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Too many guns, not enough rosaries
By TONY CASTRO, The Los Angeles Independent 19.JUL.06
Crime: The senseless killing of a Hamilton High student leads to two more killings and chaos.
They couldn’t even mourn 16-year-old Ana Interiano in peace.
When
her family tried to, with even Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa showing up to
offer the city’s condolences to the family of the murdered Hamilton
High School student, gunshots rang out a block away.
Two young men lay dead, gunned down just blocks from where Interiano was killed by a drive-by shooter.
“There's
too many guns on the streets,” LAPD Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell said
this week, “and too many people willing to use them.”
Even as
the Los Angeles City Council authorized a $50,000 reward for
information leading to the capture of the suspects in the killings of
Interiano and the two men, the violence began drawing attention to the
culture clash of diversity in the Westside neighborhood where the
murders took place.
The violence in this often forgotten part of
the Westside along Robertson Boulevard just north of the Santa Monica
Freeway is no secret to the people who live or work in the neighborhood.
Drive-by
shootings are not uncommon in the neighborhood east of Robertson,
dotted by rows of apartments as well as attractive homes selling for
upwards of half a million dollars or more.
In 2004, no fewer
than four teenagers were killed in gang-related drive-bys on Corning
Street within walking distance of Hamilton High.
In the last year alone, police have recorded 121 assaults and robberies in this neighborhood.
By
contrast, there was only one robbery and no assaults in the
neighborhoods west of Robertson, which include the upscale communities
of Beverlywood and Cheviot Hills.
Ana Interiano happened to
live with her family in one of the apartments east of the high school —
on the wrong side of Robertson Drive.
It didn’t really seem to
matter that she wasn’t a gang member. Too often, it is the youngsters
who aren’t gang member who become victims of gang violence.
That’s because gangs are a reality of life, even near good neighborhoods as Ana’s murder certainly underscores.
Police
believe that on the day she was killed Ana may have been walking home
in a group with someone who had gang connections — and that’s all it
takes: One crazy gang-banger who can’t shoot straight trying to take
out another and instead taking out an innocent bystander.
“Ana
was very popular — a lot of people knew her around the area,” her
sister, Suyapa Espinoza, told reporters. “She was very nice ... I don't
know why this could have happened to her.”
No one will ever know
for sure, and maybe it’s not the appropriate time to say it’s what
happens when kids choose to hang around with people they shouldn’t.
But
in today’s youth society, gang culture does weigh heavily on kids
yearning for acceptance. The clothes, the music, the attitude.
Drive
by any Los Angeles public high school, before school, during lunch or
after school, and just try to tell the gang-bangers from the
non-gang-bangers.
It’s why parents who can afford to do so,
don’t want their kids in the LAUSD. It’s not just that the schools are
lousy academically. It’s that they can also be a death lottery, as
killings like that of Ana Interiano show.
The private schools
and the schools where parents and administrators aren’t afraid to stand
up to the gang culture do take stances against the clothes, especially
but also the attitude that too often leads to bad kids intimidating the
good ones about doing the right thing.
Just listen to Ana’s sister pleading for the public to help:
“I
know there’s a lot of people out there that ... saw the killer, and I
would like to ask — beg — them to come forward, give the information to
the police, so they could catch these guys, so they won't do any more
harm to other families.”
What Suyapa Espinoza was saying was
what the cops know all too well: The killers of Ana Interiano and the
other two youngsters are known among their friends, classmates or
neighbors. They’re either too afraid or too involved with the gang
culture themselves to come forth.
It’s a shame, but it’s also part of what the mayor should be focusing his campaign to revamp the city’s schools.
Los
Angeles schools aren’t just failing academically. They are also, like
many public school systems, failing to provide the ethical and moral
framework for the students that they once did.
The mayor knows this all too well, which is why his youngest children are in parochial schools.
He needs to bring some of that structure into the LAUSD.
Tony Castro can be reached at tcastro@laindependent.com.
 
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