Upward-Bound Man Claimed by Violent Subculture

Felipe Vazquez died the death many would expect of a reputed former drug dealer who wore baggy clothes and the stern countenance sometimes fashioned by life in the barrio. At 24, he was killed in a drive-by shooting.

But Vazquez also lived the life of an upward-bound young man. He was attending community college and had abandoned his illegal trade for a part-time job as a teaching assistant at an elementary school near his home, friends said.

A week after Vazquez and three others were killed in a 24-hour spate of violence on a single block of East 59th Place in the unincorporated Florence district, sheriff’s deputies are hoping that the tragedy will spawn a Neighborhood Watch program. But progress is slow.

Most parents on this street say they do not have the weapons to fight a subculture that keeps many of their children in a state of perpetual flux: one foot in the straight life, the other in a gang.

Like Vazquez, they can be handing star stickers to giggling first-graders during the day, and at night they can be on “that corner,” open to everything from police confrontations to a gang-related death.

“When you live out here, it’s almost as if you have no choice,” said Monica Ibarra, 21, an 11-year area resident who has been a tutor at the same elementary school as Vazquez.

“I go to Compton Community College and I want to be a corrections officer someday . . . but driving around or on the way to work I still see those [gang member] friends I grew up with. What do I do, ignore people I knew my whole life?”

The rash of gang retaliation shootings that killed Vazquez and the three others Dec. 1 led to another slaying in rival territory the next day. Last week saw more assaults scattered throughout the Florence area and the turf of the rival gang, said sheriff’s homicide Det. Johnny Brown, who is investigating Vazquez’s slaying.

In response, Los Angeles Police Department anti-gang units, which are responsible for the other gang’s neighborhood, have met with their Sheriff’s Department counterparts. Patrols and efforts to enlist residents have been beefed up, especially on 59th Place. An undisclosed number of suspects have been taken into custody and police are confident this storm will pass.

But they also fear another will come.

The Florence district is one of many Los Angeles area neighborhoods with gangs that date back 30 or 40 years. No matter how many task forces it creates, law enforcement must contend with a generations-old gang presence based less on a drive for power or money than on violent pride in one’s home.

“This is about somebody coming into someone’s neighborhood and violating it and someone else going out and doing the same to theirs,” Brown said. “Sometimes it doesn’t matter if you’re in or not. If you look like you are in a gang and you are in the [rival’s] neighborhood, you’re a target.”

Brown said Vazquez was a self-described gang member on older lists compiled by anti-gang units. Family members said Vazquez had been shot three times during a gang-related incident in 1992 near Dodger Stadium.

That, they said, changed his life.

“He started to act different,” said Vazquez’s 21-year-old sister, Lourdes, whose boyfriend was killed in another Florence-district gang incident months before she bore his daughter. Her brother began attending college soon after the incident, and later began working at 49th Street School, she said.

Brown said he too was convinced that Vazquez had cleaned up his life as best he could.

He said he was going to recommend that the state declare Vazquez’s family eligible for benefits paid to victims of violent crimes. That is, as long as a gun believed to have been used to return fire during one of the three Dec. 1 attacks is not traced to Vazquez.

A state board will grant the maximum $3,500 benefit under several criteria, including proof that the victim was not a combatant or contributor to the incident.

Vazquez’s brother, 31-year-old Valentin, a county welfare eligibility worker, said that even with his help and state money, funeral expenses will be burdensome for his father, who works as a janitor for a fast-food restaurant chain.

The family lives in a small house near the middle of the shaken 1400 block of East 59th Place, where children ride bikes on the sidewalk, careful not to tumble the makeshift shrines on each corner that mark the murder sites.

Jilleen Sargent, a Fremont High School instructor who helped Vazquez get his teacher’s assistant job and register for classes at East Los Angeles Community College, said her 6-foot, 200-pound former pupil often spoke of his discomfort in the college classroom.

Sometimes the problem was academic material, but more often it was a much different kind of challenge.

“People used to look at him and stare. They used to talk about having a gangbanger in the class and be afraid,” she said. “But how do you be a strong, serious-looking [young man] from the neighborhood and not look menacing?”