Holding the Line : La Habra Pair Refuse to Relent in Faceoff With Gangs

The walls and windows of Dorothy Rush’s neatly painted Grace Avenue home speak eloquently of her war with the gangs.

Three bullet holes in her bedroom wall. Three more in the window of her workroom. Pockmarked plaster where another bullet grazed the front wall. And a still-gaping hole where a Molotov cocktail crashed through a bedroom window 10 days ago.

“It is scary,” conceded Rush, a retired dressmaker reborn as an anti-gang activist. “When the police say, ‘These people intend to kill you,’ it makes you think a little about what you’re doing.”

But not enough to stop.

Rush and her husband, Larry, say the recent attacks on the home where they have lived for 30 years have only hardened their determination to rid their neighborhood of the gang violence, graffiti and run-down housing that plague parts of it.

In fact, the repeated targeting of her home--six incidents, including two drive-by shootings, since the first of the year--also has helped propel Dorothy Rush into a race for the La Habra City Council. Rush said she was motivated in part by frustration with the continuing presence of gangs in her neighborhood and with the city officials she claims have done little to control the area’s violence and blight.

“All I want to do is clean up this city and make it a better place to live,” she said. “This whole city is going to pot.”

Rush’s dogged efforts have won her admirers, especially among longtime residents of her aging, two-block street. But her often confrontational methods also have created enemies, not all of them gang members.

Last week, several Grace Avenue residents expressed confusion and anger about the “lady on the corner” who calls police about people drinking beer in their front yards, or simply hanging out, listening to music and talking with friends. Others openly accused Rush of racism, claiming her actions result from a failure to understand the culture of the area’s many Latino residents.

At the center of the controversy is a diminutive 60-year-old, a woman who greets first-time visitors to her home with a wary smile and a quick glance past the doorway to the street beyond.

“I’m really watching my back right now,” Rush explained, seated at a table below a window marred by bullets during a Sept. 4 drive-by shooting.

Rush said her activism, and her troubles, began March 29, 1992, when she organized a Neighborhood Watch program, the first of three community groups she has started in an attempt to clean up her Grace-Pacific neighborhood.

Hours after the first meeting, her husband’s Nissan truck was shot several times and spray-painted with, “(expletive) the watch.”

*

For nearly two years, as Rush became increasingly active, her home continued to be the target of relatively minor attacks that police investigators told her were gang-related. The house frequently was egged. Bottles were thrown at the walls and windows. And often, when Rush and her husband drove down the street, the young men who congregated outside in the evening would yell epithets as they passed.

Last January, though, the violence escalated after Rush helped an elderly property owner evict a troublesome tenant, she said. Although the tenant and her family finally handed over the keys just before a court hearing aimed at forcing them out, the woman made it clear she believed Rush was responsible.

“She said, ‘This is your fault and you’re going to be sorry,’ ” Rush said. The tenant has since moved from the area and could not be contacted last week.

That night, Jan. 27, several shots were fired through Rush’s kitchen window. The next month, the house was spray-painted with graffiti and a bicycle sprocket was thrown through a window. In April, cinder blocks crashed through the bedroom window, bruising Rush’s back as she lay in bed and grazing her cat.

In early September, after several months of relative quiet, the front of the house was sprayed with gunfire. That was followed on Sept. 16 by the most frightening incident, Rush says, when a still-smoldering bottle filled with gasoline was tossed through her bedroom window in the middle of the night.

La Habra Police Chief Steve Staveley said he has no doubt that at least some of the incidents are linked to Rush’s anti-gang efforts. But he said they may have been committed by people with varying motives.

“Mrs. Rush has been identified by some as being responsible for improving the community, and they don’t like it because they liked it the way it was,” Staveley said. “If you’re a gangbanger, you don’t want the neighborhood to change for the better.”

He and others said they do not believe the attacks are related to her candidacy for a council seat in the Nov. 8 election.

“The reason for the targeting is pretty clear,” said Mayor David M. Cheverton, one of Rush’s four opponents in the election. “Mrs. Rush has stated it’s her intention to clean up the neighborhood and get the gang kids to go somewhere else. And the city administration and City Council are behind her in that 1,000%.”

*

Rush remains critical of the administration, however, saying it has moved too slowly in effecting change.

“We’re disappointed she feels that way,” responded Deputy City Manager Kathy Kim, noting that two city task forces have targeted the area in the past two years.

In fact, many residents on Grace Avenue last week said life there has improved considerably in recent years. Gunshots are no longer a nightly occurrence, they say, and drugs aren’t dealt as brazenly on street corners.

One recent evening at dusk, children played on the street’s rutted sidewalks, adults chatted over front-yard fences and an ice cream truck made its way slowly down the street, its tinny melody hanging on the cool evening air.

“It feels a lot safer now,” said Nancy Castro, 17. “I grew up here with a lot of the guys who are gangsters now and it feels better now. Before we didn’t come outside so much, but now it’s OK.”

Castro and several others credited Rush, along with the police department’s anti-gang efforts and the city’s increasing emphasis on forcing absentee landlords to bring decrepit buildings up to code.

The street now contains an eclectic mix of single-family homes, duplexes and multiple-family dwellings. In several cases, run-down buildings with overgrown yards are bordered by houses with flowers, fruit trees and carefully-trimmed patches of green.

“It used to be a real trashy mess here,” said Dorothy Clobes, 69, who has lived on Grace Avenue since 1965. “(Rush) has really tried hard. She’s gotten a lot of us to work together to try to make things better.”

Not everyone on Grace Avenue is a fan. While all interviewed, including those identifying themselves as gang members, said they deplored the attacks on Rush’s home, many took issue with her methods, describing them as harsh and unnecessarily combative. The anger against Rush does not excuse the violence, several said, but it may help explain it.

*

“She comes on too strong,” said Craig Bird, 33, a two-year resident. “She gets very much in a confrontational mode with the gang members and with the slumlords.”

He and other neighbors also said Rush was partly responsible for a controversial anti-blight ordinance that is expected to come before the council in the next few weeks and which, in its early drafts, sought to ban clotheslines that were visible from the street.

Rush, an active proponent of the ordinance, said she never intended to prohibit clotheslines but to keep people from hanging their laundry from trees and fences.

But the proposal sparked instant controversy. Many residents said it discriminated against Latinos and the poor. The ordinance is being revised.

Several of her neighbors last week pointed to Rush’s role in that dispute and her anti-gang efforts as evidence of racial bias, a charge Rush adamantly denies.

“There was never anything racial about what I do,” Rush said. “I don’t see any problem as far as what race is living here. . . . I just want some decent folks where kids don’t have to be scared to go outside.”

Araceli Maciel remains unconvinced.

Rush “doesn’t want to see any Latinos in this neighborhood,” said Maciel, 32, a six-year resident of Grace Avenue.

She said Rush was too quick to call the police, often over minor infractions.

“This community needs help,” she said. “They don’t need only rules. They need programs, they need food, they need jobs. But Dorothy, she doesn’t think like that. She calls the cops.”

Nonetheless, Maciel said, the violence against Rush is inexcusable. “I worry for her,” she said.

Rose Espinoza, a community activist who runs a tutoring program from her garage, is one of Rush’s opponents in the November election. She too once was targeted by gang members, but the harassment ended soon after she began helping neighborhood kids with their homework, she said.

She and Rush “both want to change the neighborhoods,” Espinoza said. “But what she’s doing, the gang members don’t see as helping them. And until she finds a way that is going to help them, it’s not going to stop, unfortunately.”

Meanwhile, Dorothy and Larry Rush have dismissed suggestions from friends and relatives that they simply move away from the troubled area.

“This is my home,” Dorothy Rush said. “I don’t want to give it to the gang members.”

“People have to have the fortitude to stand up,” added her 62-year-old husband. “It may cost a life sometimes, but that happens in a war. And this is a war.”