A Wake-Up Call for a Suburban Refuge

It’s hard to say for sure who had the knife that night in Aliso Viejo, but someone did, and someone used it.

When it was over: A 16-year-old boy was near death. A group of middle-class teenagers who had never been arrested were being prosecuted as gang members. Their mothers, most of whom are rearing their sons alone, were jolted into an unfamiliar world of jail visits, criminal lawyers and the very real possibility that their sons could go to prison.

Orange County sheriff’s deputies were saying what no one cared to hear about the danger of gangs in the refuge that is suburbia: “We told you so.”

And across south Orange County communities, where neighbors struggle against the sprawl to remain close-knit, residents have been forced to confront a reality they had long chosen to ignore. A move down the freeway isn’t always an escape. You can move your furniture and cars and children and dogs, but it’s the invisible stuff you take with you that matters most.

Almost everyone directly affected by last summer’s stabbing--investigators, neighbors, witnesses and suspects and their families--has at least one thing in common: They came to live in the suburbs in south Orange County to get away from someplace else. Like countless others, they moved for the picture-perfect parks and equestrian trails, award-winning schools and clean, safe, kid-friendly streets.

They came because crime is so rare, as in Aliso Viejo, where graffiti is still a serious offense and there have been just three killings in 10 years. They came because it represented a sanctuary.

Or so they believed. The last thing they expected to hear was the word gang.

The Incident

The five teenagers met that night at a Dana Point pizza place. Members of a group they call the Slick 50’s, the youths wore their trademark cuffed pants, white T-shirts and greased-back hair.

They started the evening with pitchers of beer and were soon joined by 21-year-old Josh Carlsen. Next stop was the beach, where they downed a 12-pack of Coors Light before heading off to a party in a gated neighborhood called Windsong in Aliso Viejo, an orderly place dubbed the “City of the Future” because it represents the next generation of master-planned communities.

The fight broke out in the street just moments after they arrived. It started, the Slick 50’s say, when they were flipped off by Galen Thorne, a then-16-year-old from Aliso Niguel High School.

Someone cracked Galen over the head with a bottle of Coors Light, opening a cut that required 40 stitches on his left cheek. What happened next is unclear, even to the victim, who was stabbed three times and nearly died.

“I didn’t see a knife or, like, feel a stab wound, but . . . it was like I was paralyzed,” Galen told the grand jury. “I felt, like, an electric shock go through my body.”

The Slick 50’s jumped back in the car. On their way out of Aliso Viejo, the teenagers claim, Carlsen showed off a red-handled knife.

“None of us could believe it,” says one youth. He insisted that Carlsen, a Dana Point resident on probation for a prior assault, threatened them. “He basically said he’d kill us if we said anything.”

Within days, the five teenagers were arrested on multiple felony charges, including attempted murder. Carlsen, who is charged with attempted murder, has repeatedly declined to be interviewed.

The Times generally doesn’t identify juvenile crime suspects, but in this case, the teenagers are being tried as adults. They are 17-year-olds Steve Crader of Aliso Viejo, Jesse Grist of Laguna Niguel, and Kurtis Pinedo of Laguna Hills, and 16-year-old Joshua Riazi of Dana Point. Another 16-year-old, Mario Duenas of San Juan Capistrano, faces the same charges in adult court, but is expected to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for lenient treatment, law enforcement officials say.

They have pleaded not guilty. Among the charges lodged against them: Gang membership, a felony enhancement that would not only add years to the youths’ sentences if convicted, but which sent shock waves through the south Orange County communities where the teenagers live. Carlsen is also charged with being an associate of the Slick 50’s.

Authorities say the “Slick 50’s” meet several of the legal criteria that define a gang: They had a group name, they dressed the same, they shared a hand sign, and some even had gang monikers.

Moreover, witnesses to the brutal attack said someone kept yelling “Slick 50’s!” throughout.

Prosecutor Marc Kelly would later tell grand jurors, “They’re out there with their Converse shoes, their slicked-back hair, going to the parties, yelling ‘Slick 50’s,’ claiming Slick 50’s, intimidating people with Slick 50’s. This is a bullying, fighting gang.”

The word “gang” is so laced with meaning in Southern California that the allegation alone has nearly overshadowed the near-fatal stabbing. In the pristine new subdivisions that multiply seemingly overnight in south Orange County, the case strikes at the heart of deep fears.

As author and social linguist Peter C. Sinclair put it, “A host of emotions are orbiting in our culture around the word ‘gang.’ It evokes negative images of signs, colors, violent initiation rites and drive-by shootings.

“In the breath of one syllable, when that word is spoken, conclusions are made. We don’t know anything different, so we are immediately afraid.”

None more so than those at the center of what happened.

A Mother

“I am walking down this path, holding Jesse’s hand, and he’s still a little boy, looking up at me just like he used to.”

Janice Grist is talking about the vision she conjures up whenever she is worried about her son, which is often since Jesse’s arrest last summer.

She thinks about it when she double-checks the phone at night to make sure the ringer is on. Or when she sets her alarm for 10 p.m. whenever Jesse is out, to make sure she doesn’t fall too deeply asleep and miss a call. She replays it, again and again, when she thinks about her late father, a retired judge who never had a problem laying down the law in his own home.

“God is there, He’s ahead of us on the path, and there is warmth and I’m not afraid. He’s there, and because of that, I know everything is going to be all right.”

Grist clung to the vision when Jesse, her knobby-kneed little boy who took imaginary trips to a made-up land he called Timbuktu, started staying out all night without calling home, when he got kicked out of school, when he was brought home after curfew by a sheriff’s deputy. It came to her when Jesse became a scrappy teen who started fights and challenged her authority--his way, she suspects, of dealing with the anger and frustration that comes with growing up without a father.

Now, after Jesse and his friends spent 14 weeks behind bars and then were bailed out, Grist says the image is different. Jesse is not a little boy anymore. And she can only watch as God takes his hand and leads him away.

To Grist, 55, it is a sign that she should let go.

Over the years, she has tried to bring some semblance of structure to her home. She plans weekly dinner menus. She takes Jesse and his older sister to church. She displays inspirational notes throughout the house.

She has struggled to keep her kids in the same Laguna Niguel house where they have spent most of their lives, in a neighborhood that evokes images of security and wealth, neither of which she has.

None of it does much to ease the guilt she feels as a parent tormented by thoughts that she somehow missed the signs that her only son was on the brink of serious trouble. Now Grist, an elementary school teacher who can disarm adults and calm second-graders with an impossibly gentle voice, finds herself overwhelmed by sadness.

“I am not that strong,” she says. “I’m just tired.”

Janice Grist was trying to sleep the night of Aug. 11 when Jesse came home about 1 a.m., bloodied and scratched. She heard him before she saw him. He was talking on the phone in urgent whispers. His tone sent her scrambling out of bed.

“He was scared,” Grist says. “He hung up the phone and told me everything.” He said there’d been a fistfight, and someone had a knife. But her son’s retelling of events made her wonder if there was anything to it. He downplayed his involvement. She also knew he’d been drinking and wondered if he was exaggerating.

Grist thought about calling police. But she couldn’t shake the advice she’d always heard her father give: “Don’t say anything. Get a lawyer.”

“My final thought was to sit on it for the night,” Grist says. Besides, it was late. She would be getting ready for work in a few hours.

Jesse went to jail the next day, and turned 17 behind bars. If a jury determines the youths are gang members, as prosecutors allege, they could each go to prison for 15 years to life.

Grist has always tried to understand her son, to respect his choices and pick her battles.

When Jesse wanted to play the drums, she paid for lessons and made sure he wouldn’t disturb the neighbors. When she realized he was going to get a tattoo despite her protests, she helped him take care of the letters on his back until they healed. When he started smoking cigarettes as a freshman at Aliso Niguel High School, she refused to let him light up inside the house or the car.

But four or five years ago, Grist wasn’t alarmed when Jesse and his friends started to cuff their jeans, comb their hair into ducktails and listen to music from her youth. The style was a refreshing change from the dyed hair and body piercings she’d seen on other teenagers.

For Jesse’s 16th birthday party, she baked a cake and wrote “Slick 50’s” across the top in white icing. “For their little group,” she recalled. “He loved it.”

As Jesse’s April 26 trial date moves closer, she thinks maybe she was too lenient. Then again, maybe she was simply inconsistent. Working full time at a year-round school in Long Beach that requires a 90-mile round-trip commute, Grist says she hasn’t always been able to impose punishments that stick.

“I ask myself if I could have done something differently,” she says. “But I have to believe that I’ve done my best.”

By the time Jesse was born, a cuddly baby who slipped into the world without so much as a peep, Grist was in a failing marriage. She and her husband separated when Jesse was 3 months old; they later divorced. They remarried, a mistake she now blames on desperation, and divorced again. Jesse sees him roughly once a year.

“It’s been so hard to do it all alone,” Grist says, referring to Jesse’s arrest, which forced her to take out a second mortgage for bail and attorney’s fees. “I used to think, ‘Am I ever going to get this kid raised?’ Now I just wonder if we’re going to survive.”

A Suspect

A blond-haired, blue-eyed kid who dreams of being a rock star, Steve Crader at times appears unconcerned about the charges--or the possible prison term--he faces. While in custody, he wrote his mother letters reminding her to tape the MTV music awards.

But he grows still and wide-eyed as he describes being locked behind bars with accused rapists, drug dealers and a Satan worshiper suspected of murdering a Los Alamitos grandmother. Fierce young men who bragged about their gang membership and boasted of their crimes doubled over with laughter when they heard what Steve and his friends were accused of.

“All I could do was sit there and listen,” he says.

Listen, but never talk back for fear it would be taken as a challenge. Listen to the inmates screaming and moaning, like the guy in the next cell who banged his head against the wall for hours, making it impossible to sleep until exhaustion set in. Listen to the inmates who’d been there before, and offered words of jail wisdom about what you could get away with and what you couldn’t.

Steve found that out the hard way one day when he was caught doodling a skeleton drinking a martini--an image taken off a popular album cover. Jailers confined him to his cell and confiscated his notebook, the punishment for scrawling anything to do with violence or alcohol.

Yes, he thought, this was a long way from the life he had known.

Growing up, Steve lived in a row of low-slung condominiums in Anaheim, where he would run through the complex with other kids and leap from one garage roof to another, just because he could.

He remembers precisely where, on a patch of grass underneath a tree, he planted his first French kiss on a girl named Johnny. They were playing Truth or Dare.

He also remembers his first fistfight, which took place around the corner. He was in the fourth grade. A sixth-grader had been picking on him, bullying him.

“I hit him one time right in the face, one pop, and he was out cold,” Steve says, reenacting the historic swing. “He fell down and I got on his bike and rode away.”

He liked his neighborhood, sandwiched between another multifamily complex and a convenience store. He liked having people around all the time, so many kids to play with. In the early evenings, when his mother would go running at a nearby ball field, he would stand on the corner with his hands clasped behind his back and pretend to be her bodyguard.

“I have good memories of stuff like that,” he says. “I had fun.”

But his mother, Yolanda Radig, faced with rearing Steve and his younger brother on her own, decided to escape to south Orange County. She was concerned about an apparent gang problem at the Anaheim junior high school that her sons would have attended. She wanted better schools and opportunities for her boys.

She marvels at the irony of that decision now.

“Here we are in the sweet, peaceful suburbs, living the life, and my kid’s a big, bad gangbanger,” says Radig, 34. “I have to laugh to keep from crying.”

Radig worries that being so close in age to her son has made it difficult sometimes to understand what she hopes are his “normal teenage years.” She was 17 when she had him, and divorced before she was legally old enough to drink.

“I became a mom and an adult in one big sweep,” she says. “I didn’t get to be a kid. So in a lot of ways, I don’t really know how this whole growing-up thing works.”

She compensates by being different from the other mothers. She is more like a friend, the boys say. She lets them bum a smoke or two when they’re in a pinch and goes swing dancing with them on the weekends. She gives them a sip of beer on occasion, she says, especially if there’s a poker game involved.

Radig insists that her son and his friends are good kids who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“They’re boys,” Radig says. “Just boys. They aren’t criminals.”

While growing up, Steve had little or no contact with his father. He didn’t miss it, either. “I don’t need a dad. Nothing would be any different. I’d still be the same person I am now.”

Steve doesn’t think much of the Aliso Viejo neighborhood where he lives. Aside from cleaner air and better views, he says, he isn’t impressed. He sneers at the law enforcement officers who apparently have nothing better to do than turn the community against him and his friends.

This, despite the disturbing case prosecutors presented to the grand jury that offers a sinister portrayal of the Slick 50’s.

According to the testimony, members often targeted young victims who were alone and defenseless and attacked them. Several fights took place in the parking lot of the upscale Dana Point shopping center where the teenagers sometimes loitered.

But ask Steve about these, and he says the incidents have been exaggerated. Besides, other Slick 50’s members were mostly responsible for those fights, he says, not him.

The Slick 50’s is not a gang, Steve insists, just a group of friends who like to hang out and collect memorabilia from a decade they only know through movies. They dress the part. They listen to the oldies station on the radio. They ogle classic cars and wish there were more drive-ins.

The gang sign? They copied it from that famous poster of their idol, James Dean, who is posing with a cigarette gripped between his thumb and middle finger. And Steve’s “gang moniker”? Just a nickname, “Buffet,” that he says comes from his insatiable appetite.

Steve’s version of events on the night of the stabbing downplays his involvement. He repeats it so often that it sounds rehearsed, no matter how much youthful energy he puts behind it.

He never even threw a punch. It wasn’t his fight.

He even tried to help the victim.

This, he insists, is the truth. But it’s also the latest story he has told about that night. In the past, he lied about where he’d been, and then about who else was there.

Steve says he is now prepared to take responsibility for being present and not doing more to help the victim.

Sometimes Steve and his friends talk about the upcoming trial. But mainly, he just wants to make the most of the time he has with his friends now, because, deep down, he suspects he will be sent back to jail for at least a little while. And he knows a judge is likely to forbid him to socialize with his buddies, a condition imposed on many gang members.

During a pretrial hearing Friday, prosecutors said they would recommend a one-year jail sentence for Steve, Joshua Riazi and Kurtis if they plead guilty to the gang allegation and a reduced charge of assault with a deadly weapon. The boys have until Tuesday to make up their minds, but their initial reaction was that the penalty is too harsh.

Josh Carlsen and Jesse were not offered plea agreements because prosecutors say they played a more active role in the attack.

If he could pick his own punishment, Steve says, it wouldn’t involve jail time. He’s spent nearly four months there already. By his reckoning, he’s paid his price.

“Let them keep an eye on me for a year, on probation, if they have to,” he says, tucking a cigarette behind his ear. “That’s enough.”

A Cop

It wasn’t that long ago that members of Sgt. Dave Cherman’s own department were loath to acknowledge the presence of gangs in the new communities below the so-called El Toro Y--the merger of the 405 and 5 freeways that also serves as south Orange County’s unofficial border with the north.

But deputies were suspicious of the Slick 50’s from the beginning.

It started with one or two incidents, then a handful of reports detailing fights and disturbances involving the 15 or so members of the Slick 50’s. Next, a couple of arrests for minor scrapes. Then phone calls from deputies to parents warning them that their children were close to running seriously afoul of the law, that they were part of a gang.

The response? Denial, says Cherman.

And why not? Beyond the colossal psychological task of admitting that your child may be a gang member, there is the reality that gangs in suburbia defy stereotypes, Cherman says.

Unlike the mostly Latino and Asian and often poor gang members in the urban areas of Santa Ana and Anaheim, gangs in these suburbs tend to be white. They are neatly dressed and typically live in well-groomed neighborhoods with large, clean homes. They have weekly allowances.

“It’s a different breed down here for sure,” Cherman says. “But their mentality is the same. These boys are gang members.”

Cherman and his colleagues are convinced that nothing short of a zero-tolerance approach will ensure that gangs do not escalate into a bigger threat.

As supervisor of the gang team, Cherman, 41, knows the unfortunate truth about most of the young boys he comes across: They have invisible dads.

“You can tell right off, just by talking to them; Dad is gone.”

Though hardened by his job, Cherman remembers that it wasn’t always like this, at least not here.

He moved with his parents from Chicago to Mission Viejo some 30 years ago. “It was as suburban as it gets. . . . It was safe and new.”

Cherman’s father was a chemical engineer; his mother stayed home until their only child turned 13.

“I got lucky with my folks,” Cherman says. “All my life, they put everything about me first. And I think--no, I know--that my mom staying home all that time like she did really made a difference.”

Those fond memories are some of why Cherman chose to continue living and working here after he divorced. It is this quality of life that Cherman says he is trying to protect, especially for his own son.

The work Cherman does--arresting kids not much older than his own, seeing firsthand the trouble they can get into and recognizing the role that absentee fathers play--strikes close to home, too close at times. He regrets that he cannot offer his son the same stability he enjoyed.

As a part-time father, he is protective; in fact, he worries that he might be overbearing. He and his son see each other every week, and he studies the boy each time, searching for those subtle clues that he sees in the youngsters he handcuffs and takes to jail.

He doesn’t blame the parents, or the family structure, of every teenager he arrests. Although he thinks most need more supervision and restrictions and interaction at home, Cherman also believes the youths themselves must take responsibility. “These aren’t babies,” he says of the Slick 50’s. “They’re young men who are old enough to know better.”

Lately he has found himself, more often than he’d like, turning around the bill of his son’s hat, from back to front. Cherman warns him: You can get killed for dressing a certain way. Why risk it?

But he is grateful that his ex-wife’s new husband is a strong role model for his son. And, he reminds himself, there is a line between being a gang member and looking like one. It’s called criminal activity. One wrong move, one poor choice, and what was once a few guys hanging out together is suddenly a street gang.

That’s what he says has been happening in the south Orange County suburbs he knows so well.

Cherman knows the Slick 50’s have all pleaded not guilty to the stabbing, and they insist they aren’t gang members. He knows their mothers have blasted the sheriff’s department, and particularly his gang team, for picking on otherwise good kids with no criminal records. But he offers no apologies.

“There are gangs, all kinds of gangs, and they are here, and that’s why we are too,” Cherman says. “Those boys, they should go to prison. They stabbed that kid. Take away everything else, all of it, and that’s still what you have.”

A Community

The brawl and its aftermath have shaken south Orange County, a patchwork of new cities and unincorporated areas that have always maintained close ties, in part because they are patrolled by the same sheriff’s department.

The victim and his parents are staying out of it for now. Galen’s mother, Janis Thorne, says she wants to see that the suspects pay for what they did, of course. But mostly, she said, she wants to put the whole thing behind her family. She and her son declined to be interviewed, saying prosecutors had advised them not to talk.

Some of their Aliso Viejo neighbors won’t talk about the incident either. They fear retaliation, the image still fresh of the army of sheriff’s deputies who swarmed their neighborhood, stringing police tape around their trimmed trees and sturdy gates and scrubbing blood from their sidewalks.

But some residents, and numerous city officials, have accused the sheriff’s gang team of creating a perceived gang problem for no purpose other than job security.

Others, like United Parcel Service worker Chrys Grubbs, 36, don’t take the Slick 50’s seriously.

“I’ve seen these kids around, and to me, they look like a bunch of punks trying to act tough,” Grubbs says. “I’d like to take them all up to Compton, drop them off and tell them to get home. I mean, let’s see what they’re really made of.”

In Los Angeles, where there were nearly 200 gang-related killings last year, some law enforcement officials scoff at the south Orange County controversy.

“We have teenage boys shooting each other dead on the street, gang members robbing strangers at gunpoint and kids running drugs,” says Steve Strong, a retired LAPD gang investigator. “You’ve got a group of greaser-looking kids who get in a scuffle with one boy at an unsupervised high school party and the whole county freaks out. Please.”

Strong questions Orange County’s “blanket” approach to filing gang charges, even against first-time offenders. Labeling teenagers can mark them for life, he says.

“These kids, if convicted, will carry that gang label with them wherever they go,” Strong says. “And if they get sent to prison, they’ll be housed with other gang members, who will know just by looking at them that they aren’t authentic. It’s like writing a death sentence.”

Pam Hill, whose son attends Dana Hills High School with two of the suspects, agrees. “These aren’t gang members,” she says. “I think it’s time they went and started chasing real gangs.”

Sgt. Cherman is quick to say that the agency is doing just that.

Deputies on Cherman’s south county team actually spend most of their time monitoring the hundreds of gang members who belong to two violent, warring groups in poor, mostly Latino, enclaves in San Clemente and San Juan Capistrano. Those places were once immune to gang activity too.

But they also made arrests in an attack on a Dana Point gas station attendant who was bashed over the head with a tequila bottle after asking some members of the Slick 50’s--not those accused in the stabbing incident--to stop loitering.

These are the incidents that can be too easily dismissed as “boys being boys,” and there can be a price to pay, says Chris Brown, a criminal justice professor at Chapman University in Orange.

“We know what’s really going on here,” says Brown, himself a former member of an L.A. street gang. “They’re building momentum, they’re earning reputations that they don’t want bruised. They’re escalating in violence, and before long you have a fight or a stabbing and some kid is almost dead.”

Many residents, like Sherri Gessesse, share the sheriff’s department’s concerns about the Slick 50’s and bully gangs, and applaud their hard-line posture in the case.

Gessesse came to Aliso Viejo because she didn’t like the crowds, wild parties and crime in Huntington Beach, where she had reared her two sons. She’d had two bicycles and a plant stolen in less than a year, and was wary of living alone.

She longed for quiet, friendly neighborhoods. She found it in a gated townhome community off Aliso Creek Road. In Windsong, she could step onto her bedroom balcony and smell the ocean, and leave her front door wide open when a nice breeze came through. Packages could sit for days, undisturbed, on her patio.

Now she is second-guessing her move.

“I didn’t expect something like this, something so violent and so close to home,” says Gessesse, 45. “It’s like all of a sudden you realize, ‘Hey, a stolen fern ain’t so bad, after all.’ ”

For now, the accused teenagers carry on with their lives, seemingly uninterested in serious reflection about the trial and the looming charges. It’s easiest to forget when they are together, prowling for parties and scrounging up money for beer and late-night burgers at In-N-Out.

They leave it to others to reflect on what the Slick 50’s are, and what they represent.

“We are plagued with cultural infections that a shot of the suburbs can’t cure,” says Rosalyn Baxandall, an American Studies professor at State University of New York and coauthor of a new book on the evolution of suburbia.

“A new house can’t replace an absent father. Better schools can’t take care of latch-key teenagers. And a nice neighborhood where everyone looks the same won’t stop people from having conflicts.”

The Changing Suburbs Series

The series will explore new aspects of the Southern California suburban experience on occasion through the year. Earlier articles can be viewed on The Times’ website at

https://www.latimes.com/suburbs.

Previously:

* Evolution from orchard to subdivision in Ventura County.