A New Kind of ER

When Michael Baca worked in the emergency room of St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, there was one type of wound he could not get used to seeing. Bullet holes in young men.

So, after five years on the trauma team assisting doctors, Baca helped the hospital open a new, unusual ER--the Earn Respect gang intervention program.

“These kids used to come rolling in here like they were frequent fliers,” said Baca, who turned in his stethoscope to be the program’s coordinator. “I wanted to develop a program for these kids who came in here shot--to give them a second chance.”

In nearly two years, the program has recruited 53 gang members, ages 17 to 25, from the emergency room and the streets and placed them in a classroom at St. Francis. Three classes of young men have traded gang attire for modest gray uniforms and hospital identification badges.

Four days a week they study a variety of topics, including computers, cultural awareness, history and government and even CPR at no charge. Those who never finished the 12th grade can work on receiving their high school equivalency diplomas. Other free benefits include counseling, van rides to and from class, dinners in the hospital cafeteria and tattoo removal.

After five months, participants are eligible for 16-week paid internships at the hospital, doing jobs such as answering phones and assisting hospital staff members. After that, Baca and 12 full- or part-time staff members help them find jobs ranging from office assistant to gas station attendant.

Besides its unusual hospital setting, the program differs from many such efforts in concentrating on young people who are active gang members. Other area programs try to reach youths before they join gangs or seek to help them once they decide they want to break away. Earn Respect often grabs them while they are still bleeding.

Several gang or crime experts said they were unfamiliar with other hospital-based programs offering as comprehensive an alternative to gang life as Earn Respect.

There have been similar attempts, but this is “a fairly elaborate and exhaustive effort,” said James Allen Fox, professor of criminology at Northeastern University in Boston.

In Lynwood, a roughly five-square-mile city about 10 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, the county Sheriff’s Department has identified 20 gangs as criminally active.

This year, at least six of the nine gang homicide cases investigated by the department’s Century Station occurred in Lynwood, said Sheriff’s Det. Dana Ellison.

There were 10 gang-related slayings in Lynwood during all of last year, said Ellison, who works in the night gang unit at the station, which covers an area including Willowbrook, Athens, Walnut Park and parts of Florence.

Already this year, about 300 gang members have been referred to Earn Respect by parents, officers, hospital staff members and others. For now, the program can handle only 21, up from 16 in each of the two previous classes.

Still, the 30-year-old Baca, a former paramedic, spends two or three nights a week cruising Lynwood streets such as Long Beach Boulevard, where drug sales, loitering youths and gang shootings are common. He makes frequent stops in his white van to talk with young gangbangers. Though he never joined a gang while growing up in East Los Angeles, he knows Lynwood’s gangs, their members and often their families. And they know him.

If Baca cannot persuade them to join the program right away, there’s a chance that, as in Jimmy Aguilera’s case, he will catch them after they wake up in the hospital’s trauma ward.

Aguilera, who said his family has been involved in gang life for three generations, recalled that, at one time, “all I knew was gangbanging.” He met Baca when he went to the hospital in 1999 with a concussion after being shot three times. He graduated from the program last year and now has a job moving patients between departments in the hospital.

“I always wanted to live a normal life,” said Aguilera, 22, who left gangbanging in East L.A. to raise a child with his girlfriend in Lynwood. “I found that in this program. I’m working, I’m paying bills, and I can do it without dope money.”

For 19-year-old Trayvon Jeffers, the program “opened my eyes to see you can get the best out of life.”

Jeffers said he started gangbanging at age 11 and spent his days mostly selling drugs or robbing people. He learned about the program while recovering from a gunshot wound.

He completed the program last year and is studying for his high school equivalency diploma so that he can pursue law school.

The program’s ability to wrench young men from the clutches of gangs is in part due to the hospital’s owners, the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. The nonprofit Catholic charity has given the program $394,000 over the last two years and plans to provide future funding, said Sister Arthur Gordon, the group’s health and social ministries counselor and a member of Earn Respect’s advisory board. The program is doing what some health professionals have been considering for years.

“In hospitals, I think we have a tremendous opportunity that we’re not taking advantage of,” said Billie Weiss, program director for the county Department of Health Services’ Injury and Violence Prevention Program. “It’s what many of us have talked about. . . . In general, there hasn’t been funding.”

Armando Morales, a UCLA professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences who has treated violent gang members for 47 years, said hospital access to gang members is a “window of opportunity” that comes when they experience a brush with death.

“This program could be multiplied 100 times or more to meet the needs of L.A. County,” he said.

Baca said he met with city officials early on to inform them and garner support. Since then, the city has given only moral support, he said. He hopes soon to make a presentation to the City Council with sheriff’s deputies, parents and former gang members to “show them that this needs to be addressed.”

Lynwood Mayor Paul H. Richards II and other city officials did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

Lt. Mike Herek, liaison between Lynwood and the Sheriff’s Department, said the city has traditionally sought grants for youth education and gang prevention programs. The city may work with Baca in some capacity, he said.

“We’re trying to address, now, aggressively, the gang problem,” Herek said. “Intervention is very hard to take on. We’re letting the private entities take the lead so we can see how it goes.”

Fox sees little alternative to allocating the resources necessary for effective anti-gang programs.

“The choice is to pay for the programs now or pray for the victims later,” he said.

The real test is crime reduction, how many youths stay in the program, and “how long does the student stay out of trouble,” he said.

Baca said that of the 53 gang members who have entered the program so far, 15 have dropped out.

But those who are hanging on say this chance to change their lives is a blessing.

“It’s like going from hell to heaven,” Jeffers said. “All we need is a chance.”