A Deadly Knock at a Suburban Door

Within the city of Walnut’s 8.35 square miles are 26 miles of bridle and hiking trails. Follow one of them to the next, pick up a third, find a riverbank trail and eventually you can run or ride all the way to the sea.

As the hillside paths run both ways, from the countryside to the city and back again, so do other things: smog, for one--the AQMD headquarters, just over the scalped brown hills, often finds the air of Walnut worse than it is in the cities that make the smog.

And crime finds its way here--found its way here last week, to one of the immaculate four-bedroom stucco houses. Ramon Manalaysay opened his front door to it, and it killed him.

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The city of Walnut is about as far east as you can go and still stay within the limits of Los Angeles County. The people of Walnut like it that way.

Until a few years ago, there wasn’t even a green freeway sign alerting drivers that Walnut was just an exit away. People liked that, too.

The farmers and ranchers and horse-lovers of Walnut won their first civic fight in 1959; fending off the encroachments of cities, they incorporated. Since then, Walnut has kept an airport, a chain store, a chemical shipper at bay. Around the corner from Ramon Manalaysay’s house, a sign rallies Walnut residents to battle a proposed landfill.

City painting crews cover up graffiti on public land or private, for free, within 24 hours, sometimes 12. Wiping away the gangs who painted it is another matter.

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Ramon Manalaysay bought the house new about nine years ago--a two-story, four-bedroom home with a fountain in front, on a street of graceful willows and sternly tended topiary bushes.

Before he died, I never saw the house. Until recently, he worked on the editorial support staff at The Times where I knew him as a man who was patient with my Luddite fumblings with the paraphernalia of high-tech. He had endeared himself to me when I heard the other guys in his office tease him mercilessly: They had plastered the place with pictures of super-models--and his contribution was a photo of his wife in a bikini.

Living in Walnut made for a long commute, but one or two co-workers rode the Foothill Transit bus, too, and there was time to talk.

Of late, he had confided that he was worried about his teen-age son and gangs. Faraway Walnut was still not distant enough to keep the boy out of harm’s way. The Sheriff’s Department gang crime database carries the son’s name, says homicide Detective Robert Taylor. After the boy ran away, Ramon told one co-worker he invited him back; he’d rather have him home with whoever he hung out with, so Ramon could keep an eye on them.

Eight days ago, at 2:40 on the Tuesday morning after Labor Day, an hour when doorbells and phone bells get the pulses roaring even in the perilous city, one man or perhaps two came to the door and asked whether Ramon’s son was at home.

Ramon stood in the double doorway; he wouldn’t awaken his son, he said, because the next day was the first day of school, and he needed his sleep. With two shots, the man with the handgun perforated Ramon’s chest. He died on a hospital gurney less than an hour later.

To a local newspaper, a neighbor of Ramon’s delivered a valedictory that was classic newspaper-ese: He was a quiet man who usually kept to himself.

Isn’t that what we all want? Neighborhoods of quiet men and women who keep to themselves and don’t let their lives slop over into ours?

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The forces that Walnut’s pioneers encountered were external: big cities, big railroads, the pests and diseases that wiped out Walnut’s walnut groves 20 years before it took the tree as its city name and symbol.

But how do you fight more intimate forces--in math class? Over the back fence? In the upstairs bedroom?

A couple or three years back, and not too far from where Deputy Frank Girard sits in the Walnut sheriff’s station, deputies serving warrants at a couple of beautiful million-dollar homes turned up two fully automatic machine guns.

Walnut is by no means the busiest eight square miles of the 300 the deputies patrol; the biggest local crime is residential burglaries, of which there were 10 last month. “We’re a sleepy little town, or have been for years and years,” Girard says. “Don’t let anybody tell you we don’t have gangs”; a venerable Latino gang has been in operation for about as long as there has been a city of Walnut. “But we’ve been able to keep it in check. . . . Gangs are not new to Walnut, but the violence is.”

Girard works in the crime prevention unit. He would love to get one of those block grants for some kind of youth center to keep borderline kids to the right side before things get out of hand. They’ve had no luck so far; most government agencies do not look sympathetically on quiet towns with nice parks and quarter-million-dollar homes. Maybe, he says, “our blighted neighborhoods aren’t blighted enough.”