13-Year-Old’s Crack Bust Brings Drug Problem Home to Mother

Tony was supposed to start seventh grade Thursday. Instead, he sat in Juvenile Hall, accused of selling $20 worth of crack to an undercover cop just yards from his family’s home.

The boy, who turned 13 in August, was the youngest drug suspect picked up in Wednesday’s “Operation Roundup,” a police sweep of his Santa Ana neighborhood.

On Thursday, his mother sat weeping in the family’s living room, showing off pictures of the boy dressed in a pressed dark suit at his baptism and beaming in his Santiago Little League Major Giants uniform earlier this year.

“I’m so afraid. If he doesn’t get out of jail I will end my life, because he’s my only reason for living,” she said, sobbing as she awaited word from Tony’s hearing in Juvenile Court. “He’s my baby.”

Police say the little house on West 3rd Street has been the source of many neighborhood problems. They allege that several of the family’s seven children are gang members and that Tony and his 17-year-old sister, who also was arrested Wednesday, have sold drugs more than once. The father previously was arrested on suspicion of giving alcohol to minors, police add.

But the arrest of the boy and his sister has devastated a family caught up in the violent culture of this troubled neighborhood in the heart of the 6th Street Gang’s turf. The teen-ager’s last name is not being used in this story because he is a juvenile.

For Tony’s mother, Imelda, the arrest of her “baby” is an unbearable message that the drug dealing and gunfire that has come to her doorstep many times over the past few years has now pierced her family.

Imelda, who came to Santa Ana from the Mexican state of Michoacan 21 years ago, described her son as a good student who loves Little League and started helping out with family expenses several months ago. He chipped in for a trip to Mexico, bought his own school clothes and baseball uniform, and promised his mother that he would pay to have the phone reconnected.

The source of her son’s income, she firmly asserts, was his job at a market around the corner where he spent the summer stocking shelves. His mother said he had planned to continue working there in the evenings while attending Willard Intermediate School.

“I’ve known Tony since he was a little kid. When he worked for me he was a very good boy, always on time,” Wajeeh Mughrabi, the market’s owner, said Thursday, adding that Tony is welcome to come back to work there.

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Tony and his sister both appeared in Juvenile Court Thursday on drug charges, family members said. They are scheduled to appear in court again on Sept. 15, said a 31-year-old sister, Gina.

She said prosecutors indicated Thursday that they hope to remove Tony and his sister from their home, alleging that their parents are unfit. The older children adamantly deny that.

“We’re a really close family. We miss these kids and we want them home,” said Gina, who lives directly behind her parents’ house on West 3rd Street.

A court clerk said no information would be released about the case until after Tony’s detention hearing.

Investigators say they captured Tony and his sister on videotape selling crack to an undercover officer during the five-month undercover probe that ended this week with more than 100 arrests.

“The family is a major contributor to the problems in that neighborhood,” Santa Ana Police Lt. William Tegeler said. “The children are gang members. Their house on 3rd Street is where gang members frequent on a daily basis.”

Tegeler would not comment on the videotape nor say when the evidence was gathered to indict the teen-agers, but he did say the brother and sister were a consistent presence on the streets throughout the investigation.

“I do know that that is not the only time they sold drugs,” he said. “This family certainly is not the victim in this.”

Thursday, Imelda struggled to retrace the events that led to Wednesday’s early morning raid, when she watched 10 uniformed officers enter her home with a police dog.

They rummaged through her headache medicines, scattered the family’s belongings on the floor and photographed her husband’s food stamps and collection of tequila and Scotch bottles before leading her two children away handcuffed together, Imelda said.

She conceded that her home has been a focal point for neighborhood gang members, some of them acquaintances of her children who have fled police into her back yard on numerous occasions, trampled her potted roses and fired shots that lodged in a chair out front and still scar the wall that encircles their home.

For two months earlier this year, the family slept on the floor because gunfire was so rampant, and they still sleep in their clothes for fear that gunfire will awaken them, she said.

“There was a time when we couldn’t even stand outside, there was so much gunfire. I was worried about the children because I saw who some of their friends were,” she said. “But none of my children have ever been in jail before. They’re not bad kids. They don’t carry guns, and they listen to Mexican music when a lot of kids who grow up here won’t.

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“Tony has good grades. He’s punctual. He always rises on time and he does his homework,” she added. “His friends are all in jail now. They’re older. I think it is their fault, that they were a bad example for him.”

In the past six months, police have searched the home seven times, Imelda and her daughter Ana, 19, said. But they said the searches have turned up nothing.

In February, Tony’s father--63-year-old Jesus--was arrested on suspicion of providing alcohol to minors. He said Thursday that police found empty bottles on the sidewalk outside his home and arrested him, but that no minors have come forward to say that he provided them with alcohol. The case went to trial once but ended in a hung jury and is still unresolved, he said.

Imelda said she and her husband have been powerless to control the gang activity that swirled around their home.

After a three-week visit to Michoacan in March, Imelda said, they returned to find the neighborhood much calmer. Some of Tony’s older friends had been taken to jail, she said, and she hoped that peace would return.

But Imelda, who said she collects cans and bottles to make money for food and clothes, said the violence of the neighborhood may have overpowered her best intentions.

“My children always have hot food, carnitas and frijoles. I keep their clothes clean. I think that I am a good mother, but now . . . I don’t know.”

She said her husband visited her son in Juvenile Hall on Wednesday, and that Tony told him tearfully that he sold crack only once, to the undercover officer who captured the transaction on videotape.

“He was crying. He said he wanted to study, that he wanted to go to school,” she said. “He told his father, ‘Don’t leave me to sleep here alone.’ ”

Times staff writer Tracy Weber contributed to this report.