Reeling From Raw Violence : Crime: Students in Inglewood and Lennox are at risk of being caught in the cross-fire of feuding Latino gangs.

A feud between rival Latino gangs from Inglewood and Lennox has led to a surge of shootings and other crimes, leaving many students afraid to walk the streets and stunning some school counselors who thought themselves hardened to the violence.

Police say gang members have attacked rivals in daylight before dozens of witnesses. In some instances, they have boldly identified themselves by their own gang nicknames to terrified bystanders.

“It’s just raw violence,” said Lennox sheriff’s Lt. Lawrence Schwartz.

Authorities in three communities--Lennox, Inglewood and Hawthorne--say they have seen an increase in overall gang-related violence.

Inglewood, for example, reported an 18% increase in non-narcotics gang-related offenses last year. Hawthorne police said gang-related felonies in the first nine months of this year have more than doubled, to 265, over the same period last year.

There have been seven gang-related homicides in Hawthorne this year, compared to three in the city for all of 1991. And in the area served by the Lennox sheriff’s station, which includes Athens and Lawndale, non-narcotics gang-related offenses for the first nine months of this year were up 8.5% over the same period in 1991.

Although police do not have crime statistics for the Latino gang rivalry--there are believed to be more than 1,700 current known members of the Inglewood and Lennox gangs--they say there has been a clear upsurge of violence.

“It’s been going pretty strong since June,” said Ben Vargas, an investigator with Inglewood’s gang intelligence unit. “We don’t know why. All it takes is for someone to think they’ve been disrespected.”

If police statistics are hard to come by, stories of bloodshed are not.

There was, for example, the 14-year-old Inglewood youth who was fatally shot in a drive-by incident June 29. The boy, Hugo Magallon, was walking near Cedar and Olive streets in Inglewood when a car pulled alongside and youths inside opened fire, Vargas said. Magallon died the next day.

“I remember that kid from when he was little,” Vargas said. “He was a pretty good kid and just got caught up in gang banging.”

His killers are believed to be Lennox gang members retaliating for an earlier killing of one of their own, Vargas said.

In another case, a 14-year-old Lennox youth, who was not involved in gangs, was shot five times by a suspected Inglewood gang member as he stood in front of a house on 104th Street, according to Lennox sheriff’s officials. The youth survived the Aug. 25 shooting.

“He was very, very lucky,” said Brenda Muse, a Lennox Middle School security guard and a confidante of the boy. “They just started shooting; they assumed he was a (gang member.) For a few moments, it was touch-and-go.”

A 17-year-old gang member was arrested in the shooting. Police later said he was a suspect in another drive-by shooting that left two Lennox gang members wounded.

That shooting and other violent gang crimes have been particularly troubling to Muse, a former gang leader who now devotes her time to steering kids away from the lifestyle.

“I go home and cry at night sometimes thinking who’ll be next, and I can guarantee you that there will be a next,” Muse said. “I’m running out of answers. This is just madness. There has been nothing like this.”

Although there have been problems at local schools in the past, police say most of the recent incidents have occurred after school lets out in the early afternoon when students--and rival gang members--are walking home and most vulnerable.

The Lennox-Inglewood feud has primarily involved students at Hawthorne and Inglewood high schools. However, there have also been recent after-school incidents involving other gangs from Leuzinger High School in Lawndale and Inglewood’s Morningside High.

Hector Torres, a gang expert who counsels troubled youths at Morningside, said gang members are bolder now than ever. Their crimes are known in gang parlance as “putting in work” to heighten the gang members’ stature among peers and instill fear among rivals, he said.

“They are terrorists and they’re working,” said Torres, who has been shocked by the level of violence. “They have substituted ideas, names, for (killing) to make it sound legit. What you’re doing is killing.”

Torres said today’s gang members are much more indiscriminate in their violence than those of previous generations, having discarded the “codes” that the veteranos lived by.

The older guys “had borderlines that they would not cross, generally,” Torres said. “You don’t shoot this person because he’s walking with his mother. If you’re going to do a drive-by and the person you want to shoot is standing in front of the house, you don’t just shoot the house because you might hit the grandma.”

That has changed, he said.

“These little gangbangers just went and crossed lines and found out there were no consequences. They felt stronger every time they crossed the line until now life means nothing to them.”

Many of the recent incidents have occurred along Inglewood Avenue, a stretch long notorious for drug dealing and other crime.

With no high school in Lennox, students who live there attend either Hawthorne High School or Leuzinger High School in Lawndale. The routes home, including Inglewood Avenue, often leave students at risk of getting caught in the cross-fire of dueling gangs, said Rachel Romero, a counselor at Lennox Middle School.

Romero gives about 10 of her former students rides to Hawthorne High and a nearby continuation school to prevent them from encountering gangs on the street.

“You’ll find that a lot of parents give their children rides to school because they don’t want to take a chance on something happening,” Romero said.

Inglewood Avenue is the route a 17-year-old former Lennox gang member, who declined to be identified, uses when he walks home from Hawthorne High. Although he has left his gang, he said he routinely carries a loaded pistol in his backpack when walking along the street.

“It’s dangerous out there, you have to have something,” said the youth.

“Even now, (rival gang members) remember my face and they will never forgive me. If they see me, they will still hit me up, ‘Where you from?’ They pull out guns and point them at me. . . . It’s scary. It’s scary even now. Every party I go to, I get shot at.”

The youth said he first became involved with the gang when he was 13. He was considered a “walk in” because his three older brothers were members. As such, he did not have to go through the brutal gang initiation of “jumping in,” being beaten, to join.

Within a few months, he said, he and other gang members would drive up to Inglewood to blast away at rivals.

On one occasion, he said, he is certain he struck someone after opening fire from a car.

“At first, I felt like depressed because I just shot somebody,” he said. “But my homeboys were all impressed. I was showing like I was mean on the outside, but inside I was sad because I didn’t know who I had hit.”

It wasn’t until the death of his closest brother three years ago that he decided to leave the gang. His brother was shot to death after a fight with a drug dealer.

“When he got shot, the next night I was confused and didn’t know what to do,” he said. “One of the options I had was (to) walk away from everything and take care of myself, take care of my family. Another option was go back and get the guy who did it ‘cause I had the guns and everything at the house.”

After much soul-searching, he decided to turn the incident into a learning experience.

“After we buried my brother, I decided no more gangs for me, that it’s not worth it,” he said, adding he hopes to attend college and go on to become a police officer.

His two surviving brothers, he said, are in jail, and a sister involved with gangs has run away from home.

“It’s taken my family one by one,” he said.