Consoling Those Left Behind

The Angel of Death stands 5 feet 1 and favors bright-red pumps. Christine Lopez earned that street name from teen gang members who know that when she appears on your street, or at your front door, someone you love is dead.

She or a member of her tiny staff is summoned by police departments or hospital emergency rooms at all hours of the night or day to notify parents or other next-of-kin that a son or daughter has been killed.

Lopez heads an Orange County program that deals with the aftermath of gang violence. It is the first of its kind nationwide. It is also the model for a more recent program in Los Angeles, as well as another on the drawing boards in New York City.

“I take care of the rushing, screaming people at murder scenes,” she says. “I tell them who I am. I say, ‘Your child has been shot. The injury is fatal. I’m going to take you to see him.’ ”

Lopez not only guards fallen bodies on street corners if necessary, she also attends funerals and preliminary hearings, and sticks with families through years of grueling court proceedings and parole hearings.

In her spare time, she is a volunteer youth counselor, trying to persuade some of the county’s 23,867 documented gang members that life is worth living.

“They act tough, but I hold their cold little hands, and make a wish for each of them--a good long life, a new house. Sometimes I just wish for them to stay alive. They tell me, ‘Don’t worry, you’re never going to knock on my mama’s door.’ ”

Every war has its dead, and every warring group has its way of notifying next of kin. Over the past eight years, as 391 people have been shot down by gang members on street corners and in playgrounds, in back alleys and bedrooms, Lopez has made her rounds.

“She’s very calm, very confident and competent,” says Sandra Truong, a social worker in the emergency room at Western Medical Center-Santa Ana.

Usually, Lopez arrives at a homicide scene in her battered old Mercedes, a bulletproof vest strapped over her dress or suit. She always dresses nicely--even if the deceased helped cause their own deaths--because it is a tragedy for the survivors, she says, and they deserve respect.

Once a victim is identified, she is escorted by police to yet another front door, yet another kitchen table, yet another slow collapse.

“There’s always fear in people’s eyes when you say who you are. Sometimes it’s fear of the unknown. Usually it’s fear of the known,” she says.

Lopez recalls one woman who stood on her porch with her arms folded, watching her come.

“I knew as soon as I saw you,” the mother said. She pointed to the refrigerator, where a photo of Lopez was taped. “My son told me that the next time I saw you, it meant he was dead.”

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In Orange County, a gang victim is nearly 20 times as likely to be Latino (and twice as likely to be Asian) as to be white.

Lopez and her four co-workers in the program all speak Spanish or Vietnamese as well as English, but they deal in other languages as well: police jargon, legalese and medical terminology.

That means knowing to request an “in lieu of crime report” for a woman seeking benefits after her husband has been killed, but before police have declared it a murder. It means explaining to an elderly Mexican grandparent the medical condition of a beloved grandson who is in a coma.

“Believe me, the system can create a second crisis for a family after they make it through the murder,” she says.

There’s nothing gushy or timid about Lopez, who has dealt with death and grief for 30 years as a nurse, as a worker in the county Probation Department and as the first staff member of the Orange County Gang Victim Services program, a nonprofit agency funded by federal and state grants.

She has handled the toughest requests. When a baby was shot in the head and vomited from the impact of the bullet, she was called by the coroner’s office.

“Can you find a hat? Can you help?” they asked.

She found a baby bonnet, and cleaned the tiny body before the parents came to identify it.

“I made it smell like a baby again,” she said.

Mostly, she holds a mother’s hands firmly in her own while delivering the verbal blow. She inquires about state money for coffins and lobbies to see if survivors can take possession of the personal effects of the dead. Sometimes she has to say no.

“All I wanted was to see the morgue pictures of my daughter. She’s my daughter,” said Regina Lewis, mother of Huntington Beach high school student Mary Lewis, who was stabbed to death by a gang member.

Lopez told her she couldn’t see the pictures, and couldn’t sit in the courtroom while the jury was viewing them either, because prosecutors felt it might open up appeal issues if the panel saw the family’s reaction. She also knew other clients who regretted seeing grisly morgue or crime scene photos of their relatives, after initially insisting.

“I can’t tell you how difficult it is to be that link between victims, the police department, and the D.A.’s office. We walk a tightrope,” says Lopez.

Lopez is intensely private, a survival mechanism she says she learned long ago. She adamantly refuses to tell her age, saying tartly: “Obviously, I am a well-worn woman.”

She allows that she lives in Santa Ana and loves Cajun cooking, especially jambalaya. She has two grown children, a daughter and a son, but she has “never, ever said, ‘That could be my son lying there.’ ‘That could be my daughter lying there.’ ”

While she will tackle the toughest tasks, “I can’t own people’s pain. If you get sucked into that, it can hurt you.”

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In her cramped and cluttered office in the juvenile justice complex in northern Santa Ana, teddy bears and a big container of hard candies vie for space with legal briefs and homicide reports.

On the windowsill, a slim volume of poetry, “A Stream in the Desert,” sits between the thick California Penal Code and a black leather missal. “I am Catholic,” she says, but her faith has been sorely tested by the her work. “I have an ongoing debate with God,” she says loudly.

Lopez learned of her street name early on. She walked into a Santa Ana funeral home and heard one woman say to another in Spanish, “Alli esta, Angel de la muerte.”

Local gang members picked it up, and soon they began to address her that way on the street. She says she doesn’t mind the grim tag.

“It can be taken two ways,” she muses. “It means: a person of comfort--I think.”

Besides cleaning up bodies and making notifications, Lopez has another talent: She gets people to talk.

In a time when talking to the police or testifying about a gang-related crime can cost your life or the life of a loved one, Lopez provides a moral compass.

“She has the ability to let witnesses know they are part of the system of justice, that there is a system of justice, that we need them, and that we want to help them,” says Deputy Dist. Atty. Randy Pawlowski, who prosecutes Santa Ana gang murders.

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Pawlowski recalls a gang murder where a young Mexican American was killed as his mother and an aunt watched in horror. The father did not want the women to testify.

“She broke down the cultural barrier, she gained their trust, and they testified,” says Pawlowski. “I can’t tell you how much easier it is to have Christine talking than a police officer in a uniform.”

Lt. Hugh Mooney of the Santa Ana police said the most amazing thing about her approach is her candor. He quotes her as telling understandably reluctant witnesses, “You can say nothing, and the case will never be resolved, and you will live with that for the rest of your life. Or you can cooperate, and face the music. There may be retaliation. The police will try to protect you, but the police can’t be there 24 hours a day.”

Last month, she worked with a key witness in the trial of Mary Lewis’ killer. He was a reluctant witness who had first contacted police anonymously after overhearing a housemate--the girlfriend of the killer--tearfully describe the murder in a phone call.

The witness was tracked down by police and subpoenaed to court for a preliminary hearing. He showed up, told the judge he did not want to be there, told the prosecutor where he could go, then stalked off.

Lopez followed him and shook his hand, telling him he was the only honest, good person in the whole case, and that she had been looking forward to meeting him. A month later, he testified fully and honestly.

“It cost him a great deal. It cost him friendship, it cost him the home he was staying in. But I reminded him that he had truly done the right thing. . . . I have a great sense of the need to elicit the hero in the everyday man, their ethics, their personal integrity. As a community of human beings, we have to do the right thing. You can’t just let the blood and guts lie there and do nothing.”

Her work with witnesses has made her extremely popular with prosecutors, less so with defense lawyers.

“Christine Lopez is a saint. She could walk the 26 miles to Catalina Island,” says chief gang prosecutor Bryan Brown of the district attorney’s office.

Defense attorney John Zitny, on the other hand, repeatedly accused Lopez in court during the trial of Lewis’ killer of coaching witnesses.

“I give moral support,” Lopez says. “I think defense attorneys tend to get defensive.”

Lately, Lopez has escaped being called out in the middle of the night. The number of gang homicides is down sharply in Orange County, and no one knows it better.

She turns the pages of her 1995 calendar briskly, pointing out weekends of back-to-back homicides, when she and the police went from Friday night until Sunday afternoon, from one death scene to the next.

Lopez is optimistic about the slowdown in killings.

“I’m happy about it, I really am. A grief counselor told me I was lulling myself, that statistically it will go right back up. I don’t know. If it truly is over, the Angel of Death will be happy to retire,” she jokes.

She grabs her police scanner, beeper and briefcase, and heads out the metal door.