Murders Unite Residents Against Violence : Crime: The slayings of three teen-age boys on Halloween night has mobilized citizens, clergy and law enforcement in a fight for tougher laws.

The brutal Halloween night murders of three Pasadena children has become a watershed in the city’s history, community leaders said, as citizens grieved with tears, anger and a new-found determination to unite against crime.

Police Chief Jerry Oliver said he will call for a ban on the sale of handgun ammunition, and the city’s religious leaders have pledged to fight for gun control laws.

“I sense outrage, anger, frustration and a determination to do something tangible and substantive,” he said.

Residents held candlelight vigils and neighborhood potluck meals, and they established a fund to aid the grief-stricken families of the boys slain a week ago tonight.

The youths were among a group of 10 walking home from a Halloween party at 10:30 p.m. when at least two gunmen jumped out of bushes in front of a house on North Wilson Avenue and sprayed them with gunfire from semiautomatic weapons, killing the three boys and wounding three others. Moments earlier, four cars had cruised past, with passengers inside giving the boys a “hard stare.”

Civic leaders, seeing a connection between the murders and conditions of poverty, pledged to press for long-term solutions to social ills such as high unemployment, lack of educational opportunity and broken families that spawn violence.

And people debated the controversial stand taken last Tuesday in the City Council chambers by Councilman Isaac Richard, who sought to block a city-funded reward for information on the boys’ killers. Richard maintained that using city funds for such a reward raises issues of equity.

“If there’s going to be government money, we have to represent everybody equally,” he said. “We can’t say to the mothers of all those children whose murders didn’t occur on Halloween and didn’t get any press, ‘There’s no reward in your case.’ ”

But many residents, including some in Richard’s district, felt the murders of Stephen Coats and Reggie Crawford, both 14, and Edgar Evans, 13, represented an extreme.

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According to Oliver, none were gang members, all were in school and involved in youth activities. They had attended a chaperoned party, departed at a reasonable hour, walked home in a group and phoned their parents to advise them of their progress, the police chief added.

“If our kids can’t walk down a street without being blown away, we are really in trouble,” Oliver said. “The savagery of this caused people to say, ‘Enough is enough.’ ”

The slayings struck at the very heart of the community, said the Rev. L. L. C. Hammond, pastor of Scott United Methodist Church in northwest Pasadena.

“They (the victims) represented the finest that we know,” Hammond said. “This goes to our homes, our safety, our community.”

Because two council members were absent last Tuesday, Richard’s negative vote blocked the reward measure’s passage--until he briefly left the room. Then, the remaining four members quickly voted to approve a $25,000 reward. The reward fund was raised to $40,000 late last week, after Los Angeles County supervisors chipped in $5,000 and an Inglewood foundation added $10,000.

Residents of the area near the murder site expressed outrage at Richard’s stand, many maintaining that the councilman was less sympathetic because the victims were not from his district.

“You can’t divide the community like that when children are being killed,” said Ruth Strick, who lives on the street where the boys were gunned down.

Even some of Richard’s constituents in northwest Pasadena, most of whom have been loyal through a series of hostilities between the councilman and his colleagues, questioned his reasoning.

“His reasons are out of whack,” said city employee Lee Bibbie, giving the thumbs down sign.

Oliver said he had not spoken to the City Council about his proposed ban on the sale of ammunition. He said the law he has in mind would allow only those with hunting licenses to buy ammunition for their rifles. Ammunition ranging in caliber from .22 to .45 would be prohibited from sale.

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The measure could be merely symbolic, the police chief conceded, because handgun owners could simply drive to neighboring towns to get bullets.

“But we’ve got to start somewhere,” he said.

For the city’s religious leaders, the Halloween shootings prompted a show of racial unity. Ministers from the Ecumenical Council, a predominantly white group of churches, and pastors from the mainly black Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, have scheduled a prayer vigil Wednesday at noon at the shooting site.

Previously, the two groups united en masse only twice before--in January during the Martin Luther King Jr. observance and in April after the verdicts in the second Rodney G. King beating trial.

“I think (the shootings) have brought the community together as we’ve never seen before,” said the Rev. Earl Ferris, head of the alliance and a pastor at Pasadena’s Holy Trinity Church. “My phone has been ringing off the hook. People are asking, ‘What can we do? What can we do?’ ”

The Rev. Don Locher, executive director of the Ecumenical Council, said not only will the two groups try to find long-term solutions to the city’s social ills, but they will also begin speaking out in favor of gun control laws.

“We’ll be taking a little more active role,” Locher said of church leaders.

At an emotional candlelight vigil at the shooting site last Wednesday, nearly 200 people gathered in the street, including friends and neighbors of the slain boys and a large contingent of public officials.

Oliver, City Manager Philip Hawkey, Mayor Rick Cole, Vice Mayor Kathryn Nack and Councilman Bill Crowfoot attended, as well as clergy members, Pasadena Urban League President Shirley Adams and other activists.

The mourners stood quietly in front of a chain-link fence adorned with a large red-and-black sign reading, “Save Our Children.”

Reggie Crawford’s blue football jersey hung from the fence, as did other hand-lettered cardboard signs. Flowers and burning candles were piled on the sidewalk. Some mourners wept, some sang hymns, some prayed and some called on the community to unite.

“We don’t live in the ‘hood. We don’t live in South-Central,” said Debbie Coats, whose son, Stephen, was slain. “There is no reason for this suffering. Not at all.”

On Saturday, funeral services for Edgar Evans were scheduled at Metropolitan Baptist Church in Altadena. Burial was to be at Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena.

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Funeral services for Stephen Coats are scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Monday at Church of the Recessional, Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, Glendale. Interment will follow.

Funeral services for Reggie Crawford will be held at 11 a.m. Tuesday, at Holy Deliverance Pentecostal Church, 1141 N. Lincoln Ave., in Pasadena. Burial will follow in Mountain View Cemetery.

Contributions to cover funeral expenses for the families are still being accepted at Family Savings Bank, 1335 N. Lake Ave., Pasadena, 91104.

The city has scheduled today as a day of mourning for the three boys and for all children victimized by crime.

Times staff writer Chau Lam contributed to this story.