Gang Is No Match for a Mother’s Rage : Youth: Iowa woman acts after alleged break-in aimed against her son.

As Ronald Gochett, 15 years old, tells it, he was wanted--not by the police but by the Bloody Curb Gangsters, a street gang being formed by young transplanted Chicagoans. As it turned out, however, the BCGs were no match for Ronnie’s mother.

Two of the boys, Ronnie said, had shown him their handguns in the past. They warned him that if he didn’t appear at a meeting they would “violate” him.

He didn’t show. And so, he said, four youthful BCGs kept their word, breaking into his family’s rented frame house on a wintry Sunday night while Ronnie and a 16-year-old cousin were baby-sitting six children, ages 1 to 9.

For nearly 30 minutes, Ronnie and his cousin said, the intruders kicked in windows, flung a praying hands figurine (which hit the 9-year-old in the head), shouted to each other: “Who’s got the .38?” and dropped burning tissues on the carpet.

After they left, Ronnie’s mother, Brenda Thomas, arrived. She was so incensed when she heard what happened that she didn’t even take off her coat. Instead, she got right back in her car.

Despite the obvious risks, Thomas visited each teen-ager identified by her son. She confronted parents, older sisters and aunts. From 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. she made house calls, returning to some places with police or witnesses in tow.

All too often families miss, ignore or deny signs that their children are involved in gang activity. But here in Iowa’s capital, where authorities say an emerging gang problem has them worried, the rage of Brenda Thomas forced a day of reckoning, for other adults and for herself as well.

Her march on the Bloody Curb Gangsters will not come close to ending gang crime in Des Moines. But in the low-income neighborhoods where her actions played out, they continue to reverberate and will for months to come--maybe even rerouting the course of a life or two.

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Until Thomas intervened, the scenario recounted by her son was a familiar urban tale: gang members who are neighbors resorting to intimidation when friendly persuasion fails. Mother and son showed, though, that the ending need not be preordained; a gang is not always an irresistible force.

“I’ve got a lot of respect for her,” said Des Moines Police Officer William Boggs, who escorted Thomas on part of her rounds. “That’s what it takes. Someone has to take a stand.”

Added Sharon Zanders, a community organizer here: “We don’t have a lot of Brenda Thomases. She is to be commended. We all have to get angry enough to set aside the fear.”

In the aftermath, four youths--three 15-year-olds and one 13-year-old--face three felony counts apiece on charges of first-degree burglary, first-degree arson and involvement in a criminal street gang. Their trials are set for May 2 in Polk County Juvenile Court.

Meanwhile, one of the accused has been assigned a full schedule of tutoring and basketball, along with an 8 p.m. curfew, by a consultant to the court. Another has been ordered by his family to pay damages out of his earnings from a part-time job. His stepfather, a youth counselor, has told all four they must participate in some of his programs as well.

Thomas, 32, has also made big changes, switching from the night shift to days at the suburban noodle factory where she works. With two failed marriages behind her, the mother of eight must stretch an already tight budget to pay for a baby-sitter now that Ronnie, her oldest, is in school while she’s out of the house.

But the new schedule gives her a chance to keep a closer eye on the children. “I wondered if all this would scare Ronnie into thinking he had to join a gang to protect his brothers and sisters,” she said.

She plans to make sure he does not.

She said she had overheard the police evidence technician giving Ronnie some advice on the night of the alleged attack. “I’ve seen them in the morgue,” she remembers the man saying. The future for gang members, he added, is “nothing but prison or death.”

Thomas also had a male friend discuss gangs with Ronnie.

Ronnie, though “a good boy,” is not as pure as the clear Iowa sky, she knows. Just last November, he stole her car and drove it around town, undeterred by his lack of a driver’s license. She called the police. The responding officer refused to arrest him, she said, though he did deliver a lecture.

Two months earlier, she had moved south of University Avenue to a relatively calm street filled with longtime, elderly residents. “I felt blessed,” she said, because gang members from bigger cities had settled in the blocks to the north of the major roadway.

Gang members are attracted to Des Moines as an open market for narcotics trafficking and have formed distribution networks here over the past decade, said Police Sgt. Larry Harris, a gang intelligence officer. Though Iowa is one of the safest states in the country, six gang-related killings were recorded in 1993, accounting for 12% of the murders, a recent state study said.

The outsiders often fish for local help, authorities and community workers agree. “What you have here is a lot of wanna-bes,” said Sam Powell, who supervises arrested youngsters for the county juvenile court. “And the worst are the wanna-bes. They have something to prove.”

In the old neighborhood, Ronnie had already befriended the four boys he would later accuse of creating mayhem in his new home. They had all been newcomers--the four boys from Chicago, Ronnie from Saginaw, Mich.

Thomas had left her husband and lost her job in Saginaw.

The Chicago boys had grown up in housing projects where gangs were a part of the landscape. Kelvin Briggs, the stepfather of one, said their families were involved with the notorious Gangster Disciples.

Indeed, Briggs himself held considerable rank. “This is what I gave my children,” he said. “Gang activity, gang mentality, gang behavior . . . Life in the fast lane is natural.”

Briggs also had grown addicted to cocaine. Seven of his friends had been killed in gang skirmishes. He and his relatives and friends decided that in Des Moines lay salvation. “This is much slower,” he said. He is recovering from his drug dependency, he said, and now works with the YMCA and a group called Urban Dreams.

Though gang members live in this city of 200,000, he added, they are not welded into solid hierarchies with well-defined turf and venomous feuds. “Only in Des Moines,” Briggs said, “will Crips, Bloods, Vice Lords and Gangsters hang out on the corner together.”

Still, the boys who played basketball with Ronnie Gochett were compiling what the police report in the case calls “extensive criminal records” on charges that ranged from marijuana possession to theft to robbery.

“Do you want to be in the Bloody Curb Gangsters?” Ronnie recalls them asking several times in recent months.

“I didn’t really say yes or no,” Ronnie said. “I just ignored it.”

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In January, his 9-year-old brother, Jimmy, told Thomas that the boys were issuing vague but unmistakable threats against Ronnie for refusing to enlist.

Thomas’ ensuing conversation with her oldest son was brief. “You’re not being in a gang,” she said.

“I’m not going to be in no gang,” he answered.

On Feb. 5, Thomas left Ronnie and his cousin, Louis Davis, in charge for less than two hours. She found the vandalism upon her return.

Thomas, furious, headed into the night to pound on doors.

One mother turned to her 15-year-old, Thomas said, and asked: “Are you in a gang?”

“Yeah,” the boy acknowledged. “BCGs.”

Briggs, who said the boys were “playing--that’s how they play” nonetheless said he “yelled about how I felt” to his stepson.

An aunt explained that her nephew had been home all evening. Thomas left to fetch Davis. She brought him back to the aunt’s, where he described the black pants, hockey jersey and sneakers one attacker had been wearing.

The aunt summoned her nephew, who wore the exact outfit that Davis had just detailed. He confessed to sneaking out a second-story window while his aunt thought that he was upstairs.

To Thomas, her actions were a natural outgrowth of pride in her son. “If he was involved in that stuff, I wouldn’t be laying my life on the line,” she said.

*

“Why didn’t you want to be in a gang, anyway?” she asked her son, who is quiet and tall, with a ghost of a mustache and brushed-back hair. “I don’t know,” he answered from across the dining table.

“Come on, you must know why,” she prodded. “It’s clear y’all could be if you wanted to.”

“I don’t want to be in a gang,” he replied, “because my little brothers and sisters would probably want to be in one if I did.”

Recently, Ronnie spoke to a youth group about how he stayed out of a gang. He shared the bill with Briggs.

At the New Jerusalem Church of God in Christ, they told their stories, Ronnie in a basketball jersey, puffing out his cheeks with embarrassment; Briggs in a natty suit, wiping away tears.

It was the first time the families had seen each other since the incident. As the program ended, Thomas made her way to Briggs, approaching gingerly.

He held out an arm and placed it around her shoulder. They looked at each other and smiled.