A Plea for Protection : Lennox: Caught in the cross-fire of gang wars, residents petition the Sheriff’s Department to put more deputies on patrol.

One of life’s harshest lessons came early one February morning for dozens of children on their way to Felton Elementary School in Lennox. A block from the school, the youngsters found a dead man lying in the street.

It was Carlos Bacab, 35, the father of two children who attend the school. Bacab had been stabbed to death after leaving his apartment to smoke a cigarette.

The scene was cordoned off by sheriff’s deputies, but “the kids saw everything,” said one school staff member who did not want to be identified. “The whole day the kids were just talking about it. They could see the uncovered body, the covered body and all the blood.”

This macabre incident has sparked a furor among parents and community leaders, who are outraged over the killing and other violence in this tiny community in the shadow of Los Angeles International Airport.

Continuing violence has so alarmed residents that they are petitioning Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn and Sheriff Sherman Block to permanently increase the number of deputies at the Lennox station. The group, headed by Lennox School Board Trustee Hector Carrio, has gathered almost 500 signatures from residents on petitions pleading for more assistance and say the community has become a war zone.

In February alone, there were four killings and a number of shootings in this congested, 1.25-square-mile community of 22,000. The homicide rate threatens to surpass the nine killings reported in Lennox in 1991, according to sheriff’s officials.

On the same day that Bacab was killed, a 17-year-old was shot in the head in a gang-related incident several blocks away on the same street. The youth survived the shooting.

In late March, drive-by shootings on consecutive weekends left three people injured.

“We are being terrorized,” said Carrio. His Dalerose Avenue home is guarded by a fence topped with barbed wire to keep fleeing criminals on adjacent Inglewood Avenue from jumping into his back yard.

“We want to live in peace. But it’s incredible, the state of panic. People are afraid to leave their homes at night,” Carrio said in Spanish.

Residents say the nearly 200 deputies assigned to the Lennox station, which also serves Lawndale and the unincorporated Athens area, are not enough to control the drug trafficking and gang problems afflicting Lennox.

“There are shootings all the time, at all hours of the night,” Carrio said. “It’s something monstrous.”

Lennox Sheriff’s Capt. Walt Lanier said more deputies will patrol the area as needed.

However, he added: “I don’t know that (Lennox) is any more violence-prone than any other areas we have. The point is, I don’t have sufficient numbers of deputies to put on every corner. . . . We’re living in very violent times, and I think all police agencies are doing the best they can with the resources they have.”

Lennox residents fear that the Sheriff’s Department may remove a bicycle patrol unit that was introduced last year and has been successful in reducing some types of crime.

The bike detail began patrolling a one-mile section of Inglewood Avenue and surrounding streets in Lennox more than a year ago, serving as modern-day versions of the traditional cop on the foot beat. The deputies, clad in white T-shirts and green fatigue pants, ride mountain bikes and have been highly popular with residents in Lennox, a community of largely working-class Latino immigrants.

The bicycle patrol was so successful that the Sheriff’s Department began rotating the patrols to other areas served by the Lennox station. However, Lennox residents say the increasingly infrequent presence of the patrols is partly to blame for the upswing in crime in their neighborhood.

In response to the petitions, sheriff’s officials said this week that regular patrols have resumed in Lennox.

Statistics compiled by the department attest to the effectiveness of the bicycle unit, Lt. Lawrence Schwartz said. In 1991, robberies in the Lennox community declined to 140 from 270 in 1990. And burglaries dropped to 276 from 294 in 1990.

But, Schwartz said, the teams have failed to reduce the rate of homicides and shootings, particularly gang-related incidents. And when the bike teams are not patrolling in Lennox, residents say, drug and crime problems resurface.

As dusk fell recently on the aging facade of a corner market on Inglewood Avenue covered with graffiti, there was a familiar chorus of bolts locking wrought-iron screen doors.

An apartment manager said her kitchen window provides a view of drug dealing. “It’s bad again,” she said of crime in the neighborhood.

A block away, Felipe Ruiz talked about the gunfire he hears at night as his two sons and their friends watched a video of “Boyz ‘N the Hood,” a film about growing up amid gang violence in South-Central Los Angeles.

Ruiz recently moved to Lennox from Westchester and lives on Dalerose Avenue, a residential street that is increasingly being frequented by drug dealers.

“We are all very worried,” said Ruiz, echoing the concerns of neighbors. “What we’re asking for is more police.”

A man who lives on 104th Street often forbids his children to play in the front yard. The man, who declined to be identified, said he and his family are virtual prisoners in their home because of the fear of gang violence.

Gang members repeatedly stabbed a family friend who lives at the house after he had walked his wife to work one morning last December. “They chased him to the house, right here, and did that,” said one family member, shaking her head at the memory.

The friend survived and “knows who (the gang members are), we’ve seen them. But we don’t say anything” out of fear, she said. “It’s horrible.”

Sympathetic deputies say Lennox isn’t even the most dangerous community patrolled by the station.

A war in Athens between black and Latino gangs has claimed 11 lives in a year. The dispute also is responsible for up to 25 nonfatal shootings in that area over the same period, Detective Herb Giron said.

“I feel for the people there (in Lennox); I really do,” said Giron, who for the past 10 years has been assigned to Lennox’s Operation Safe Streets gang detail. “But I’ve been doing this for 23 years, and I just don’t know that more manpower is the answer.”

Six primary gangs lay claim to Lennox, Giron said, and several others are active in the area. “And none of them like each other,” he added.

Despite the violence, many longtime residents say there are determined to stay in the area. Some, such as Walter Peretz, have paid off their homes.

“Why should I be forced out? I’m not going to get anything comparable” in another area, said Peretz, 65, who has lived on Dalerose Avenue for 30 years.

“I don’t think the sheriff is doing justice to this neighborhood,” Peretz said. “If you see a sheriff’s car pass down Dalerose Avenue once a week, you’re seeing a lot of them. I can’t blame the Sheriff’s Department in particular. I’m blaming the county for not giving them the funds (for more deputies).”

The Lennox ‘War Zone’ Since January, there have been five fatal shootings in Lennox and scores of other nonfatal shootings. Tired of the violence, about 500 Lennox residents have signed a petition asking for more sheriff’s deputies to be assigned to the Lennox station. Three of the five killings were gang-related, authorities said.

* Brian Briones, 18, was fatally wounded in a drive-by shooting by rival gang members around 9 p.m. Jan. 21 at the 10100 block of Felton Avenue, where he had been talking with a friend.

* Herman Cortez, 16, was killed about 2 a.m. Feb. 1 when shots were fired from a car that had approached Cortez and some friends as they stood in a driveway on the 10900 block of Prairie Avenue.

* Rosana Pineda, 19, was found dead in her car of a gunshot wound shortly after midnight Feb. 6 after witnesses heard a scream and saw a man jump out of Pineda’s car near the intersection of 104th Street and Burin Avenue. The motive was not clear.

* Eduardo Cruz, 30, was shot to death in broad daylight on Feb. 18 outside La Mexcla market on the corner of Inglewood Avenue and 111th Street, apparently at the hands of his own gang members.

* Carlos Bacab, 35, was stabbed to death Feb. 28 in an apparent robbery attempt that happened when he left his home to smoke a cigarette about 6 a.m. His body turned up on 104th Street, about a block from Felton Elementary School.

Source: Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department