Community Essay : ‘This Wasn’t Supposed to Happen in Orange County’ : Violence: Four middle-class youths on a bike ride intersect with four others in a parking lot. When the shooting stops, one is dead.

We knew they were up to something when we rode on our bicycles past the four young men. We were three young men and a woman, but they didn’t answer when one of us said hello.

We didn’t know it then, but they were heavily armed and planning to take things that weren’t theirs by force. One of the young men by the car, 17-year-old Ryan Mones of Huntington Beach, would not live to see the next morning’s sun.

We were on a mission, too, and the coincidence now strikes me. I had persuaded three friends to take a night ride from the Huntington Beach pier to the Bolsa Chica wetlands. I knew about the underground World War II bunker that still exists there. We hoped for an interesting adventure exploring the bunker by flashlight.

I felt some apprehension when we approached the white Camaro. The car’s trunk was open and they were putting things in and taking things out. I would have been less surprised if the four teens were drinking beer in the dark parking lot. As it was, you could tell they were getting ready for something. One of my companions muttered “drug deal” and we thought it best to move on.

We headed across the wooden bridge where binocular-toting bird-lovers stare at least terns and clapper rails during the day. A great blue heron squawked into flight beneath us. Before we reached the other side, a police car’s bright lights flooded the parking lot and the white Camaro. I felt a little sorry for the young men because it looked like they would be in some trouble now.

The police officer commanded them to freeze and put their hands where he could see them. All was quiet for half a minute as we rode on into the dark.

Then the popping began. I yelled at my friends to get down, and we abandoned our bicycles and took cover behind the raised dirt berm that runs through the wetlands. I was astonished when the popping didn’t stop. The reports echoed across the flat landscape for a minute or more and we didn’t raise our heads to see what was happening. Finally, there was the sound of screeching tires and we saw the white Camaro accelerating north on Pacific Coast Highway.

“That cop’s dead,” someone said (though it turned out he was unhurt). Indeed, it was hard to believe anyone could survive a fusillade like that. Amid my own trembling I felt a profound sense of pity for the officer, who I imagined lay bleeding on a bed of shattered glass. I had a sudden impulse to help, but it seemed impossibly dangerous to go back there. We might startle a wounded gunman or the officer himself, and end up the target of more bullets.

So we stood dumb, exposed, watching as gunfire erupted again. The fleeing youths had decided to shoot up an innocent driver’s car. We were about 60 yards away and in the line of fire. One of the shots whizzed overhead like a speeding demon, and when it was over my ears were ringing. Terrified, I checked myself for holes. How close had that bullet come?

Now all I wanted to do was get out of there fast. I knew there would soon be many police asking questions I didn’t want to answer. I just wanted to get away, to put distance between me and that violent place.

But the police were still too busy to bother us. When the car reached Warner Avenue, there were more shots. Then the tragedy reached its sad denouement--Ryan Mones, 17, confused and full of adrenaline, put his automatic pistol to his chin and exited the world.

Watching live coverage of the Los Angeles riots in May hadn’t prepared me for this experience. This kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen in Orange County, at least not in Huntington Beach, a stone’s throw from the yachts floating in Huntington Harbor. I was surprised when I learned that two of the young men--Ryan was one of them--were also from Huntington Beach. All of them had stable family lives, a good standard of living, a chance to get an education. What went wrong?

We tend to associate these kinds of incidents with drugs and poverty, but as the facts of this case emerged we had to admit that its roots lay somewhere else. Some kind of misguided adolescent psychology was at work here. Here were four youths who made a conscious decision to take the dangerous path they did. Being young men, they shared a need to belong, to form a meaningful identity, to feel important, to have power. They unfortunately chose to project power from the barrel of a gun.

I can’t help thinking that to their young minds it didn’t seem real enough. These were young men who had probably never seen someone die. They knew movies where bullets are sprayed and the plot moves to the next scene. They listened to music that sang the nobility of confronting police with guns. They became caught up in a gangster ethos that they hadn’t acquired directly, as the Crips and Bloods do, but through a vein of pop culture that enjoys prominence these days in suburban high schools and malls.

People who know firsthand what violence means need to speak out about their experiences. People who have seen human beings die violent deaths might have an impact on would-be gangsters. They might succeed in telling impressionable minds the truth about the cult of the gun. They might succeed, through honest education, in stopping, or slowing at least, the kind of gunplay that isn’t play at all.

As for me, I’m just glad my friends and I survived that night of terror intact. We had gone to see the remains of defenses constructed for an enemy that never arrived. Had history twisted a little, genuine war might have come to Bolsa Chica in 1941. Thankfully the battle never came--not, perhaps, until a Saturday night in 1992.