Gangland’s Wheelchair Brigade

When Robert “Bird” Ramos strode through a Boyle Heights housing project, members of rival gangs scurried for guns. Bird was a shot-caller who’d served time for murder.

But these days when Bird leaves his home, his girlfriend lowers him in his wheelchair down the steps, one by one, like a child in a stroller.

Shot and paralyzed from the waist down five years ago, Bird is one of hundreds of Southland gang members who have wound up in wheelchairs--an inglorious end to audacious careers of crime.

These are casualties of a war in which they knowingly participated. A small number go straight, renouncing gangs. But many would still be shooting today if their legs could bear their weight. Most remain inextricably tied to their gang. Bird has been shot in his wheelchair when rivals opened fire on him and several of his homies.

Guys like Bird expected prison or a violent death, or both. They expected to die by their mid-20s. None expected to be transformed from gang leader to gang liability.

“I never saw myself living a long life,” said Bird, 32. “But I never thought this could happen to me; it never crossed my mind. When I was a kid, you’d hardly ever see anybody in a wheelchair. Now there are so many.”

In California and nine other states, firearms have surpassed auto accidents and become the leading cause of injury-related death, according to federal officials. (By the year 2002, if current trends continue, gunfire will become the leading cause of injury-related death nationwide.)

Such violence exacts a toll: For every patient who dies from a gunshot wound, three are injured seriously enough to warrant a hospital stay. Improvements in medical technology have kept pace with increasingly sophisticated weaponry, allowing more and more seriously injured patients to survive.

Their medical costs and monthly state disability checks cost taxpayers millions. (The first year of care for a paraplegic comes to $152,000, according to one group’s estimate.)

Nowhere outside military battle has society created so many crippled young men.

“These guys are at war; they’re just as serious about their war as we were about ours in Vietnam,” said Sgt. Wes McBride of the Los Angeles County sheriff’s gang unit.

On the streets, handicapped gang members are treated in accordance with how much respect they had earned in the gang. Guys like Bird have “juice”: longtime gang connections and a track record of carrying out missions on behalf of their gang. Lesser members, like Enrique “Kiki” Lopez, paralyzed by a payback bullet five years ago, often become outcasts, unwanted by the gang and estranged from their families.

“For the first year or so, it’s like they are the hero and a lot of attention is paid to them,” said Mary Ridgeway, a county probation officer. “They end up relics, castaways on the street. These were macho kids who wanted to kill someone for giving them a dirty look, and now they are reduced to all these dysfunctional problems. They are a burden on their families; they are angry, hostile men.”

Today Kiki, 24, lives in his aunt’s El Sereno backyard in a 5-foot square aluminum tool shed several miles from his gang’s Boyle Heights territory. The ceiling of the windowless shed is too low to allow a person to stand upright, but it’s high enough for someone in a wheelchair.

“I feel good in this room,” Kiki said inside the shed. “This is my house. Right here, I’m independent. I don’t like asking for help.”

The small yard is also home to a mourning dove, four scrawny sparrows in tiny cages, eight scraggy chickens in a wooden coop and a brown and white mongrel named Spotty. In the heat of summer, the air is heavy with flies and the odor of chicken manure.

Kiki, a 10th-grade dropout, can tell you how many years, months and days it has been since he was shot and condemned to a wheelchair. He clings to feeble hopes. A neighbor dreamed that Kiki was strolling down the street, and Kiki sees the dream as a sign, even though his doctor has told him he will never walk.

Twice this year, with no success, he attended so-called “miracle” services held by a preacher in Anaheim who reportedly healed the handicapped and restored sight to the blind.

“I know I’m going to walk,” he said, resolutely. “God has a plan for everyone and whenever he decides I’ll get out of this chair, I’ll get up. Actually, I’ll leap up.”

At first he believed he would walk on the fifth anniversary of the day he was shot, July 29.

On that Monday, he woke early. Even in the morning, his shed was swelteringly hot, smelling of sweat and old urine. (He uses a bottle as a urinal). At the edge of his metal cot, ants and fruit flies invaded a plastic bag of old fruit. Scores of empty 7-Up and Coke bottles gathered beneath his bed.

Kiki showered and brushed his teeth with the hose outside the white shed. Afterward, he doused himself with cologne. Dressing was a long, tortuous process of trying to get his limbs to obey. He pulled his white socks up to his knees. He stuffed his swollen, misshapen feet into black shoes and set about fastening on his steel leg braces.

He tried to pull up his white cotton shorts, but the belt buckle came off in his hand. Sweat pooled on his brow. Getting his shorts pulled up and settling himself in the wheelchair took 21 minutes. Now he faced another problem: maneuvering his body so he could rethread the belt.

With his hands, he moved his legs as though they were tree trunks, placing them carefully on the foot rests of his wheelchair, and leaned back to struggle with the belt. Unbalanced, the wheelchair tumbled over backward, pinning Kiki on the floor, helpless like an upended turtle.

“Pick me up,” he yelled to a visitor. “Pick me up.”

He would not walk today.

Kiki was mortified. The chair had never tipped before. How could it happen on such an important day?

Restored to his wheelchair, Kiki rolled out into the driveway, despondent. He wanted to call his father; maybe he would visit him. He shouted into the house, where his aunt, uncle, two cousins and their children live.

“What do you want?” A cousin yelled.

“The phone,” he replied.

“It’s being used,” said the cousin.

Kiki waited in the hot sun for 15 minutes. He rolled back to his shed when it was clear that he’d been forgotten.

“I don’t want to be dependent on anybody,” he muttered. “I do my own business, I don’t bother no one.”

Kiki used to be a foot soldier with the State Street gang. He earned about $200 weekly, “tax free” as he says, dealing PCP in his neighborhood.

“Kiki is one of those kids who was just trying to fit in,” said John Tuchek, Kiki’s former probation officer. “This is a sad kid who’s chosen his destiny.”

On July 29, 1991, Kiki had gone on a mission, shooting a .32 magnum at members of a rival gang, the Tiny Boys. Today, Kiki doesn’t actually remember why he was shooting. Maybe it was in response to his homies’ complaints that all he liked to do was get loaded. He’d show them.

After his mission, Kiki rewarded himself. He’d done it. Now he could get high in peace. Lost in a fog of PCP, alcohol and crack cocaine, Kiki forgot about the possibility of a payback.

He was sitting stoned behind the wheel of his father’s burgundy Cutlass when the car was suddenly surrounded by four members of Tiny Boys. It was like a surreal trip. He knew one guy from a stint in county jail. He watched him aim and pull the trigger.

“I’m gone,” Kiki remembered thinking. “Go ahead, take my life.”

The first bullet hit Kiki in the forehead. He felt his head slam back. Another bullet pierced his side, entering his lung. Three other bullets sliced into him, including one that lodged in his upper spine.

Kiki awoke several weeks later, unable to talk, with tubes down his throat. He could see his father standing next to the bed, holding his hand.

What am I doing here? he wondered. Instead of his legs, he felt an enormous heavy weight.

Doctors told Kiki he would never walk and he was furious. What did they know? Who were they? When he got out, he’d kill the man who’d put him there.

Six months later, Kiki left the hospital, seated in a wheelchair with a scar crowning his head from ear to ear. His life plummeted from bad to worse. Except now, he could no longer hurt anyone else, only himself. He carried a can of Mace for protection.

His rage boiled inside. At one time, Kiki had glorious visions of his future. He saw himself rising to power in prison, becoming a godfather with the Mexican Mafia, emerging to become a man of respect on the street.

Instead, he was shunned. His homeboys like to hang out with him when his monthly $626 disability check arrives. They have been known to party and leave him stranded, far from home during early morning hours, when the money ran out.

When Kiki was 8, his mother left. He and his father moved in with Kiki’s grandmother. After Kiki was confined to a wheelchair, he initially moved back to his home with her. At times he could not contain his fury, especially if he was stoned.

Two years ago, convinced that his grandmother was possessed with demons, he threw a cup at the frail, 84-year-old woman, cutting her forehead. Family members called the police.

When Kiki got out of jail, he moved in with his aunt in El Sereno. Worried about his gang and drug ties, she didn’t want him there. But she also recognized that he had no place to go.

Kiki insists his paralysis is temporary.

He believes that one day before the end of the year he will walk right out of that tool shed.

“I know one of these days, I’ll have to get up,” he said.

Bird doesn’t entertain such dreams.

When he was released from the hospital, Bird used to pray that he would one day walk. He doesn’t bother with that now.

“God put me in this wheelchair to slow me down,” said Bird.

Bird is a guarded man whose emotions remain buried beneath an impassive gaze. He is like smooth gray rock, the kind that would thwart a climber. He joined the Primera Flats gang when he was 10, after his father overdosed on heroin. His father, many of his uncles, aunts and cousins were gang members. His two brothers, Little Bird and Dillinger--both now in jail--belong to gangs as well. So does Baby Bird, the 15-year-old son Bird fathered at 17.

Cops don’t care for Bird. They believe that he hides dope and guns in his wheelchair to protect his homies--an allegation that Bird denies.

The studio apartment that he rents for $375 a month is not equipped for a handicapped tenant. It sits atop a steep flight of concrete stairs. No ramps. Inside the apartment, his wheelchair cannot fit into the bathroom because the doorway is too small. So he must depend on his powerful arms to jockey his withered lower limbs onto the toilet or into the bathtub.

After he was released from the hospital, Bird first moved in with his girlfriend of almost six years. That arrangement ended when Bird found his woman in bed with another man. Now he lives on his own and sees another woman.

In his neighborhood, curbs are not cut for wheelchairs and bus drivers don’t always stop. So Bird, a gangster accustomed to getting his way, learned a new kind of patience and humility.

He has crafted a routine. He wakes up, watches “The Price Is Right” and dresses himself to go to the projects. He gets there by bus or a friend picks him up. He likes to hang with his homies simply because he has nothing else to do. This is his family.

When he rolled into the Aliso Pico housing project on a recent afternoon, a handful of teenagers, their arms sporting gang tattoos, their shorts sagging, greeted him with cries of, “Whassup? Whassup?”

Bird smiled. Wheelchair or not, he is a veterano, a survivor. Most of his peers are either behind bars or dead.

Bird parked his wheelchair in the shade of a carport beneath the peeling pink two-story building. His homies gathered around, turning up a boom box, teasing a girl member who was trying to decipher her algebra homework.

Bird was first shot six years ago, just after he was released from prison, having served eight years of a 15-year-to-life sentence for murder. In a confrontation with a rival gang, he was struck in the neck, back and hand, he says, holding up a right finger, severed at the joint.

When he recovered, Bird sought revenge, returning to the piece of enemy territory where he’d been wounded. He was shot once more. This time, he was paralyzed from the waist down. He believes this was God’s payback for the numerous shootings he had committed. Does he have any regrets? Only about being drunk on a mission.

The third time Bird was shot--two years ago in his wheelchair during a conflict with a rival gang--the bullet shattered the femur in his left leg. Because he has no feeling in his legs, he felt no pain; he didn’t even know he’d been hit. He saw no blood but he did see a hole in his sweat pants.

When police arrived, Bird was on the ground. Bird says his brother, Little Bird, threw him to the ground to get him out of the line of fire. But authorities say his buddies turned over the wheelchair because it housed a much-needed gun. Bird was lucky: the air pump he carries for his tires stopped a bullet that he believes would have hit him in the back.

Bird has sat through plenty of shootings. Most times, someone grabbed his chair, shoving him out of the line of fire.

Bird himself won’t bother.

“I wouldn’t push myself, I don’t feel like I have to, I sit there and try to see who is doing the shooting,” he said. “To me, it’s like ain’t nothing really changed--just the part about being in a wheelchair.”