Gang Violence Returns to Rattle Venice’s Oakwood Area

A recent wave of gang violence in Venice and on its borders has left three men dead and the eclectic beach-side community once more grappling with the future of its troubled Oakwood neighborhood.

Melvyn Hayward, director of Venice’s Vera Davis McClendon Community Center, said the killings and three other shootings in the last two weeks have residents on edge after months of relative calm. “At nighttime, when you come down here, you see nobody out on the streets,” he said.

But like other residents in Oakwood’s 40-block area east of Main Street, Hayward is ambivalent about discussing the violence, which flared again on Friday. He’d rather talk about his center’s new computer classes for developmentally challenged adults.

He and other Oakwood residents say they want safe streets and are tired of their community making headlines mainly through the gangbangers.

At the same time, however, many longtime, low-income residents already feel under a different kind of siege from ongoing gentrification, which is raising their rents and, some contend, making them feel unwelcome.

Venice suffered through gang wars in 1994 and 1997, but violence was down over the last few years, police said. There were six homicides in Oakwood in 1998 and two in each of the two following years, according to the LAPD.

The recent violence led authorities to step up patrols in the ethnically diverse neighborhood--which includes small houses with neat yards owned by the same families for generations, artist studios, subsidized housing complexes and newly remodeled bungalows with skylights and high fences.

“My thinking is most of the shootings appear to be gang-related and appear to be a feud between our two local gangs,” said LAPD Pacific Division Capt. Gary Williams, referring to a two-decade rivalry between Culver City and Venice gangs.

But he added, “To stop [the shootings] altogether, we’d have to put police officers on every street corner coming into Oakwood and every street coming out. We can’t do that.”

Williams would not discuss possible motives for the three killings and three other shootings. No arrests have been made in any of the incidents, four of which took place in Oakwood. Another was just outside the neighborhood but near Venice High School and the other was nearby in Culver City.

The most recent took place about 1 a.m. Friday, at Broadway Avenue and 6th Street in Oakwood, leaving an unidentified 28-year-old Venice man in critical condition at a local hospital, police said. Witnesses said three suspects fled on foot. Detectives said they were unsure of the motive, but would not rule out a connection to last week’s shootings. Sgt. Ruben Lopez of the Pacific Division’s anti-gang detail said that his unit is working closely with the Culver City Police Department to solve the homicides and that both departments have deployed extra officers.

Oakwood resident Sal Salas, 18, said he stayed away from gangs but has firsthand experience of the tension between the Culver City and Venice gangs. He grew up in Culver City and moved to Oakwood when he was in high school.

“The guys used to give me a hard time because they knew where I was from, but then I got to know them and it chilled out,” he said.

Since the recent shootings, Salas is careful to be out on the street as little as possible. He shuttles quickly between classes at El Camino College and work at a local cafe among the flourishing antique stores on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, only blocks from the shootings.

The outbreak took many residents by surprise.

“We don’t understand, it was so quiet here for so long,” said third-generation Oakwood resident Laddie Williams.

On Jan. 28, a 15-year-old boy was shot seven times near his home in Oakwood. The next day, a 25-year-old Venice man was shot in the back several blocks away. Both victims survived and have been released from hospitals. Police have declined to identify them, citing security fears.

The violence escalated Jan. 31, when men in a black Datsun 280Z shot to death 19-year-old Francisco Herrera of Huntington Park as he drove past Venice High School just as classes were ending.

The next day, Oakwood resident Charles Tizeno, 48, was killed in still another drive-by shooting half a block south of Lincoln Boulevard, across the street from Broadway Elementary School. On the same night, in what police believe to be a related incident, Culver City resident Eric Baiz, 25, was shot and killed as he was walking down Keystone Avenue near Overland Avenue.

This week, family and friends left fresh flowers and candles at the site where Tizeno, a janitor at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, was killed. A card, left at the base of a telephone pole read, “We love you Daddy.”

LAPD homicide Det. Mike Depasquale expressed frustration that Tizeno’s killing occurred during rush hour on a major thoroughfare but that investigators have been unable to locate witnesses. Residents say they are often afraid to help the police in fear of retaliation from gangs.

Oakwood anti-crime activist James Richards, 55, was shot to death in October just outside his home in what many thought was a retribution for his high-profile anti-gang activities. No arrests have been made in that case.

The shootings are but one of the hardships Oakwood residents face, said Ola Mitchell, in front of the bungalow where she has lived for 40 years, just a few blocks from one of the recent shootings.

She criticized a new city inspection program to clean up the neighborhood, which fines those who don’t paint their homes or cut their grass. She said the effort ignores violations by the neighborhood’s newer, more affluent residents, such as having high fences and overgrown, naturally landscaped, gardens.

Gang Injunctions, More Police Presence

“We’re being attacked on every level,” Mitchell said. “People are being murdered, property owners told to fix up properties. But the city is not doing its part,” she said, pointing to a nearby unpaved alley.

Mike Bonin, deputy chief of staff for Los Angeles City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, whose district includes Venice, said the city is trying to improve the quality of life in Oakwood. He said the code violations crackdown is part of an effort to change any perception that Oakwood tolerates drugs and violence.

Bonin noted efforts to increase the police presence in the neighborhood. And he spoke of court-ordered injunctions issued in the last two years that make it illegal for known members of three area gangs to congregate in public spaces.

In response to the recent shootings, Bonin said, Galanter is working with the city attorney’s office to update and expand those injunctions, which affect people who were identified as gang members as of 1997.

Even amid the trouble, Oakwood residents are unwilling to surrender their neighborhood. After hearing the police sirens racing to a shooting scene last week, Phyllis Des Verney said she went outside to her front stoop and began playing her flute in the evening air.

“I believe music can change things,” she said. “So I was out there just trying to put some positive mood on the situation.”