At Funeral, a Call to End Gun Deaths

Lori Gonzalez, the innocent victim of an apparent gang shooting, was mourned, celebrated and buried Saturday, an occasion, said her grandfather, Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, for reaffirmation of a commitment to eliminate gun violence.

Gonzalez was put to rest just a day short of her 21st birthday after a long, loving and emotional service at Crenshaw Christian Center. She was buried on a high hill overlooking southwest Los Angeles, her grave next to that of her aunt, Parks’ daughter Lori, who died years ago of cancer and for whom Lori Gonzalez was named.

“Today we stood on the headstone of Lori No. 1 while we buried Lori No. 2,” said Parks, a normally stoical man whose eyes were swollen and whose voice was choked with feeling.

He said the week since the shooting “has been nearly impossible” for him and his family. And he resolved to rededicate himself to eliminating youth violence.

“It’s a very dangerous time, and we can’t ever forget it,” he said. He noted the decline in homicides in the city over the past few years but said, “It is still a very dangerous time to be young in a large city.”

His wife, Bobbie, called for the gunman, who is still at large, to “never do this again.” She said to fellow parents, “Let us again be parents. . . . Become aware and start to help our children enjoy their lives.”

Gonzalez was killed last Sunday evening in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant in Southwest Los Angeles. She was in her car with a male friend. Police believe the friend was the intended target. Shots were fired at his side of the vehicle; he ducked and Gonzalez was struck.

Police have made no arrests, although Parks said, “Our people feel they have some pretty good leads.”

Gonzalez was the daughter of Felicia Parks-Mena and Jose Gonzalez. They divorced 18 years ago and for the past several years Lori had lived with her father, stepmother, Debbie, and their two other children. The Gonzalez family had gone on a camping trip over the Memorial Day weekend, but Lori stayed behind to visit her mother in Los Angeles.

Her mother also had two other children. Lori was the oldest child in both families and doted on her siblings. A program prepared for the funeral was full of photos of Lori and the other children, of Lori and other relatives, of Lori and friends. She stands out in the photos, staring straight into the camera, smiling, young and impossibly pretty.

Friends and relatives said they would remember her as a breeze that blew too quickly--through conversations, through a door and finally through their lives.

She was a student at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo. She kept busy with a full-time job as a telephone operator, a part-time job at a drugstore, and several volunteer activities, including teaching Sunday school.

A line of mourners two hours long filed past the closed casket, which sat in the center of the church, an immense blue space with a raised center platform ringed by floral sprays, all the lushness Southern California has to offer and all the blank sadness too.

Mourners remarked on Gonzalez’s high spirits and boundless energy; they spoke of a young woman with huge ambitions being achieved on the smallest of scales--soothing the ache of a burn victim, helping to stucco houses in Mexico and especially reaching out to children, no matter how young or how inconvenient the situation.

One woman said that maybe Gonzalez had been around longer than it seemed.

“Twenty years of being good. That’s a long time,” she said.

“Lori is a symbol of all the victims who have lost their blood to the violence of this society,” Bishop Charles E. Blake of West Angeles Church of God in Christ told mourners.

But “the good she did can never die and lives on through her deeds,” he said. “She lives in our hearts. She lives in the good that she incites us to do. She lives in the good that she did. And she lives in the very presence of her Lord.”

Mayor Richard Riordan, county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and City Councilman John Ferraro also spoke.

“We hope that no other person in Los Angeles falls victim [to gun violence], and in her memory we hold out for peace,” Burke said.

Ferraro said the death was “a tragedy that should not have happened.”

Blake said people who commit such crimes are “unemployed, they were raised in a violent culture and exposed to violence in the media. Society has done little to enhance their self-esteem, and thus they have little esteem for others.”

Two uniformed Los Angeles police officers, Rosaland Iams and Philander Butler, sang “Wind Beneath My Wings.”

Pallbearers included Gonzalez’s fiance, Brian Small, and Bernard Parks Jr. Additional expressions of sympathy from President Clinton, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Rep. Maxine Waters and singer Lionel Ritchie were read to the estimated 700 people at the service.