Death Defeats a Life of Precautions

Gregory Gabriel’s parents did everything they could to keep him safe.

They put him in private school. They kept him indoors. And to make extra sure their gregarious 12-year-old stayed out of danger, they enforced strict rules. Among them, a ban on sleepovers. With anyone. Ever.

Except once.

This weekend, Gregorio Gabriel, the boy’s father, bent the rules -- just a little. And Sunday morning, he sat hunched in his den in South Los Angeles, staring red-eyed at the floor, going over that decision, again and again.

“Just this one time, just this one time ... ,” he kept repeating, “the one time I gave him a break.”

Gregory Gabriel was pronounced dead of a gunshot wound at Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital shortly after 1 a.m. Sunday.

Los Angeles Police Department detectives said Gregory sneaked out with friends during a sleepover Saturday night to go to a party and was caught in the cross-fire of an indiscriminate shooting that left two others, a 13-year-old girl and a 26-year-old man, in critical condition. Police did not identify the injured pending notification of relatives.

In an interview a few hours after Gregory’s death, his parents recounted how they went to what, in most neighborhoods, might seem extreme lengths to protect their son, and how those efforts ultimately proved futile.

Their account underscores a predicament faced by vast numbers of parents in Los Angeles’ high crime areas -- particularly parents of young black males, by far the most likely people to die from gunfire. Gregory was entering the high-risk age for murder, according to national and local statistics.

Gregory’s parents, Gregorio Gabriel, a mechanic, and Ella Crawford, a visiting home-health nurse, both immigrants from Belize, hoped their son would go to college. And Gabriel wanted to instill in Gregory the same discipline and industriousness he had learned in his tiny village back in Belize.

But living in South L.A., “I saw this problem,” he said: Frequent gang shootings were ravaging the ranks of the neighborhood’s black, adolescent boys.

So from the beginning, the couple set out to make sure Gregory would beat the odds.

Because Gregory’s older sister and brother were grown, and “there was no one to look out for him,” they pulled Gregory out of public school, his mother said, and enrolled him at St. Cecilia Catholic School, where he was a seventh-grader.

Because they did not want him home alone, they put Gregory into an after-school program where UCLA students offered tutoring and help with homework. Sometimes Crawford took Gregory with her on her rounds, so as not to leave him in the house for even an hour.

Gregory was virtually forbidden from going into the street and nearly always kept indoors, they said. His friends had to come visit him at his house.

When he pleaded to go outside in front, his mother made him stay within her view. When he got a motorized scooter, his father allowed Gregory to ride it only on a short stretch of sidewalk in front of the house as Gabriel watched from the front gate.

Gregory was a sociable, restless, computer-savvy boy -- “a busybody,” his father said, who did chores for neighbors and loved to assemble things. Keeping him under such strict confinement wasn’t easy.

So Gabriel engaged his son in a variety of projects around the home. He taught his son to fix the car and enlisted his help building a garage. “I would keep him with me all day long,” said Gabriel, who works nights.

There was one more rule: Gabriel said he “didn’t believe in sleepovers,” and until this weekend, he had never allowed Gregory to spend a single night outside their home with anyone but a relative.

But later on, circumstances seemed to favor an exception. Gregory was eager to stay with a close friend, age 14. Gregory’s parents knew the friend and his parents, and the couple had planned to go to a Valentine’s dance that night.

Gregory’s mother had a long discussion with the 14-year-old’s mother, and “felt comfortable” letting her son sleep over.

Just this once, thought his father. “Then, I will put a check on it.”

When the couple got home from their dance, the phone rang. It was the police.

Detectives Sunday were still trying to piece together the details of the shooting. According to Crawford, the 16-year-old brother of Gregory’s friend had gotten a flier for a party at the Western Club, in the 5700 block of Western Avenue, and the three boys sneaked out to attend the event.

Bouncers there turned them away, said LAPD Det. Rudy Lemos. They looked too young. Around that time, he said, bouncers had also turned away a slender young man.

Police believe that young man may then have gotten into an argument. The man retreated to a nearby corner, then turned and fired at least 17 rounds into the crowd from a semiautomatic handgun, Lemos said.

Gregory and the two other victims were near a line of people awaiting entry to the club. All three were struck in the upper torso, Lemos said. “They were not the intended targets,” he said.

Gregory’s mother was also trying to piece together accounts from her son’s companions, neither of whom was struck. She said the boys had tried to run for cover when the shots rang out; her son was hit as he reached the door of the club.

When she met with her son’s young friend, the guilt-ridden boy threw his arms around her, she said.

“ ‘I wish that bullet had hit me instead,’ ” she said he told her. “ ‘I am so, so sorry.’ ”

Police are seeking information on the gunman and ask anyone with clues to call (213) 485-1385.