3rd Street’s Gang Fight Continues : Neighborhood: Santa Ana’s toughest area enjoys the relative calm after massive sweep--but few expect it to endure.

The crack of gunfire is now rare on this battered stretch of 3rd Street, just blocks from the hub of county government. For the children, it is a novel calm, filled with the sounds of their laughter and roller skates.

But 72-year-old Ignacio Barrientos remains unconvinced that his neighborhood has become safe. “Here, one can’t trust others. You walk in the street and see a little boy, but he pulls up his shirt and shows you he has a gun,” Barrientos said. “Now it’s calm, but it will start again. The violence will be the same, or worse.”

It is here that police swept through the neighborhood at dawn on Sept. 7, armed with grand jury indictments, in a raid that resulted in 119 arrests, mostly for drug charges. By day’s end, officials declared they had crippled Orange County’s most vicious street gang. Even Gov. Pete Wilson made an election-season appearance to commend “Operation Roundup.”

But despite authorities’ efforts to intervene, the legacy of violence here has so shrunk people’s dreams that their lives are still centered around protecting their families.

An uneasy peace has settled over 3rd Street, but it is a respite from violence that few believe will endure.

“It will be really hard to keep things calm,” said Eleanor Martinez, who has twice buried relatives gunned down by gang bullets in as many years. “First of all, we would have to be a united neighborhood. But we’re all afraid.”

Although the raid highlighted the troubles on 3rd Street, residents say conditions actually began to improve earlier this year with the arrest of some key members of the 6th Street gang, which has controlled the two-block stretch of 3rd Street between Flower and Baker streets.

As a result, this street of mostly older bungalows, many with well-kept gardens full of roses and fruit trees, is no longer a clearinghouse for rock cocaine and heroin. Families have stopped sleeping on the floor for fear a random bullet will find them.

By day, roosters crow and Mexican music wafts from open windows as residents water their yards. Pushcart vendors peddle corn and Popsicles. But by sundown, the street is eerily deserted, the metal-grilled doors on almost every house locked tight.

The story of life along 3rd Street is about Martinez, who struggles to believe she has raised her children well, despite their troubles with the law.

It is about the family of Imelda and Jesus, baffled by the court system and overwhelmed by the events that led to the recent arrests of their son and daughter on suspicion of selling drugs.

And it is also the story of their grandson, George, who at 14 works a full seven-day week while attending middle school, in the hope of earning his way out of the barrio .

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For years, Barrientos has lived a life of internal exile in his 3rd Street apartment, strumming his guitar, studying the apocalyptic writings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and watching the late-night Spanish-language news before turning in alone.

When he did venture out, he collided with the violence: Two blocks from home, a group of men ambushed his car last year, threw him to the ground and stole all his papers and money, he said. When a young teen-age couple asked him sweetly for a ride, he welcomed them into his car and they mugged him.

“Everything I do, I do in plain day, and I never leave on foot,” said Barrientos, who always sports a smart short-brimmed hat. “I have thought that there might come a day when I have to leave the house at night, and I live in fear of that day.”

In 1968, the diminutive man, nicknamed Nacho, came to Santa Ana from Mexico, leaving his home in the state of Guerrero. For eight years, he has managed a 3rd Street apartment building for the nonprofit Civic Center Barrio Corp, which he helped found in 1974.

Before the security gate was installed, and during the months earlier this year when it was broken, Barrientos said as many as 40 or 50 youths would loiter under the carports, painting the walls with graffiti and blasting their music.

“Anyone who would go down and tell them to calm themselves was really risking something,” he said. “One time I said to them, ‘ Hombre , please don’t paint the wall.’ And one told me, ‘Shut up, because if you don’t, you’ll be gone.’ It’s sad, but it’s the truth.”

On doctor’s orders, Barrientos must walk daily, but he refuses to do so in his own neighborhood.

Instead, he grabs his cane and one of his four hats at 7 each morning, climbs into his brown Buick Century, and drives three miles to a park in another part of town. There, he walks briskly around the lake, with nothing more than the sound of sprinklers and the squawking of ducks to distract him.

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Between November, 1993, and February of this year, police said, 6th Street gang members were linked to five fatal shootings and more than a dozen robberies. In a recent 10-month period, the two-block strip of 3rd Street generated 500 calls to police for help, said Santa Ana Lt. William Tegeler.

But since early this year, police have dealt a series of blows to the gang, which took over 3rd Street in 1989 after splintering from F-Troop, now an archrival that occupies territory north of Civic Center Drive.

Several of 6th Street’s most violent members were arrested earlier this year. Then came the Sept. 7 raid, which culminated five months of undercover work.

Seventy-five people, six of them juveniles, were arrested on the street that day, most of them suspected of committing crimes in the 3rd Street area and some of them--police will not say how many--gang members. Others already in jail or prison were also charged.

At a news conference held to unveil the undercover operation, Santa Ana Police Chief Paul M. Walters said 6th Street has “become the most violent gang in the city and maybe the county.” Added Orange County Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi: “The 6th Street gang has been busted in every sense of the word.”

Some residents criticize the sweep as political theater, pointing out that many gang members were already in jail. Others claim that officers sometimes did not respond to calls for help when the neighborhood was suffering its worst violence.

Drug dealing had turned the area into a gathering place for users in search of quick cash. Rock cocaine addicts actually blockaded the street last year with old sofas and abandoned washing machines, brazenly robbing the occupants of cars passing through the neighborhood, according to several residents who watched from their homes.

In a neighborhood just blocks from the Santa Ana police station and nearly in sight of the Orange County Courthouse and the County Jail, residents saw people they grew up with pressing guns to the temples of passersby.

“You see someone walk up to someone else and put a gun to their head, to jump them, and you don’t know whether to witness it or walk away,” said 22-year-old Ruth Arreguin.

For months, gang members squatted in several empty houses on 3rd Street, turning one into a nightmare for the owner, who fled the neighborhood two years ago for Riverside. They plastered it with graffiti and blasted holes through the roof, the owner said. On an outside wall, they scrawled “Sixth Street Motel.”

Once those houses were boarded up, the dealing moved west to the corner of 3rd and Baker streets, where police in hiding shot much of the videotape of frantic drug deals used as evidence for the Sept. 7 arrests.

Last year, four members or friends of the gang were gunned down, the first deaths since 6th Street split off from F-Troop.

Among them was a 13-year-old youth with a loud laugh who is now known by the martyrized jargon of his gang name: “Chucky Rest-in-Peace.”

The day he was shot while climbing on his bicycle to pedal home, Chucky had made a request that would be strikingly macabre for a child his age in nearly any other neighborhood: He wanted to be buried in his parents’ native Mexican state of Michoacan, a friend said.

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At Fairhaven Memorial Park in Santa Ana, four graves are clustered close together, covered in cloth flowers and children’s pinwheels that squeak in the afternoon breeze. Three hold the young men who fell to gunfire last year along with Chucky, their lives and deaths entwined in 3rd Street’s warfare.

The newest contains the body of Maria Corona, 27, a young mother caught in gang cross-fire this month six blocks from 3rd Street.

For Eleanor Martinez, Corona’s funeral marked the second time in as many years that she has watched a relative laid to rest here.

The reserved and well-groomed woman has lived on 3rd Street for two decades and struggled to raise a good family. She and her husband even counsel troubled couples, convinced that strife at home drives children to the streets. But her own home seems only to attract more misfortune as time passes.

Martinez’s nephew, Corona’s widower, has been in and out of jail for years on drug-related charges. A spindly man with an elaborate tattoo of Christ and his crown of thorns on his bicep, Frank Gonzales Martinez last got out of jail only four months ago. Last week, he was hauled off to jail again, this time on a parole violation.

Eleanor Martinez’s son, Gilbert, whom she tried to tether to the house and shield from trouble, was shot in broad daylight at age 16 last year. Another son is an alleged member of the 6th Street gang and currently on probation, police say.

“It’s not easy, being a mother here,” confides Martinez, whose living room is arranged like a shrine, filled with votive candles and religious images. Among them hangs a giant portrait of Gilbert, a handsome young man who stares disarmingly into the camera.

On Saturday night she sits on her porch in a white quilted robe, a risk she would not have taken just months ago.

But despite the current lull in the violence and efforts to clean up 3rd Street, Eleanor Martinez doesn’t believe the killing will stop. Maria’s death has prompted her to buy two plots next to the cluster of graves, before they fill up with more of the neighborhood’s young.

“We’re trapped, with gang problems and drug addiction. These things are destroying everyone. All of us,” she said.

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Nowhere is the sense of despair on 3rd Street as evident as at the home of Imelda and Jesus, a house that not long ago attracted 6th Street gang members, who lounged outside, dealing drugs and painting gang slogans on the fence.

The tan dust of the front yard, where three junked cars are parked, bears the marks of Imelda’s incessant sweeping. These days, she clutches one of her six brooms almost constantly, an attempt to bring order to a life plagued by new turmoil.

Ever since two of her seven children, a 13-year-old son and a 17-year-old daughter, were arrested in the Sept. 7 raid on first-time charges of selling crack cocaine, Imelda has broken down in regular sobs, hiding her face in the heavy black shawl that she rarely removes.

“Some woman told me that I should just leave (the boy in jail) because he’s malcriado, “ Imelda cries, using the Spanish word for “ill-bred.” “But I could never do that. Even if they raise a hand to me, even if my children kill me, then I will simply go to heaven.”

For years, Imelda has remained true to a regimented daily routine, rising at dawn to collect cans and bottles she turns in for cash. At 6:20 a.m. on Sunday, she emerges into the gray dawn dressed neatly in black stockings and a fresh shawl, and traces a circuitous route west to Our Lady of the Pillar Catholic Church.

“I always return a different way than I went,” Imelda says, keeping an eye out for empty cans. “You never know who will be waiting to get you.”

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For 3rd Street’s youth, violence is a casual reality, more a part of daily life than school or play.

On Saturday, 13-year-old Nancy and 9-year-old Salvador wrestle playfully outside in the driveway. “I’m a gangster, beating up a (newcomer),” Nancy squeals in jest. Recent immigrants suffer a disproportionate share of street attacks in the neighborhood.

For the older girls, who have all dated 6th Street gangsters, beatings are commonplace.

Ana, 19, another of Imelda and Jesus’ daughters, went out with one gang member who is now serving 25 years to life in prison after a murder conviction. She split up with him before he landed in jail, but not before he punched her in the face and broke a tooth.

Another girl, a 16-year-old, holds her 4-month-old baby boy in the air and recounts the beatings her ex-boyfriend inflicted on her. A 6th Street gang member picked up on drug charges in the Sept. 7 raid, he scraped her legs with knives in a regular ritual of domestic abuse. He once broke three bottles over her head, she said. One of them was full.

“He used to beat me like I was a guy, like I was a Trooper,” she said.

Four months after she became pregnant, the 16-year-old decided to leave him and tossed his belongings out the door. But now she says she might take him back, if he decides to change, “so me and him and the baby can be together.”

The girl rarely ventures outside with her baby, afraid that she will be jumped by rival gangsters while the child is in her arms.

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On Wednesday, workmen nurse beers in the afternoon light and patch bullet holes in the front wall of the small house that was ransacked by gang members. Tortillas and tripe sizzle on a makeshift barbecue in its front yard.

In the past six months, the 3rd Street neighborhood has clearly settled down. But neighbors speak uneasily about the cars they’ve seen cruising the neighborhood all week, full, they say, of rival F-Troop gangsters who are boasting of plans to fill the power void. Remaining 6th Street gang members, still a threatening presence to some, vow they will never allow that to happen.

Early on weekday mornings, women come out of their homes along 3rd Street, cautiously pushing strollers as they accompany their children to school in groups. The goal of the project, begun six months ago, is to bring the children to Carver Elementary School and back without assaults or harassment by drunks who hang out at a liquor store near the school.

The parent patrol, organized with the help of the county-funded Project SABADO, also received training in safety techniques from police.

But parents still have a familiar fear: that gang members might mistake their activity for some attempt to challenge the gang’s dominance, a step no one here is willing to take.

“We want to make a special emphasis that our sole purpose is walking the kids to school,” said one mother, who fears that gang members might target her house if they misunderstand the group’s mission.

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A few remain hopeful that the next generation might escape the neighborhood’s oppression.

George, 14, stocks shelves at the same market where Imelda’s 13-year-old son worked before his arrest. As soon as school lets out, he races there and works a full eight-hour day. He also works on weekends.

“I’m used to it,” he said of the labor.

Late at night, his mother often hears him washing the dishes, listening to his radio and savoring an imagined solitude in the one-bedroom bungalow that is home to their family of eight.

On this Friday, George wears a heavy cotton short-sleeve jersey with a wildly colored geometric print--one of five he bought with the money he has earned.

George said he also bought two pairs of pants and a pair of sneakers, pooling the $95 a week he makes at the market with $200 he managed to save from helping his stepfather in a job now relegated to his little brother, 9-year-old Salvador.

What he doesn’t spend, he gives to his mother, Gina, another of Imelda and Jesus’ daughters. One day, he tells her, when he’s a lawyer “helping people,” he’ll buy her a house.

“Sometimes I’m scared for them to grow. I just want them to stay like that,” said Gina, a 33-year-old mother of six who has just started the first job of her life, working three hours a day as a playground monitor.

“But if they grow, I don’t want them to grow crooked. I want them to grow straight, straight up so they can be something. I do want my kids to be something in life.”

The dress code at George’s school, Willard Intermediate, forbids everything from belts with initials to plain white T-shirts, in an effort to combat gang influence. But Gina worries that someone might mistake her son for a gang member anyway, just because his hair is short.

“I tell my kids, if anyone asks you, ‘Who do you claim?’, say you claim your parents,” she said. “I don’t think it’s worth dying, just for a street.”

To prepare this report on Santa Ana’s 3rd Street, reporter Lee Romney and photographer David Fitzgerald of the Times’ Orange County Edition lived for a week in an apartment there. Their stay followed a police sweep designed to cripple the gang that has controlled the area.

3rd Street Crime

The number of robberies in the area controlled by the 6th Street gang has increased since 1990, while the number of residential burglaries remained relatively constant. But not all these crimes can be attributed to gang members. Authorities say the number of reported crimes does not reflect the actual number committed, because victims fearful of gangs might not report them.

Reported crime 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994* Homicide 0 2 2 2 2 Robbery 12 26 43 56 32 Assault with a deadly weapon 8 20 19 24 9 Rape 2 0 2 4 0 Residential burglary 26 22 24 18 20 Thefts 170 142 153 105 43 Vehicle theft 79 53 66 68 15 Narcotics reports 38 25 38 53 26

* Jan. 1 through Sept. 21

Neighborhood Census Data

The densely populated area claimed by the 3rd Street gang in Santa Ana is home to 9,193 people. About nine of 10 residents are Latino, and the median age is 24. A demographic look at the neighborhood:

Place of birth California: 29% U.S., out of state: 5% Foreign born: 66% Language spoken at home (5 and older) English: 9% Spanish: 89% Other: 2% Number of people in household 1 person: 8% 2-3 people: 12% 4-5 people: 16% 6 or more: 64% Education (18 and older) Less than high school: 77% High school graduate: 11% Some college: 10% Bachelor’s degree or more: 2% 6th Street Gang turf

6th Street Gang sphere of influence

Census area

Source: Santa Ana Police Department, U.S. Census