Street Violence Robs Mother of All Three Sons--and Faith : Crime: Raleak was the first to die, then Andrew, then Frankie. None of the brothers lived beyond 22.

After her first two sons were slain, Frances Davis tried to wrap a security blanket around her last one. She gave him cab fare so he wouldn’t ride the subway. When he was out, she made him call home constantly.

“I kind of treated him like a baby,” she said. “When you have three and then you have one, then you put all your hopes and dreams into that one.”

The hopes and dreams ended earlier this month, in cruelly familiar fashion.

Frankie Davis, 18, was shot down July 6 outside his grandmother’s housing project, on the same street in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant where both his brothers were killed. The hail of gunfire also seriously injured a 10-year-old girl who was skipping rope.

In 1987, Frankie’s 20-year-old brother, Raleak, was shot to death 50 feet from the spot where Frankie died. The middle son, Andrew, was 22 when he was cut down by a bullet on the same block in 1991.

Davis, 43, insists all her sons died in random shootings and never were involved in drugs or carried guns. “They had better sense than that,” she said.

But police said that Frankie Davis got off a few shots of his own in a battle with three or four youths seeking revenge for a past dispute. And they could not immediately confirm the mother’s accounts of the first two murders.

What is certain is that all three victims met a violent end in a community where unemployment is high and morale is low. Soaring homicide rates among young black men have pushed the life expectancy of all black males down to less than 65 years, 10 years below the average for all Americans.

Relatives of the three brothers gathered at their grandmother’s home to console Frances Davis.

Outside, barefoot kids eating grape Popsicles inspected the score of quarter-size pockmarks pounded into steel security doors by the previous day’s gunplay.

Inside, no tears were shed.

Davis’ sisters watched “All My Children” and braided their daughters’ hair. The grandmother, 63-year-old Clara Saunders, wandered around the apartment in slippers and railed about the drug dealers holding the neighborhood hostage.

“We have more shoot-’em-up here than anywhere in the world,” Saunders said, her index finger stabbing the air. “They don’t care about children; they don’t care about nothing. This is a shoot’em-up gallery.”

Davis, mellowed by sedatives, reclined on a twin bed in a back room and gazed out from under heavy eyelids. She talked about her family’s history in a soft voice.

A native of the Brownsville area of Brooklyn, Davis grew up during a time when if “you had a fight, you had it with fists.”

She had her first two sons with a boyfriend she said she no longer keeps in touch with. Frankie’s father, Frank Sr., mostly was absent too, and died in 1989 after a long illness.

The eldest brother, Raleak, became the man of the house, watching out for Frankie and taking him to movies and baseball games. When he died, Frankie turned to Andrew. When he was gone, Frankie turned inward.

He dropped out of high school and “became very depressed,” his mother said. Davis, who quit her job as a secretary and began collecting disability, said she held herself together by joining a support group for mothers of homicide victims. She also watched over her only son.

Recently, she saw improvement. Frankie began to talk about going to college. He stayed out of trouble and read lots of books.

The night before he died he went to his grandmother’s house, where the family discussed last-minute details for a trip to Disney World. What exactly happened the next morning--and why--remains unclear.

Family members and neighbors say two men showed up at the apartment about noon to get Frankie, who was asleep on the couch. When he went outside, gunfire erupted from a Jeep parked on the street.

Frankie and one of his companions, Dwight Boone, pulled guns and fired back, with Boone mistakenly hitting one of the young female bystanders in the cheek, police said. Frankie, hit in the chest, staggered back and collapsed as he tried to push his way back into the building, said Patricia Dun, a witness.

Davis got the news when her sister called her at a hair salon. She described her reaction as “shock, just shock.”

Now, she says, not only are her three sons dead, but so is her faith.

“I used to believe in God,” she said. “I don’t think I do anymore.”