Fears Haunt Pasadena on Anniversary of Shootings : Violence: Halloween party at City Hall seeks to offer safe alternative to trick-or-treating. Police blame the gang that allegedly killed three youths for more slayings, shootings.

A year after three teen-agers were slain in Pasadena on Halloween, allegedly gunned down on a sidewalk by gang members mistakenly out to avenge a shooting, fear still stalks some city streets.

Although five suspects await trial, their alleged gang cohorts are believed to be responsible for a series of murders, carjackings and assaults, most of them unsolved because the victims are too scared to talk, police say.

Fear dominated the trial of two suspects in a related murder committed the same night. Witnesses recanted their statements to police, leading to acquittals of the two men, believed to be associates of those suspected of killing the three teen-agers. One witness was so terrified that he appeared in court disguised in a wig and sunglasses, authorities said.

As a result, special security measures were taken in the preliminary stages of the murder case against the five gang members. The most controversial was withholding names of the witnesses scheduled to testify.

And for many children in Pasadena this year, there will be no trick-or-treating. Instead, police and community agencies are throwing a Halloween party on the City Hall steps.

“It’s been there from Day A, the fear,” said Ed Bryant, a counselor in Pasadena Municipal Court. “There’s been a lot of gang activity in the city.”

When the five suspects were arrested, police hoped city streets would become calmer. But since Halloween, they attribute at least four murders, half a dozen shootings and three carjackings to the same gang.

Members of the gang were present at another fatal shooting Friday night, although police say they do not know what role--if any--the gang played in the incident. They were among several gang factions hanging around a party in the 1400 block of North Garfield Avenue.

For reasons that remain unclear, gunfire erupted about 11 p.m. and four men and a 15-year-old girl were wounded. Christopher Celestin, 22, later died at St. Luke Medical Center. Police said Celestin, who had worked for the Police Department as a youth counselor, had previously associated with the gang responsible for the Halloween slayings that shocked the city a year ago.

On Oct. 31, 1993, 10 eighth-grade boys returning home from a Halloween party were ambushed by three gunmen. They opened fire along the sidewalk in the 500 block of North Wilson Avenue. Killed were Edgar Evans, 13, and Stephen Coats and Reggie Crawford, both 14. Three boys were wounded.

After extensive publicity and a 52-day investigation, murder charges were filed against five suspects. Awaiting trial in a high-security courtroom in Los Angles Superior Court are Karl Darnell Holmes, 21, of Altadena; Lorenzo Alex Newborn, 24, of Los Angeles, and Solomon Emanuel Bowen, 19, Herbert Charles McClain Jr., 26, and Aurelius Duano Bailey, 19, all of Pasadena. Their trial may start in December.

All five are leaders of the small Pasadena gang with a growing reputation for violence and intimidation, authorities say.

Police believe that the trouble began on Halloween when the group became outraged after fellow gang member Fernando Hodges, 22, was gunned down. Twenty gang members assembled to seek revenge, police said.

*

Cruising central Pasadena’s residential streets in a four-car caravan, they attacked the 10 youngsters. The boys may have been mistaken for gang members because they were wearing dark clothes and were walking near a home where a gang rival of the gunmen lived, police said.

The shooting was typical of the gang, police said.

According to police, the group was formed in violence and betrayal in 1990. Its members, who then belonged to a larger Pasadena gang, split off when members of that gang killed one of their own, police said.

The gang has only 25 active members, compared to hundreds in other local gangs, police said. The smaller gang became tougher, more disciplined and more calculating to survive and even dominate the streets, Pasadena Detective Tom Delgado said.

“The gang is so intimidating that people drop charges,” Delgado said. “It’s very frustrating.”

Fear silenced witnesses in the trial last month of Felton Leagons, 20, and Daywon Green, 19, who police believe are associates of the five accused in the murders of the three teen-agers. Leagons and Green were charged with Hodges’ murder--the crime that authorities said led to the later killings the same night.

Police said Leagons, with Green’s help, killed Hodges because he was dating Leagons’ former girlfriend. Leagons and Green, fearing retaliation, blamed the murder on rival gang members, which led to the mistaken slayings of the three boys, police said.

Leagons and Green were acquitted after witnesses refused to testify and recanted previous identifications made to police.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Antony Myers, who is handling the case against Holmes, Newborn, Bowen, McClain and Bailey, has taken steps to safeguard witnesses.

Instead of a preliminary hearing with witnesses testifying in open court, Myers used a closed, grand jury session. Afterward, transcripts of the session were sealed from the public and the names of witnesses withheld even from defense attorneys.

Although defense attorneys protest that the unusual secrecy prevents them from adequately preparing their case, Myers said he wants to ensure that witnesses are not intimidated.

“This is exacerbated by the closeness of the community in Pasadena,” Myers said. “We’re talking geographically about a very small area . . . where everybody knows where (witnesses) go to school, where they live, where they shop, where they hang out.”

One grand jury witness was intimidated anyway and was forced to move away with family members, a confidential informant was stalked and another was shot at, court documents in the case say.

But attorneys for the accused say witnesses have nothing to fear from their clients who, they maintain, are innocent of the charges. The reputation of the five as dangerous and ruthless gang members comes, in part, from the fact that police have historically singled out the group for extraordinary law enforcement attention, defense attorneys say.

Police zeroed in on the group, their relatives and friends in a controversial gang sweep the day after Christmas, 1991, in Pasadena and Altadena.

Using nearly 40 Pasadena officers and half a dozen sheriff’s deputies, the raid yielded 14 guns, a cache of ammunition and two police scanners. A federal civil rights lawsuit was filed a year later by those whose homes were raided, including Halloween homicide defendants Newborn and Bowen.

Attorney Wilson McLeod, who filed the lawsuit, said police lacked sufficient evidence for the raids, made false arrests and terrorized and humiliated those arrested, which included teen-agers and grandparents.

*

A federal judge ruled in the city’s favor without a trial, calling the lawsuit baseless. The case is on appeal.

“The general consensus in the city of Pasadena and Los Angeles is that blacks can’t get a fair deal,” said a Pasadena minister who early in the case expressed concern over how the defendants, all of them black, were being treated. “As a minister, I’m constantly trying to defuse that negative feeling.”

For those not directly connected to the case, there is a recognition of increased unease in parts of the city, some community activists say.

“If people don’t acknowledge there is fear, we need to re-examine ourselves because it is very present,” said Lydia Fernandez Palmer, director of El Centro de Accion Social, a Pasadena social service agency.

To counter that fear, a nonprofit agency was started last year to fight violence. The Coalition for a Non-Violent City has received more than $300,000 in private foundation and city money, sponsored a conference that drew 800 residents and plans another public meeting Tuesday to plan a multi-pronged effort to enlist help from the community.

And this Halloween night, the city’s children will have a safe option to trick-or-treating. The Police Department and half a dozen community groups are sponsoring the party at City Hall. Organizers downplay fear in the city and say the event is simply an outgrowth of youth activities begun over the summer and an opportunity for the city to come together.

But Palmer said the event also will draw children from unsafe, gang-troubled neighborhoods who otherwise would be afraid to venture out.

This anniversary of the shootings, she said, is “a symbol to remind us our work is not finished.”