A Gentle Life Ended, Fear Was Born on Beach : Crime: Family of victim tries to come to grips with last month’s late-night slaying, while Manhattan Beach no longer feels safe to many.

Christopher Dwayne Barreto grew up in a small Southern town where people sleep at night with the doors unlocked. He died in a small Southern California city that used to feel that safe.

He was a Navy veteran of the Persian Gulf War who despite his military service never saw much sense in fighting. He died on the shoreline of Manhattan Beach, stabbed to death by robbers as he and a friend walked on the beach.

He was a cheery, clean-cut kid who came to Los Angeles two years ago with dreams of college, a business career and cycling someday in the Tour de France. He was buried last month in his hometown of Opelika, Ala., a flag draped over his casket and the theme to the movie “Forrest Gump” serving as an anthem for mourners.

He was 25.

The sun still rules over the smog here. The mountains and the beaches still loom larger most days than all of the crime and dirty streets and the rest. Somehow, for all its problems, Southern California still beckons. It surely did for Barreto.

At 23, fresh out of the Navy, he was drawn here from Opelika like a moth to a porch light. This was the place he would make it, he thought. This is the place where dreams come true.

For a while, it was like that. He shared an apartment with his older brother, Bobby, just outside Marina del Rey. He was going to return to school to take up accounting at Santa Monica College. He was cycling 70 to 120 miles a day, three or four times a week. Most of his family had moved here. He had made good friends.

Barreto and a female friend were taking a walk at 2:30 a.m. on Oct. 1 when they were attacked by three robbers in a beach city regarded as one of the safest around. She was stabbed once and he was stabbed more than a dozen times. Mortally wounded, he died on the hard-packed sand of the beach as his attackers fled into the night. They have not been caught.

Maybe we have lived here too long. Maybe we have grown numb to the mayhem around us, sad but no longer shocked when toddlers are caught in gang cross-fire or pregnant women are slain. Maybe we have grown numb to those things. But Barreto’s family, like others rocked by violence, have not.

“Back home, we know this would never have happened,” said Bobby Barreto, who was a police officer in Alabama and is now a security guard. “Right now, we want retribution. After that, I will make a decision on whether I want to stay here.”

“It’s not fair that this has happened to our lives,” said Barreto’s mother, Sheree. “How do people pick up the pieces? I’ve heard so many people say, ‘Where is it going in Los Angeles? So many people being struck down.’

“One newspaper person said this was just another murder,” she said. “And I let him know, it’s not just another one.”

True enough. At least in Manhattan Beach.

Over the last decade, there have been at least 15,079 homicides in Los Angeles County.

In Manhattan Beach, there have been three, including Barreto.

Four years ago, a 17-year-old was shot to death after an argument that began at an El Segundo convenience store and ended at a Manhattan Beach gas station.

Two years ago, Officer Martin Ganz, 29, became the first officer in the city’s history to be shot to death, killed two days before New Year’s after he pulled over a motorist outside the Manhattan Village shopping mall.

As horrible as those shootings were, the murder of Barreto has somehow shaken the affluent seaside community in a different way. This wasn’t a killing that began with an exchange of words or one that took the life of one whose very job entails risk.

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This was an attack on a beach where, throughout the summer, both residents and visitors feel safe enough at night to stroll the 45 city blocks of shoreline between the city’s north and south boundaries.

“Give us a warm evening with a full moon and we have a couple hundred people on our beach,” said Police Sgt. David Ferguson.

This also was a random crime that could have claimed anyone instead of Barreto and his friend, whose name has not been released by authorities.

“This was a 100% a crime of opportunity,” Ferguson said. “[They were] like the first target that was available.”

For that reason and so many others, the killing rattled Manhattan Beach. Today, more than a month later, with the summer weather and summer crowds gone, the crime’s impact has lessened but not disappeared in the upscale city of 32,000.

“It has brought about some definite concerns within the community,” Sgt. Ferguson said.

“Most people do not live looking over their shoulders. Nor should they have to,” he said. “But there is reality and practicality.”

After all, suburban community or not, Ferguson said, this is still Los Angeles.

“There are few places where you can go” to get away from crowds, Ferguson said. And it is not, he said, “an unreasonable expectation” that you should be safe in the relative seclusion of a beach where scores of people are walking.

“But there again,” he said, “in L.A. County, you have to be aware of the ever present danger that [something] could happen.”

This time, Barreto’s family said, it happened to a friendly, gentle man who would never go looking for trouble.

“He had to be comfortable where he was at, or he wouldn’t be there,” his mother said.

At the same time, his family knows, Barreto might have been caught off guard by how easily trouble can find you, even in a place that is known as safe.

He may have been smart and he may have been in the military, serving as a cryptographer aboard the USS Independence during the Persian Gulf War. He also may have been a fine athlete, good enough to be a Navy Seal if a deviated septum had not kept him from staying underwater long enough to join the elite squad of commandos.

He may have been all of those things. But Christopher Barreto was not about confrontation, his family recalled.

“I don’t think he had even been in a fight in his life,” said brother Bobby, 36.

The only time anyone could remember him almost getting into a scuffle was back home when a drunk in a bar tried to pick a fight. A friend stepped in, family members said, when Barreto made it clear he had no beef with the drunk. “He was a peacemaker, not a fighter . . . he considered it a waste of time,” said his sister, Penny, 32.

The youngest of five children, Barreto was the one everyone looked out for even though he was as much a caretaker as anyone in the family, Penny and others said.

“He called me three or four times a day. He drove me to the store,” said his mother.

When a family quarrel broke out, they said, more often than not it was the youngest child who stepped in to stop it.

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Even his schedule was respectful of the family. “We could set our clocks by when he came [home],” his mother said.

Two months before the murder, she said, her son had been out late with friends, staying at the Marina del Rey bicycle shop where he worked and was building experience as a cyclist.

“Chris was out till 1 a.m. and we were terrified,” she recalled.

The day he didn’t come home, the Sunday of the murder, his family did not worry immediately. They knew he was scheduled to compete in a race that Sunday. So they figured he had again been out with friends on Saturday night and left early Sunday without calling.

“We just assumed he was at the race and got caught in traffic” on the way home, said his sister, Penny.

Instead, the family learned that afternoon that he had been killed.

“The last time I saw him I didn’t even want him to walk to the car by himself,” said his brother, Bobby, recalling the night before the murder. “It’s just ironic that all the looking after, all the caring in the world, couldn’t protect him from something like this.”

The other irony, of course, is that Barreto would be killed in a relatively crime-free city thousands of miles from the other safe town where he grew up.

As soon as he arrived here, Barreto was hooked, family members said. “He loved [the] area,” Bobby said. “He loved the coffee shops, the bookstores. A pizza shop next to the [supermarket]. He loved the entire scene. The weather. Being around the cyclists.”

Someday, the avid cyclist told them, he would achieve his dream of riding in the Tour de France.

“He wasn’t as gifted as some other athletes, but he had will, determination. He was going to make a himself a world-class athlete,” Bobby said.

Instead, his family is now working with some of his friends and former co-workers to organize a memorial bike race Dec. 2 that they say will feature world-class athletes including Olympic medalist Greg LeMond.

The event will celebrate Barreto’s life. His death has already been marked with a $25,000 city reward for his killers.

“The longer that they are out there,” said his sister Penny, “the stronger the anger gets inside.”

A month after his death, Penny said, she figured it wouldn’t be this way. “I . . . thought it would have been easier by now. The pain would be lighter. The anger a little less.”

But it hasn’t happened, she said.

“I still go home every day and weep about it,” she said. “Every day.”

For the Barretos, she and other family members said, the killing shattered every value they grew up believing.

“The way he died was so un-American,” said Bobby. “It was so unfair.”

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When Barreto was buried in Opelika, his family said, there were two ministers on hand for the services. Like the Barretos, the mourners were largely Southern Baptists, who came to the Jeffcoat Funeral Chapel from small towns as far away as Phenix City, Ala., and Columbus, Ga.

Hurricane Opal was pounding the area, knocking out electricity and utility lines, threatening to turn the funeral into something even more grim. But on the day of the services, the storm passed. The sky was a pale blue dotted with soft white clouds, the family recalled.

“Beautiful,” Sheree Barreto said, smiling and closing her eyes at the memory.

After Barreto died, brother Bobby remembered how hard he used to work to better himself. How his intensity would push him to spend extra hours on a work project or a personal goal, like becoming a world-class cyclist.

“I used to get on him for working out so hard,” Bobby said. “And he would say, ‘You know the light that shines twice as bright, goes out twice as fast.’

“I would say, ‘What do you mean by that?’ ” Bobby said. “And he would always say, ‘You’ll figure it out one day.’

“I guess I have.”