Killings Reveal a Hidden Santa Monica

Santa Monica is no island of tranquillity, but it seems that way from a seat at a Starbucks sidewalk table on Montana Avenue in a fashionable part of town.

That’s where Peter Coopersmith, a 40-year-old writer, could be found late one morning last week, reading the newspaper, sipping a cup of iced coffee and pontificating on the rash of killings that has shocked this celebrated beach city. “Like mushrooms after the rains, things changed,” he said. “People said, ‘Wait a minute, what’s going on?’ ”

Santa Monica is no raging gang war zone, either, but it seems that way to some people less than four miles from that Starbucks in the city’s Pico neighborhood, a working-class community by the Santa Monica Freeway.

That’s where John Diaz, 27, sat on a discarded old bench at the end of a dirt alley next to a freeway wall, playing cards with friends, glancing over his shoulder and feeling like a sitting duck.

Street gangs blamed for some of the killings agreed to a brief truce. But Diaz, who has seen one friend killed and another wounded in the spate of violence, didn’t trust it. “If they walked down this alley, some of us wouldn’t make it over the wall.”

Much of Los Angeles and the nation gasped as five people were killed and three wounded between Oct. 12 and Oct. 27 in a city that experienced only one homicide in 1997. But people who live here know better: Most of the killings have occurred in and around a slender rectangle of land along Pico Boulevard, a largely minority community that, residents complain, has been neglected for decades.

“It is a tale of two cities,” said Clyde Smith, chairman of the Pico Neighborhood Assn., whose 15,000 residents live in part of the area where the killings have occurred. “People talk about how the city is growing wonderfully, the tall swaying palm trees, but we also have the ‘South-Central’ Santa Monica . . . they talk about it in that fashion.”

Smith says that his neighborhood, which stretches from the city’s border with Los Angeles to Lincoln Boulevard and from Pico to Santa Monica Boulevard, has historically lagged behind other sections of the city, receiving less municipal support for everything from street improvements to development.

“We suffer from a benign neglect,” he said.

Some of the alienation is rooted in the state’s decision to build the Santa Monica Freeway through the neighborhood in the 1960s. African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans had long been able to buy homes in the Pico neighborhood during a time when deed restrictions enforced segregation in most of Southern California. The freeway split the community in half and left it inferior as many other parts of Santa Monica blossomed.

Over the years, the city of 90,000 has responded, expanding the size of the neighborhood’s Virginia Park, opening a police station and supporting a farmers market. But frustration still exists over the shortage of job opportunities, alleged harassment by police and lack of political representation.

Still, the notion that a gang feud could explode here--even though a related gang war had raged off and on for years in part of Venice on the city’s southern border--seemed improbable. From 1989 to 1997, there were only eight gang-related homicides in the city, and gang-related crime had dropped from 269 incidents in 1989 to 25 this year. The era of the city’s largest number of homicides--17 in 1980--was distant.

And then, on Oct. 12, 50-year-old German tourist Horst Fietze was shot, apparently by robbers, during a stroll with his wife and another couple near the Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel.

Omar Sevilla, 22, a former member of a Culver City street gang who was enrolled in a substance abuse program, was killed the same day near Santa Monica High School.

The next weekend, a gunman from Culver City retaliated for Sevilla’s death, police said: Juan Martin Campos, a 28-year-old former gang member, was slain as he tried to flee from two men who chased him into a liquor store. Then Jaime Cruz, a 25-year-old Santa Monica College graduate and former gang member who was attending UCLA, was wounded the next day outside his home.

And on Oct. 27, Michael Juarez, 27, and his brother Anthony, 19, both of San Luis Obispo County--neither of them gang members--were killed in a hip-hop clothing store their cousin had recently opened. A 21-year-old customer and part store owner Frank Juarez, 25, who had turned away from gang life, were wounded in the shooting, which police labeled a random retaliatory attack.

In response, police expanded patrols throughout the city and leased a helicopter. School officials prohibited students from leaving campuses during lunch. Football games were rescheduled from evening to afternoons and school dances were canceled. Halloween trick-or-treating was discouraged.

And yet, on well-heeled Montana Avenue last week, Oliver Keese, getting his hair cut in a barbershop, was not worried.

“It’s not dangerous out here,” he said. “Most of the shootings involved gang members. I feel sorry for the German tourist. He was innocent.”

“This is a different area,” added barber Leo Caceras, 64. “Even during the Los Angeles riots, when the city was burning everywhere else, this street felt like we were in another country.”

At Starbucks, writer Coopersmith warned of a false sense of security.

“Had the shootings happened a few miles away in Los Angeles, in Venice, it would have simply assimilated into the daily statistics of Los Angeles: another gang shooting in Venice--as if Venice is Latino America. It isn’t.”

To some, Santa Monica’s reaction to the killings was reminiscent of how Los Angeles responded a decade ago when a Long Beach woman was killed by an errant bullet during a shootout between rival gangs of Crips in Westwood--an incident that, like the Santa Monica homicides, brought newfound concerns about gang violence’s ability to infiltrate previously safe areas. The notoriety that followed is still partially blamed for Westwood’s decline as a tourist center.

Coopersmith said he was troubled by the security measures taken in the wake of the Santa Monica killings, suggesting that they could worsen racial relations by hardening an already deep-seated association between minorities and crime.

Said the Pico neighborhood’s Smith: “America has a color problem. The crime and poverty of America is a black and brown face. When they say ‘gang,’ that is a code word for black and brown people acting violently.”

Santa Monica Mayor Robert T. Holbrook said that although he personally doesn’t feel a sense of fear anywhere in the city, he recognizes the concerns in the Pico neighborhood and plans to meet with community groups to determine what roles the city can play in preventing violence.

“Maybe we need better lighting. Are we providing enough social services? I’m going to see what can be done to bring an initiative before the council that we can all buy into,” Holbrook said. “Santa Monica is a pretty complex city with a lot of things going on.”

Yet in the alley off the freeway, the needs seemed simple.

Diaz said he needed a job. He should probably go back to school and get some training in a skill first, he acknowledged, but at 27, he knew he had already blown opportunities.

“Jaime Cruz [one of the shooting victims] was pressuring me to go back to school,” Diaz said above the drone of the freeway noise on the other side of the wall. “I need a job.”

“Who is going to hire you when you are dressed like that?” said one of the older men in the alley to both Diaz and another young man wearing baggy clothes. “You are going to get messed with as long as you are wearing those clothes.”

“These are not gang clothes,” Diaz said. “They wear these clothes everywhere.”

North of Montana--a phrase that in West Los Angeles is shorthand for Santa Monica’s wealthiest section--Doris Sosin was deeply aware of the significance of the violence.

“It is a citywide problem,” she said. “The shootings have been in one part of the city but it touches everyone. My grandchildren play soccer in those parks near where the shootings happened.

“I hope it is a tale of one city because we all [should] feel a responsibility to alleviate problems as well as we can.”