Gangs are not the only evil

She’s a mother and a high school teacher. She works in South Los Angeles but lives in a different neighborhood, one that affords her family the luxury of an arms-length relationship with crime.

So Jill Norton was stunned when she heard that a former student at Jefferson High — a “sweet and innocent kid” who played on the football team, worked at a grocery store and graduated early to enroll in college — had been shot to death on Jan. 2.

She was even more surprised when her daily search of the newspaper failed to turn up a mention of Edwin Johns Jr. or the shooting that took his life.

“I found nothing about him,” Norton wrote to me. “Instead I found the article celebrating low crime rates, with a brief mention toward the end that 168 deaths were gang-related [last] year.”

Crime is down for the ninth consecutive year, to a level not seen since 1952. The rising tally of gang homicides seems like an aberration, especially since it is up from 2010. But five years ago, 300 people in Los Angeles died in gang-related homicides. So 168 is, at least, better than that.

It’s hard to celebrate, though, if you take that number to heart.

And Norton does, thinking about Edwin — “how he talked, how he thought ... a kind, respectful, fun soul, just trying to make his way in life.” He was her student for three years, 90 minutes every day.

“I grew up in a small town,” Norton told me. “And 168 is the amount of students in my middle school and high school combined.

“I imagine if we’d all been murdered in one year.”

And she wonders — where is the outrage?

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Edwin Johns Jr., “an 18-year-old black man, was shot and killed Monday, Jan. 2, in the 800 block of East 53rd Street in South Park, according to Los Angeles County coroner’s records.”

That’s how the entry begins on our online Homicide Report, The Times’ official repository for reports on killings in Los Angeles.

Edwin died in a drive-by shooting in the middle of the day on a quiet residential street a block from home. Three other people were wounded, including an 11-year-old girl and a 57-year-old man. The “unknown suspect or suspects” drove away in a gray sedan.

Police said from the start that the shooting might be “gang-related.” That’s a sort of default label, the investigative starting point for just about any drive-by crime in any number of neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

That doesn’t mean the victim is a gang member.

Any crime in which the suspect is believed to be affiliated with a gang is considered gang-related by Los Angeles Police Department guidelines. Get cross-ways with a gang member — wear the wrong clothes, say the wrong thing, date the wrong girl, travel the wrong street — and you might wind up as the victim in a “gang-related” case.

Edwin’s death made me think of all the young men who are laid to rest with the label “gang-related homicide,” including the El Camino High soccer player gunned down this week in his San Fernando Valley frontyard.

I sought out LaWanda Hawkins to ask how that feels to the victims’ loved ones. She knows because her only child, Reginald Reese, was shot to death in San Pedro 16 years ago, when he was 19.

She was shocked not just by her son’s death, but by the response of people she encountered.

“Law enforcement, the clergy, my neighbors, the community as a whole … the first thing they say, even before ‘I’m sorry about your loss,’ is, ‘Was your child a gang-banger?’

“Like our children must have been doing something wrong, and that’s why they were killed,” she said.

Two years later, Hawkins created an advocacy group, Justice for Murdered Children, to support efforts to tamp down gang-related violence. She understands why people latch on to the “gang banger” label.

“It’s a way of distancing yourself,” she said. “It’s scary, just the thought of losing a child. This is a way of saying ‘It couldn’t happen to me.’”

But the label frames the treatment of survivors and fuels the growth of gang violence, she said. “That disconnect is what keeps gang homicides from dropping. If it’s your child and you’re connected, then you would do something.”

Instead, Hawkins said, people retreat and let gangs rule the streets. “These crimes are not happening in the middle of the night. They go in front of grocery stores and shoot the place up. They know no one’s going to say anything. Because people are afraid.”

It’s time for the community to take the reins, she said. “We have to own the problem. There’s no way that I’m going to go in broad daylight and shoot you down in front of a whole crowd of people if I don’t believe that it’s OK and my community thinks it’s OK.”

When she hears gunshots in her neighborhood, “People try to brush it off. ‘That’s just the gangbangers, not us.’ They try to slap a label on it,” Hawkins said. “But this ought to involve all of us.”

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The investigation into Edwin’s death suggests he was shot by gang members because he wore the colors of their rivals. “This kid was particularly targeted because of the red shirt he was wearing,” said LAPD Capt. Jorge Rodriguez. “A Crips gang came by, saw the kid; seeing the shirt, [believing] he was a member of a rival gang, he was shot and killed.”

Except that Edwin wasn’t a member of any gang.

“We know now that was not the case,” Rodriguez said Friday. “He was a good kid, college kid.... He was not a gang member. We met his parents at the scene.”

Said Norton: “His family and his neighbors felt the need to emphasize that he was not in a gang,” and that got her thinking about what that means.

“Edwin wasn’t in a gang, but it wouldn’t diminish the tragedy of his death if he had been,” she decided.

“We tend to treat all gang-related violence in a similar way to a smoker’s lung cancer or a drinker’s liver disease — with the attitude that the smoker or drinker knew the risk he or she was taking.”

In this case, Edwin’s risk was living in a neighborhood where a red shirt on a holiday afternoon can get you killed a block from home.

sandy.banks@latimes.com