The Justice System Courts Girls to Work With It

The ponytailed twins, Adela and Eva, quietly decided they could make good use of their visit to the county courthouse in Newport Beach. It was Take Our Daughters to Work Day, a chance to meet role models and hear pep talks from professionals. But the girls didn’t see legal careers in their futures.

They saw their chance to find out what happened to the gangster who killed their father with a bullet in the face when they were just 9.

The soft-spoken twins came to the Harbor Court on a bus along with 13 classmates from a Santa Ana alternative school, rounded up for career day by Girls Incorporated of Orange County. Most had long, dark hair and all wore the nonprofit group’s red T-shirts with a boast on the back: Strong, Smart and Bold.

Daughters of gardeners and cooks, they were treated to a red-carpet reception in courtrooms and jail cells all too often reserved for their fathers and boyfriends as defendants. Now the girls were there as potential recruits for the justice system. They met a judge, two prosecutors, two public defenders and a supervising bailiff--all women in a branch court that’s a veritable female fiefdom.

At one point, mostly unnoticed, the twins took a business card from Victoria M. Hill, a public defender with blond hair whose short talk touched the kids on their level. Hill confessed that “high school was the most horrible time of my life.” She had felt alone and afraid and had nobody to talk to, she told the girls.

That’s the worst part, not having somebody to talk to.

Maybe that’s what inspired Adela to put the lawyer’s business card in her back pocket. She and her sister intended to call her. They have been living with fear too. And so has their mother.

Their father, Mauro Meza, was the victim of a shocking assault that sparked a public call to action against gangs in Santa Ana. It happened one night in April 1992. Meza and eight companions were trying to leave Santa Ana High School after a game of pickup basketball. The van Meza was driving was surrounded by a gaggle of gang members who taunted the unarmed men.

One punk asked for a cigarette just before the shooting started. Meza, 31, managed to drive away before he died. His two brothers and a cousin were wounded, leaving one brother disabled.

The papers played up the killing of a decent family man who loved the Lakers and left behind three young children and a widow. The grieving twins’ picture appeared in the press.

I came to work in Orange County a few months later and it was still being talked about as the night a life was extinguished for a smoke. Mauro Meza became one of those names reporters don’t forget.

A year later, the killer pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years to life. Uciel T. Murgo was 19 when he ripped out the heart of the Meza family.

Then the story faded. Crime subsided and we forgot about the tragedy and the anti-gang plan it prompted the city to pass. I never expected to meet the survivors, the children who could never forget that someone had taken away their father, the man from Puebla who made a living delivering plants for a nursery.

I didn’t talk to Eva and Adela until after the morning court tour when they were preparing to board the bus back to Summit Community School in Santa Ana. Until then, they were just two more red-shirted girls who seemed shy seated in the jury box while being interviewed by Superior Court Judge Frances Munoz, their gracious career-day host.

One by one, they told the judge their names, their ages, their goals. A few said they wanted to be probation officers. A few said nurse. One said FBI agent and one said beautician.

Lorena, the most outspoken of the group, said she wanted to go to UCLA and work in a jail. Patricia, a live wire with glasses, said she wanted to be a pediatrician or, if not that, a singer.

Patricia looked perky, sitting on Lorena’s lap for lack of a juror chair. A few years ago, around the same time as the Meza murder, Patricia had received an unwanted lesson in how the courts work. She was 10, her daddy’s girl, when she witnessed her father being sentenced on a drug charge.

She recalls she was taken to court that day because “nobody had time to baby-sit me. . . . I was like traumatized.” The girl remembers the male judge scolded her father and sounded mean.

Patricia was later expelled from intermediate school. “They kicked me out because, they said, of my attitude,” she offered with a cockiness that betrayed her.

During the court tour, she was one of three girls handcuffed by the bailiff when the group was briefly put into a glass-enclosed area for prisoners. Afterward, Patricia confessed she had slipped the cuffs, showing me her wrists where they hurt. But the cautionary message got across: “Wow, I don’t want to go to court.”

Munoz asked the girls if any of them thought about becoming a judge.

“It looks too hard,” Lorena shot back. “And people won’t like you. They see you on the street and say, ‘Oh, you’re the one who put me in jail.’ ”

Well, how about a teacher?

Another unanimous no.

How many girls are bilingual?

This time, every hand went up. The judge then switched briefly to her slightly stilted Spanish spoken in a refined tone. She shared that her parents came from Jalisco, from a little ranch where they got very little education. They were very poor.

When she started on the bench 20 years ago, she told the girls, there were very few women in the courthouse. Not like today, with so many women on the staff it’s a courthouse joke. The women’s triumph underscored the day’s lesson: Hard work beats barriers.

“You have to be dedicated,” said the judge. “You have to be focused, and you can’t let anything sidetrack you.”

Those words took on a deeper meaning when I later learned the sad story of the twin sisters. The judge was not aware of the tragedy that has haunted Eva, who wants to be a bank teller or a police officer, and Adela, who wants to be a police officer or a nurse.

The killing shattered their father’s family. They’ve survived on their own with their mother, who starts work at 4 a.m. at a bakery. The girls are in charge of getting their 9-year-old brother to school; the boy was 18 months old when their father died.

Their teacher, Karen Bellerose, admires the twins for their strength and sweetness. She treasures the music box they gave her for Christmas.

“These girls are so humble and so generous,” the teacher said. “They’re intelligent girls with so much potential, but they have no vision beyond their community.”

All the girls heard the lawyers in court talk about what it takes to build a career. The four years of college, the three years of law school, the crushing costs and the time away from family.

The sincere attorneys were standing so close to the teenagers when they addressed them. But the gap seemed so wide between the girl’s harsh reality and the far-off future they were being asked to shoot for.

“It’s a great, wonderful world out there and you can learn so much and do so much with that great powerful key of education,” urged Deputy D.A. Eya Garcia, adding a piece of advice from her father. “He always told me to make sure I can stand on my own two feet, and never depend on a man.”

That took on added meaning too. The twins and their widowed mother have already learned the lesson of self-reliance. What they want to know is whether they’ll be safe.

Eva and Adela said they got no information about the killer’s release from the prosecutor who handled the case. Corrections officials told me Friday that Murgo is serving time at Calapatria and is scheduled for his first parole hearing in 2005. Whether he’s released at that time is up to the parole board.

Judge Munoz, known for her community work, is well aware of the fears and uncertainties faced by kids like Eva and Adela. At the end of Thursday’s long day on the bench, Munoz rushed from court for her weekly tutoring session at a Santa Ana elementary school.

Every little contribution helps, she said. The youngsters need positive connections to adults who care.

“That’s part of our mission,” said Lucia Munoz, teen facilitator with Girls Inc. “To hold their hands until they make it.”

Godspeed to them all.

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com