are united.”

It was the emotional climax to a week of tension and anguish for the residents of the Ramona Gardens housing project in East Los Angeles, where Jimenez was shot three times in the chest by a sheriff’s deputy during an early-morning confrontation last Saturday.

Sheriff’s officials said Jimenez provoked the shooting by attacking one of the officers, who had stopped their patrol car after someone hurled a beer bottle at them. Residents of the 497-unit complex, dozens of whom were celebrating a birthday party that night, contend that Jimenez was merely protesting the deputies’ rough treatment of a friend when he was shot.

Jimenez’s mother, who had long talked of moving her six children away from the two-bedroom apartment they have rented since 1975, fainted during a Mass on Thursday morning and had to be helped from the small Boyle Heights church.

Later in the day, Jimenez’s friends from the Big Hazard gang gathered for a party around the spot on the lawn where he was shot.

“This is to you, Smokey,” said Eddie Zagueta, 19, as he poured some beer near the small wooden cross that has stood there since the day after the shooting.