Grand Jury Transcripts Shed Light on Slaying, Ventura Gang

Bill Zara was surrounded by the mob. He tried to defend himself with a bat, and got in one blow, injuring two attackers. One of the mob circled around and hit him in the back of the head with a shovel. They wrestled the bat from him and an attacker brought it down on Zara’s head.

Zara, 18, a popular stagehand at the Ventura Theatre, fell to his knees. Sensing Zara’s peril, a friend shouted, “Run to me, Bill!” and Zara struggled to his feet. The shovel across the back sent him sprawling again. The bat came down on his head.

This time he didn’t get up.

“Oh my God, you’ve killed him!” someone screamed as the mob ran off.

“Yeah, right,” came the laughing answer.

In the weeks following Zara’s beating, police swept in and arrested eight members and associates of a gang that has terrorized portions of the Ventura Avenue area for more than 30 years. But investigators released few details about the Sept. 25 beating. Now, recently unveiled grand jury transcripts for the first time describe in graphic detail the killing of Zara and the violent tactics by which the 500 members of the gang have exercised their power for generations.

“This attack is what [the Ventura Avenue gang] is famous for,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Maeve Fox, arguing the case for jurors last winter. “They are a violent street gang that commits acts of violence to gain stature and respect. The whole reason Billy Zara is dead is because these defendants acted in a pack.”

The following description of the events of Sept. 25 is based on witness accounts to the grand jury; it should be remembered that defense attorneys were not allowed to challenge them. Also, out of concern for the safety of people who testified before the grand jury, one of whom has since fled in fear of retaliation, the identities of witnesses are being withheld.

According to the grand jury transcripts, that September day started with a celebration. The gang held a barbecue in the afternoon at Camino Real Park in Ventura to commemorate the birthdays of two gang members. One was Ricardo Silva, nicknamed “Mousie,” who was shot in the head and killed during a fight on Bell Way in May 1998.

As night fell, Rosana Olvera, 36, a stocky, dark-haired woman known for her quick temper, invited the group back to her house on East Warner Street to continue the party. Soon, loud music boomed from Olvera’s garage, where revelers drank from a keg of beer. At 9:30 p.m., neighbors called the police.

The two officers who responded knew the address. They had been to the two-story, wood-frame townhome before on disturbing-the-peace calls. According to the transcripts, Olvera was a known gang associate, as was her husband. Her son was a gang member, and her daughter dated one. But when Officers Darrick Brunk and Matthew Liston arrived, they found a quiet house. Olvera, her husband Frank, 33, and a friend, Chris Gonzales, 22, were standing outside.

No, Rosana Olvera told the officers, she was not having a party. But she thought her neighbors were. She pointed across the street at Zara’s apartment.

The officers crossed the street. “Are you here to bust the party?” asked a 16-year-old girl, who sat in the tiny courtyard surrounded by the U-shaped four-plex apartment building.

“What party?” Liston asked.

“The one across the street,” she answered.

Without talking to Zara, Brunk and Liston returned to Rosana Olvera to warn her to keep the music down. “What are you talking about?” she angrily demanded. “I’m not having a party.”

Liston told her he knew better. And in a break from police protocol, Liston told Rosana Olvera the source of his information.

After the officers left, Rosana Olvera stormed across the street and confronted one of Zara’s neighbors. In slurred speech, she demanded to know if he was a “rata.”

“You and your friends should learn to keep your mouth to yourself,” she told him.

Chaos Erupts

The teenage girl, still sitting in the complex’s courtyard, tried to intervene. “Hey, listen,” she said. “There’s no problem here. Everything’s cool. You guys just go back home.”

Rosana Olvera shoved her hard, the transcripts show. The teenager tumbled backward into several trash cans. Rosana Olvera crouched over her and punched the girl repeatedly in the face.

“No, don’t!” the teenager screamed. “Don’t!”

A neighbor ran out to find Rosana Olvera beating his friend, now curled into a fetal position. He jumped in to help her, and Rosana Olvera backed off, for a moment.

Then chaos erupted.

From across the street, 10 to 15 gang members swarmed the tiny courtyard. They jumped the neighbor who came to the girl’s aid. Some held him down while others kicked and punched him. Rosana Olvera hit him with a barbecue grill.

The girlfriend of one of the other apartment residents took a punch in the face, then fell to the ground with a chipped tooth. Someone stood over her and kicked.

Another neighbor tried to run inside to call the police, but couldn’t get past the swinging fists. He was scared. He knew the gang’s reputation. He stumbled into a storage shed attached to one of the apartments, looking for something to defend himself with. He saw a shovel.

But his attackers were too quick. Several followed him inside and dragged him back toward the courtyard. The young man frantically grabbed at the shovel. His fingertips brushed the wooden handle and he inched it toward the palm of his hand until it was in his firm grip. Blows were coming from all sides, but suddenly, the beating stopped. The attackers ran back into the courtyard for reasons he still doesn’t know.

“I want to say it was an act of God,” he told the grand jury.

At the doorway of the shed, he wildly waved the shovel and stepped outside. In front of him, a dozen or so of Ventura Avenue’s more notorious gang members were fighting furiously. Someone ripped the shovel from his hands, prompting the frightened man to run back into the shed. This time, he locked the door behind him.

After being threatened with a knife, another neighbor ran to a nearby laundry room and locked himself inside.

Bill Zara was soft-spoken, known for his love of music and a laid-back attitude toward life. He liked to give friends massages, and he worked the stage at the Ventura Theatre just to hear the groups.

Looking at the commotion outside his apartment, he saw his friends in trouble. He found a bat and stepped out to defend them.

“He’s got a bat!” someone cried.

In an instant, as many as 10 attackers surrounded him. Zara swung, hitting two of his attackers, including gang member Terry Schell, 22, who received a large knot on the back of his head.

But the transcripts show his rescue attempt came to an abrupt end when Frank Olvera, now armed with the shovel, circled around and allegedly slammed Zara in the back of the head. Zara stumbled off the porch and into the crowd, still holding the bat. Someone with a knife began stabbing him on the left side of his body and arm.

Wearing a white hat with a large black band, Benny Lopez Jr., 18, wrestled the bat from Zara and allegedly brought it down on his head.

Zara fell to his knees, stunned but still conscious. Screaming in pain, he struggled to stand.

A friend tried to help, but the mob held him by the arms. He did the only thing he could think of, calling out to Zara.

“Run to me, Bill! Run to me!” he pleaded.

Too Late for Help

Zara managed to stand, and took a step. Two more blows from the shovel knocked him down again. After three or four more swings to the head with the bat, Zara lay motionless.

The punches and kicks continued for several more seconds, before the mob scattered. Tires screeched as the attackers fled into the night.

His friend dropped to his knees next to Zara’s body, now slumped between two porches on a patch of mud. Zara’s thick, black hair was soaked with blood.

Gently, the friend rolled him over. Someone brought out a pillow and placed it under his head. “Bill!” the friend called, searching for a sign of life. At the sound of his name, Zara clenched his hands.

But by the time the ambulance arrived minutes later, Zara’s eyes had rolled up.

In the fields to the east of the apartments, Brunk stopped six people as they ran from Warner Street. Among them were Rosana Olvera, her 16-year-old daughter and Schell.

A day after the attack, Zara was taken off a life-support machine. His father, Sam Zara, donated his son’s organs. “Bill would have wanted it that way,” Sam Zara said. “Bill aided a lot of people in his life. That’s what he was all about.”

At the Ventura Theatre, a message went up on the marquee: Justice for Billy Zara.

In December, the Ventura County Grand Jury indicted seven people on charges of murder and conspiracy: Frank and Rosana Olvera, Schell, Gonzales, Lopez, Mario Jaquez, 19, and Thomas Barrios, 21. A 14-year-old boy was also arrested.

It was a grisly attack, but not atypical for the gang along Ventura Avenue. Gang members have claimed Avenue streets as their turf as far back as the 1960s. Teenagers from poor families, they made the streets their possession.

Today, while there are more than 500 members, only 100 or so are active. But together, the gang accounted for more than a quarter of all gang arrests in the city during the past year.

According to the police who testified before the grand jury, there is a method to executing an attack: Move in quickly, in large numbers, hit hard, and get out. They are long gone before police arrive.

Zara’s death was the eighth homicide in 10 years attributed to the gang and its associates. There was Jesse Conchas, 18, who in 1992 stabbed 16-year-old Jose Lopez Navarro of Oxnard in the back of the neck because he thought the younger man had smashed his car windows a few days earlier.

In 1993, 17-year-old Jerrimi Hampton shot Alfonso “Sammy” Garza Sanchez execution-style in an alley between Vince and Flint streets in Ventura, because Sanchez was cutting in on another drug dealer’s business, according to authorities.

In 1995, Thomas Corral, 29, was sentenced to life in prison for shooting in the stomach his friend Roger Rowland, 23, after learning Rowland was dating his ex-girlfriend.

Police are still looking for the killer of Silva, shot in the head in 1998 as he stood in the driveway of an apartment on Bell Way. Silva was surrounded by about a dozen people at the time, but the case has stalled because witnesses won’t talk.

On the Avenue, you are not supposed to talk to police--even when one of your own is killed. To them, the lowest form of life is the rata--a rat.

“That’s a huge sign of disrespect,” said Cpl. Mark Stadler, a gang investigator who testified during the grand jury hearing, “and something that won’t be tolerated.”

A rata tells police your name, testifies for prosecutors--or calls the police on your loud party.

“These gang members . . . went over to the complex in order to teach their neighbors that it was disrespectful to call the police on their gangster neighbors,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Fox explained to jurors. “In street parlance, the defendants went over to this little complex to kick some ass, and that is exactly what they did.”

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Times Community News reporter Gina Piccalo contributed to this story.