You Have to Believe You Can Make a Difference : Youth: In the alleys of the city, a gang murder might as well be thought of as death by natural causes.

Only two people have died for whom I’ve cared and grieved: my father, dead at the age of 67 after a heart attack in the family room of our home, and Jesus Perez, 16, who was executed by gang members on the night of Feb. 12 in a cold, dark alley. He had no real home.

In the increasing brutality and callousness of our society, both could be considered dead of natural causes.

I came to know Jesus when he was 10 years old and a fifth-grader at an elementary school in the heart of Skid Row. I helped coordinate a “pen pal” program between 75 Los Angeles Times employees and 75 students at the school. Each of us “adopted” a child with whom we corresponded on a monthly basis. Each of us hoped to make a difference in a young life, bridging the economic and social chasms that separated our worlds.

Many of these relationships, like mine with Jesus, grew beyond letters and included family get-togethers and outings. Some friendships continued even after the child’s graduation from elementary school, providing a semblance of continuity and stability to children entering a harsh world of gangs, drugs and violence: junior high school.

As years went by and I sporadically heard from and saw Jesus, I began to think that just maybe I had made a difference to this extremely overweight, sweet-faced boy of mixed ethnic heritage whose only pillar in life was a doting but emotionally wrecked alcoholic father. He was a gentle child who was relentlessly teased in school and then went to sit by himself in a theater watching slasher and terminator movies.

When Jesus graduated from 6th grade, he wasn’t a good kid and he wasn’t a bad kid. He was like most American pre-teens, scared of what junior high meant. He was prime fodder for the mentality that preys on the frightened, the lonely and the insecure kids who just want to belong somewhere.

I went to lunch with Jesus a few months ago. We remembered some of the good times as if they had happened a million years ago: the night he spent with me and my husband at our apartment, trembling as lightning slashed the sky and thunder rattled the windows; the day at Knotts Berry Farm, when we practically had to carry him from the booth that sold fried, sugar-coated funnel cakes; the morning he spent stroking my pet rabbit.

I told him that the rabbit had died recently. Then, with a shy little smile, he told me that he was in a gang. He didn’t like it, but for him there were no other choices. The boy who just three years before had been busted by an elementary school principal for sneaking out of the schoolyard to buy candy now had a police record. He had already been stabbed twice.

Suddenly, I choked on my safe, middle-class upbringing. In the space of seconds, we were isolated from each other. Everything I proceeded to say was meaningless to him. In words that sounded platitudinous even to me, I told him that he had to get away from the gang, to look ahead to the future. He chuckled softly, his huge hazel eyes almost pitying. He asked how old I was and, when I said I was 38, he gasped in awe. “I’ll be dead before I’m 20,” he said.

I’ve gotten so used to reading about gang murders in the paper that I almost missed the one telling how Jesus had been driven to an industrial site and shot in the head. No one knows why it happened. Maybe just because he was big and shy and slow. I picture it in my mind in a thousand different terrible scenarios. The story also told how his father, a few days later, went to the same dark alley and, in anguish and loneliness, killed himself on the spot where his son had died.

Whatever I did wasn’t enough for Jesus. But I have to believe that other children survived because individuals made the effort to bridge the chasm with commitment and caring.

Children shouldn’t have to grow up wondering if they’ll live long enough to vote. Adults shouldn’t allow a world where children are executed. But I still believe that we can make a difference. If not, then Jesus’ father was right--there’s not much left to live for.