In Remembering Victim, Mourners Vow to Seek Peace

One by one family and friends hoisted a shovel Saturday and tossed in fresh earth, burying the roots of the coral tree. A photo of the 30-year-old woman they were honoring sat under teardrop-shaped leaves the size of an outstretched hand.

Less than seven days after Maria Isabel Villalvazo was shot at her home trying to save her father, about 200 residents, police officers and politicians gathered Saturday. In this South Los Angeles community, houses sit behind iron bars that can’t protect residents from gang violence.

Early last Sunday morning Villalvazo was caught in gang cross-fire outside her home. The night before, a 19-year-old was killed just a few blocks away. Los Angeles Police Det. Sgt. J.D. Furr has called the area south of Vernon Avenue a hotbed of gang-related shootings. According to LAPD figures released last week, there have been 24 homicides since July 24, compared with 15 in the same period last year.

Councilwoman Jan Perry, who represents the area, and LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks spoke about the woman whose death had inspired this “Stop the Violence” event and offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to her killer. The event was part of a growing effort by police to “show gangs and predators that they don’t control the area,” said Capt. Reginald Maeweather of the Newton Division.

“This is a time of sadness,” Villalvazo’s husband, Ricardo, told the crowd through a translator, “but we’ll make something positive out of this.”

Other family members--too emotional to cross the street to Fred Roberts Park, where the tree was planted--watched from the mint-green home where Villalvazo was killed trying to get her father off the porch. Inside the house, the hole left by the fatal bullet sits by the phone that Ricardo Villalvazo used to call 911 that night.

“I used to tell my sister, ‘You need to move out of here for your daughter,’ ” said Villalvazo’s brother, Gino Murrieta, 33. “She’d say, ‘But everyone knows us and, besides, we grew up with the gang members and they won’t hurt us.’ ”

In an area where some houses are boarded up and abandoned, with faded paint flaking off, Villalvazo’s determination to live here endeared her to neighbors. Residents like 70-year-old Howard Carter, who was awakened that night by a dozen gunshots, thought “enough is enough” and organized the rally.

“I was not going to let this go,” Carter said. “Maria’s husband, who doesn’t even speak English, said to me, ‘You’ll be my friend for life.’ ”

Chief Parks called the shooting the “type of tragedy that can paralyze a community.”

Before rejoining his mourning family at the home, Murrieta begged those who knew anything about the slaying to come forward: “I do not want to see another parent, brother or sister go through what I’ve been through. We’ve known these gang members since they were born. . . . It’s sick seeing neighbor against neighbor.”

Anyone with information on the shooting is asked to call detectives at the Newton Street Station at (323) 846-6556 during business hours or (323) 846-6547 at other times.