In Seconds, Bullets Shattered Family’s Dream

The bullets brought pain and anguish to a family and a neighborhood.

The bullets ripped into the neck and arms of an 18-year-old college basketball player who must now work harder to make a wheelchair roll than he ever worked to make his jump shot swish.

The bullets linked a 6-year-old child who has never known anything but the safety of the suburbs with a grief-stricken mother, and helped her believe that goodness still exists.

When Cal State Fullerton opens its basketball season at home Wednesday, the basketball player, Rodney Anderson, will be at the game. But not in the game.

That’s because in March, he decided to take advantage of a rare day off from practice and drive to the small, tidy house on 94th Street in South-Central Los Angeles where he grew up.

If the street has seen trouble, if the street can seem mean and dangerous when the sun goes down, there was never anything but warmth and kindness in the Anderson home.

Martha and Joseph Anderson raised Glenda, 36; Joseph, 34; Thressa, 33; Demetriss, 31; and the baby, Rodney, in an atmosphere of respect for authority, for religion, for education and for sports.

On the day Rodney signed his basketball scholarship with Fullerton, Martha cried. “At that moment,” she says, “I thought, ‘We’re OK. Rodney’s getting out.’ ”

Rodney was looking forward to Fullerton’s last regular-season game and then a summer of practice. His dreams were to graduate from college and to play in the National Basketball Assn.

If people wanted to think the NBA was an outrageous dream for a 6-foot-2, 180-pound guard who didn’t even start for a bad team like Fullerton, Rodney didn’t care. Just watch, Rodney told his buddies on 94th Street. Someday, I’ll be buying my mom a new house.

After a hasty dinner, bought from McDonald’s on his way there, Rodney called to his mother that he was going up the street to talk to his buddies.

It was about 6 p.m. and Rodney walked two houses up 94th, then stood on the sidewalk talking with three friends. The conversation was nothing memorable--maybe a little Fullerton basketball, certainly talk of the Lakers. Then, suddenly, a man came up behind Rodney and shot him three times for no apparent reason.

*

Whenever an unfamiliar young man walks past her home, Martha Anderson tracks him with narrowed eyes. She watches until he is out of sight and then she asks Rodney, “Who was that?”

Rodney sits in his wheelchair on the porch and watches the world go by. Martha is with him, reaching over to straighten a towel draped around his thin shoulders and shooing a fly from his leg.

He wears bright white sneakers, neatly pressed sweatpants and a T-shirt. It is late afternoon, about the time his teammates are straggling into Fullerton’s gym, ready to start practice.

The shots that were fired into his back have left Rodney a quadriplegic. He has no use of his legs. Only in the last couple of months has he regained some movement in his biceps and his lower arms.

Last Monday, for the first time since the shooting, Rodney wrote his name and the number 4--his uniform number. On Wednesday, he was able to propel his wheelchair forward a few feet. The effort left him sweating, panting. And smiling.

Rodney weighs barely 140 pounds. Besides damage to his spinal cord, the bullets cost him his spleen and one kidney. His lungs were perforated and his bowels suffered obstructions that, for weeks, left him unable to eat without vomiting.

There were days when he didn’t want to live. Those days were the toughest on Martha, 54, a tall, strong woman who wears a gold necklace that spells out “Rodney.”

“I bought that for my baby,” she says, “but he would never wear it. So I wear it.”

*

Martha and Joseph grew up together near Lubbock, Texas, but more than 30 years ago moved to Los Angeles, where Martha had family. Joseph got a job with the city and Martha got a job with the school district.

For nearly 14 years after Demetriss was born, the couple worked hard to make a living and to keep their children safe.

“But I always wanted another baby,” Martha says. “I wanted another boy. What do you always say to your brother and sisters, Rodney?”

“I always said,” Rodney answers, “that I was the child you really wanted.”

It is the family joke. Because his siblings were mostly grown and gone, Rodney and Martha became so close that they now finish each other’s sentences.

From the time Rodney was 2, Martha says, he played sports. The seasons were determined not by the weather, but by the ball. As he got older, he left football alone. Baseball and basketball were his sports. At Washington High School, Rodney starred in both. Martha was sure he would be a professional baseball player. “The scouts were looking at him,” she says.

But during his senior year at Washington, Rodney told Martha he wanted to go to college and play basketball. Delaware and Northern Arizona recruited him, but when Fullerton came calling, the decision was easy.

“I didn’t want to get on a plane to go to school,” Rodney says. “I wanted my family to come see me.”

And they did. Glenda, Joseph, Thressa, Demetriss and his mom and dad came to every home game and many away games. So did many of Martha’s 14 brothers and sisters and 13 grandchildren and assorted nieces and nephews. Family was Rodney’s lifeblood, and so of course he would go home on a free afternoon.

*

Martha, Joseph and Glenda were all in the living room when they heard the shots. “It wasn’t the first time we’ve heard gunshots on this street,” Martha says. “I jumped up and went to run out. My husband said, ‘Martha, get down.’ I said, ‘My baby’s out there. I’m going out.’ ”

Glenda went out the front door, onto the street. Martha ran out the back door knowing that “Rodney would come up the alley if he was OK.”

But Rodney was lying in the street. Glenda heard someone shout, “Rodney’s down, Rodney’s down,” and from there the evening is a blur, the week is a blur, the month is a blur; all the time between March 2 and now is a blur.

Rodney is paralyzed, and Martha’s voice hardens when she speaks of how her family and neighborhood have been torn apart. She never before considered leaving 94th Street, but now she speaks of wanting to pack up and move back to Texas. “It was always so quiet in Texas,” she says.

But then Martha remembers the devotion of a 6-year-old boy from Orange County.

Aaron Blumenthal, a second-grader from Cypress, has been drawing pictures and mailing them to Rodney nearly every week. Aaron has also been donating most of his weekly allowance to the Rodney Anderson Assistance Fund, which has been set up by Cal State Fullerton.

In March, Aaron’s parents, Richard and Melanie, both pediatricians, read Aaron a story about Rodney’s shooting. They felt Aaron was becoming too interested in guns.

“He was always asking for a water pistol,” Richard says. “He would ask for play guns. The kids at school were always pretending to shoot people. He saw guns on his Nintendo.

“My wife thought we needed to show Aaron that real guns hurt real people.”

Richard and Melanie told Aaron how the bullets from a real gun had hurt a real boy. Aaron asked questions about Rodney and listened carefully. Aaron asked his parents if he could draw Rodney a picture. On a Friday night when the Blumenthals lighted candles as part of their Jewish religious observances, Aaron asked if he could give some of his money to Rodney.

“That little boy,” Martha Anderson says, “he restores my faith in people.”

Rodney and Aaron will meet at Wednesday’s game for the first time. Richard says Aaron can hardly wait. Aaron considers Rodney a hero and, Richard says, Aaron doesn’t ask for water pistols or toy guns anymore.

Ron Kamaka will be at the game too. Kamaka, 37, is an assistant track coach at Fullerton. He is also a quadriplegic, having broken his neck in a body-surfing accident 10 years ago.

Rodney and Kamaka had met only once--”I joked with him that he should try track,” the coach recalls--before Kamaka heard about the shooting and went to the hospital to visit.

“It was hard for them at first to see me,” Kamaka says. “I still think it makes Martha uncomfortable to see me. It’s what she doesn’t want for Rodney.”

Indeed, Martha speaks often of her belief in God and the miracle she is sure he will provide. “I believe,” she says, “that God has plans for Rodney to get out of that chair.”

Every Sunday, Martha and Joseph take Rodney to church, and the pastor tells the congregation to pray for that miracle.

Kamaka doesn’t want to discourage Rodney, but he also wants him to know he can have a life in a wheelchair. “This is not the life I envisioned,” Kamaka says, “but it is a life I’m very happy with now.”

Dr. David Alexander, medical director of rehabilitation services at Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood, is among the many medical professionals who believe that there will be a cure for spinal cord injuries in Rodney’s lifetime. “It is not unrealistic for Rodney to hope to walk again someday,” Alexander says.

*

For now, Martha and Glenda help Rodney negotiate daily life. They get him out of bed, bathe him, dress him, feed him. They transfer him from bed to chair, they wheel him outside to sit in the sun. Some people from Fullerton have built a wheelchair ramp in the frontyard and up to the front porch.

But it is a monumental struggle for Rodney to travel.

The family can’t afford a specially equipped van for the disabled, so Martha and Glenda take Rodney to rehab in his Volkswagen Jetta. The effort of lifting him into the little car, of storing the wheelchair in the trunk, of getting him out of the car and into the chair and then reversing the process to go home is exhausting.

“And it’s dangerous too,” Kamaka says. “These are the things you don’t know about. And to get the least expensive van, one without any bells and whistles, it costs about $40,000.”

That’s where the money in the Rodney Anderson fund will go. For things like a van so Rodney can travel. His basketball scholarship is being held for him, so he hopes to go back to school in the spring. But he needs to be able to get from home to Fullerton, and he can’t do it in the Jetta.

In rehab, Rodney says, he works harder than he ever imagined possible. The effort to do one push-up is more than it ever took to play basketball for 40 minutes. “I know what it is to work hard,” he says. “I will do whatever it takes.”

*

Two months ago, Curtis Vaughn Jackson, 24, of Los Angeles was arrested in connection with the Anderson shooting. He has been charged with three counts of attempted murder.

In testimony at a preliminary hearing Oct. 23, Jackson was presented as a gang member who is known on the street as “Baby Blue Fly” or “Big Blue Fly.”

Rodney isn’t a member of any gang and neither are his friends. But Louie Aguilera, the investigating detective, said he believes that Jackson saw the group of men and assumed they were members of a rival gang.

Rodney remembers that after he was shot, the gunman stood over him and said something like: “Sorry, I shot the wrong guy.” Rodney even remembers the shooter asking if there was anything he could do.

“I asked him to go tell my mother,” Rodney says, “but I don’t think he understood me. He just ran off.”

Martha says that all her son’s life, “the gangbangers left Rodney alone because they knew he was an athlete. Even the gangbangers respected Rodney. I had truly believed, with all my heart, that Rodney was the last person something like this would have ever happened to.”

If she ever speaks to her son’s assailant, Martha says, she will ask him to look at Rodney, to see his daily life, to look at the Anderson family, to stand on 94th Street.

“I’d ask him to take a long look at how many people he hurt, at all the damage he has done,” she says.

Yet for all the hurt, the Andersons have reason to hope for the future, and Wednesday will be a time they can embrace some of the people--a certain 6-year-old included--who have helped them through a most difficult time.

Says Martha: “There are still good people in the world.”