A Home of Their Own--Until Gang Menace Intrudes

The little house on Prado Street in Boyle Heights isn’t a palace. Frankly, it needs a lot of work. It has only one bedroom. There is no dining room. The roof needs help and so does the fence.

The noise from the Santa Ana Freeway--located across the street--is so deafening that the 10-foot-high sound walls do little good. You can hear the traffic inside the 800-square-foot home.

But none of this seems to matter to Chris and Lupe Doan, who have been married about three years. The little stucco house, near Olympic Boulevard and Indiana Street, is their first home. They love the place.

It’s a love, however, that’s being sorely tested. Since the couple moved in last May, the house has been shot at twice by area gang members. The couple have been threatened by cholos. Graffiti has been scrawled on the fence surrounding the home. Mail apparently has been taken from the couple’s mailbox. One man, recently released from County Jail, showed up at the house and tried to break in.

In the second shooting attack about two weeks ago, Chris remembers hitting the living-room floor and asking his wife, who also was spread-eagled, “What did we do to deserve this?”

*

Unbeknown to the couple, the home they paid $116,000 for was a onetime gang hangout, according to the cops.

“All kinds of stuff was going on there--drugs, unsavory people, trouble,” said one cop at LAPD’s Hollenbeck station, which patrols Boyle Heights. “The place was bad news.”

Neighbors also say the home was a gang hangout. “It was a pretty tough place,” says Armando Cano, a 20-year resident of the area. “A lot of punks were hanging out there. And, of course, these people had enemies. I guess they’re mad the new people in the house aren’t cholos like them.”

“This was supposed to be our dream,” Chris Doan says. “Now, it’s the house from hell.”

Needless to say, there’s disagreement over who is to blame for the couple’s dilemma.

The Doans, who bought the place because it is only two blocks away from the home of Lupe’s parents, blame the agent who sold it to them. They contend he should have told them of past gang activity under the requirements in state law that any problems or shortcomings of a property be disclosed to potential buyers.

“That was one of my first questions,” Chris Doan said. “Was there any gang problems?”

I contacted the agent involved and he said he was not to blame. Jun Gamboa, who was working out of a Century 21 office at the time he sold the home to the Doans, said he told them of every shortcoming connected to the house, including plumbing trouble--in fact, $500 was deducted from the final price because of that. He said he was unaware of any gang trouble. “I’ve been there at night and I saw no gang activity there,” Gamboa said. “I’ve taken other buyers there and nothing happened to them.”

Because Lupe’s parents live close by, he added, the Doans should have known of any trouble in the neighborhood. “I don’t live in the area, but my observations showed no gang problems,” Gamboa said.

Chris Doan shook his head at the explanation. “We don’t want much,” he said. “Just an apology from Century 21 and some help for a new fence to protect us from future gang trouble.”

Gamboa said that he is sympathetic to the couple’s plight, but that the particular Century 21 office is now closed. “I’d like to help them,” he said. “They can sue me if they want, but I’m about to lose my own home because of the poor real estate market.”

*

I was thinking over the agent’s reasoning when I decided to drive by the couple’s stucco palace. The house ain’t much, but the Doans want to hang onto the home if the cholos will leave them alone.

Perhaps a big sign--”We aren’t gang members”--will be needed. But nobody ought to live that way in this town.

“We shouldn’t have to put up a sign to tell people we aren’t cholos,” Chris Doan said. Lupe added, “We aren’t. We’d just like to live here and maybe have a barbecue every once in a while. Right now, we can’t. I don’t even leave the house at night. . . . That isn’t much to ask for.

“I mean, this is our first house.”