Reseda School Mural to List Victims of Violence

Their first reaction when they heard their friend Lucky had been killed last February was to grab their own guns and hunt down the van involved in the fatal shooting.

But two months later, Spooky, Chubz, Mousie, Plucky and other members of the Latino gang Brown Pride are setting aside weapons for paintbrushes and honoring Luis (Lucky) Hernandez in a mural at Cleveland High School in Reseda.

The Memory Wall, as they are calling it, will include the names of other Cleveland students killed by the plagues of their time--drive-by shootings, drunk driving, homicidal parents--as well as those of a couple of teachers. The artists are also thinking of adding the name of Michael Ensley, whose gang-related killing Feb. 22 took place at Reseda High School but still woke echoes of sympathy among Cleveland students.

After all, a killing is a killing, the Brown Pride boys seem to be saying.

“We hope it gets it into people’s heads to stop fighting,” said Chubz, 18, who lives in Northridge. “We don’t want to be putting up a lot of names.”

In return for the privilege of immortalizing Lucky on school property, the artists have promised to erase any graffiti left there by Brown Pride comrades. The deal was struck between the 40 or so Brown Pride members on the Cleveland campus and Barbara Yanuck, a former drama teacher who now spends all of her time counseling students on race relations, gang issues and family problems.

“By stopping tagging you stop cross-outs, and by stopping cross-outs maybe you can stop shoot-outs,” Yanuck said.

Thus was born Cleveland High’s own version of a Wailing Wall. In the spirit of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Memory Wall will list the names of the dead in the pages of an open book pictured as floating among clouds. Still undecided is whether to include an image of Christ somewhere in the scene.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to get too religious,” Chubz said.

“ ‘Cause not everybody is the same religion,” added Mousie, 18, also of Northridge.

That sort of broad-mindedness seems to be infusing the project so far and Yanuck hopes it will continue once the mural is completed in about a month.

The honored dead not only include Latino, Anglo and African-American names, but the cooperating artists are members of sometimes rival “cliques,” or chapters, of the Brown Pride gang. Spooky, for example, belongs to Brown Pride Mafia, while Chubz, Mousie, and Plucky belong to the Brown Pride Surenos (Southerners). Lucky was a Sureno too.

As Spooky explained it, they don’t even consider Brown Pride a gang since its members aren’t necessarily from the same neighborhood and don’t defend territory. They prefer the term kickback to describe their more loosely knit association.

But while they talked of peace when it came to their mural, the artists still boasted about their easy access to guns and how they would defend to the death any member of their clique who might be threatened or offended.

“I got a 9mm,” Chubz began. “It’s my dad’s, but if someone’s messin’ with me I’m not goin’ to be sittin’ down.”

Yanuck, groping for a way to explain the dichotomy, suggested that the youths “haven’t gotten to that point” where they see a clear connection between peace on the campus and peace in the streets.

She and Jack Juntilla, a youth counselor with the school district, believe that rather than glorify gang violence, the wall will serve as a stark reminder of its consequences. Yanuck also insisted that victims of other types of crime, accidents and illness be included.

“So many of our kids don’t understand the finality of death, and this is a good way of doing that,” Juntilla said. “It’s almost like the Holocaust. We need to keep reminding them.”

The wall will include the names of Lucky Hernandez, 19, who died a few blocks away from the campus in a drive-by shooting Feb. 13; Rocio Delgado, 16, who was caught in a gang confrontation as she walked home from school Feb. 22; Deborah DeLeon, 17, a popular track star strangled a year ago during a trip to San Francisco with her boyfriend, who was charged with killing her; Miguel Loayza, 17, who died in 1989 from injuries received in a car accident caused by a drunk driver; Brandy Fernandez, 16, whose despondent mother shot her, her sister and her brother before turning the gun on herself three years ago; Jamel Maddox, 18, killed in a car accident last summer; Arnie Leckman, 64, the school’s football coach who died two years ago of a heart attack; Gladys Carter, a health and career planning teacher who died of cancer last year, and Linda Peltzman, 49, a school volunteer who died last week of complications from a blood infection.

The wall will have room for more names.

“We hope nobody else dies, but just in case,” Chubz said.