Coming back from a big loss

ONE January evening a pair of football players from Gardena High School waited outside an apartment building in South Los Angeles for friends to join them. They were part of a three-car caravan of teammates idling impatiently at the curb.

“Varsity Blues,” a film about small-town football heroes, had just opened and the Gardena athletes were eager to get to the show and hang out together.

Horns honked. Some of the guys kept ringing an apartment buzzer. Another made cellphone calls to prod their dawdling friends to hurry. The entire caravan did a sudden, tire-squealing U-turn near the apartment building’s frontdoor.

Their commotion drew attention. There was no way for neighbors to know that the kids in those three cars were a good-humored bunch of student-athletes.

And the kids from Gardena, inadvertently appearing to be a rowdy gang of outsiders, had no way of knowing they were being seen as unwelcome intruders -- or that they were double-parked in a violent gang war zone.

Brandon Pettway, in the passenger seat of the 1982 Oldsmobile Cutlass, casually held the handgrip above his door. He didn’t see the white car approaching. He didn’t see the three men inside. He didn’t see the weapon.

The explosion came out of nowhere -- rapid blasts of gunfire, shattering glass, smoke, bits of upholstery. The air reeked of gunpowder. Jeffrey Gardner Jr., sitting behind the wheel, may have shielded Pettway from some of that first burst of flying debris.

Gardner, the high school quarterback, had always been important to Pettway. They were best friends, brothers almost, who often checked in to see what the other was wearing to school, and routinely joined each other’s family functions.

On the football field, Gardner and Pettway were something special too. They teamed as passer and receiver to take their underdog Panthers to the playoffs. Gardner’s uniform was No. 3, Pettway wore No. 4.

Next season held even greater promise. They talked of a City Section championship, and beyond -- of big-time college games and even big-money pro careers. Or, if that didn’t work out, Gardner might become a policeman. Pettway favored dentistry. “We had dreams of doing something bigger,” he said.

Of course, everything was possible then. It was 1999, and they were only 16.

Amid the noise and confusion of the sudden barrage of gunfire, Pettway felt a sharp pain in his arm. He was bleeding. A bullet fragment was snagged on his sleeve. The slug had torn through one side of his forearm and come out the other. It was still steaming.

“Coco!” he cried, using Gardner’s nickname. “I’ve been shot.” But the other boy said nothing.

Two hours later at King/Drew Medical Center, Jeffrey “Coco” Gardner Jr. was declared dead.

Eight years later, Gardner’s family clings desperately to his memory. His bedroom in a modest single-story house on a Gardena cul-de-sac remains a shrine to their son’s sports and academic achievements -- his trophies, certificates and memorabilia, much as he left it.

His parents share a fear that they might be starting to forget. “I fight with myself to remember the little things that we did, the things he would say,” his father says.

Lead homicide Det. Mary Bice, now retired from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, is haunted by the unsolved murder case. It still ranks among her most heartbreaking investigations.

And a grown-up Brandon Pettway is back home in Gardena, where he still feels the pain of that distant night. But he also hopes he has found a way to make his loss “a steppingstone to something” meaningful.

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EVEN though Gardner’s killing had the signature of hundreds of other unsolved, gang-related killings in South Los Angeles -- notably, another a young black victim -- it didn’t take the homicide team long to discover this one was different.

Recalling the crime scene years later, Bice said:

“When we got there, these kids are sitting there with injuries, they’re devastated ... saying, ‘We weren’t doing anything.’ ”

Gardner and his friends were clearly out of their element; it also was obvious to the detective that they were not gang members.

“When you work in this business you know when kids are involved in gangs,” Bice said in a recent interview.

Jeffrey Sr. and Chanita Gardner arrived at the scene 30 minutes after the shooting. An ambulance already had rushed their mortally wounded son to the hospital. The chassis of the family’s Cutlass told the parents more than they wanted to know about how badly their boy was probably hurt. It was riddled with bullet holes.

Bice and her partner worked through the night gathering evidence -- finding shell casings indicating that two guns were used -- and checking the neighborhood for witnesses. There were none.

The next day, they met with the devastated Gardner family. Bice, then the only mother in the homicide detectives unit, always struggled when one of her cases involved a young person. Years later, she still remembers how anguished she was for the Gardners that afternoon.

To Bice, their sorrow seemed compounded by the timing. The Gardners, an African American family, had lost their son on Martin Luther King Day, normally a time of celebration.

“There were a lot of parades and people being happy and waving the flag,” Bice recalled. But “this mother was grieving.”

At first, the investigation focused on rumors of a feud between students at Gardena and L.A. Washington high schools, but in a matter of days it shifted to neighborhood gang members including two brothers with violent histories.

About two weeks after Gardner’s shooting, Bice said a young man was pulled over in a stolen car near the crime scene. Under police questioning, he said one of his acquaintances had bragged about the killing. The acquaintance had a brother.

Shortly afterward, L.A. Unified School District police chased down that brother fleeing a crime scene and recovered a 10-millimeter Glock handgun that he discarded. Tests showed it was one of the weapons used in the Gardner shooting.

More lab results came in, these from another seemingly unrelated murder a month earlier. Tests on .762-millimeter shell casings tied the same Soviet-made assault rifle to both killings, Bice said.

The weapons evidence was solid. There were prime suspects. But who possessed the guns the night of the shooting? With no eyewitness testimony, Bice said, there was not enough evidence for a criminal indictment.

Meanwhile, new cases kept demanding more of Bice’s attention. Gradually, the trail of Gardner’s killers grew cold.

Bice retired to the Pacific Northwest, but every Martin Luther King Day, she says, she finds herself remembering Chanita Gardner’s terrible loss.

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ON the cul-de-sac where Gardner’s family still lives, a framed No. 3 Panther jersey is a recent addition to the memorabilia. The 1982 Cutlass has been repaired and is parked in the garage. But his father doesn’t much care anymore who killed him.

Catching the culprit, he said, “won’t bring my son back.”

Gardena High retired Gardner’s jersey number. His teammates dedicated their next big game against rival Serra High to his memory and called it “the Jeffrey Gardner Classic.”

Pettway thought about quitting football after the shooting. He skipped opening practices for his senior year. In his first game without Gardner, the star receiver failed to catch a single pass.

“The weird part,” he recalled, was looking around during the game and “feeling like, I’m out here, but I’m not out here.”

In school, Pettway’s grades dropped. “I found myself wandering off, thinking about other things,” he said. “It wasn’t like it used to be.”

He hung out more than ever at the Gardner house -- until an emotional outburst from Coco’s father in which he lashed out at Pettway for trying to substitute for his son. The grieving father demanded more space. Then he regretted his words.

“I just didn’t know how [bad] I was feeling at the time,” recalled Jeffrey Sr. He said he later came to see that Pettway “was mourning, just like I was.” The dad apologized.

After high school Pettway played football at West L.A. College and earned an athletic scholarship to Eastern Illinois. But he never realized those teen dreams of big-time college sports or a pro career.

And he never entered medical training to become the dentist he told Coco he intended to be. Instead, Pettway returned to Southern California after majoring in exercise science to work as an athletic trainer. He landed an assistant coaching job at Washington High.

Gardena Coach Marshall Jones invited Pettway to join his staff a year later. Pettway recalled Jones’ remarking about “how much I had grown up since the incident.”

So many things changed that night in South Los Angeles, but Pettway sees his return to Gardena as a way to pay some kind of lasting tribute to his lost friend -- by mentoring young athletes.

Rather than being dragged down any further by his deep and personal loss that night, Pettway says he is determined to turn the memory of his friend into “more of an inspiration.”

Maybe that’s one way to make sense out of a senseless shooting, he said, “like this happened for a reason.”

Pettway still avoids the scene of the shooting. Just passing through the area, he says, “brings back bad memories.” But he makes regular weekly visits to Gardner’s grave site.

Late last month he and a group of former classmates, including others who were wounded that night, joined the Gardner family at Alondra Park in nearby Lawndale to celebrate Coco’s 25th birthday. Many brought their own children.

“Nobody made any speeches,” Pettway said. The day was dedicated to memories of a friend and “the old times.”

Pettway is one of those who has started a family of his own -- two daughters, 2 and 6. They might benefit the most from one of the costly life lessons their father learned that night his friend died: to cherish the simple things.

“Me and him would just get up and go work out or toss the ball around ... or go to the mall or go here or there,” Pettway said. “Those simple things left when he left.”

Pettway no longer needs football or big dreams to find satisfaction. Increasingly, that comes from the simple things, he says -- “taking care of my kids and living life.”

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dan.arritt@latimes.com