Ex-Gang Youth, 12, Returns to Hometown That Rejected Him

Luis (Mousie) Fernandez, 12, a former gang member sent to Los Angeles because school and court officials made him unwanted in his rural Washington hometown, returned there Wednesday at the direction of a Los Angeles Dependency Court commissioner.

Commissioner Bradley Stout ordered that Luis return to live with his father and four siblings in Wenatchee.

An attorney appointed for Luis at the hearing told Stout that he would line up an advocate to represent Luis’ interests in Washington.

Stout could not be reached for comment on the case. Dependency Court officials, citing state confidentiality statutes, would not confirm that a hearing had been conducted.

But sources who asked not to be named described the terms of Stout’s order.

Luis has returned to the north-central Washington town of Wenatchee, the center of a rich fruit-growing region along the Upper Columbia River, for the second time in less than a year.

Although he was born in Wenatchee, Luis spent more than a year beginning in late 1991 in a gang-ridden part of the San Fernando Valley and became involved in street life, hanging out with a North Hills gang into the night without supervision by his father. He and his family moved back to Wenatchee last fall after the death of Luis’ oldest brother in a gang-related shooting accident.

Upon Luis’ return, he became a symbol of the town’s struggles to retain its peaceful isolation and keep out gangs. The handling of the matter by officials there raised a number of legal and moral questions about how difficult children should be educated.

Last month, Wenatchee school officials, who earlier banned Luis from attending classes, went to court to get an order making it a crime for him to go on school campuses or associate with students. The district argued that he had harassed and threatened students and administrators and was dangerous.

In an attempt to get his son back into the fifth grade, Jose Fernandez agreed last month, at the urging of state officials, to have Luis move from Wenatchee to Los Angeles.

Two weeks after his return, the San Fernando Valley church group he was to live with, Victory Outreach, had not enrolled him in classes. He was the only adolescent living at a church-operated rehabilitation facility for adult drug addicts, alcoholics and gang members.

When the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services heard about his situation last week, Luis was taken to stay at MacLaren Hall, the county’s group facility for abused and neglected children. That move prompted this week’s court hearing.