Violence Punctuates Truce Between Bloods and Crips : Gangs: Rivalry-based killings have declined since the spring accord. But other reasons can lead to slayings.

The truce that has united Bloods and Crips could not save the life of Jackie Winters.

After nearly seven years behind bars at the California Youth Authority, the 22-year-old member of the Six-deuce East Coast Crips was released in April, determined to make a fresh start on life. With tensions just beginning to subside in the South-Central gang world, his family was optimistic he would succeed.

But on a July evening, while Winters was visiting friends in his old neighborhood, police say a rival Blood rode up on a bicycle and opened fire with a 9-millimeter pistol. Winters was struck once in the heart and died on the sidewalk at 61st Street and Broadway.

“This truce is kind of a skeptical thing for me right now,” said Yolanda Hannah, 18, Winters’ sister. “One minute you want to believe it, because you want this community to get better, but it seems like something always comes around to hinder you from believing.”

As the summer winds to a close and the truce between many of Los Angeles’ black gangs nears its sixth month, the peace they forged has become a complex puzzle in which some pieces fit neatly together and others have broken apart.

In some parts of town, the truce is a powerful force, credited with erasing two decades of hatred and fear. In a few communities, Crips and Bloods continue to war as if nothing has changed. In many others, gangs have agreed not to initiate combat, but still end up killing in the course of robberies, drug deals, dice games and parties.

Between May 1 and Aug. 31, detectives in South Los Angeles counted 24 killings involving Bloods or Crips, nine of which were directly motivated by gang rivalry or affiliation, they say. There also have been gang homicides in Venice, Long Beach, Cerritos, Lynwood and the unincorporated area near Firestone Boulevard.

Those numbers represent a significant drop from the same period last year, when Bloods or Crips in South Los Angeles were involved in 52 gang killings--31 of them motivated by rivalry. But it is also clear that the truce means different things to different neighborhoods, different gangs and different individuals.

“It’s not like there’s one king of the Crips and one king of the Bloods, and they’ve come together and exchanged blood and there’s gonna be no more killing,” said Los Angeles Police Lt. Dennis Shirey, head of the department’s anti-gang CRASH bureau in South Los Angeles. “It doesn’t work that way.”

In Los Angeles County, officials have identified 219 gangs that call themselves Crips and 84 that use the designation of Bloods. Each is an independent, autonomous entity--usually without a formal hierarchy--that does not recognize or answer to a centralized Crips or Bloods leader.

In fact, few of the gangs have anything in common, apart from claiming the colors of red or blue. Crips outnumber Bloods nearly 3-to-1, and most killings--both before and after the truce--have stemmed from rivalries between Crip factions.

The truce has probably had its most profound impact in Watts, where unity parties were first thrown in the community’s four housing projects several weeks before the Los Angeles riots. Since then, police say, there has not been a gang-motivated killing between the two Bloods and two Crips factions that call Watts home.

Although the housing projects are sometimes troubled places, they also offer a sense of community, history and identity not always found in the sprawl of South-Central Los Angeles--factors, truce organizers believe, that helped the peace movement take root there and blossom. Many rivals had grown up together, attended the same elementary schools and, in some cases, even belonged to the same extended families.

“Watts is showing all the other communities that we can get together, that we’re all one,” said Tony Bogard, 29, an ex-gang member from Imperial Courts, who is working to maintain the truce through a nonprofit group called Hands Across Watts. “But all we can do is be an example. You can’t go out there and make nobody do what they don’t want to do.”

The message from Watts created a ripple across South-Central, as well as in such other cities as Compton, Inglewood and Pasadena. Most notably, authorities have seen a dramatic reduction in random drive-by attacks and the tit-for-tat cycle of paybacks that such shootings usually provoke.

What violence has occurred, say gang members, should be viewed as the work of individuals settling personal or business disputes--not gang-on-gang attacks. As such, those incidents are not truce violations, they say, but a reflection of the brutality that can easily interrupt the life of anyone struggling to make it in the ghetto.

The 24 killings involving Crips or Bloods this summer in South Los Angeles included two Crips gunned down in front of a crack house during a drug rip-off; a Blood allegedly shooting another Blood while robbing him of his gold jewelry; a Crip accused of accidentally shooting his homeboy during a hold-up, and a Crip killed in a dispute over a dice game.

“That’s not gang violence,” said Tariq Thompson, 22, of Inglewood, who joined several dozen peace marchers on a trek through the four Watts housing projects last week. “That’s survival.”

But as the months have passed, and frustration mounts over the lack of economic opportunities for young men marked by tattoos and criminal records, old wounds have begun to open. Some had never healed.

So far this summer, Aaron Heard, 19, was gunned down in front of his grandmother’s South-Central home by gang members who mistook him for a rival; Salmon Daniels Jr., 18, was beaten and shot by rivals who saw him with his girlfriend on the Venice boardwalk; Robert Callaham, 36, died in AK-47 and shotgun fire in Long Beach; Rachmon Page, 16, was slain while stopped at an intersection near a notorious gang hangout in Southwest Los Angeles, and Robert Reed, 22, was gunned down by rivals at 73rd Street and Central Avenue in what police say was retaliation for a shooting earlier that day.

“F--- peace,” declares freshly painted graffiti at 52nd Street and Central Avenue, a neighborhood claimed by a Bloods set. “CK (Crip-killing) season is on.”

In some cases, that anger has been directed at innocent people who have nothing to do with gangs. “You know what peace is?” asked a young man in a Crips neighborhood who called himself Indo Smoke. “Sometimes I think peace is death. That’s the only time you aren’t worrying.”

The line between peace and war can be so thin, the threshold between irritation and murder so low, that even people trying to straighten out their lives are frequently dragged over the edge.

Timothy Lamb, 24, an Eleven-deuce Broadway Crip known as Big Bam, began the night of Aug. 22 with a jubilant phone call to his father in Salinas to let him know that his girlfriend had just given birth.

Lamb told his father how much he loved him, that he realized how much heartache he must have caused in his mischievous adolescent years. He spoke of getting married, finding a job and going back to church--a practice he had abandoned as a teen-ager because the church his family attended was in Bloods turf.

“I told him I loved him and to stay out of trouble,” recalled Travis Lamb Sr., who moved north 2 1/2 years ago to escape the crime of Los Angeles. “He said, ‘I got to stay out of trouble now because I got to raise my children.’ ”

At 2 a.m., Travis Lamb’s phone rang again: “They called to say he was dead.”

Shortly after they had spoken, his son had gone to a party at 99th and Main streets, where nearly 300 people from at least nine Crips factions had shown up. The bash was for a Main Street Crip just released from prison and had been advertised on flyers inviting women to enter free, men for $1.

No one is quite sure what started the trouble. Some reports suggest one of the guests was trying to provoke a fight by intentionally bumping into party-goers. Other versions point to a jealous boyfriend angered when he saw his girlfriend dancing with a member of a different gang.

Detectives are sure only that a gun battle broke out about midnight and quickly spilled onto the street. When it was all over, two people had been killed, at least three were wounded, and more than 30 shell casings of various calibers littered the ground.

Lamb, who police think was the target of the initial attack, died of a gunshot wound to the chest. The other casualty, Ongelique Millner, 19, was struck in the stomach while lying on the pavement, seeking cover from the rain of bullets. Her mother, Beverly Reed, who lost a son to street violence three years ago, had worried that Ongelique was hanging out with the wrong crowd.

“Naturally,” Reed said, “she wouldn’t tell me if it was true.”

Gang members concede that not every neighborhood is on board with the truce, but they blame that on a growing sense of disillusionment over the government’s response to their peaceful achievements. Although many Bloods and Crips factions insist they united because they were tired of killing one another, there was also an expectation that they would be rewarded with increased economic, educational and recreational opportunities.

Yet, for the most part, the lives of most gang members are as bleak as before. “These brothers have done the part that society asked them to do,” said Fred Williams, a former gang member who works to keep at-risk youth in school through the Cross Colours Common Ground Foundation. “We ought to be ashamed of ourselves to let such a historic event go unanswered.”

In the meantime, those in the gang world fear that they are being held to an unrealistic standard, that outsiders--especially the media--are looking for excuses to say the truce is not working rather than nurturing it along.

“The story is not in the fragility of the truce--it’s in the strength of it,” said Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), who has been an outspoken supporter of the peace efforts. Noting that even some of her colleagues in Congress have been convicted of crimes, she added: “There is no 100% enforcement on anything in life.”

But those who are left to clean up the damage by gang members’ bullets have a more jaundiced view. “They say there’s a truce, but words are just b.s.,” said Detective Bernard Rogers of the Los Angeles Police Department’s West Bureau gang unit. “Their actions are what you have to look at.”

Two days after the shootout on 99th Street, a car pulled up alongside Tam’s Burgers No. 6 at 101st and Figueroa streets. In what detectives believe was an act of retaliation for the two killed at the party, someone in the car opened fire, cutting short Gregory Jester’s life.

Jester, 29, who had no gang ties, lived in a garage behind his mother’s home, a tidy stucco bungalow about three blocks from where he collapsed. Peering through the pinpoint holes of her wrought-iron security door, Jester’s mother said she felt no anger, no fear, no hatred, no sadness.

“It’s in the Lord’s hands,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do.”

Deaths During the Truce

Between May 1 and Aug. 31, homicide detectives counted 24 killings involving Bloods or Crips in South Los Angeles. Of those, nine were believed to be directly motivated by gang rivalry or affiliation. 1. July 7: Aaron Heard, 19, no gang affiliation, shot by suspected gang members who detectives believe mistook him for a rival.

2. July 10: Robert Reed, 22, standing on Crip turf, shot in a walk-up attack, allegedly by rival Bloods gang members.

3. July 12: Harlan Hearndon, 33, no gang affiliation, shot to death while arguing with gang members outside his girlfriend’s apartment.

4. July 12: Jackie Winters, 22, a gang member, allegedly shot by a rival on a bicycle.

5. Aug. 18: Samuel Smith, 42, veteran gang member, shot in a drive-by while standing on a corner. A friend was left paralyzed.

6-7. Aug. 23: Timothy Lamb, 24, and Ongelique Millner, 19, both killed in a gun battle during a gang party. At least three others were wounded.

8. Aug. 25: Gregory Jester, 29, no gang affiliation, shot to death at a hamburger stand in what is considered a pay-back killing for the gang party shootout two days before.

9. Aug. 29: Rachmon Page, 16, gang member, shot to death at an intersection near his home.