Mother’s Lonesome Crusade for Justice : Crime: She hopes someone will stop and help her find her son’s killer.

Hour after hour, as hundreds of motorists roar past, Teresa Wheel stands alone on an Artesia street corner, doing all that a mother can for the memory of a son.

She keeps her vigil in silence, tears sometimes streaking her cheeks. As if performing penance, she refuses to eat, use the bathroom or rest her aching feet. In her hands, she clutches a cardboard sign with a picture of a smiling teen-ager and a hand-lettered appeal: “Please help me find Kevin’s murderer.”

Two and a half years after her 19-year-old son was slain by suspected gang members in an apparently random drive-by attack, this is the solitary crusade of Kevin Wheel’s mother.

Despite a reward fund of $10,000, no one has come forward with information leading to an arrest. Sheriff’s detectives, having exhausted their leads, are no longer searching for the killers. Even the rest of the Wheel family members, although they share her grief, have made an effort to get on with their lives.

“A lot of people tell me I’m crazy,” said Wheel, 41, as she waved her sign at the stream of traffic one morning last month. “But I need to do it for Kevin. I want him to look down at me and say: ‘God, my mom just won’t give up.’ ”

That is why, about once a month, she comes to this intersection at 183rd Street and Pioneer Boulevard, just a few blocks from where she believes the culprits live. Or she travels to 221st Street and Norwalk Boulevard in Hawaiian Gardens, planting herself right on the spot where four young adults, gunning for action, pulled alongside Kevin’s car and riddled it with semiautomatic gunfire.

By now, Wheel recognizes that the odds are slim that anyone will be made to pay for her loss. After standing all day at these two corners on at least two dozen occasions, her pleas for assistance have not turned up a single clue. But, then, solving the slaying is not really what brings her here anymore.

Although gang violence has claimed more than 5,000 lives in Los Angeles County over the last decade, the anguished cries of those who bury loved ones are rarely heard and soon forgotten. Wheel’s efforts are now aimed at forcing people to confront that pain--to keep her son from becoming another statistic in a numbing tally.

“When you lose somebody, especially a child, it’s like you think the world should stop,” said Wheel, who lost her customer service job after Kevin’s death, dropped 30 pounds and began to suffer from several stress-related conditions, including a sleep disorder that requires her to strap on an oxygen mask every night.

“I wish I could go out and talk to everyone and tell them what it feels like. It’s a gut-wrenching pain that reaches down into your innermost soul and just eats you alive. It’s there 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Something like this, if you let it, will consume your whole life.”

As part of her therapy, Wheel attends weekly meetings of a support group known as Bereaved Parents Hurt. Once a month, she meets with Parents of Murdered Children, as well as Drive-by Agony, founded by a Lynwood woman who has lost two children to gang violence. She also has monthly sessions with a psychiatrist, who supplies her with antidepressant medication, and every two months she is counseled by a psychologist.

But none of that taps into her anger and sorrow like the hours she spends on the streets with her sign, an act of profound intimacy in the most impersonal of settings. When possible, Wheel tries to make eye contact with each driver who passes by--a particularly daunting task, considering how suspicious people have become toward anyone who gets near their car.

“Just the other night, I told her: ‘This is probably hurting you more than helping you,’ ” said her husband, Stan, who relishes the distraction of his 12-hour days at the office. “If I spent all of my time talking about this, it would be so fresh that I don’t know if I would ever start to heal. With as much time as she spends . . . I’m afraid it’s going to kill her.”

On a recent day, as Wheel stood in Artesia outside a Jack in the Box restaurant, at least two dozen people honked or waved. Many studied her sign, shaking their heads in dismay. One woman, who was stopped at a red light, clasped her hands in prayer.

“I’ve gotten pretty good at reading lips,” said Wheel, gesturing to a car traveling down Pioneer Boulevard. “That woman right there? She just said, ‘My God.’ ”

A man walking with a shopping bag gave her a rose wrapped in plastic, its $1.99 price tag still affixed. A woman in a BMW pulled to the curb and handed Wheel a dollar bill. “To help,” she said. “I hope you find them.”

“See,” Wheel said, “there’s still nice people out there.”

Not all her encounters were so pleasant. A young man, dressed in the gang style of baggy pants and a crisp white T-shirt, rode past on a bicycle with a wide smirk across his face. Later that day, a group of teen-age girls pulled up and snickered.

“Those kids,” said Wheel, fashionably attired in a white blazer and red slacks, her blond hair coiffed in a shaggy mane and her nails freshly painted. “That really pisses me off.”

The last time she came to this corner, a carload of youths whom she took to be gang members shouted at her and sped off. “They told me to go home--’Go home, bitch,’ they said,” Wheel recalled. “Nobody’s going to chase me away.”

In fact, given the choice, Wheel said she would rather take that abuse than be ignored. At least she knows that someone’s getting the message. Unlike the woman in a luxury sedan who gripped her steering wheel and stared steadfastly ahead, even though Wheel was just a few feet from her front bumper.

Or the young fellow in a Honda Accord who pulled up, rolled down the window and asked: “Where’s an In-N-Out Burger around here?”

“I mean, at least look at the sign,” Wheel said after he drove away. “I guess people don’t want to wreck their day thinking about this.”

There is nothing in Wheel’s past that would seem to have prepared her for such a public display of emotion. For the previous 17 years, she had lived an unremarkable middle-class life in Lakewood--”your typical American family,” she said. “I had this stupid assumption that because you’re white, nothing can happen to you.”

Her husband worked his way up to vice president of a Paramount company that paves and stripes parking lots. Their eldest child, 25-year-old Dionne, is in college studying for a degree in speech therapy. Kevin, though he had dropped out of Artesia High School, kept busy learning his father’s trade.

Their world came unglued on May 3, 1991, as Kevin drove to his Hawaiian Gardens apartment around midnight. According to authorities, the assailants pointed a 9-millimeter pistol out the window of a white, four-door compact and fired at least 15 rounds at his Honda Civic. Two slugs struck him in the head and three landed in the back.

Several days later, the Wheels received an anonymous letter saying that some Artesia gang members--longtime enemies of the Hawaiian Gardens gang--had been attending a party that night and grew bored. They stole a car, drove to rival turf and apparently deemed Kevin fair game.

“The unfortunate thing is that we know that people know what’s going on, but nobody has come forward,” said sheriff’s homicide Sgt. Jacque Franco, adding that never in her 20-year career has she seen a parent so dedicated to finding a child’s killer. “I have a son and daughter, and I don’t know how I would cope . . . knowing that the killer is out there on the streets, free.”

Four weeks after Kevin’s death, on Memorial Day weekend, the Wheels and their friends walked for miles, stapling 1,200 reward posters on telephone poles in Hawaiian Gardens, Lakewood, Artesia and Cerritos.

From that time on, Kevin’s father has carried his son’s wallet. His mother wears his bracelet. His sister has his ring. And his grandfather keeps his baseball glove.

But as most of their wounds began to heal, a process helped by the family’s move to San Bernardino County, Teresa Wheel remained consumed by grief.

On the first anniversary of Kevin’s death, she decided to post his high school photo on a sign and head to the corner in Hawaiian Gardens. She returned on Mother’s Day, then did it again on Kevin’s birthday that August. Now, she stands vigil every few weeks, whenever she feels the need.

“It’s weird,” Wheel said that afternoon in Artesia, as she headed back to her car, equipped with personalized license plates, LVUKEVY. “But when I leave from here, I’m almost in a good mood.”