Reason for Attacks on the Innocent: Just Because

They say in the newspapers that it was over a cigarette.

They say that’s why gangbangers shot four guys who’d just finished playing a pickup basketball game on Santa Ana High School’s outdoor court. Mauro Meza, 31, a father of three, died within minutes. One of his brothers took a bullet to the head, another brother was shot in the chest and an 18-year-old cousin was wounded in the hand.

None of the victims happened to be in a gang themselves. If they were, maybe the newspapers wouldn’t bother to speculate on a “reason” for the carnage this time around: a request for a cigarette denied. But we are eager to hear such speculation now.

We want to know about a rule that was somehow broken, a code overlooked--even if such isn’t really a “reason” for murder at all. Because we fear that the guys on the basketball court could have been us.

So maybe if we can uncover the slight, the catalyst for the blazing guns, we can add this to our list of things not to do. Maybe this will protect us from the violence.

But probably it will not.

When gangbangers shoot each other, as opposed to one of us, we already know the reason why. It is “because.” We’ve pretty much come to accept this now. We’ve been numbed over time.

Was a killing over territory, or drugs or a girl? Doesn’t matter. It translates the same: Because. And most of the time when the newspapers report on gang warfare, they don’t even attempt to ponder a reason why. Retaliation is assumed. This covers it all. Because.

Still, on a deeper level, such reasoning remains virtually incomprehensible to those of us with our sense of decency intact. People do not kill over cigarettes--isn’t that right?

We don’t get it. It’s beyond us. Gang warfare has become a phenomenon , we say. Like some cosmic happening, an earthquake perhaps, naturally occurring and bad.

As such, prevention becomes a dream. We can’t stop the earth from rumbling, nor make the streets safe. The best we can hope for is protection, and luck.

Don’t wear any colors identified with a gang. Don’t go out at night. Try to mind your own business. Don’t rat to the cops. This is street sense when the streets are particularly mean. The rules don’t have to be fair. They just are. Because.

And now no more pickup basketball games on a high school grounds? Yet another threshold has been crossed. This is particularly shocking news. Even as I write those words, they ring naive. These guys were just shooting hoops, minding their own business, playing by the rules . . .

And the punks wanted to have their own kind of fun. Police say they were sitting in the bleachers watching the game, yelling at the players, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer.

Then the players, their game over, went to leave. The gang members formed a human barrier at the exit of the school parking lot. The players, in a van, didn’t run the thugs over. They stopped.

Who can say, now, whether that was foolish or wise? It was natural, and decent, and it cost Mauro Meza his life. His last words to his killers: “Why are you asking me for a smoke?”

The shock of this latest murder, sadly and of course, will fade from the public’s mind, even as the Meza family--Mauro’s wife, Maria Guadalupe, the 9-year-old twins, Eva and Adelita, and the baby, Mauro, Jr.--struggles with life inexorably changed.

In the immediate aftermath of the slaughter, there was official talk of finding the bad guys, throwing them in jail, and sending a message to the other punks around. The Santa Ana police chief said a countywide gang task force might be formed. When is unknown.

He said this would “help alleviate the fears in the community so everyone realizes what we are doing as a county.”

The neighbors around Santa Ana High School, where police recently responded to the school’s request to close off a nearby street on school days, are unlikely to have any of their fears alleviated soon. Task force does not translate as an action verb.

Instead, of course, the people of the neighborhood, the ones who worry about their children, their grandparents, themselves, dream of moving out. They want to escape this phenomenon that even they do not fully understand.

It’s like living on an hyperactive earthquake fault. Why all the rumbling? Innocents keep getting swallowed up.