No Sanctuary Here From Crime--or Punishment : ‘I hate to see anybody go to jail, but if they can’t live out here in society, then that’s where they belong.’

The God-fearing folk at the Imperial Church of Christ believe that even the most troubled souls can be redeemed. They have studied Jesus’ words about the virtues of forgiveness. They know it’s best to turn the other cheek.

But don’t expect them to shed any tears for Harry (Pookie) Cheatham, the suspected thief who allegedly ransacked their South-Central Los Angeles church on Mother’s Day. Under California’s new “three strikes and you’re out” law, the 27-year-old ex-con could go to prison for the rest of his life.

“Adios, amigo,” said an unapologetic Sampson Wiley, the church’s minister of music. “He had his chance.”

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Even before this month’s break-in, the church brethren had grown frustrated in their battle against Satan’s pernicious pull.

A spiked, six-foot-high, wrought-iron fence rings the property at San Pedro Street and Imperial Highway. Thick bars cover the sanctuary’s stained-glass windows. The burglar alarm, which alerts officers at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Southeast Division, gets triggered every few months.

“I remember when churches didn’t even have to lock their doors,” said Wiley, 58, who joined Imperial Church of Christ a year after its founding in 1953. “Basically, people have lost respect for a supreme being.”

In recent years, bullets have whizzed into the church’s blue stucco walls. A rock was hurled through a chapel window. Batteries have been snatched from cars parked out front. Not long ago, robbers burst into a Bible class, stealing everyone’s jewelry and cash.

These days, a church elder is stationed outside during services, standing sentry as worshipers come and go. The Tuesday night Bible class now begins an hour earlier, allowing congregants to head home before darkness falls. The church still opens its food pantry every Thursday for the poor, but that did not stop someone from breaking in on a recent Saturday night and stealing all the cereal left out for the Sunday school’s breakfast.

“As a Christian, part of my duty is to live within the law,” said Robert McKinzie, 61, a retired postal worker who has spent three decades serving the church. “I hate to see anybody go to jail, but if they can’t live out here in society, then that’s where they belong. I may feel sorry for the guy, but the law’s the law.”

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Pookie Cheatham, an unemployed resident of the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts, has not done well living within the law. Court records show that he acquired three felony convictions over the last decade, each time the result of bungled thievery.

In 1984, he was caught trying to steal an Atari video set from the living room of a South-Central man, who jumped on Cheatham and held him until police could arrive. In 1985, he used a toy gun to rob a man of $22, then was arrested a few blocks away trying to buy a hamburger. In 1987, he took a car at gunpoint, but did not get far because he could not release the emergency brake.

The first offense earned him 180 days in jail. The second one got him two years in prison. After the third felony, he was sentenced to a 10-year term and ordered to pay $300 for the burned-out transmission. He was paroled in December.

Ronnie Wherry, a 42-year-old disabled veteran, lives a block away from the Imperial Church of Christ, which employs him as a part-time maintenance man. When the alarm goes off, as it did shortly before midnight on May 8, Wherry cleans up the mess.

This time, a burglar had pried open the church door and trashed a storage room that contained soap and razors for the homeless. The suspect also was trying to yank out a stereo system from behind the pulpit, but police arrived and ordered him out of the church. The man fled through a side door and ran to the back yard of a home. That is where officers arrested Cheatham, hiding behind a bush.

“We make our own heaven and hell,” Wherry said a few days after Cheatham’s arraignment for second-degree burglary, one of more than 260 “three strike” cases filed in Los Angeles County. “You can’t blame it on anybody else.”

It is a lesson Wherry learned the hard way. Before he found religion, he said, he too lived as an outlaw, stealing to feed his cravings for alcohol and cocaine. He knows that economic factors fuel much of today’s crime, that most criminals are addicts, that drugs are just a salve for those who cannot bear their spiritual pain.

But Wherry also believes there is only one way out of that self-destructive spiral. If society chooses to deal with the problem by building more prisons, so be it. If Cheatham gets his third strike, then that is just the price he will pay.

“Our main goal is to make it to heaven,” Wherry said. “For that, there’s only one righteous judge.”

A judge whose mercy transcends even prison walls.