A Drive-By Victim’s Special Understanding

It was two months before community worker Javier Frausto got past the urge to take revenge on the drive-by gunman who shot him in the head on the Eastside’s Whittier Boulevard.

In the aftermath of the shooting, Frausto, a volunteer in the federal government’s AmeriCorps youth service program, was bitter and afraid. “At first, I didn’t want to come back. I was trying to do something good here and look what happened to me. What am I, a masochist? I get shot in this neighborhood and then I come back?”

But by the time Frausto had recovered from his wounds, his feelings were resolved, at least enough for him to return to the AmeriCorps program operated by a community group called Building Up Los Angeles. Its headquarters are in a drab utility building on the grounds of Hollenbeck Middle School, just across the street from Roosevelt High School, a few miles from where he was shot.

Spared from death, Frausto resumed such tasks as planning a huge mural on a graffiti-scarred Roosevelt wall. He also took on an additional job, speaking up against violence among students, whose schools lie at the confluence of territories controlled by three of L.A.’s toughest gangs.

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I interviewed Frausto last week at the suggestion of Sandy Choe of Building Up Los Angeles, who told me about his narrow escape from death or serious injury. She said his scrape with death had given him a special insight into violence.

Frausto is a slender young man of 20 with the shaved head and baggy clothes that originated in the gang culture but are now high fashion.

He grew up in the southeastern Los Angeles community of Bell, where most of his friends were in gangs. But not him. “My parents were a big factor,” he said. “They told me to think about the consequences.”

As an AmeriCorps volunteer, working for the minimum wage, he will receive $5,000 for college after a year’s service. He intends to finish up work at East Los Angeles College so he can transfer to UCLA or UC Irvine.

“I want to get into the social sciences,” Frausto said. “I want to teach eventually for a few years and do some more community work in Boyle Heights.”

Last March 31, he and some friends were driving on Whittier Boulevard. “That’s where everybody goes and drives around and shows off their cars,” he said.

“All of us had bald heads. Everybody in the car was bald. So of course we attracted some sort of negative attention. Some guys pulled up next to us, and screamed something at us. We passed them. One guy screamed out his neighborhood. We got not even a car length in front. He shot at us four times with a 9-millimeter.”

One of the bullets struck Frausto’s head, just below the base of the skull. “Blood was just coming down my neck. The guys were catching up to us again to shoot us again.”

The driver made a U-turn, he said, and headed down the street “about 80 miles an hour to get away from these guys. The whole time I was thinking, ‘Am I going to die? Am I going to die?’ ”

They flagged down a passing police officer, who called an ambulance, which took him to County-USC Medical Center where, as chance would have it, he had been born.

The bullet had stopped short of his spinal cord. “They didn’t understand what stopped the bullet,” he said. “The bullet just got underneath the surface and stopped.”

Frausto thought about the shooter.

“I knew who it was, I heard him scream his neighborhood,” Frausto said. “I could have easily found out where he lived. If not me, I could have easily gotten someone else to do something to him. And that went through my mind a lot of times. I was thinking, ‘who is this guy to decide Javier had lived long enough?’ He didn’t know who I was. Who in the hell gave him the right to say, ‘Javier is going to die tonight?’ My mom was suffering. My brother was suffering.

“Then I checked myself and [asked], ‘Why am I even thinking this?’ I’m going to be doing the same thing the guy was doing.”

“I got to thinking, it’s not him. I have to look way beyond him. He’s a product of poor and inefficient education. He is a product of unemployment. He is a product of losing the sense of family.”

Back in the schools, he said, “I spoke of what happened to me. If I had gained this awareness of violence, I should share it with people.”

“A couple of weeks later, one of our students was shot with a .45 in the chest and the back. . . . This guy was notorious. We expected him to retaliate. He didn’t. [He said] it was because of things I had told him. . . . It go him thinking of people who just say no.”

The student, recovered from the shooting, has changed his attire, Frausto said, and gotten rid of his guns and the car he purchased with drug dealing money.

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I wondered if there was a magic formula for preventing violence, a sure-fire cure. Hoping to hear one, I asked Frausto what he told the students.

“Analyze all the situations you are in,” he said. “Don’t make rash decisions. Don’t make decisions based on your first impulse. Being self-destructive here doesn’t lead to anything. It’s our responsibility to do something about it.”

No magic cure, just the advice Javier Frausto received from his parents when he was growing up amid the gangs of Bell.