A Shaken Community Fights for Its Children : Rash of Slayings Sends Grim Message

On a late afternoon, the voices of playing children drift down the streets that surround Durley Park, a working-class neighborhood of pastel-colored houses and bungalows, and streets named after trees like birch and cedar.

In many ways, it is a vital and racially diverse community. Parents coach baseball in the summer and Pop Warner football teams in the fall. There are four local schools and more than a dozen churches where families gather for Sunday worship.

But something has gone dramatically wrong here in recent months that has shaken the community of Durley Park and the neighborhoods that surround it--setting the south-central Oxnard area apart from most of Ventura County.

Since New Year’s Day, five young men have been killed, mostly in gang-related violence. The slayings in a neighborhood of less than one square mile represent about one-fourth of all the homicides in Ventura County this year, marking the area as the county’s deadliest neighborhood.

And even the police are puzzled. The official view is that the actual death toll is just some kind of statistical anomaly. And men like Oxnard Police Officer Jim Stallings are hard-pressed to explain it.

“I know I work in the murder capital of Ventura County,” he said one recent evening as he drove along the back alleys that cut through the neighborhood.

But Stallings quickly added that, despite the killings, the area is really no more dangerous than others in Oxnard in terms of overall violent crime.

The residents of the area have mixed views. Some are frightened and say they wish they could leave this place where they came to raise their families. But others say it is still a good place to live, and that they have decided to make a fight for their homes.

Michelle Godoy, who leads a Neighborhood Watch group, is one of those fighting to keep her community from turning into another urban war zone. She and other volunteers patrol the streets several nights a week, looking for signs of trouble.

“My thing is to get the crime down and make it a family neighborhood again,” said Godoy, who lives across the street from Durley Park in a house her parents bought in 1955. “I can’t see the neighborhood go down the drain. My goddaughter is growing up here.”

Diversity Evident

Framed by Wooley Road on the north, Channel Islands Boulevard on the south, Saviers Road on the east and Ventura Road on the west, the neighborhood that includes Durley Park, Bartolo Square and the Kamala area is a community in transition, much like all of south Oxnard.

Many of its 13,000 residents are newly arrived immigrants from Mexico, and some of the old-time white and African American families have moved out. The children who play in Durley Park and in nearby Beck Park reflect the diversity of the community, which is now more than 75% Latino, 14% white and 8% African American.

Overall violent crime--rape, armed robbery, assault--is actually down both here and in the city of Oxnard as a whole, police say. But the five killings have shaken the sense of safety that many residents had taken for granted.

The bloody series of killings in this area of 2,800 families began with the New Year’s Day slaying of two men shot in the head in Durley Park. One neighbor, who lives near the park, told police she heard two men arguing over how to kill their victims.

“I’ll show you how to do it right,” one of the men finally said before shooting Manuel Encarnacion, a 28-year-old gardener, and Jesus Silva Onofre, 22, who worked as a waiter.

Three weeks later, 16-year-old Felipe Hernandez was gunned down about 1:30 p.m. in front of shoppers at the aging Centerpoint Mall on the far southeastern corner of the neighborhood.

Police later arrested 22-year-old Victor Raul Aguilar, and two juveniles, all suspected gang members.

About two months later, 15-year-old former gang member Gabriel Gomez Torres was beaten to death with a bat on Hill Street less than a block from Durley Park. Police found Gabriel just after dawn, face down in a flower bed about three blocks from his home.

And then, in the most recent slaying, 17-year-old Jaime “Jinx” Morales, a former gang member on the mend who had plans to attend college, was chased down by three men July 25 in an alley near N and Hill streets. He was beaten to death.

Jaime’s slaying was the 12th homicide in Oxnard since January, a 175% increase over the same period last year. The killings have sent shock waves throughout the city, but nowhere stronger than among the families of the dead.

At the Morales home on a cul-de-sac near Durley Park, many relatives complain that they have had trouble eating and sleeping since Jaime’s death.

“I was worried about violence, but you never think it is going to happen to your family,” said Jaime’s brother, Anthony Morales, 27. “You just think this only happens on TV.”

Jesus Morales, 69, a retired meat cutter, had hoped that his son was turning his life around. Now the elder Morales spends his days fretting about finding enough money to buy a headstone to mark his son’s grave.

“What I would like to do when everything is over is move away from here,” he said.

In a community where most residents say they get along with their neighbors regardless of the color of their skin, Jaime’s death brought racial tension to the surface because of reports that his assailants were black.

A memorial service a day after the teenager’s beating death turned ugly when mourners began to yell racial epithets at a black minister attending the vigil. A few minutes later, the teen’s friends chased and kicked a black youth who was passing by the crowd.

Wazirah Rasheed, a 52-year-old African American resident who for 25 years has lived with her family in a house near where Jaime was killed, said the mixed community had never before frayed along racial lines.

“To me, the neighborhood has just been my little heaven,” Rasheed said. “I’m very surprised by the racial tension. It was a wake-up call.”

Tensions were further heightened a week after Jaime’s memorial service, when two black youths, Travon Miller, 17, and Derrick Parks, 16, were shot in an apparent retaliation attack at an apartment complex on Channel Islands Boulevard. Although Miller was hit in the face, he escaped serious injury. But a hollow point bullet hit Parks in the lower back, shattering his spine and possibly paralyzing him for life.

His mother, Daphyne Parks, 40, said she heard the pop-pop-pop of the gunfire just as she was opening the door to get her son.

“I couldn’t open the door,” she said. “I just kept saying, ‘Oh my God, please don’t let him be dead.’ ”

Derrick, described by his mother as a studious “homebody” who wanted to study robotics in college, lay on his back in a pool of blood. His mother worried that the gunmen were still lurking about.

“He was saying, ‘Mama, I can’t feel my legs,’ ” she said. “I was saying ‘Baby I can’t pull you in the house’ . . . and my son said to me ‘Mama I don’t want to die.’ ”

The diminutive Daphyne Parks managed to drag her 6-foot-4-inch 240-pound son into the home and held him close, telling him “Derrick, you know how to pray, now pray.”

Saying that crime in her neighborhood has claimed too many victims already, Parks was one of more than three dozen residents who attended a community rally at St. Paul Baptist Church a week after the shooting.

They gathered to pray for the victims and comfort their families. They also pledged that together they would find a way to end the violence.

“This has got to stop,” said Parks.

Rallying for Cause

The gathering of victims’ families and community leaders at St. Paul in mid-August was just another example of how residents have rallied to protect their neighborhood.

Dollie Wells, a 68-year-old retired Oxnard schoolteacher, and her husband, L.G. Wells, 74, live on Birch Street. They have scoured their streets and back alleys in search of suspicious activity as volunteers with the Bartolo Square Neighborhood Watch.

“You can’t live in fear,” said Dollie Wells, who has lived in the neighborhood since the early 1950s. “When people start living in fear, everything is lost.”

Since January, police have also stepped up their activities, routinely scattering across the city in predawn raids of gang members’ homes. But residents and police agree it will take more than police crackdowns on gangs for the violence to end.

In Durley Park and other areas, police and residents are encouraging youngsters to beat the streets by playing sports and joining other social activities.

The Oxnard Police Department in 1994 founded the Police Activities League in a small beige stucco hut on Durley Park’s rim.

The program draws about 11,000 children a year from the community and south Oxnard, up from just 4,000 two years ago.

“The PAL program is the best thing that has happened to the neighborhood in years,” said McKinna Elementary School Principal John MacArthur III.

On a recent weekday, more than two dozen Latino, African American and white youngsters gathered in Durley Park to play pool in a recreation room and shoot hoops on a nearby basketball court.

Scanning the blacktop, Oxnard Police Officer Steve Adams, director of the PAL program, said stories of racial strife stem more from gang rivalries than from true friction among races in the neighborhood.

“Gangs do what gangs do. Bullets don’t have any color,” said Adams, who is black and grew up two blocks away from Durley Park.

After practicing layups at the Durley Park court, Lorraine Lee, 12, expressed a similar view that most south-central Oxnard youngsters are like kids anywhere else. The tall, straight-A student dreams about becoming a lawyer or professional basketball player.

“I love basketball, but school comes before sports,” she said. “Being a lawyer would be the fallback. There is no guarantee you will always make it in sports.”

But as teammates dribbled past on the court, Lorraine confided that her everyday worries about violence do set her apart from her peers in other communities.

“It can be scary at times,” said Lorraine, who is not allowed outside her home after dark. “There’s been a lot of killings. A lot of times when we have practice, I am worried someone might come by and do a drive-by shooting.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Neighborhood Under Seige

The rash of violent crimes that has plagued a south Oxnard neighborhood so far this year has earned it a reputation of being the county’s deadliest neighborhood. Although it doesn’t look like the “murder capital of Ventura County,” police who patrol the area say they have never seen such violence here over such a short period of time.

*

1: Jan.1: Sometime after midnight on New Year’s Day, Manuel Encarnacion, a 28-year- old gardener, and Jesus Silva Onofre, a 22-year-old waiter, are shot in the head at Durley Park. The police have no suspects or motive in the slayings of the two friends.

2.: Jan. 25: Felipe Hernandez, 16, is shot once in the upper chest, at the Centerpoint Mall in a gang-related killing. Police bust an Oxnard man and two teens as suspects. Victor Raul Aguilar, 22, a 15-year-old boy and a 16-year-old. The 15-year-old was recently set to be tried as an adult.

3.: April 15: Gabriel Gomez Torres, 15, is beaten to death with a blunt object at 521 Hill St. His body is found face down in a flower bed about three blocks from his home. A 16-year-old was recently arrested in the apparent gang-related homicide.

4.: July 25: Jalme “Jinx” Morales, 17, is beaten to death by three young men in an alleyway off N Street near Birch and Hill streets. In August, police arrested two youths, but later released them after determining they did not yet have enough evidence to go to trial. A third suspect is still at large.

5.: July 31: Travon Milles, 17, and Derrick Parke, 16, are shot in front of their homes on Channel Islands Boulevard near C Street in an apparent retaliation for the Morales slaying. Miller is hit in the face but escapes serious injury, while a hollow point bullet hits Parke in the lower back and shatters his spine, possibly cripplling him for life. Three weeks later, police conduct a gang sweep looking for evidence related to the shooting, and although they arrest four teens and two adults in the sweep, none is charged with the shooting.