Boy’s Troubled Odyssey Raises Moral, Legal Doubts : Juveniles: At 12, he said he wanted out of gang life. But courts and social agencies have sent him back and forth.

Scarred by Los Angeles gang tattoos on his neck and a man-sized chip on his shoulder, 12-year-old Luis (Mousie) Fernandez embodied this town’s worst fears.

He had returned to his birthplace--the largest of the bucolic settlements along the irrigated fruit-basket of the upper Columbia River--saying he wanted to start over, that the accidental shooting death of his older brother at the hands of a North Hills gang member made him want to escape gang life.

But this difficult child, damaged by neglect and street life, was seen as an interloper bringing the threat of violence to this rural paradise, which, like so many other towns across America, is struggling to preserve its isolation and serenity.

So it is perhaps understandable that Wenatchee’s 23,000 residents did not throw out the welcome mat for this boy, who fought with other children, intimidated adults and bragged of his gang exploits.

Fearful town officials not only expelled him from school, they obtained a unique court order making it a crime for him to even play with other youngsters.

“Kids like that, when they get to Wenatchee, stick out like a sore thumb,” said John Gordon, assistant superintendent of the town’s school district. “And we don’t have the ability to deal with it.”

With Luis’ attempt at a new life in Washington crumbling, a state child protective services caseworker flew the boy back to Los Angeles, turning him over to a Sun Valley rehabilitation house for adult gang members, recovering alcoholics and drug addicts--even though he has never been accused of a serious crime and does not have a substance abuse problem.

When the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services got word of his situation, Luis was picked up again and taken to MacLaren Hall, the county’s large home for abused and neglected children. Today a Juvenile Court judge will conduct a hearing to determine who should have custody of Luis and where he should live.

“I don’t see how we can not get involved” in the situation, said Alfonso Garcia, head of the Latino Family Preservation project for the Children’s Services Department. “We would just be doing the same thing that Washington is doing, washing our hands of him.”

The case has raised a number of difficult questions about the legal and moral responsibility a society has to educate its children, especially those who are troubled and seem unresponsive to help. It also calls into doubt the oft-repeated belief that small towns offer both a haven and a salve for young gang members influenced by harsh urban environments.

School and court officials in Washington said they tried their best to help the slight, dark-eyed boy but admit that they were confounded by a child whose needs seemed completely out of proportion to the services they could offer.

Jim Tiffany, the editor of a Spanish-language weekly newspaper in Wenatchee, said the story of Luis is simple. “This kid scared us all and we didn’t know what to do with him so we kicked him out,” he said.

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Although born in Wenatchee, Luis moved with his father and four siblings to the North Hills area of the San Fernando Valley almost three years ago after his father and mother separated.

The neighborhood could not have been more different from Wenatchee.

Almost every wall, gate, garage door and fence around Columbus Street is scrawled with graffiti marking it as gang territory. Many of the streets are barricaded to combat open drug sales. Gunfire is common. Gang members take over vacant apartments.

Last summer, Luis’ brother Vincent, 15, was shot in the family’s living room by a gang member playing with a gun.

“Every day I think about you and I feel sad,” Luis wrote in a note to his brother just after Vincent’s death. “I’m going to take my tattoos off my neck and I’m not going to be with Columbus no more because I don’t want to get shot.”

The death of his oldest son drove Jose Fernandez, 54, to return to Wenatchee.

“I thought, in part, that . . . there wouldn’t be the violence and the air would be cleaner,” he said.

But, he admitted, Luis continued to hang out on the streets in Wenatchee, as he had in Los Angeles, sometimes drinking wine with older youths and not coming home at night.

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Wenatchee is as rural as North Hills is urban.

The graffiti on the walking bridge that connects Wenatchee with East Wenatchee memorializes teen-age love rather than gang feuds. And the video arcade in town, which is supposed to be the gang hot spot, on one recent evening had only a couple of dozen well-behaved youths feeding machines with quarters. If there is drug dealing in town--and police say there is, although it is not organized--it is done secretly, not out in the open.

But many residents fear that growing ranks of newcomers are threatening the isolation they cherish. Blessed with clean air, stunning vistas of the Cascades to the west and cheap housing prices, Wenatchee is now attracting not only retirees and urban refugees but also Latino farm workers, such as Luis’ father, who are choosing to collect unemployment during the off season or get out of the orchards altogether.

The tripling during the 1980s of the Latino population in this still mostly white region--where right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh’s midday program attracts an enthusiastic audience--has touched off bitter town meetings at which residents have argued for mass roundups of illegal immigrants.

“The Hispanic community . . . has grown so fast that Wenatchee . . . didn’t see it coming and they don’t like it,” said Ruben Ruelas, a state unemployment office worker who co-chairs the mayor’s advisory group in town. “They say, ‘Why should we make it any easier or provide any extra services for these people?’ ”

Some Wenatchee residents, he said, equate young Latinos, especially those who have moved from Southern California, with gang members. There has never been a drive-by shooting here, and police have identified only about 100 gang “wanna-bes.”

“We see a scribble on the wall and we say the Mexican gangs are coming to take over the community,” said Tiffany, the editor, who resigned from the town’s anti-gang committee because he thought its approach was repressive rather than supportive of kids heading for trouble.

D. Ty Duhamel, directing attorney for Evergreen Legal Services, a poverty law agency in Wenatchee, said what happened to Luis is not unusual in the region. He has sued several school districts for expelling Latino students simply because they were thought to be gang members.

The problem, he said, is one of perception. Administrators’ fears “make them assume the worst and think of Hispanics as someone to be excluded instead of someone to be given the benefits of what they want for their own children,” he said.

Luis, who defied authorities in court hearings and classrooms, “fit the stereotype,” said Ruelas. Rather than trying to belie those fears, the youngster immediately began testing the town’s patience as well as its resources for helping a troubled child reform.

The 6,300-student Wenatchee school system, for example, is the largest in the area but did not offer Luis a home study program that would have allowed him to keep up in school.

Nor did the Wenatchee schools or the probation department provide him with one-on-one counseling to help him control the rage that teachers said would suddenly erupt as if from a deep, dark place. Once last winter, for example, he returned to Robert E. Lee School in East Wenatchee with a double-edged ax that he used to destroy a snow fort that other students had made.

He was expelled soon after, five weeks after he had enrolled. Principal Cathie West said she had done everything from letting Luis tutor other students to build his self-esteem to giving him a chance to earn new clothing with good behavior.

“We went the extra mile for this child,” she said.

Luis’ father said he had told judges in court hearings in Wenatchee that he could not control his children or keep them off the street. But he said he got no help. He tried to get Luis admitted to school in Wenatchee itself but his request was rejected, without an appeal. Instead, Wenatchee school officials headed for Chelan County District Court to get a legal weapon to keep Luis away.

On May 9, after a hearing at which Luis represented himself, the district was given an anti-harassment order against Luis and another boy; they were said to have been threatening students. The district later acknowledged that a school administrator who testified at that hearing had been confused and that some of what she said to get the order was untrue.

Judge Robert Graham’s order is far broader than the temporary order that an Orange County school district asked for last month to allow a kindergarten student to be moved into a special education class. Officials there were later told to allow the student into a regular class.

Although a minor cannot be sued in the state of Washington, Graham said he went along because he “wasn’t attempting to imprison the kid or fine him or anything else.” His order barred Luis from campuses and from associating with other kids. Violating it would subject him to criminal penalties.

Graham also acknowledged that, although Luis’ father was present, he might have erred in not appointing a guardian or securing an attorney for the boy.

“The thing came up suddenly and we did it,” Graham said in an interview.

Graham said he was saddened by the sight of Luis, a child who during breaks in the hearing played with his 4-year-old niece. But he issued the order anyway, he said, to try to get the boy’s attention.

“Folks around here are pretty malleable,” he said. “They would give every break to a youngster who was trying to go right.”

During the eight months or so that he lived in Wenatchee, Luis also appeared before Peter Young, the Juvenile Court commissioner for Chelan County, at hearings in which he was convicted of breaking a window, fighting and shoplifting some candy from a grocery store.

“He seems to retain this arrogance and defiance. . . . In this small community we get concerned that we’re not going to change him and, instead, he’s going to change us and pull in the other 11-year-olds,” said Young.

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After Luis was barred from the local schools, his father began searching for a place to help his son. For a brief time last fall, Luis had stayed with families from Victory Outreach, a church in the San Fernando Valley, and Fernandez decided to send him back there.

Pastor David Martinez, who heads the church, said the group reluctantly agreed to let Luis stay at its drug and alcohol recovery house and tutor him until he could get into a Christian school. That, however, may make Luis truant, county probation officials said.

Martinez said he does not believe that Luis needs anything more than love, attention and structure.

“It’s just that he’s used to being out there with the street kids,” he said. “We’re trying to settle him back down and get his mind back into church.”

Then, last Thursday, he was taken away.

Paula Rangel, a North Hills apartment manager who took Luis in after his brother’s death last summer, was angry at how he has been treated. “No one wants to help this kid,” she said. “No one wants to say, ‘We’re going to take the responsibility.’ ”

The day Luis flew into Los Angeles, he got one more look at his Columbus Street neighborhood.

He broke a window at Victory Outreach and managed to make it from Sun Valley to North Hills. When he showed up on the street, he was met with shouts of welcome and hugs, witnesses said.

For a few hours, until two carloads of Victory Outreach workers tracked him down at a park near Columbus Street, he was back home.