Preacher Trades Guns for God

While shedding the bonds of gang life can be tough, there are those who manage to break free. For good. Victory Outreach Assistant Pastor Gilbert Neri is one of them.

The 29-year-old aspiring evangelist was a hard-core street thug from Oxnard as a teenager. But before his 20th birthday, Neri said, God called to him, and he never looked back.

He embraced religion and made it his passion to walk the streets where he used to sell drugs and brawl with rivals. He now urges others to follow in his footsteps.

Neri credits his religious convictions for allowing him to make it out alive. His decision to go from gun-toting gangster to evangelist stunned his friends into silence. No one threatened him. Nobody tried to kill him. No one harmed his family. They just looked at him and shook their heads.

“It trips them out to see me doing what I’m doing,” Neri said of his former street colleagues. “But I guess it gives them hope that I’m still here. And I always tell them, ‘Hey, man, when you’re ready, I got a seat for you, too.’ ”

Neri’s wake-up call came in the form of a shotgun.

During a drunken fistfight in front of a rival’s home, someone pulled out the firearm. With the barrel shoved against his stomach, Neri thought there was nothing more to do but wait for the inevitable blast.

So this is it, he thought. I lived the life of a gangster. Now, I’ll die a gangster’s death.

But the blast never came. The parents of the would-be gunman caught their son in the act and pried the weapon from his hands. It was a lucky break, though Neri didn’t realize that until the next morning, when sobriety took hold. Then he shivered.

“It struck me real bad,” Neri said. “I started thinking, I could be dead right now. And for what? I didn’t even know that guy.”

That was 11 years ago, when Neri felt most comfortable in a baggy pair of jeans with a .25-caliber handgun tucked into his waistband. It’s a drastically different image from the Neri of today, dressed in neatly pressed pants and horned-rim glasses, with a Bible in his hands.

He knows he is one of the lucky ones. He survived nine years of the gang life before joining the church, where he takes classes to become licensed in the ministry. Meanwhile, he works at the church, using the lessons of his past to help pull others out of gangs. He knows their struggle because he lived it. And that earns him their respect.

“I feel like that’s why I’m here,” Neri says of his work. “I mean, why wasn’t I shot that night? Why didn’t I ever end up in prison or addicted to drugs? Because I had to live through it. I had to experience it all so I could do this. I understand because I was one of them.”

An Escape From Troubled Home Life

Even as a small boy, Neri remembers aching to be on the streets. He wasn’t anxious to be a gang member, but he wanted an escape from life at home, where his single mother supported the family, and her own drug habit, by dealing heroin and cocaine.

He watched as his mother became hopelessly addicted to the drugs she sold. He was there the night her boyfriend overdosed, and he became accustomed to police raiding his home. Area prostitutes streamed in and out of his house with such regularity that they all knew him by name.

“I despised it all,” Neri said. “Those things drove me out of the house. I wanted to be gone, out on the streets as long as I could.”

That was an ideal situation for the gang lifestyle, already being enjoyed by several cousins also living in the Colonia barrio. He slipped almost seamlessly into the gang, at first just hanging out at their parties, then rolling with them to fights with rivals, then actively taking part in the clashes and shootings.

“Pretty soon, you have to be in it because you’ve done damage to people,” Neri said. “And they want to do damage to you.”

He drifted in and out of juvenile hall for fights and drug use. By the age of 18, he had a tough reputation and was more than willing to live up to it. Which was why he cared so little when a stranger pulled a shotgun on him, at least until the next morning.

And when a few months later he narrowly escaped a sentence of 15 years to life for kidnapping, assault and car theft because his victim refused to cooperate with police, he was hungry for change.

His pregnant girlfriend took him to Oxnard’s Victory Outreach, a church where elders and parishioners are former gang members, drug addicts or anyone with a past. And something clicked.

It wasn’t easy telling his old crowd about his new life. He expected to be shunned. He expected their mockery. “I don’t know if people don’t want you to do better,” Neri said. “They just don’t want to be left alone.”

Still, he shared his message with them. And they were incredulous. “Church?” they asked. But Neri also felt they respected his decision, understanding the need for something to fill the emptiness they had all grappled with for most of their lives.

Neri took on new role models, men like Art Blajos, a former high-ranking member of the Mexican Mafia--the infamous gang that demands murder to get in and a member’s own death to get out.

During a stint in prison for heroin possession, Blajos was put in a cell next to an enemy, one he promised to kill before their sentences were served. But it never happened; instead, the man introduced Blajos to religion and convinced him to seek out the Victory Outreach church.

Now, like Neri, he shares the story of his life from church pulpits, juvenile hall classrooms and anywhere else he can find an audience. He has even written a book, “Blood In, Blood Out,” after the Mexican Mafia’s motto. The book was turned into a movie starring Edward James Olmos.

Blajos now occasionally works with Neri, who at 29 is still a fixture in the streets where he grew up. As a married assistant pastor at Victory Outreach, he leads church members across the alleyways and sidewalks where the younger brothers, cousins and children of his former associates still roam.

On a recent walk, they chatted with the mother of a former childhood friend who is now serving a life sentence for murder. They passed a corner where a 22-year-old cousin of Neri’s was fatally shot. And Neri stopped to talk to an old friend about the friend’s recent drunk-driving arrest.

It’s only in these moments that there are glimpses of the old Neri, who reverts back to the street slang of his adolescence.

“Hey, man, check it out, check it out,” he says while handing a flier to an old neighborhood buddy. He hopes the guest speaker he has lined up, Blajos, will draw in a few new faces. Some still seemed surprised when they read Neri’s invitation to a church service.

“Yeah, OK,” most would say after an awkward pause. “I’ll try to make it.” Neri knows it’s probably an empty promise. Most won’t show. But maybe one or two will. If not this Friday night, then a Friday night in the future.

“Sometimes this neighborhood can seem not just like an environment,” Neri said. “It’s your bondage. And I want them to know that when they’re ready, there are hands here to help them out.”