Gangbanger to Gangbuster : Profile: Mona Ruiz has escaped barrio violence and is now an officer with Santa Ana’s anti-gang police unit.

Mona Ruiz carries the weight of two badges.

One, Santa Ana police shield No. 1725, she has worn proudly while arresting hundreds of gangbangers from the city’s toughest turfs. The other, a faded red and black tattoo that coils around the wrist of her shooting hand, marks her as a former gang member, a past predator on the same streets she now protects.

The two symbols clash, as do Ruiz’s troubled past and her law-and-order present. “I lived in two separate worlds,” says the 34-year-old divorced mother of three. “Two different lives--one life on the gang side, and now a life on the other side of the fence.”

Getting over the fence was the hardest thing she’s ever done. Becoming a cop meant turning her back on much of her former life. To many childhood friends, even relatives, that made Ruiz a traitor and a threat.

Her welcome wasn’t exactly warm in the police station, either. From the time she first joined the department as a part-time clerk in 1975, Ruiz’s appearance and background made her a suspicious figure. She had to face distrust, contempt, even open hostility from the officers around her.

“I’ve had to prove myself over and over,” said Ruiz, now a four-year veteran street cop assigned to the department’s gang unit. “It’s never been easy. It’s always been a struggle to get where I wanted to go.”

Ruiz walks and speaks slowly, precisely. Her 5-foot-3 frame may not cut an imposing figure, but she is wiry and street-smart, an accomplished kick-boxer. Fellow officers grin when they talk about the times Ruiz has cowed hulking male suspects who doubted her strength.

“Believe me, she holds her own,” said Cpl. Dave Marshall, her partner.

One of eight children, Ruiz grew up among aunts, uncles and neighbors caught up in gangs and their violence. She remembers as a preschooler watching her parents help a wounded cousin who came banging at their door seeking refuge from the police.

She had seen a dozen people killed before she was old enough to drive, and half a dozen times as a teen she cradled the dying bodies of friends who had been shot in the head or heart during street skirmishes. Others she saw die from drug overdoses, their glazed and wild eyes dimming before closing forever.

“You don’t forget things like that,” she said quietly. “Ever.”

While Ruiz fought for her gang, and even married another member, she said she always distanced herself from the group’s hard-core activities. She said she was careful to stay on the sidelines when others committed crimes.

“I got in a lot of fights because I wouldn’t do drugs,” Ruiz said. “I had seen too many girls get raped by guys, guys in the same gang, because they got too wasted. And the people I knew who did drugs--their lives just fell apart.”

Her no-drugs stance was not the only thing that set the scrappy Ruiz apart from her cohorts. “I would talk about becoming a cop, and they would all just laugh.”

Her friends were still laughing when she got the clerk job at the Santa Ana Police Department through a high school job program. Others shied away, worried about her allegiance. At the police station, the reaction to the new clerk was also uneasy.

“It was obvious that she was a gang member,” said Lt. Felix Osuna, now commander of the department’s Traffic Division. “She was a real concern to us. We wondered if we could trust her with reports, we wondered why she was working here, all sorts of things.”

Partly because of his suspicions, Osuna decided to get to know Ruiz. The two became unlikely friends, and the veteran cop learned about the violence, drugs and desperation that surrounded Ruiz when she left work every night.

“She would tell my partner and I horror stories about what she had seen, shootings and stabbings and drive-bys,’ Osuna said. “And she would talk about wanting to get out of it.”

The two chatted daily during the next few years, with Osuna offering Ruiz advice, a small loan or a friendly ear--whichever she needed most. He said he worried about her, especially when she quit the department for four years during her marriage to an abusive gang member.

When the two would see each other, Osuna would urge Ruiz to come back. He would tell her to get away from the gang scene, to think about her children.

Finally, in 1985, Ruiz made the break with her husband and the gang, returning to the station as a “meter maid.” The next four years, she was busy writing parking tickets and raising her kids alone, but she knew she wanted more.

Although he knew her well, Osuna said, he was floored in 1989 when Ruiz walked into his office and announced her new aspiration, an old dream. “I want to be a police officer,” she told him.

Osuna told her that it would be a difficult road, and he was right. The department turned down her initial application, telling Ruiz she “was not Santa Ana material.”

“But what they meant was I didn’t look like a cop is supposed to look,” Ruiz said. Even now, she stands out among the department’s predominantly white, male ranks. Among 380 officers, only 15 are women. Among those 15, only three are Latinas.

After the department refused to send Ruiz through its academy, she became more resolved to prove herself. She went to a nighttime reserve academy, while holding down her day job and raising her three children. It was her young ones that drove her to find a way, she said.

“I would look at my kids sleeping at night and think about them being shot like all the kids I had seen get killed,” Ruiz said. “That helped me decide.”

Osuna beamed with pride on Ruiz’s graduation day from the police academy in December, 1989, when he pinned the silver badge on his protege’s lapel. The only woman in her class, she finished among the top five, graduating with honors.

“She did it, despite all the odds,” Osuna said. “She’s a survivor. How could you not respect her?”

It was no secret that more than a few people in the police station hoped background checks would give the department grounds to deny her application. During her rookie months, she said, she was confronted by officers who told her she was unworthy of the proud blue uniform, or suggested she was a gang spy. Others went even further.

“I had one sergeant tell me, ‘You don’t belong here. If it takes the rest of my career, I’m going to make sure you don’t make it.’ ”

Ruiz, weary of the confrontations, says now: “When I meet other cops, they see (the tattoo) and ask about it. Some get real tense about it. I had one tell me, ‘You look like you should be in the back of the patrol car, not the front.’ ”

Despite her associations, Ruiz said, she never did end up in the rear of a squad car during her teen-age years, an assertion that the department’s exhaustive investigations confirmed. She admits to being in scores of fights, but said she was always careful not to cross the line.

Santa Ana Police Chief Paul M. Walters said that while Ruiz’s background may have been a stumbling block earlier in her career, it now gives her a special affinity for her work with the department’s gang unit.

“Her background certainly enables her to better understand the mind-set of the people she deals with,” Walters said. “Officers that come from the middle class or other types of areas sometimes find it frustrating and troubling when they deal with people that seem lost or caught up in gang lifestyles.”

Ruiz smiles and admits that her roots--and that tattoo of a faded heart, pierced and bloodied by an ink dagger, on her wrist--earn her some measure of respect among the homeboys. But it was a costly badge to acquire.

“There are so many things that could have gone wrong, but God had plans for me,” Ruiz said. “I had a shining star above me.”

Gregory C. Brown knows about the odds Ruiz beat. He escaped the gang scene in his childhood home, Watts, and is now an assistant professor of criminal justice at Chapman University in Orange.

“She is just an incredible individual to have come as far as she has,” Brown said. “She came to the force with two strikes against her--she’s a woman, and she was a former gang member. And to work the same streets where she grew up . . . just incredible.”

Most people who use education, religion or plain hard work to rise above the dangerous allure of gangs usually have to leave their neighborhood to do it, Brown said. “That’s what I did. But she’s there every day, dealing with the place that could have killed her.”

Ruiz joined a gang in her freshman year at Valley High School. Unwittingly, on the first day of school, she had tread on ground claimed by one of the school’s four dominant gangs, and a group of girls surrounded and beat her for the transgression.

“There was a lot of peer pressure to join a gang, and that day I knew I had better find some friends if I wanted to survive,” Ruiz said. She chose the gang that had ties to her family, the one that included another of her cousins among its leaders.

She won’t identify the gang. “I don’t want to glorify them, I don’t want them to use me to get fame or glory for themselves.”

As a teen-ager, Ruiz was an adamant protector of her gang’s honor and name. “I thought it was what I was supposed to do, what I was supposed to be,” she said. “But I always wondered what life was like for other people, in other places.”

Amid the chaos of her teen years, that curiosity lingered in her mind, accompanied by a piece of advice her father gave her years earlier, when she was still in elementary school.

He had told her to become a cop. That job, he said, would bring her respect and give her life a direction. That was the way to a better world. Become a police officer. “In my father’s eyes, police were like soldiers of Christ.”

She filed the advice away, and nearly abandoned it when she ran with her gang during high school. Then something happened that made Ruiz stop and take stock.

On New Year’s Eve in 1978, Ruiz was at a party in a neighboring barrio, a place she had never been before. She was visiting the home of her sister’s fiance, and the mood was festive as people danced and caroused on the lawn.

The music was interrupted by a series of loud pops, like someone had ignited a string of fireworks. Ruiz felt a burning slash across her neck, and something passed through her long dark hair. She turned just in time to see the slug tear a hole in the chest of a young man standing a few feet away. Screaming, she dropped to the ground and crawled on her stomach toward the house.

“The shooting kept going, and we all scrambled to get inside,” she said. “I said to myself right then, ‘Do I want to live like this? That could have been me out there, dead. I’m only 17, do I want to die?’ ”

It was just one of many killings she had witnessed, but the heat from the bullet and her fear affected her like never before. An inch away from death, she thought to herself, just an inch. It was then that she vowed to escape the chaos of the streets.

Ruiz has come a long way since that night, but sometimes the memory seems too close. Just this past Halloween night, she and her partner were sitting across from a local teen hangout when gunfire erupted from a passing car.

“There was this girl dancing on the step in front of this restaurant, I remember her moving up and down,” Ruiz recalled. “Then she was shot. Her head just exploded. It seemed to happen in slow motion, like a movie.”

The two officers sped after the car, and caught up to the drivers as they gathered a few blocks away to celebrate their deed. “They never saw us until we busted them.”

As she talked about the arrest, Mona Ruiz cast her eyes downward, the memory of the girl’s gruesome death still jarring loose a jumble of violent memories.

Lost friends, lost lives, and the night she herself felt the touch of the bullet. “At least we caught them this time. At least now I’m on the side that’s trying to make a difference.”