Will a Father’s Death Mean a Son’s Demise?

Last Sunday, in an under-furnished apartment on Westminster Avenue in the tiny Venice enclave of Oakwood, they threw a little baby shower. It was a sparsely attended and sad affair, almost surreal given the events that had preceded it. The mother, 18-year-old Barbara Vazquez, had already given birth five days earlier. Born eight weeks before his due date, the baby weighed 3 pounds, 11 ounces and is still hospitalized.

Barbara’s labor was sudden and brief; it lasted less than half an hour. The pains came as she was preparing to attend the funeral of her baby’s father, Michaud Andre Lewis, 18, gunned down a week earlier on Rose Avenue in Venice as he walked to a pay phone across the street from his home.

Police believe Lewis was killed by gangbangers as part of an escalating war between the predominantly black gang Shoreline Crips and the largely Latino Mar Vista gang Culver City Boys. So far, four young men have died, including a 14-year-old with no gang ties. Nine other people have been wounded.

And another fatherless child has entered the world. Will he fill that void by joining a gang one day?

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This is the second gang war to be waged in Oakwood in the last four years. In 1994, after nine months of bloodshed and fear, a truce was struck between black and Latino gangs, but not until 17 people died and 55 were injured. Kudos were being exchanged as recently as last summer over the truce, the only one of three in the city that seemed to be holding.

Technically, it still is. Shoreline Crips were battling a different Latino gang then, but frankly, when you’re ducking bullets, it’s an irrelevant distinction.

Because Oakwood, for racial and economic reasons, is psychologically isolated from the surrounding more affluent and whiter beach community, there doesn’t seem to be much of a public uproar about the violence.

On Saturday, for instance, fewer than 100 people showed up at a peace meeting at the rec center. Most were from grass-roots anti-violence groups. By contrast, a pro-dog rally on the Venice boardwalk, which took place at exactly the same time Saturday, drew twice as many people and far more press.

Saturday’s meeting was reminiscent of one I attended during the last round of gang madness, when mothers complained that they were putting their babies to bed in bathtubs to keep them safe from bullets.

Once again, there was heated rhetoric about racial injustice and urgent calls for jobs, education, more sensitive policing. But this time, there was something different in the air, a new tact being tried. There was a plea for parents to intervene, especially fathers.

“We need to step up and be responsible fathers and male role models,” said Ken Riley, president of an L.A. group called Mad Dads. “Women have been doing this work by themselves for too long.”

Parents from Oakwood were urged to reach out to parents in Mar Vista. Michaud Lewis’ father spoke about attending the funeral of 14-year-old Rafael Adan, the Mar Vista youth slain in apparent retaliation for Michaud’s murder. A written plea for peace from Rafael’s mother was read.

“I am more than worried,” said a man who helped broker that truce in ’94. “We either squash this thing today or we are facing a major, major disaster.”

For a tiny baby born the day his father was eulogized, the disaster is already here.

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Barbara Vazquez, on the scene minutes after she heard the gunfire that killed Michaud, sat on a curb for five hours weeping, big belly and all, until the coroner took Michaud’s body away. She thinks perhaps grief brought the baby so soon. Michaud’s family took it as a message from their slain son: focus on life, not on death.

Her baby shower, hosted by Michaud’s older brother, Lucien, was low-key. Young women came in twos and threes, dropped off gifts and left. Barbara didn’t know most of them. They were Michaud’s homies, she said, girls who probably didn’t approve of her relationship with him in the first place. Michaud was black; Barbara is Cuban American. And she lives not in Oakwood, but on “enemy” turf, in Culver City.

As we spoke, her first son, Angel, not quite a year old, played at her feet. Angel’s father, she said, is in jail.

As she tells me this, her eyes well with tears. She shakes her head. “I have no luck with fathers.”

Her words transcend her. For in ways large and small, they apply to the terrifying and bloody events that take place all over this city. Sure, we’ll always have bad guys. But how many kids turn to gangs to fill that void when there is no father, no discipline, no supervision, no encouragement?

And when, for the sake of us all, is that going to change?