COLUMN ONE : Youngest Homeboy Wants Out : After his family fell apart, a 10-year-old was adopted by a Valley gang. But his brother’s death hit him hard. So, instead of a gangster named ‘Mousie,’ he’d like to be a boy named Luis again.

Luis Fernandez was 10 when he got his first gang tattoos.

It was just before Mother’s Day, but his mother wasn’t around. She lives in Washington state.

Luis, known on the street as “Mousie,” lived with his father and four siblings in a one-bedroom apartment in a decrepit part of North Hills, where street barricades were installed several years back to discourage the local gang’s curbside drug dealing.

His father, on welfare and unable to cope with being a single parent, said his children just wouldn’t listen to him.

So late last year, the Columbus Street homeboys took over Luis’ young life, stepping into the vacuum of love and attention. They made Luis their mascot.

It has taken the death of his older brother and the intervention of a sympathetic neighbor to give him even a glimmer of a chance for a normal childhood.

His troubles with the gang began in November, soon after members muscled in on Luis’ apartment complex and began using it as a clubhouse. They bought the boy man-sized pants and extra-large T-shirts that hung down to his skinny knees. They took him to their homes for days at a time and, on New Year’s Eve, helped him up the stairs to his apartment when he was too drunk to walk.

Sometimes gang members let Luis sell a $20 rock of cocaine for them, letting him take a cut of the profit so he would have money to eat. Other times, he and his siblings begged neighbors for food.

“I talk and I talk to them,” Jose Fernandez, Luis’s father, said in Spanish. He said that living away from the children’s mother, from whom he is separated, makes things worse. “A father is never like a mother and that’s why they look for the homeboys.”

In May, he showed up on the street with the gang’s tattoos.

The stylized “C St” and “13” etched into either side of his neck just below his jawbone mark Luis as a gang member.

Probation officers and police say Luis, who turned 11 on May 15, is the youngest child they know of to be scarred with the symbols of a gang.

However, his path toward a life of hanging out on the street corner, peddling dope and dodging violence is not unusual. His story, they say, is only one example of how a gang can quickly become a substitute family when the real family disintegrates.

His free fall, officials say, also illustrates the ineffectiveness of the social service and law enforcement safety net for catching vulnerable children before they become hard-core gang members.

Even some of the homeboys thought it was a dumb move for a child so young to mark himself.

“They go, ‘You’re stupid!’ because I’ve got them on my neck, because I could get shot easier,” Luis said. “But I don’t care.”

Of course, this 70-pound child being wrenched toward adulthood by violence and neglect did care.

The evidence that he is still a little boy with a little boy’s emotions is clear in a letter he wrote July 13, the day his 16-year-old brother died. Vicente (Vince) Fernandez died nearly a month after he was shot by one of Luis’ closest homeboys in what police believe was an accident. In memory of his brother, who was not a gang member, Luis has promised to get out of gangs.

“Every day I think about you and I feel sad,” wrote Luis, who has wide-set, tired eyes and angular features. “I love you and I always will. . . . I’m going to take my tattoos off my neck and I’m not wearing those baggy pants no more and I’m not going to be with Columbus no more because I don’t want to get shot. I told you I was going to change and I did.”

Despite Luis’ earnest promises, he and youngsters like him may have little chance of escaping from gang life, said Supervising Deputy Probation Officer Rick Saenz. The only hope is if he can move from the neighborhood.

“If we can identify somebody like that early on and can have him removed from the environment that is poisoning him and give him a fresh start before he is too deeply involved in delinquent behavior, then he has a chance,” Saenz said. “But if you wait much longer than 9 or 10 or 11 years old they are usually pretty far gone.”

Saenz and others who try to steer children from gang life said gang wanna-bes are getting younger all the time and increasing in number. New Directions for Youth, a publicly funded anti-gang agency in Van Nuys, works with children who are in the fourth grade or younger. The Los Angeles Unified School District has a cadre of counselors assigned to elementary schools who help children who are dressing and acting like gang members get help before it is too late.

Saenz spent four years with a Probation Department gang prevention program. He supervises officers whose caseloads include 350 gang members on probation in the San Fernando Valley. Even though the program rescues some children who seem destined for gang life, the program is too small to reach most youngsters, he said.

He said children such as Luis “get lost in the system” because schools, social welfare agencies, children’s advocates and even the Probation Department do not have enough time or resources to give them special attention.

“If he doesn’t get support at home or in school, where is he going to get the support he needs? He’s going to get it from the gang.”

The head of the Probation Department’s office of prevention services, Sandra Moss-Manson, said public and private agencies help many children stay out of gangs but that families have to want the help. “If the primary source of the problem is the home and the family these things are not going to work,” she said.

Plummer School Principal Dolores J. Soll said she had tried to get help for Luis. The Police Department’s Project Jeopardy gang education and prevention effort met with the family but help was rejected, she said.

She described Luis as mercurial, sweet and loving one minute and “thinking nothing of stomping on a kid” the next. “He was very difficult to manage and I’m afraid he’s going to be far worse because of what he’s been through.”

Although he is more involved with gangs than any other child at the school, she said, he is also bright and does well in math and reading. “It is such a waste,” she said. “He has such potential.”

Soll said she will not let Luis display his tattoos on campus because of the tensions they cause. Even if the tattoos are removed or can be covered up, she said, she would not let him back into the year-round school until the end of August, when a special gang counselor will be available.

“I don’t know if there’s any hope for him or not,” she said. “I would like to think there is, but I don’t know.”

One source of help is New Directions. Executive Director Sally Thompson said the agency provides individual and family counseling, starting with children in kindergarten. She said her group would check into the Fernandez family’s situation.

Paula Rangel, who manages a nearby apartment building, is also trying to help Luis.

She heard about the tiny tattooed boy hanging out on the street and sought him out. After spending time with him and meeting his father several weeks ago, she invited him over to swim in her pool. He has been living there ever since, with his father’s permission.

“He shows me every minute of the day that he wants to get out . . . but I don’t think he knows how,” said Rangel, who has bought him boy-sized shorts and helped him with his reading and math.

She knows she has chosen a difficult task. “He doesn’t know what it’s like to feel discipline. He tells me, ‘If I stay here I’m going to do what I want.’ ”

Luis’s parents separated about five years ago. His mother, Maria, stayed behind in Wenatchee, Wash., where Luis and his five brothers and sisters grew up. His father headed south. Jose Fernandez, 53, an itinerant orchard worker, ended up in the barricaded neighborhood north of Parthenia Street and east of Sepulveda Boulevard.

Luis and four of his siblings, the oldest not yet 15, came to live with him about 18 months ago.

Jose Fernandez acknowledges that the Columbus Street-Memory Park neighborhood has not benefited his children, but says any area in Los Angeles he could afford would not be much different.

While they were in an apartment on Memory Park Lane, Columbus Street gang members began living in a vacant unit. The shifting group used the apartment, and other units, to sleep, smoke crack and have sex.

When police rolled into the area, they hid there. Within months, Luis and his brother, Juan, 13, had come under their influence.

“Mousie wanted love,” said one veterano, or older gang member, who befriended Luis and Juan. “All he wanted was to have somebody to hug him and tell him ‘I love you’ and make him go to bed at night and put him to bed in a clean bed.”

Luis says little about his gang activities, although he acknowledges having acted as a lookout for police and helping stop the cars of potential buyers.

The veterano said gang members would give Luis money and took him and Juan home so they could shower and wash their clothes. “A kid should not go to bed hungry and a kid should not wake up in the same clothes he wore all week and go to school,” said the veterano, who asked not to be identified.

Gang members said Luis would occasionally drink to impress them. He began smoking cigarettes and, sometimes, marijuana. “I can’t think as good as I used to,” Luis admitted.

His father said he told him the dangers his son faced, sometimes screaming at him in the middle of the street to come home. He would go home and then, when his father fell asleep, go back.

“They say I’m going to get shot. I’m going to get killed and this and that,” Luis said. “They say, ‘He’s crazy’ and this and that. They think I’m too small for being in the gang.”

Luis said he was beaten up around the first of the year when he was “jumped into” the pequenos, the gang’s minor league team, said to be just as vicious and dangerous as the older gang members because they want to prove themselves. Not long afterward, Juan joined the gang. He, too, is tattooed--on his arm and wrist.

Not long after Luis began hanging out with the gang, police began to see his street nickname--Mousie, because of his tiny stature and quick laugh--sprayed on walls and garages.

Officer Michael Albert, who is with the department’s anti-gang unit, said he and other officers singled Luis out for special attention because he is so young. “We would stop him and say: ‘You are going the wrong way. You’re going to get up on the street and wind up in Juvenile Hall.’ ”

Albert said he and other officers told Luis to change out of his gang uniform and he would, but would change back as soon as they were gone. Although they searched him frequently, he said, he was never found carrying drugs or a large amount of money.

Not long after Luis and Juan began associating with the gang, their apartment became one of the homeboys’ main refuges.

On June 10, some of the homeboys were playing with a gun in the living room and Vince was watching television. The gun went off. The .22-caliber bullet hit Vince in the side. The shooting appears to be an accident but is under investigation.

Vince was kept alive at Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills until July 13. His father spent almost every day there, silently watching his son slip away.

Meanwhile, the Fernandez family was being scattered. Juan went to Washington to stay with his mother but came back to live with another family in the neighborhood. Veronica, 12, went to live temporarily with a family in Mission Hills. The youngest child, Yolanda, 7, stayed with an aunt.

Luis went to stay with Rangel. She said he is still very much a little boy and spends much of his day swimming. He has joined a baseball team. His proudest possessions are the key to the complex’s security gate and to the lock he has put on the room he shares with Rangel’s 17-year-old son, Paul.

Rangel said his brother’s death has had a profound effect on Luis. He asks her all the time about getting his tattoos removed. He asks about heaven and hell.

A few weeks ago, before his brother died, he had said: “I’m proud of everything” about being “down” with the Columbus Street homeboys. He had said that when he grew up he wanted to be the “biggest, toughest, meanest” cholo in the neighborhood. With a bravado that seemed comic coming from someone so small, he had said, “Yo soy el vato que controla todo” or, “I am the crazy guy who controls everything.”

The day after his brother’s death, Luis talked to a TV reporter. He said he had whispered to his brother while he was near death that he wanted to get out of the gang. “I thought I was bad and it was cool and I thought I was all cool,” Luis said. “And I lied. I just don’t want to be in no more.”

He said the same thing in the letter to Vince. He started to sign it Mousie, but crossed that out. Then he signed it Luis.