Making Teens Part of the Solution : O.C. Doctor Seeks Gang Members’ Help in Ending Violence

The surgeon and the gang cholo were an odd couple.

Here was Thomas E. Shaver, head of the trauma ward at Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center. By his side was Raul, a convicted 17-year-old assailant from Varrio Chico San Clemente and a veterano of south Orange County’s escalating gang confrontations.

Together on a recent evening they headed to a community meeting on gangs.

“I coaxed Raul into coming to the meeting because I believe that we won’t find a solution to the violence without the help of gang members like Raul,” Shaver said.

But civic participation was never Raul’s forte. As the youth opened the door to a local church and saw a sea of mostly white faces, police officers and lawmakers, he said, “Chale . “ No. He bolted.

“If they want to stop youth violence like this, they need to help us, not talk about kicking us out of high school,” Raul said last week. “I wanted to go in but I didn’t want to go in and say something rude or stupid and have these people come down on me and like maybe kick me and my family out of the city.”

Raul said he is still interested in talking peace, although he remains wary. And Shaver said he is unshaken in his determination to work with Raul and other gang members.

How fate brought together the same trauma surgeon who helped treat Steven Woods, the 17-year-old who recently was fatally speared with a paint roller, and a member of the gang believed involved in Woods’ death is a page from the book of cultural awareness in Southern California.

Shaver, 57, said he is trying to spread awareness of the senseless deaths he sees every weekend. It hit him a few months back when another bad weekend landed a teen-ager on a gurney staring up into his face.

“Hey,” Shaver said, “I’m the guy who sees these guys coming into the trauma unit with knives sticking out of their backs. It’s gotten so bad at the hospital that I had to do something.”

Nothing at the University of Kansas could mentally prepare the Mission Viejo resident for what he is seeing in the emergency room.

“One day I got a young man with a gunshot wound to his abdomen,” Shaver said. “Four days later a San Clemente kid got shot, hit in the kneecap. Then they go after one guy and it takes nine shots to hit him once in the chest.”

Earlier this year, when 20 gang members visited one of their own injured in a drive-by, Shaver decided it was his chance to talk with the youths on a more friendly basis--after hospital security relaxed its alert status and ushered the boys into a waiting room.

At first, they taunted Shaver and the staff.

“They were making fun of me,” Shaver said. “I remembered that one had survived a gunshot wound and two others were victims of stab wounds. So, I asked this question: ‘Let me tell you this. Ten years from now, do you want your little brothers to be here in this same room doing the same thing you are?’ ”

Raul recalled Shaver’s question. In his mind, the answer scared him. And he and the other cholos , or gang toughs, grudgingly have accepted the gringo doctor taking an interest in them.

“None of us,” Raul said, “wanted to have our little brothers in our situation,” in 10 years or “anytime” in the future.

Raul said he didn’t want to attend any meeting. But the surgeon was persistent. They made plans to meet at Our Lady of Fatima Church in San Clemente last week, but Raul didn’t step inside.

The meeting had been called after the Oct. 15 attack on Woods, who is white, in a beach parking lot and the subsequent arrests of nine young men, all of them Latino and two of them believed to be gang members. Community groups and residents launched an anti-gang campaign that includes slogans such as “Support Steve,” “Take Back Your Community” and “Do It for Steve.”

Raul later said that hearing everyone in the city talk about “this gang problem and that gang problem” in not-so-friendly terms has angered his homeboys.

A sheriff’s official compared gangs to a spreading “fungus,” while state Assemblyman Bill Morrow (R-Oceanside) told the crowd he wants to enact legislation so gang members can be “kicked out of public high schools.”

Raul is a senior at San Clemente High School, the same school Woods attended, and said he plans to attend community college after graduation.

“I got plenty to say,” Raul said. “What we need are youth recreation centers. We like to play handball but there’s no place around here. When we go to the high school and try and play handball there, they kick us out.”

“They got these signs that say, ‘Get our community back.’ Hey! We never had it, we never took it from nobody. We keep to ourselves. We don’t just go walking the street beating up on people for nothing. We don’t bother people if they don’t bother us.

“At school they want to kick all the Mexicans out of here,” he added.

Raul said that Latino gang members have been getting shot and stabbed “all along.” But no one cared about them, he said, until a white student was attacked.

“Hey, a few months ago, five of my friends got stabbed at the beach right here at Linda Lane, and you didn’t hear them or anyone try to make a fund-raiser for my friends,” Raul said. “There was no big deal like they did with that Steve Woods guy. But they’re spray-painting, ‘White Power,’ and putting swastikas up at the 7-Eleven off (Avenida) Palizada.”

As for peace and an end to violence, Raul says he doesn’t believe any type of summit among street gang members will work because there is too much bitterness and not enough participation among rivals.

For Shaver, South County’s new community awareness has been good, though he too objects to the community group slogans, which he says are discriminatory--and divisive.

“I’m trying to have these gang members take more responsibility for their actions,” he said.