Victim’s Father Battles to Bring Peace to Warring Gang Factions

Chuck Jordan’s world caved in two years ago, when his 20-year-old daughter Jennifer was shot and killed outside her Thousand Oaks home, the unintended victim of a gang-related shooting.

Since then, the former aerospace engineer has waged a campaign to persuade gang members to end drive-by shootings by appealing to their sense of honor.

Jordan’s simple message is that only gang members can stop drive-by shootings, which he describes as cowardly acts that often take the lives of children and other innocent victims.

“If the police could stop it, they would have done so years ago,” said Jordan, who recently moved to Oxnard from Thousand Oaks. “Our public officials would have stopped it also, if they were able.”

In sessions with convicted gang members serving time at the California Youth Authority’s Ventura School, Jordan minces no words in condemning the attacks that have increasingly terrorized urban neighborhoods.

“A drive-by shooting as we know it today is an immature, stupid, cowardly and insane act,” Jordan said. “Drive-by shootings are not a time-honored tradition.”

While he condemns the shootings, the 57-year-old Jordan is more compassionate toward the gang members themselves, an attitude he may have developed growing up in South Los Angeles. His best friend for a time was a member of a street gang.

“The fact is, I knew them as human beings,” Jordan said of his friends who belonged to gangs.

He emphasizes that drive-by shootings are a modern plague, brought on by a combination of easy access to guns and the glorification of violence in the media. “Drive-by shootings before were a very rare occurrence,” Jordan said.

“Some of today’s gang members come from two- or three-generation gang families, where their grandfathers tell me they are ashamed of the shooting at innocent bystanders and killing children.”

Law enforcement officials give Jordan high marks for his dedication to reducing violent behavior. It’s an obsession that has led him to put aside a fledgling manufacturing business and live off rapidly dwindling savings.

Ventura Sheriff’s Cmdr. Bill Wade said that law enforcement can suppress gang activity but not eliminate it. More is needed in order to change the way gang members think.

“Personally, I think we are going to have to change the value system in our society, and that’s what Chuck is trying to do,” Wade said.

Gil Garcia, who heads the Gang Violence Reduction Project in East Los Angeles for the California Youth Authority, said Jordan helps change attitudes by making gang members feel some of the agony their crimes have caused.

Garcia looked into Jordan’s methods before the CYA gave him permission to address inmates at the Ventura School, and commended Jordan’s strategy of recruiting former gang members.

“People traditionally felt that gang members are irrational, but (Jordan) is focusing on the fact that they can be rational,” Garcia said.

By his own account, Jordan was unaware of any gang problem in Thousand Oaks when his daughter was slain May 31, 1991. Herself the mother of a 2-year-old daughter, Jennifer Jordan was outside the house where gangsters had attended a party and was shot by a member of a gang.

Less than a week later, Chuck Jordan delivered an emotional speech against gang violence at a Thousand Oaks City Council meeting. Then he began to devote time to combatting gang violence. He spoke out at community meetings, helped raise funds for youth projects and began speaking at the Ventura School as part of the CYA’s Victim Awareness program.

He speaks bluntly about the anguish his daughter’s death has caused as he appeals for an end to the killings.

“I’m walking a hell of a tightrope when I talk to the inmates,” Jordan said. “I don’t condone murder, but I tell them if we can stop the drive-bys--the most senseless murders--we can take away the reason for many revenge murders.”

After some gangsters asked how they could help, Jordan founded Operation Permanent Cease Fire. He has recruited several dozen former and current gang members to spread the message against drive-by shootings. Recently, he videotaped the appeal of three former gang shooters for a cease-fire, which he would like to make widely available.

Tracey Lewis, a 21-year-old Thousand Oaks resident who served nearly three years in a CYA facility for her role in a nonfatal shooting, attended an anti-violence rally in Oxnard at Jordan’s request.

Afterward, Lewis said Jordan’s honesty and respect for gang members has already changed attitudes.

“Deep down, everyone knows what he says is true, whether they want to admit it or not,” Lewis said. “What he’s saying has already gotten across to a lot of people, and now it’s spreading by word of mouth.”

FYI

For more information about Operation Permanent Cease Fire, call Chuck Jordan at 984-5959. To learn more about the Victims Awareness program of the California Youth Authority, contact the Office of Prevention and Victim Services at (916) 262-1392 or the Ventura School at 485-7951, and ask for the Victims Awareness director.