17-Year-Old’s Death Reveals His Secret Life to Parents

I can’t presume to understand the pain that Alberto and Cynthia Mones must be feeling this week. They got the kind of news from Huntington Beach police about their 17-year-old son, Ryan, that no parent can be prepared for.

The information must have come in the form of successive jolts of electricity to their souls.

Your son is dead.

Your son killed himself.

Your son was in a gang.

Your son’s gang was planning a robbery the night he died and had fired shots at an officer before the pursuit that led to your son’s death.

Not our son, the Moneses said in the aftermath. He was a kind and good-hearted boy. He was responsible. He couldn’t have done those things.

But then friends of the boy confirmed that he had been hanging out with a gang--perhaps not a hard-core gang, but one that, according to police accounts, had graduated into a world of lethal violence.

And while reading the accounts of the two different Ryan Moneses, I felt a dull sadness for his parents and wondered how it can be that children and parents can live under the same roof and keep such secrets from each other.

I went down to the Huntington Beach Pier Thursday, not so much in search of wisdom but just plain cold truth. I stopped Danny Ruiz, 18, and John Peters, who just turned 20, and asked if they’d mind explaining a few things to me.

I asked them how parents can be so in the dark about what their kids are doing.

“Sounds like my parents,” Ruiz said. “If parents don’t let their kids hang out with friends that are in gangs, he’s not going to tell them. Then the parents are going to be blind to everything he does with them.”

On the other hand, Ruiz and Peters said, not many kids are going to tell their parents they’re hanging out with anyone associated with a gang.

Police have said Ryan Mones killed himself after being cornered.

I asked Ruiz about that. “Maybe a kid doesn’t want to let his parents down (by having them know he was in a gang). Maybe he doesn’t want to disappoint them. Maybe he didn’t know how to handle the situation. If you’ve never had trouble with the cops, it’s kind of a scary thing.”

How could a kid described as good-hearted and responsible in everyday life get involved in a crime spree?

“Maybe he got talked into it,” Ruiz said.

“Maybe he had a friend who had a friend who had an idea,” Peters said.

“Maybe they didn’t do drugs,” Ruiz said. “Maybe they broke into houses and partied. Maybe he got a rush busting into houses, knowing they could get caught.”

“Adrenaline is a powerful drug,” Peters said.

“Maybe they got in deeper than they thought,” Ruiz said. “Maybe they were not that bad of a gang--just a bunch of kids wanting to have their own gang, and they tried to be harder than they really were.”

What struck me talking to Peters and Ruiz was that neither automatically assumed Mones was a bad kid. To them, it was perfectly plausible that he or many other teens could, in effect, be model citizens by day and criminals by night.

How can parents decode that kind of behavior, I asked them.

“Listen to what the kids have to say,” Ruiz said. “Let them do their own thing. Sheltering your kid and making them how you want them to be is out now. They’ve got too many options and choices now. Maybe parents wouldn’t understand if their kids told them they had problems. Like, if I tried telling my parents I was all screwed up on drugs or really depressed and had no place else to go, they’d probably go, ‘We should put him into counseling.’ They couldn’t help me. They couldn’t get the drift of it.”

Not that I was surprised, but neither Ruiz nor Peters was especially surprised to hear Mones and his friends were heavily armed.

“Kids associate shooting with power,” Ruiz said. “They have a gun, they have power. You can push someone around.”

Why is power such a big deal, I asked?

“Because everybody wants it,” Ruiz said. “It’s all over. They all want a piece of the action. And with a gun, you can take someone else’s piece.”

Well, I said I wanted the hard truth from them.

The last thing I asked them about was morality. Do they see much of it at play in the world?

“What ideals do we have any more?” Ruiz said. “We don’t have any role models. Not too many. Basketball players, movie stars. But Presidents--what happened to our Presidents? I don’t think any youngsters look at them as role models.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.