Stray Bullet Shatters Couple’s Dream to Leave Gang Area

June Guin was killed by a stray bullet over the weekend in the gang-torn La Puente neighborhood that she planned to soon leave. A little piece of the American dream died with her.

The 60-year-old church worker and her husband had been among the first to settle in their corner of this city in the 1950s, when walnut groves began to give way to neat bungalows with tidy lawns.

In many ways, their lives remained rooted in that time. Guin, a mother of four, relished being the doting homemaker. Marion, her husband of 40-plus years, worked his way up the ranks of a pump company, volunteered as a Boy Scout leader and served in the Air Force reserves.

Yet as these Oklahoma natives kept an eye to the past, the urban world sneaked up on them. A band of youths adopted their street name, Eldon Avenue, as its gang name. The shootings got so frequent that the Guins both began sleeping next to loaded pistols--he with a .38, she with a .22. They kept a baseball bat behind the front door.

Finally, when Marion Guin retired last November, the couple started packing their belongings, took bids on the house and counted the days until they could hit the road, where they planned to spend their golden years cruising the country’s highways in a two-tone camper.

“They were torn because the majority of their life memories were tied up in this house,” their son, David, 37, said Sunday before beginning the painful task of cleaning his mother’s blood from the rust-colored carpet. “But the flavor of the neighborhood had changed and they knew they had to get out.”

On Friday night, another of the area’s frequent gang fights broke out. Sheriff’s investigators have no suspects and few details, but neighbors say it was one of many internecine battles among factions of the principal gang in this San Gabriel Valley town.

About 11 p.m., two cars came racing down Eldon, then turned left on Moccasin Street, which dead-ends about half a block away. Witnesses recalled hearing at least seven shots fired between the cars. One passenger, Jesus Calletano, 17, known on the streets as Diablo (Devil), was fatally wounded.

At least three bullets missed their mark, traveling 50 yards down to the Guins’ house. June Guin was watching TV in the den; her husband was talking on the phone in another room. When the shooting erupted, she began to walk out of the room, away from the street. But a bullet pierced the window, ripped through a white curtain and lodged in the back of her brain.

Her husband, who wears hearing aids, called out to see if she was hurt. When he got no answer, he ran to her side, turned her over and cradled her bleeding head.

“He said: ‘Oh my God, Lord, why do these things happen?’ ” said longtime neighbor Carmen Hubert, who led him to her home when the paramedics arrived. “He had blood on his face and his hands and was crying. I told him: ‘Calm down, your wife is going to need you.’ ”

But five hours later, June Guin, the tiny, silver-haired woman known to fellow churchgoers as “Grandma June,” was dead.

“Innocent, innocent,” said John Genera, a co-worker for more than 35 years with Guin’s husband at Peerless Pump in Montebello. “Just good people.”

Much of the neighborhood’s troubles seem to be focused four houses away, on Moccasin Street, where Francisco and Celia Salas have lived for 28 years. The couple, whose own home has been shot at several times, acknowledged Sunday that at least one of their sons has been associated with gangs, but said he is now 21 and has settled down.

“Some of the neighbors, they look at us like (Friday’s shooting) was our fault,” said Frank Salas, another son. “But the problem isn’t us. It’s these young kids trying to make a name for themselves, so they come by acting stupid. Even guys from the same gang are fighting each other--it’s gone berserk.”

A few blocks away, someone had already spray-painted a wall with the eulogy: “Rest in Peace, Diablo.” A group of tattooed cholos was holding a carwash nearby in his honor, but they refused to comment on the nature of the dispute.

Such scenes would have been unthinkable in 1957, when the Guins purchased their three-bedroom, two-bath dream home with a faux fireplace with a plastic, light-up log.

“Our biggest problem back then was whether a coyote was going to come by, running across the wheat fields,” said David Guin, a communications major at Cal State Fullerton.

Grudgingly, June Guin had come to recognize just how much things had changed.

On Sunday, a lifetime of knickknacks still sat in packing boxes, some marked “Mom and Dad.” On the walls were ghostly shadows where photos of their children and five grandchildren once hung. Their camper, their ticket out of La Puente, remained parked in the driveway.

“My dad’s instructions last night were to get everything out and sell the place,” their son said. “He doesn’t want to come back.”