A Sad Coda to a Short Life : Just Before His Death,Teen Wrote of His Hope to End Violence

Just three weeks ago, 17-year-old Siriaco Gonzalez issued a written plea for an end to the gang violence that has been an everyday part of the neighborhood where he grew up.

In an essay that he completed for his Saddleback High School Family Studies class before Christmas vacation, Siriaco wrote:

“One of the greatest goals I want to achieve, not just in my life but in everybody’s life, is to stop gang violence and increase the peace. Too many innocent people pay the price for individuals fighting for pride.”

No one read it until Siriaco was dead--the victim of violence.

Teacher Nancy O’Connor sat down to read her student’s essay the day after she learned that he had become Orange County’s first 1994 homicide victim. The veteran educator said she was struck deeply by what Siriaco had written.

“This young man was more than just another teen homicide,” O’Connor said Friday. “His dreams and goals were so ambitious and so full of hope. He was a young man with potential and a dream that is now gone.”

Siriaco was gunned down near a stretch of Santa Fe railroad tracks on his way to school early Tuesday in a slaying that police suspect was gang-related. Siriaco was not a known hard-core gang member but was carrying a handgun when he was killed, police said.

“He was in a territory where there is a hard-core gang, and there may have been some kind of confrontation,” Santa Ana Police Lt. Robert Helton said Friday. “He may have been at the wrong place at the wrong time.” Police have no suspects in the killing.

Siriaco was buried Friday at Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in Orange after a funeral service at St. Anne’s Church attended by 500 people. The boy’s mother, Vitalina Gonzalez, requested that her son’s essay be read at his rosary service Thursday night as a message to teen-agers to give up gang life.

Siriaco, who for a time played soccer and ran track at Saddleback High, was a known graffiti tagger who had begun hanging with the wrong crowd for at least nine months before his death, according to police and those who knew him.

“He was different,” said his brother, Jose, 24. “He wasn’t involved in sports at school this year and he was behind in credits. But he said he never had any problems with anyone. Everyone in the neighborhood who knew him liked him.”

Nevertheless, Siriaco, who was enrolled in Saddleback High School’s Independent Studies program, still hoped to graduate with his classmates in June, O’Connor said.

“Some of his teachers felt that he was trying to break away from the wrong crowd,” O’Connor said. “He had a determination to graduate. He was taking independent studies for extra credits in addition to a full load of classes.”

In the essay, which O’Connor gave to the boy’s family the day after his death, Siriaco writes of his dream to receive his high school diploma:

“In June of 1994, if everything goes as expected, I will be walking up that aisle in the middle of the auditorium to shake our administrator’s hand and receiving my high school diploma.”

Siriaco also hoped to attend Rancho Santiago College and eventually own an auto repair business, and he wrote of getting married and having children.

“My parents were very sad when they read the essay,” Jose Gonzalez said as he stood outside the family’s home after the funeral.

“They were upset to know what his goals were and to know that he was not going to have a future. What made them most upset was what he wrote at the end about gangs and that he was the one to be killed.”

Jose Gonzalez said his family is still mystified by the shooting.

“They say he had a gun,” he said. “We never knew he had a gun. Still, he wasn’t the kind of guy who could shoot anybody, who could do what was done to him.”

O’Connor, an educator in the Santa Ana Unified School District since 1964, said she had sensed that her student was caught between two worlds.

“He was an identified gifted student in junior high school,” she said. “He expressed himself very well, was very prompt with his work and did a very good job. How could this happen to somebody with those dreams and goals?

“That’s the frustration, wondering what went wrong.”