Alexanders look to help children on world scale

Shortly after his mother, sister and two nephews were shot to death in his mother’s South Los Angeles home, Kermit Alexander discovered what he considered to be a terrible truth about their killer.

He had known the gunman when the gunman was a boy.

“I had helped set up a Pop Warner program in Watts, where I grew up, and this little kid was a terrific ballplayer,” says Alexander, a 66-year-old former UCLA All-American and NFL defensive back. “But he was an incorrigible kid, fighting everybody.”

Alexander, who played two of his 11 NFL seasons with the Los Angeles Rams, was told that the boy had moved from Texas, his mother having sent him west to live with a grandmother because he was constantly getting into trouble.

“And I kept saying, ‘Somebody needs to do something,’ ” Alexander recalls. “But I didn’t do anything about it myself. And this 8- or 9-year-old kid, 10 years later he walked into my mother’s kitchen and he killed her.”

That was 23 years ago, on Aug. 31, 1984, when two men who had been hired to kill a neighbor of the Alexander family apparently misread the address and charged mistakenly into the Alexander home, about two miles from the Coliseum.

Tiequon Aundray Cox gunned down Ebora Alexander, 58, as she drank coffee and shot the others as they lay in bed, authorities said. Cox and two other men are serving life sentences for the crime.

But Alexander says he can’t help feeling a bit culpable himself.

“We neglected those children, and they ended up killing our neighborhood,” he says. “Why I feel responsibility is because I’m a part of that community, and I was one of the people that neglected them. . . .

“It took that 2-by-4 hitting me in the head to know that I needed to do more.”

What Alexander is doing now, with wife Tamra, is spearheading Operation Windmill International, an environmental nonprofit organization dedicated to “lighting up the lives of children worldwide,” according to its website, through windmill solar generating systems, a more affordable alternative to diesel systems.

Its first project is the Mission of Hope, a missionary school and orphanage outside Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and Alexander says Operation Windmill also plans to assist impoverished areas in Africa and the United States.

A former NFL first-round draft pick and NFL Players Assn. president, Alexander says that faith and years of therapy helped open his heart.

“I’ve never gotten over it completely,” Alexander, the oldest of 14 children, says of his mother’s murder. “It made me real bitter, made me very reclusive, made me very vengeful. It took a lot of prayer and a lot of hard work with both psychiatrists and ministers to help me and my family work through it.

“And it took about 10 years to work my way out of it.”

He’s pushing 70 now, but he and his wife, married four years ago, plan to adopt.

“As a result of going back and forth to this mission,” Alexander says of the couple’s frequent trips to Haiti over the last four years, “we fell in love with this little boy named Clifton, completely out of the blue.”

Only later did they discover that the youngster had four brothers and sisters living at another orphanage. One surprised them by asking for a photo of Clifton.

“And Tami, who speaks French, asked him why they wanted a picture,” Alexander says of his wife, who hatched the idea of starting a windmill program. “And he said they wanted a picture of Clifton because they knew we were going to take him away and they were afraid they’d never see him again.

“Well, when that happened, all the tears started flooding, and I looked at Tami and she looked at me and I said, ‘We’re going to take them all.’ ”

Though they still haven’t sorted through the red tape, the Alexanders hope to soon welcome five young Haitians into their Riverside home.

Their American dad can fill them in on his football exploits. He can tell them that he was a two-way starter at UCLA; that he was UCLA’s leading rusher and receiver in 1962, the last Bruin to lead the team in both categories until Chris Markey did it last season; and that the San Francisco 49ers, after making the versatile Alexander the eighth pick in the 1963 draft, asked him to learn eight positions.

Alexander, who played defensive back and returned kicks in the NFL, had an unwitting connection to “Brian’s Song,” the 1971 movie that chronicled the friendship between NFL great Gale Sayers and teammate Brian Piccolo, who had cancer. A clean hit by Alexander wrecked Sayers’ right knee in 1968, leading to the running back’s close bond with the dying Piccolo, who helped him rehabilitate.

Alexander, who made the Pro Bowl in 1968, later worked as a broadcaster for the Los Angeles Express of the United States Football League and for UCLA. His son, Kelton, and a brother, Kirk, played football at UCLA. Until recently, Alexander envisioned a life of leisure.

“I thought I was going to play a lot of golf,” he says. “I didn’t think I was going to have much to focus on, but then we decided to adopt these children and my whole life opened up. I’ve got something to do for the next 30 years.”

And something to keep his mind on happier times.

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jerome.crowe@latimes.com