COLUMN ONE : A Mother Turns In Her Sons : Marilyn Ross says when her elder son told her he and his brother had killed a clerk, she had to tell police. But Ross’ mother blames her for neglecting them.

Marilyn Ross is hiding from her boys, the two smooth-skinned teen-agers she gave birth to and now has turned in for murder.

“I couldn’t live with the thought that they might kill again,” she said.

Ross’ nightmare began in February, when she confronted her eldest son, Nicholas, over his unruly behavior. She says he told her that he had killed an Azusa convenience store clerk during a robbery a week earlier, and that his little brother had helped.

“I felt like somebody passed a death sentence on me,” Ross recalled. “From the moment he said it to me, I knew what I had to do.”

Since then, the tall, thin woman who often wears a gold cross has cut a somber image in the glitzy hotel she has called home while the justice system tries her sons, ages 15 and 16.

The younger boy was convicted of murder and robbery June 9 in Pomona Juvenile Court. He will be sentenced today and could be incarcerated until he is 25.

Now she is waiting for Nicholas to be tried as an adult on the same charges this summer. He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment last week, when a preliminary hearing was set for July 12. If he is convicted, he could be imprisoned for life. Prosecutors expect Ross to be a key witness and say she was vital to breaking the case.

It is rare for a parent to turn a child in for murder, officials say. But for Ross, going to police was the latest in a long history of family conflicts. It also has triggered bitter countercharges between Ross and her own mother. Elsie Newman says her grandsons are innocent and accuses her daughter of neglecting them. Newman, who helped raise the boys, says she struggled to keep them away from the street life that Ross said finally claimed them and forced her to turn them in.

From the time they were infants, the boys were shuttled between a mother and a grandmother who argued constantly; their father disappeared before he could even be a memory. In their teens, they appeared to shed many vestiges of family ties and a religious education. They where thrown out of school for bad behavior. A year ago, Ross brought them back to live with her but, she says, they took over her house, holding days-long parties and skipping school.

Attorneys defending the boys declined to comment. But their grandmother and some of their former teachers are staunch defenders. They say the boys are not killers; they are the victims of a bad mother.

“The kids were very much out of control,” said Ellis Powers, the boys’ former football coach and teacher at St. Anselm’s School in Los Angeles. “But those children really never had a chance to make it in life.”

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Ross, 37, concedes that she has been in and out of her sons’ lives--mostly out.

Sitting stiffly on the edge of her chair in the hotel bar, her hands knitting nervously over the drinkless table, she tries to explain her decision: “Yeah, I was afraid of my kids but I didn’t have to turn them in. I could have disappeared. . . . We can’t keep condoning the wrong that our children do.”

Authorities verified threats against Ross from Los Angeles and Carson gang members who were friends of her sons. They vowed to “get her” if she testified, sheriff’s Sgt. Rey Verdugo said. “She’s a good woman,” he said. “She may be a pain sometimes, but she’s doing the right thing.”

With no witnesses and few clues, sheriff’s detectives were slowly picking their way through the investigation when Ross came forward.

Since then, county prosecutors have built a case they say also includes testimony from witnesses at a bar next to the convenience store and two friends of Ross’ sons who say they knew about the robbery and saw the youths with the murder weapon.

Sheriff’s investigators allege that Ross’ sons robbed a store on Arrow Highway on Feb. 5 and killed the father of two young children.

Dimly lit, with its only window nearly obscured by posters and shelves, Michael’s Mini-Mart was “ripe for robbery,” one former employee said. At 8:30 the night of the crime, Raj Kumar Sharma, 40, was working alone, helping out his ill sister, the store owner.

Two shots to Sharma’s head and three shots to his chest--all .38-caliber bullets fired at close range--sent him spilling onto the floor, sheriff’s investigators said. The cash drawer was emptied, but nearly $200 of the store’s money was in his pockets.

Newman insists that the former altar boys and Catholic school football players are the innocent victims of a negligent mother. “They definitely were not raised up that (gang) way,” she said.

This case is extremely unusual, Los Angeles County officials say. Each year, the district attorney’s Witness Relocation Program finds new homes for more than 120 people who have been threatened after agreeing to testify in criminal trials. Only a handful have been parents, said Michael Genelin, head deputy with the district attorney’s hard-core gangs division.

“Parents are usually more protective or in states of denial,” said Verdugo, an 18-year veteran of the homicide bureau. “I’ve had parents tell me on the side (about a crime), but they’ve never come forward or turned their children in.”

Detectives used the Witness Relocation Program to pay first and last month’s rent and a security deposit on an apartment for Ross, the only financial aid the program provides. But she said she finds it easier to live in the hotel where friends pay her bill and give her rides to day secretarial jobs. She is searching for a permanent job so she can afford to begin life in a new place that she hopes will be kept secret from her sons.

Raised in South-Central Los Angeles, Ross said she married at 18 and moved to Chicago to escape a mother who berated her and who refused to listen when she leveled rape accusations against a male family member. Ross said she called police but never filed a complaint.

She had two children, Nicholas and a daughter. But her first marriage ended when the girl, then 3, died in an accidental fall from a fourth-floor apartment window. Ross, pregnant with her second son, placed Nicholas in a friend’s care and went to a religious women’s center to recover.

Her husband left, never to reappear in his sons’ lives. With two children to care for, Ross said, she returned to Los Angeles and left her sons with her mother in 1978. Meanwhile, Ross said, she worked office jobs to help support them.

“It’s not that unusual a situation for the grandmother to raise the children,” she said. Still, she said, she now “beats up” herself daily for leaving them.

When she gave birth to a daughter in 1982, she kept the girl with her. She said she flitted in and out of her sons’ lives while they grew up in Newman’s comfortable Spanish-style, two-bedroom apartment on West 85th Street with its view of the Downtown skyline.

Yet, the area’s graffiti-free houses with their neat lawns and flower beds belie the toughness of this neighborhood. Police say it sits in the heart of 8 Trey gang territory.

Newman, 61, said she countered the heavy street influence by insisting on strict curfews, a Catholic education and attendance at Southside Church of Christ, where the boys sang in the choir. All without a dime’s help from her daughter, Newman insisted, denying Ross’ assertion that she helped support her sons.

“I did whatever I could for Marilyn,” Newman said. “Right now, if she would come to my door, I honestly wouldn’t let her in.”

Father Lawrence Shelton, pastor at St. Anselm Catholic Church, where the boys last attended parochial school, lauds Newman’s efforts to help her grandsons.

Powers said the boys felt betrayed by their mother, who they said abandoned them whenever she became romantically involved.

The boys were likable and, at first, not particularly troublesome at school, both men say. They played football for the St. Anselm Mustangs, Shelton recalled. Both were behind a grade and appeared to be indifferent to their studies, cutting class and failing to do their homework, Powers said.

The school and Newman’s influence were overpowered by street values that claimed her grandsons, if not as gang members, then as imitators, Shelton said.

Barely adolescents, at 12 and 13, the boys were caught shoplifting from local stores and stealing from fellow students, according to Powers, Shelton and Ross. They were asked to leave after three years at St. Anselm, before Nicholas completed eighth grade.

Clara Moore, 68, a friend of Ross who occasionally baby-sat her daughter, said she urged Ross to mend the relationship.

“I asked her many times while the boys were young,” Moore said. “I told her after they get a certain age, if their mama didn’t raise them, they don’t listen to you because they don’t have any feeling for you.”

When Ross remarried and moved to Carson in 1989, the boys were only occasional visitors to the low-slung, shake-roof home with its front-yard rosebushes.

Ross said her mother insisted on keeping the boys and would call police and family members whenever Ross tried to get them.

On Aug. 25, 1992, the stormy relationship escalated. Newman obtained a temporary restraining order for 30 days that required Ross to stay at least 100 yards from the apartment. In the court document, Newman said Ross had called the 85th Street home for two days, threatening to kill Nicholas and breaking porch furniture.

Ross counters that she was merely showing her anger over her son’s theft of another child’s computer game. She accuses her mother of exaggerating to obtain the temporary order.

With chaos inside the home, the boys grew vulnerable to street influences, their teachers say. Ross said she first suspected her sons’ involvement in gangs about three years ago, when Nicholas asked for a Georgetown University shirt with its bulldog mascot. Clothes with dog images are favored by some gang members.

Soon, her sons began wearing blue, a gang color, and hanging out late on the streets with adults, Ross said. But both boys denied any gang involvement, she said.

Last June, Ross said, she moved the boys into her Carson home.

The boys increasingly took over the house, she said. They slept late, drank beer from 40-ounce bottles and brought in youths who hung out on a nearby corner, Ross said.

At first, she said she permitted the gatherings in the hopes of communicating on some level with her sons. But the small groups soon mushroomed to midday parties with 40 youths, loud music, drinking and drug use.

Through it all, Ross said, she heard the youths murmuring the name SIN and then found the initials scratched into her sons’ arms in ink. SIN is known to Carson sheriff’s deputies as a taggers’ group with gang affiliations. The initials stand for “Strictly Insane” or “Straight Insane” followed by a derogatory term for African Americans, Verdugo said.

Soon, Ross said, Nicholas began pressuring her to buy him a gun. He said he needed it to protect himself in public school against gang-affiliated Latinos.

After a week of Christmas partying--during which Ross said her sons smoked marijuana and drank--she abruptly moved her children on New Year’s Eve from Carson into an Azusa condominium with one of her friends.

In moving, she also separated from her husband, Ollie Ben Feagin, their marriage unraveling in part because of the boys’ behavior, both said. Feagin admits that he left Ross with the responsibility of disciplining her sons, failing to intervene even when the boys were suspended from Carson schools for fighting.

“I made a bad decision,” Feagin said regretfully in a phone interview. “I should have taken control and I didn’t.”

During the move, Ross said, her boys convinced her that they should take a revolver Feagin had in case he became upset. Ross said she gave in after an argument.

Investigators say the gun was used in the Azusa killing. The boys dismantled it after the shooting and tossed pieces of it in dumpsters, authorities said.

Ross said she had hoped their new environment would change things. But on the night of Feb. 5, she said, the boys went to a video store for about half an hour. They returned, winded and excited. They said they had been racing.

From that point on, Nicholas began acting more aggressively and their bickering escalated, she said. Four days later, he struck her during an argument.

Outraged, Ross asked Azusa police to hold Nicholas in jail for a few hours. Police complied, Verdugo said, releasing him to her for a heart-to-heart talk at a doughnut shop that afternoon.

But instead of the contriteness she expected, Ross said she found her son enraged, but controlled. He issued a sharp warning: Never turn him in to police again.

“When I asked him why, he said: ‘That man that got killed last Saturday, I did it,’ ” Ross later told police. Because she could not give him what he wanted, she said he told her, he had to get it himself through robbery. She said he also spoke of a child he had fathered and the reason for shooting the clerk: “That’s how you take care of business. You don’t leave anybody alive to eyewitness you.”

“He said that man’s life didn’t mean anything to him,” Ross recalled tearfully. “I was very afraid of him.”

That night, she visited the convenience store and spoke to customers at the bar next door. They told her Sharma had left a wife and two children, ages 2 and 4.

The next day, Ross moved out of the Azusa home with her daughter, who has been relocated.

She said she had no doubts about what she had to do next: call the police. “As Christians,” Ross said, “we should protect the widows and orphans, not the killers.”