O.C. Parents Fight Street’s Lure, Often Lose

Irma Garcia checks her watch as her 13-year-old son, Jose, enters the house, a spotless refuge painted midnight blue and decorated with lace and artificial flowers.

It is 2:25 p.m.--the exact time, to the minute, that Jose should arrive home each afternoon from Willard Intermediate School, no stops allowed.

“School, home. School, home. That’s all he does. I am so proud,” his mother says. “He never goes outside. If we go somewhere, we go together.”

On this afternoon, like every afternoon in the two years since the Garcia family moved to this house a block from 3rd Street, Jose’s activities involve playing inside with his 2-year-old brother, Carlito, a job he assumes with devotion as his mother prepares a giant vat of ceviche .

“Kids who get into trouble, they’re not real smart,” says Jose, a strikingly soft-spoken child.

In the 3rd Street neighborhood, the lure of gangs has been so strong that near-seclusion may be a mother’s best hope of protecting a son from joining up or getting shot. Despite their best efforts, some have buried their children or seen them sent to jail.

Though a police sweep earlier this month has temporarily weakened gang members’ hold on this stretch of turf, the temptations of street affiliations are still irresistible for many of 3rd Street’s young.

Down the street from Garcia’s home, Imelda and Jesus are baffled by the series of events that led to the Sept. 7 arrest of two of their seven children, a 13-year-old son and a 17-year-old daughter, along with 117 other suspects in the highly publicized Sept. 7 sweep. The family’s last name is not being used because the suspects are juveniles.

“I was worried, because I saw them talking with the friends they had,” Imelda said. “But I never had any ideas about (her son) selling drugs, or (her daughter) either.”

But the gang was literally at the couple’s doorstep. Sixth Street gang members, who claim the two blocks of 3rd Street between Flower and Baker streets as the core of their turf, would sell drugs outside Jesus and Imelda’s home and paint gang graffiti on the front-yard fence.

Jesus and Imelda said they could do little to stop them, and at least felt secure that their house would not be robbed or their children intentionally harmed.

“They didn’t respect me,” Jesus said. “But they respected the integrity of my family.”

Theirs is a home full of affection, where all the children know the words to their father’s favorite ballad. But it is also a home where Imelda and Jesus seem overwhelmed by the lives of their children, and unable to influence them.

On Sept. 13, just two days before their children’s first court hearing, Imelda and Jesus waited at the well-worn picnic table in their front yard for another daughter, 16-year-old Susie, to return home with her newborn baby, Jesus and Imelda’s 12th grandchild.

A tiny girl who looks closer to 14 emerged from the cab, holding a pink hospital balloon and a five-pound bundle. Later, she held court in the bedroom she would have shared with two sisters if one hadn’t been in jail.

“Look at my family,” Imelda wailed, her eyes red from crying. “All these babies. But (her son) is missing. (He) is not here.”

Those who are not raising children on this street find it easy to point fingers at parents who seem to condone their children’s affiliations with gangs.

“The parents of the cholos need to get involved, or if they can’t control them, at least tell them to go do their damage in someone else’s neighborhood,” said Ignacio Barrientos, a 72-year-old retired boat builder who feels trapped by the gangs.

But gangsters and those who associate with them say the street can be preferable to the alternatives they have.

For Lucia, a tall and fiery 17-year-old, 3rd Street and the camaraderie of the Sixth Street gang members are a refuge from a home she said was torn by strife. Her parents’ divorce sent Lucia to the streets at age 12, she said.

“This street is like a drug. You get addicted and then you can’t stop coming,” she said, eyeing every car that cruised the quiet corner, a booming clearinghouse for rock cocaine just six months ago. “It’s so sad now. There’s nothing to do at all.”

Her mother tried in vain to keep her home, Lucia said; her father ignores her. On Father’s Day, she went to Los Angeles to see him, bringing a gift of white Levis, a denim shirt and shiny white shoes.

He showed up late at night, drunk, she said, and in the two weeks that she lived next door with her grandmother, he never once came to see her, she said. From her grandmother’s kitchen window, she could see the present unopened on his dresser.

Earlier this month, Lucia said she discovered that her father was begging his friends for money, telling them that she and her brother had been gunned down in drive-by shootings.

“When I didn’t go to school last week, I just told the teacher that my dad died,” Lucia says defiantly. “He killed me and my brother already, so I killed him.”

Many parents, however, believe they have done as much as they can to prevent their children’s descent into crime.

“We have to teach them when they are little, because as soon as they grow up, forget it. By the time they’re 15, it’s too late,” Garcia said. “I think the problem with most of these gangsters are the parents, because many of them, they don’t care.”

Despite her firm house rules, Garcia acknowledges that her daughter, Marta, joined a gang from another area at the age of 15 after a rapid series of events that Garcia felt helpless to control. There are no female members of the Sixth Street gang.

For other families, the seduction of the street proved far more serious.

Eleanor Martinez lost a 16-year-old son, Gilbert, to a drive-by shooting last year. Police say another son is a member of the Sixth Street gang, and she raised a nephew who has been in and out of jail on drug-related charges.

“I tried to keep my kids inside, so they wouldn’t be out there. But they had to go to school,” said Martinez, who works for a Fullerton company that manufactures medical instruments.

Martinez said she rarely allowed Gilbert to go out, and forced him instead to socialize with friends on the family’s porch.

“It’s the mothers who have suffered from the violence,” Martinez laments. “I have lived through this and it is horrible.”

But despite the tragedy, Martinez said she would not consider moving now. Like her children who have grown up with the street’s gang members, the family feels a sense of belonging on the block.

“I’m not afraid here. People know me,” she said.

And, Martinez adds, her children are so marked with the stamp of the Sixth Street gang that she fears they would be killed in any other neighborhood.

“People have asked me, ‘Why don’t you move to a different neighborhood? But I say, ‘Where can I go? I can’t move, now that my kids are big,’ ” Martinez said. “A friend of mine moved to Perris, and her two kids were killed because they weren’t from there.

“Here I’ll stay, where people know me, where we belong, where my children grew up.”

Despite the inevitable lure of the street, even the gang members here are fiercely protective of their younger brothers and nephews, hoping to spare them the violent life they have already experienced.

“I have a 14-year-old nephew and I tell him, if he ever tries to be from the ‘hood, I’ll smack him,” said one gang member, who said he has tried to stay out of trouble since his girlfriend became pregnant four months ago.

His nephew’s admiration, however, may resist any efforts at dissuasion.

“They told him to write a story in school about his hero,” the gang member said. “He wrote about me.”

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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.