Searching for Hope at a Place of Horror

Just down the highway from Disneyland is an outdoor mall called the Block, which was built to resemble the towns we used to know.

It was here in the imitation city that two girls, 13 and 15, rendezvoused with their boyfriends, 16 and 17, on the night of July 2. It’s a flirtation played out nightly by hundreds of teens. But on that occasion, the four continued on to a remote but well-known hangout called Black Star Canyon in the hills east of Orange, where five teenagers attacked them for kicks.

The five, who range in age from 15 to 19, run with a crew in Anaheim, according to authorities. They allegedly beat the boys with a rock and metal rod and gang-raped the girls. When they were done, they allegedly drove the girls to an even more isolated area and dumped them naked out of the car.

The other night, I began the evening at the Block and ended it at the scene of the crime. It was a journey from a spirit-sapping temple of conformity, chaperoned by bright lights, to the edge of civilization, where animals roam wild and the sprawl dips into blackness.

I was looking for something; I don’t even know what.

The attack, which reads like a war crime, was sickening enough. But there was something just as repugnant in the jailhouse confession two of the suspects made to a Times reporter. Though they expressed remorse, there was an almost casual tone of detachment. Yeah, hey, we got high and it happened. Sorry.

“It all seemed like a fantasy--not a fantasy, just a dream,” said 19-year-old Erick Oswaldo Dominguez. While he was raping the 13-year-old, he said, she begged him not to kill her. After they dumped the girls, he told his friends: “I can’t believe we just did that. Keep your mouths shut and act like nothing happened.”

But in fact they wanted credit, not anonymity. One of them allegedly went back and tagged the gang’s emblem on a fence, the way an animal lifts a leg to mark what’s his. That’s how they were caught.

“Kids today are desensitized by all the violence they see,” said Sheridan Ball, 51, who was strolling the Block with Kathy Haines. She has two teenage sons and worries, as every parent does, when they leave the house. Ball said the rape suspects “didn’t seem to understand the gravity of their crimes. Kids keep looking for bigger and bigger thrills, and you wonder where it’s going to end.”

Jose Ambriz and Jose Ramirez, both 18, were cruising the Block on the lookout for young ladies. They wore Elvis hair, big looping pocket chains, and tight black T-shirts with the names of social clubs they belong to.

“There’s a lot of peer pressure to get with a girl,” said Ambriz. Some guys won’t leave the mall until they get a girl to leave with them, said the two Joses--or at the very least, a phone number. The game can get ugly, Ramirez said, if you add drugs and booze to the equation.

“It’s kind of scary,” said Vanessa, 15. She and three friends, two of them 14 and one 15, said they won’t give a phone number to any guy. “If you like him, you ask for his number and try to get to know him first. You have to have morals and self-respect.”

The drive from the mall to the canyon takes you past the low-burning lights of a million homes. There’s a sense of order in the neat grids of tree-lined streets, a sense of protection behind the fences of new developments that climb the hills. But you wonder about the breakdowns behind those walls, and you wonder how many parents know who their children are, let alone where they are.

The families of the three minors charged in the assault made claims with familiar-sounding rings. They were good kids who’d merely fallen in with the wrong crowd. One mother, a Vietnamese immigrant, showed a reporter a wall of academic awards won by her son, including a certificate from the president. She was careful with her boy, she said. But there’s something out there, and it came for him, trampling ethnic borders and parental will.

The lights fall away gradually heading into the hills, the road rises and falls, and finally the canyon swallows you.

Kids party at Black Star Canyon. They make out. Legend has it the place is haunted, and that animals are sacrificed here. It is the last place you would want your 13- and 15-year-old daughters coming at night with their older boyfriends.

In the deep, spooky silence where a girl begged for her life and four teens were terrorized, there’s broken glass on the ground, and the sight of it brings a shiver. The gang had begun their fun by smashing the car the two young couples arrived in.

Tonight, there’s no one here. Alone with the stars and the mystery of this madness, I blame parents, the culture, the media. First and foremost, I blame the gang of five. But there’s no satisfaction in any of it.

I wander back up the road and drive farther into the hills. Around a bend, halfway to nothing, I see a light, and before me is a church.

Calvary Chapel of the Canyons rises up out of nowhere, as if to catch you before you sink into total darkness. Inside, I meet a man of 40 who partied as a teen, dealt drugs, hated his parents, ran from the police. Larry DiSimone is his name, and he is the pastor.

What saved him, DiSimone says, was the idea that Jesus died for his sins. But there are no sins today, he says. No boundaries. No right and wrong. Thirteen-year-olds date, sex and violence dominate pop culture, nothing shocks.

“There’s been an erosion of an authoritarian base,” Pastor Larry says.

We talk until nearly midnight, and he is filled with faith and hope. When I leave, he says he’s going to lead his congregation down to the scene of the crime, and together they’ll pray.

Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com