A Rash of Valley Gang Deaths & One Story Behind the Story

Tuesday night it was the Valley, not East or South LA, that was Los Angeles County’s most lethal war zone. By evening’s end, there were two dead, eight wounded in Northridge and North Hollywood, and shell casings scattered on the street and sidewalk like a toxic spray of metallic leaves.

Last week there was another earlier outbreak of gun violence in the northeast Valley—specifically in Pacoima—that left four dead, three of the deaths gang-related.

In an effort to get some more in-dept information about the sudden spate of shootings, I called Blinky Rodriquez.

Blinky is a former world champion kick boxer turned gang intervention specialist. His Communities In Schools program, which he runs with a guy named Bobby Arias, is considered by most to be the main event when it comes to gang prevention and intervention in the San Fernando Valley.

Blinky called me back around 2 pm yesterday. He sounded exhausted. I asked if he knew why there had been such an uptick in Valley shootings.

“I wish I had an answer,” he said. “We’re seeing all this violence and we don’t know why. But we’re out there trying to do what we can, 24/7.”

He had just come from his second funeral of the week, with one more still to go that night. First there was the funeral for a 14-year old, who was shot after he got into a fistfight with another kid.

Then Wednesday’s funeral was for a sixteen year old boy named Manuel Rodriguez who was shot while he was riding his bike last Monday.

The following afternoon, another Pacoima kid, a 19-year-old named Jaime Mejia, was riding his bike when a white Mustang pulled up next to him. One of the two men inside it opened fire and shot Mejia multiple times in the chest.

Jaime and Manuel were members of rival gangs, so it’s highly possible that one gang shooting, was some kind of retaliation for the other.

But the phrase “gang shooting” never tells the whole story… as Blinky reminded me when he gave me a little of the background on Jaime Mejia, the dead 19-year-old.

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Jaime made his home in tiny, crowded, wood shack —literally a shack (It’s the structure in the photo above) —that sits on bare dirt next to an active chicken coop. He lived there with his aunt and a slew of cousins after his mother went back to Mexico and his father pretty much ran out on him.

Still, in the the last year and half things were looking up for Jaime. He was being mentored by a woman named Norma Ramirez who, together with her husband, Jose Luis Ramirez, had taken the boy under their collective family wing.

First they helped him find work, mostly odd construction jobs that paid little, but at least put honest money in his pocket.

As they got to know him better, the Ramirez’s encouraged Jaime to enroll at LA Mission College.

Jose Luis was the college’s Vice President until health concerns forced him to cut back on work. Now he is one of the school’s academic counselors. Both he and Norma promised they would help Jaime through the process.

The Ramirez’s first met Jaime because he lived down the street from Norma’s mother and often helped the older woman out with chores, seeming to crave the friendly adult company.

Even though he lived with his aunt,” says Norma, “she has her own family so, in many ways Jaime was like an abandoned child.”

The Ramirez’s liked the young man because, despite his gangster exterior, they found him to be sweet natured and respectful. Furthermore, they thought he had potential. “I’ve been in education for twenty-five years,” said Jose Luis, “and you have an extra sense about some kids. First of all, he was intelligent and, whenever we got him jobs, he really worked hard and seemed to enjoy it.”

(THIS IS A LONGER POST THAN USUAL, SO READ THE REST AFTER THE JUMP)



But Jaime, who had dropped out of high school, had little personal confidence, and wasn’t at all sure he could fit in at the community college. “He was uneasy,” says Norma. “He didn’t think he was smart enough.”

Finally the Ramirez’s convinced him that he was plenty smart, and that whatever academic skills he lacked, could be built over time.

Last Tuesday, was the day Jaime was scheduled to go to campus where Jose Luis would meet him and shepherd him through enrollment.

For the week prior, Jaime had been doing construction work for Norma’s mother. Norma likes to cook, so each day that Jaime was on the job, she made a point of going over to make lunch for her mother and Jaime and whatever other family happened by the house.

Last Tuesday, May 13, Norma cooked tacos and Jaime helped with the preparation. As they ate, he again talked nervously the whole college plan. But he was also excited, Norma says.

While he was working, Jaime had asked for and got permission to do a load of laundry at the mother’s house. After lunch, he told Norma that he was going to take the clean clothes back home, and then he’d be right back. After that, Norma’s cousin would drive him to Mission College.

“I watched him as he took off on his bicycle….” says Norma.

But he didn’t come back. Instead a minute or two after Jaime rode away, Norma and her mother heard shots. “A lot of them.”

“We ran down the street and we saw him lying there on the ground,” she says. Her voice breaks. “He looked really bad.”

Jaime made it to the hospital and through surgery. But then his kidneys failed. And that was it.

Norma was devastated.

“When I called her,” Blinky told me. “She was crying that terrible cry that parents do. Even though she wasn’t his mother. She’d gotten really close, you know?”

As it happens, Blinky knows that particular terrible cry personally.

In 1990, his sixteen year old son, Sonny, was killed in a drive-by shooting in Sylmar. While some grieving parents might have been born again as law-and-order fanatics, Blinky decided that helping young homeboys move away from violence was his new life’s mission.

On this day, as he listened to Norma’s grief he had an idea.

“Here’s the thing,” Blinky told her, “there’s a mother across town who’s feeling pain too because her son was killed a few hours before Jaime. I’d like for you to talk to her.”

Blinky said Norma was silent for a long moment. “Traeme la,” she said finally. Bring her.

Norma and the aunt had organized a rosary for Jaime that night. At Blinky’s suggestion, it was decided that rosary would include both boys, dangers and enemy gangs be damned.

Just after seven that night, Manual Rodriguez’ mother arrived—along with an additional two car loads of friends and family from “the other side.” After the rosary, the second group left, Manual’s mother remained. “It’s okay, I want to stay,” she told the rest of her family. “I’ll be okay.”

Now Norma is planning a candlelight vigil with the family’s of both dead boys and other women from the community. “It’s how I grieve,” she says. “I organize.”

And she intends to keep organizing.

Yesterday, before the funeral, Norma and her husband, together with Blinky, made a presentation to the Mission College Trustees in which they pleaded for the college to establish a satellite campus in the neediest parts of the northeast Valley, either Pacoima or Panorama City, so kids in those areas would have access to college classes without having to travel so far. (LA Mission College is in Sylmar.)

Jaime was originally scheduled to speak as part of the presentation. Instead, Norma did her best to invoke to those assembled, some of what she had so connected to in the dead boy’s spirit:

I will always remember Jaime with his beautiful, amazing smile. We also know that there are too many Jaimes out there, and that all of us need to listen to their cries for help. As for us, we will grieve our loss for nine days by gathering in front of my mother’s house, Jaime’s second home, to pray the rosary and to direct all our future efforts to stopping the drive-bys and the escalating, senseless violence in our neighborhoods.

“We need to come together as a community,” Norma told me late last night, “and keep coming together, to teach these boys that there’s another way. We’ll teach by showing. Look, I know they watch us.”