Violent Pasts : Former Gang Members Recount Dead-End Street Life to Troubled Youths

When he joined his South-Central Los Angeles gang, Miguel Montoya thought he was “in” for life. But when a rival gang member shot him four times, piercing his spine, his homeboys ran off.

“They just got in the car and left me there,” Montoya said.

Now, at 16, Montoya is paralyzed for life, but still thankful he escaped his gang alive.

“As I was in the hospital, I was thinking, ‘Man, none of my homeboys came to see me,’ ” Montoya said. “But as I think back on it, I’m glad because I don’t want to see any of them.”

Montoya was one of seven former gang members--four in wheelchairs--who emotionally recounted their gangbanging days before 50 students at Jereann Bowman High School on Tuesday. Bowman is a continuation school for students removed from other campuses in the William S. Hart Union High School District. Many of the students are gang members or at-risk youths.

The Bowman students were mostly impassive, but attentive, as they listened to the 75-minute presentation from a group with the same crew cuts, tattoos and street clothes as themselves. The speeches weren’t polished rhetoric. This was rapid-fire street lingo, often incomprehensible except to those from the ‘hood.

There were morbid exchanges too, such as the time Lita Valentine, 21, talked about driving a fellow gang member to a hospital with a bullet wound in his chest. When she arrived at the emergency room, the car was surrounded by police, their guns drawn, while TV news helicopters hovered overhead.

“I didn’t even care,” she said of all those guns pointed at her. “I was that type of person that had to be Homegirl of the Year.”

The audience lightly chuckled.

The former gang members spoke passionately, imploring students to abide by messages they either ignored or never heard.

Montoya recalled how he used to dismiss such warnings. “I used to walk out the door,” Montoya said. “I’d say, ‘Shut up. I know more than those fools in there.’ ” The fools, in his mind, were counselors, teachers and anyone who told him to steer clear of gangs.

But that was before he was shot, before his homeboys deserted him. “If you want to gangbang,” he told the students, “there’s a price you gotta pay.” As Fidel Valenzuela, a former gang member who organized Tuesday’s program, spoke, Montoya bowed his head, clearly distraught.

The former gang members are from Los Angeles Teens on Target, part of a statewide network of rehabilitation organizations for those with physical or emotional disabilities caused by gang violence. Valenzuela, 36, the program director for Teens on Target, also uses a wheelchair, though he needs it because of a medical problem, not because he was shot.

Teens on Target has 15 members, 10 of whom are paraplegic. They have made presentations to about 2,500 students statewide during the past few years.

Many students raised their hands when Valenzuela asked at the end if they learned anything, although a few interviewed afterward said such pitches are not new.

“I’ve heard stories from people like them before,” said Guillermo Arzu, 18, matter-of-factly. “But that’s the only time I think about it.” Arzu, a senior, said he belongs to a tagging crew but is not a gang member.

Many of Tuesday’s speakers had delivered their remarks before, but repetition has not dulled the pain of recounting life on the street.

Lonnie Washington, 27, grimly wheeled his chair out of the classroom during the airing of graphic eight-minute video of police and paramedics working to save shot gang members bleeding in the streets. For him, the video is too painful to watch.

“I think I’ve seen it three or four times, but I don’t like it,” he said. “It messes up my presentation.”

Even so, Washington, like Montoya, clearly became emotional, holding his hand to his head as he somberly looked down.

When it came time for Washington to speak, he didn’t mention his gunshot-inflicted handicap--the wheelchair spoke for itself. Instead he focused on the rules and lifestyle he grew up with that placed him there.

“If somebody hit you, you hit them back,” he said. “If you lose, you come back and fight them tomorrow.”

Backing away from a fight might seem cowardly, he told the students, but in the end is a tougher decision than going out on a drive-by shooting.

“That’s a coward,” he said. “I don’t know anybody from my ‘hood that shot somebody up close and watched them die.”

Getting out of a gang is tougher than many think, the ex-gang members warned. The streets won’t let you forget who you were--and they may hurt those who become a part of your straight life, Valentine said. She said she attends college now, has a boyfriend--and is not in a wheelchair--but a recent encounter at gunpoint with a former street rival nearly proved disastrous.

“One of these kids that was with (the gunman) kept saying, ‘Let me do it, let me do it--just shoot her,’ ” she said. “He pulled the trigger and he shot my old man.”

Her boyfriend recovered, Valentine added, but it was a reminder of how hard it is to escape her past. She said her face is well-known to gang members in the neighborhood because she used to lean out windows as she fired guns during drive-by shootings.

The straight life is worth it in the end, however, if only because you’re alive to tell about it, said Valenzuela. The alternative, he said, is death.

“A lot of you won’t back down, but that’s what will take you out.”