Oakwood Tries to Cope With Rash of Gang Violence

On Venice’s 6th Avenue between Santa Clara and California avenues is a beautifully maintained Craftsman-style house with lace curtains on the front door and a well-manicured landscape of drought-tolerant plants in the yard. Flowering vines frame a locked gate spanning the driveway.

A block and a half away on the same street, a vacant one-story clapboard house has been marked by taggers and covered with “No Trespassing” signs. All the windows are boarded up, and the words “Venice Crips” are in gray spray-paint above the front door. An empty liquor bottle lies in a front yard that is nothing but dirt, baked by the summer heat. On this street full of contrasts, four men have been shot to death in less than four months within six blocks of one another.

The street is part of Venice’s Oakwood neighborhood, where since mid-June police have investigated five murders, two attempted murders, seven assaults with deadly weapons and four instances of shots being fired into inhabited homes.

Three years ago, a war between two Venice gangs left 17 dead. Police believe that the four men who died on 6th Avenue this summer were victims of emerging tensions between a Venice gang and a gang from nearby Mar Vista.

What isn’t revealed by the gruesome statistics is the life of 6th Avenue: mostly good people living in a bad neighborhood.

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On a hot, muggy Friday morning, Joe Crouch points to the curb near the intersection of 6th and Brooks Avenue. Some of the bullets fired at Gregory Moore, who died in front of Crouch’s duplex July 24, made ragged craters in the concrete.

Wearing a T-shirt that reads “I Am the Christian the Devil Warned You About,” Crouch shows where parts of Moore’s brain were found, propelled into the front of the white stucco building by the force of the shots.

Crouch, 28, a lighting technician for movies and television shows, has lived here for four years. He and his roommate, 40-year-old Gary Murphy, say they stay because the rent is cheap and they like being close to the beach. And there are fewer drug dealers on their corner than there used to be, they say.

Murphy is a full-time musician who often comes home from work late at night. He says he dislikes walking on his street even in the daytime.

“When I get close to home on the bus, I go, ‘Oh, God, I gotta walk down that street,’ ” he says. “Twenty-four / seven (24 hours a day, seven days a week) I’m looking over my shoulder.”

Standing in the doorway, Murphy greets 76-year-old Joe Rhodes, who regularly stops by during his daily walk on 6th. Rhodes retired from a job at the Department of Defense 22 years ago and has lived on nearby Brooks Avenue since 1935.

He doesn’t get involved in the life of the neighborhood much anymore; most of his old-time friends have died or moved. But Rhodes says he never intends to leave.

Down 6th on a weathered orange bicycle comes Michael, who details cars for a living. Neighbors wave to him.

Michael, 45, who spoke on the condition that his last name not been used, said he has lived here “damn near” his whole life, and he literally has the scars to prove it.

The way he tells it, in October 1995, coming home from a barbecue at 2 a.m., he found a man lying wounded in the street. As he struggled to pull him out of the street, he was shot in the back, arm and hand. Smooth, shiny scars mark his right arm and a finger that doctors reattached after it was shot off.

The shooting occurred one block south of where he’s standing. Is it any safer today? “By no means,” he said. “It’s not safe at all.”

Michael says he understands when Oakwood residents are hesitant to tell police what they know about the crimes that are committed here. People fear that if they say too much, they’ll be targeted by an anonymous gun fired from an anonymous car.

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Living in the Oakwood neighborhood just east of Lincoln Boulevard means being a few blocks from the ocean and from the trendy boutiques and trendy restaurants on Abbot Kinney Boulevard. But in this case, location is not everything. Oakwood, a mixed-race, working-class neighborhood, has known drug dealers and violence for decades. There is no one living here who hasn’t heard gunfire, known someone who’s been shot or been shot themselves. On Sunday, about 100 residents from this street and nearby ones staged a march through their community, pleading with authorities to help them stem the violence.

In the middle of a weekday, 6th Avenue is traversed by gleaming Pathfinders and tired-looking Oldsmobiles, LAPD cruisers and hand-pushed carts that jingle by stuffed with helados. Periodically, an enormous truck announces its presence with a musical horn-honk, then throws open its rear doors to sell soft drinks, vegetables and candy to the neighborhood.

Closer to the immaculate, modern condominiums just off Rose Avenue is the home of Elizabeth Browne and her parents. Elizabeth has lived on 6th all 10 of her years. She and her friend Vanessa Brown, also 10, are practicing cartwheels on the small front lawn when the Brownes’ dog, China, catches sight of a passerby.

China has a ferocious, hair-raising bark and a way of charging the fence that is quite enough to stop any would-be intruder.

Elizabeth says her family’s home was burglarized a few years back. Although she has not heard any of the recent gunfire, she has heard car chases. She is aware of the climate on her street, and she stays strictly indoors when her parents tell her to.

“What’s been going on up and down the street sort of frightens me,” she says. “I feel more protected now that we have a dog.”

What’s been going on frightens a lot of people.

Around the corner from where Gary Murphy and Joe Crouch live, Cynthia McLemore sweeps her kitchen and gets ready to go to a funeral at a church down the street. Stacked on the carpet are perhaps a dozen packed boxes; McLemore and her boyfriend, William McKillian, are planning a move to the San Fernando Valley.

“I’ve been here all my life, but I’m getting kinda tired of all the commotion,” says McLemore, who gets off work at GTE in Mission Hills at 2 a.m. and drives back to Venice. “Every six months we have this outbreak of violence. . . . This is my home and I love it here, but some nights. . . .” She gestures: Enough is enough.

But McKillian, who says he is a retired gambler, knows he’ll miss the beach and all his friends in the area, where he has lived for 20 years.

An hour later, dozens of cars and two police motorcycles pack the parking lot of the Friendship Baptist Church at 6th and Broadway. Mourners fill the pews in remembrance of a woman who died at the age of 84 after living in the neighborhood for 50 years. McLemore and McKillian are here too. They only knew the woman by her first name, Gertrude, but she was part of the neighborhood. Despite its problems, it is home.