Ominous Turn for the Family Mendiola

The passion that seems equal parts anger, frustration and fear come spilling out of Alicia Mendiola as she sits at the family dining room table. She’s been in the caldron before -- too many times over the last 16 years, she now concedes -- and hasn’t flinched from the fire. But this is different. Now, she’s talking about her sons and murder.

She needs help but isn’t sure where to get it. She wants answers but doesn’t know who has them. She’s angry but knows this is a time when getting mad may not be enough.

“I have to do something,” she says, intently. “I have to go there and investigate. With the camera. We will go, take pictures, go every place and we will do a real investigation. Not just one-sided. Everything is so one-sided.”

On paper, those thoughts sound like someone in the throes of self-delusion. But Mendiola is so earnest while spitting out the words that the idea doesn’t sound crazy. Maybe she and family members will go to Idaho and start looking for information.

But make no mistake: Desperation is setting in.

Mendiola is the matriarch of a Lake Forest family that includes her husband, Edgardo, and nine grown children. It is not an anonymous family. To the contrary, the Mendiolas are the stuff of local legend because of the athletic exploits of the children (particularly an all-star hoopster daughter now in college) and an ongoing reputation as a tight, spirited but sometimes in-your-face family.

Others wince, but the family chuckles over the “Mendiola Rule” invoked several years ago at El Toro High School sporting events to monitor behavior. It sprang from the family’s highly “active” patronage at the games. “You go to a game, you have to cheer,” Alicia Mendiola says, wryly. “You cannot play dead.”

As with all legends, separating fact from fiction about the Mendiolas isn’t easy.

But the latest development isn’t fable.

This week, two of the Mendiola sons will be extradited to Idaho to join a third already in custody. All three are charged in the slaying of an alleged drug dealer. Giovanni Mendiola, 32, is charged with murder; brothers Eddie, 33, and Pierro, 31, are charged with kidnapping and conspiracy to commit murder.

Alicia Mendiola, hardened by battles over the years with school officials and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department -- the family has sued both -- is wary about her sons’ fates in the judicial system.

She believes her sons are being set up in a drug scenario gone bad but can’t afford legal help. “We have no money,” Mendiola says. “Money talks. Money gives you power.”

She hopes a high-powered attorney will take the case pro bono. She’s convinced the case against her sons is weak and that the attorney would make a name for himself or herself.

So far, she’s had no luck.

Media reports have made the boys look bad, she says. Worse, they have no one they can trust in Idaho. “We figure we have to get an attorney up there, but we’re not getting anywhere,” Mendiola says. “How can my children get a fair trial? I’m scared to death.”

She hasn’t yet spoken in person, in detail, to her sons about the charges. Asked if she thinks they could have been involved in the killing, she says, “Impossible. For me [to believe], impossible.”

Because the family has ruffled feathers in Lake Forest (it claims, among other things, that some sheriff’s deputies have conducted petty harassment against family members for years) Mendiola says she knows some people are saying about the boys, “We were right.”

She’ll have the final say. All the family’s exploits and travails, she says, will go into a book she’s writing. And then ... “it will become a movie,” she says, “I hope with a good ending.”

*

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at

The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.