HOW A COMMUNITY IMPLODED - VARIO 204th STREET GANG

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How a community imploded

L.A. long ignored Harbor Gateway. Now a Latino gang calls the shots.


By Sam Quinones, Times Staff Writer
March 4, 2007


SHRINE: Candles mark where 14-year-old Cheryl Green, an African American, was slain near her Harbor Gateway home. Two members of the predominantly Latino 204th Street gang have been charged in her killing.

Sideris sold his last building in 1993 and hasn't built since.

"I feel bad. I felt the neighborhood could have gone the other way very easily," he said. "Where they have too many apartment units like that, it's unfortunate."

Feeling 'penned in'

In 1994, Toni Bowden moved to 207th Street from Compton with a Section 8 voucher. At the housing office, the neighborhood was listed as Torrance, said Bowden, who is black. "I said, 'Oh, wow, a way out of Compton.' "

Over the next five years, however, Bowden saw numerous shootings. She and other blacks didn't dare walk to Del Amo Market, a mom-and-pop convenience store that had become the gang's chief outpost.

The 204th Street gang had started as a clique years before. However, it had recently split from Tortilla Flats, a larger gang farther east. Asserting their dominance, gang members began attacking blacks.

They shot at Bowden's daughter and her boyfriend as they went to the movies, she said.

"You feel penned in," Bowden said. "You don't have extra money to just jump and move someplace else."

For their part, Latino gang members feared for their turf.

"In jail, people would comment, 'The blacks took over your neighborhood,' " said one area gang member, who asked not to be identified, fearing retaliation from other gang members. "It's embarrassing, because it's true."

Before that, the neighborhood had been "kind of like a little TJ," he said, referring to Tijuana. "People would say, 'Hey, what's up?' or offer us a beer. You got tamales. Drugs. It was a great neighborhood for gang members."

Tensions worsened when a small black gang formed — the 208th Street Crips. The Crip gang's willingness to go to the police with complaints offended the Latino gang's sense of honor.

Blacks were "writing on our walls, throwing bottles at us and telling on us at the same time," said the gang member. The 204th Street gang figured "that's kind of disrespectful … so [we are] going to shoot every black guy up there."

By L.A. standards, the 204th Street gang was small-time, with no more than a few dozen youths. But it was large enough to terrorize a neighborhood.

"We'd call pizza and they didn't want to deliver," said Blanca Hernandez, a resident for more than 30 years. "The mailmen were afraid. Everyone was afraid."

Meanwhile, larger forces were transforming Southern California Latino street gangs, which for years had mostly gotten along with their counterparts in black gangs.

The change "happened almost overnight," remembers LAPD Officer Liavaa Moevao, who was a young Harbor Division gang officer in the area in the early 1990s.

Older 204th Street members began attending meetings held by representatives of the Mexican Mafia prison gang (known as Eme, Spanish for "M"), he said. They reported back "that Eme wants us to get rid of all the black gang members," Moevao said.

Mafia representatives told Latino gangs to stop feuding among themselves and to collect taxes from neighborhood drug dealers on behalf of Eme, according to law enforcement officials and gang members.

Blacks were drug-dealing competition.


Harbor GatewayCHERYL Green was hardly the first.

Since the 14-year-old was shot to death in December in the forgotten strip of Los Angeles known as Harbor Gateway, she has become a symbol of the region's gang and racial strife.

Yet long before the mayor, police chief and FBI director showed up to decry the violence, the tiny neighborhood lived with it.

For more than a decade, many say, the neighborhood Latino gang — called 204th Street — had been attacking blacks. African Americans had taken to warily surveying their streets for Latinos, and few dared go north of 206th Street, which the gang had set as a boundary for blacks.

In 1997, 11-year-old Marquis Wilbert, an African American youth with no gang affiliation, was shot and killed by a 204th Street gang member on a bicycle.

In September 2001, Robert Hightower, a 19-year-old Pasadena high school senior, was shot to death after hugging his sister, whom he had been visiting. A 204th Street gang member shot him, according to court testimony, because he was upset that a black boxer had beaten a Latino in a prizefight.

In 2003, Eric Butler, 39, was shot to death as he drove from the neighborhood's lone business, the Del Amo Market, which the gang considered to be in its territory. He'd gone there to intervene after gang members began harassing his 14-year-old stepdaughter. She was shot in the back and lives today with a bullet lodged near her spine.

Butler's wife, Madeline Enriquez, organized marches to bring attention to the problem, without success.

Instead, the violence spread.

From 1994 to 2005 in Harbor Gateway, there were nearly five times as many homicides, assaults and other violent crimes by Latinos against blacks as by blacks against Latinos, according to Los Angeles Police Department statistics.

Cheryl's shooting — allegedly by two 204th Street gang members as she and friends talked on a street in broad daylight — underscored a new reality: that since the mid-1990s, according to the L.A. County Human Relations Commission, Latino gangs have become the region's leading perpetrators of violent hate crimes.

"It took this girl's death to show what's going on," said Khalid Shah, director of Stop the Violence, an anti-gang nonprofit group that has worked in Harbor Gateway.

Two weeks after Cheryl's death, the gang allegedly struck again, stabbing 80 times a white man they believed to be a witness to her shooting death. Five gang members were charged last month in his slaying.

None of this makes sense to Cheryl's mother, Charlene Lovett.

"My daughter's dead and I don't know why," Lovett said at her kitchen table after Cheryl's killing. "That's the question I would like answered: Why?"

The answer goes well beyond a single slaying or a single neighborhood. Packed into the 13-block area where Cheryl Green lived and died is a story of many of the forces fueling gang and racial violence in Los Angeles and the region today.

It is a story of civic neglect and the rise of the low-wage economy, of immigration, changes in federal housing policy and the street influence of a prison gang.

But the story begins, as does so much in this city, with real estate development.

From fields to families

Before World War II, the neighborhood was mostly vacant fields.

Then came factories, attracting workers who needed housing. So builders filled those fields with small houses and duplexes.

"This is where the workers lived," said Sharon Wyatt, who moved into the neighborhood with her husband, Jack, a shipyard worker, in 1971. "The contractors didn't even live here. It was the people that built the houses."

Cubans settled nearby in the 1960s, and a wave of Mexican immigrants arrived in the 1970s. Few blacks lived in the area, but on the Wyatts' block of 207th Street were white families like themselves, Latino families, a Middle Eastern man.

Harbor Gateway was like other parts of Los Angeles in many ways. But tucked as it was into a strip that connects the city to the port, it was an afterthought to local politicians consumed with the port, San Pedro and Wilmington. Residents themselves didn't always know to which city they belonged: The neighborhood was in Los Angeles but had a Torrance mailing address.

In the competition for city services, Harbor Gateway usually lost. Wyatt remembers that street sweepers came by maybe once a month. Street lamps didn't arrive until the late 1980s. The area had no park, no school nearby. Los Angeles police, always strapped for officers, patrolled intermittently.

Homeownership anchored the community, Wyatt and others said. Families cleaned in front of their places. People knew each other.

All that changed in the late 1980s. Southern California was absorbing immigrants and refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, Mexico and Central America. Demand for housing rose — especially for apartments.

From 1985 to 1989, 187,000 units were built in Los Angeles County — almost 30% more than all those built since, according to the Construction Industry Research Board.

Harbor Gateway was transformed. From 1985 to 1992, city records show, about 75 houses gave way to apartment buildings — adding close to 500 units. The neighborhood gained roughly 1,500 residents — a 65% increase — with no new amenities or open space.

Residents "didn't have the knowledge, or the resources, or the time" to fight it, Wyatt said.

While Torrance made developers add trees, landscaping, open space and enclosed garages, Los Angeles required only sewer and school taxes.

"It was the Wild West," said Ken Sideris, who built more apartments than anyone else in the neighborhood — about 20 buildings. "It was developed wrong. There was no plan, no thought."

By 1992, the real estate boom had ended; recession arrived. Building owners needed tenants. The union jobs that had sustained earlier residents were disappearing.

"For about five years there, everyone on this block was laid off at one time or another," said Sharon Wyatt, whose husband lost his shipyard job.

The people who moved in were cashiers, gardeners, mechanics and swap-meet vendors. Most were Latino immigrants.

Blacks also moved in. The neighborhood's African American population more than doubled, from 313 in 1990 to 835 in 2000.

Many were fleeing the gang war zones of South Los Angeles, Inglewood and Compton in search of affordable housing.

Others came from housing projects, as federal policy shifted and concentrated developments for the poor fell into disfavor. They came with Section 8 vouchers, tickets to subsidized housing, in hand. Many were former residents of Normont Terrace, a housing project two miles from Harbor Gateway that the city's housing authority razed in 1995.

With so many renters and a dearth of city services, conditions in the neighborhood deteriorated. Discarded sofas stayed where tossed for weeks. "The neighborhood got dirtier," Wyatt said.

Landlords reinvested less, and tenants, divided by race, culture and language, no longer knew one another.


REMEMBRANCE FOR A YOUNG VICTIM: Shana Miller, 22, lights candles where her cousin Cheryl Green was killed. Cheryl’s mother, Charlene Lovett, struggles with her loss. “My daughter’s dead and I don’t know why,” Lovett says. “That’s the question I would like answered: Why?”


High fences can be found throughout the neighborhood in Harbor Gateway where the 204th Street gang stands accused of terrorizing many area residents. A gang crackdown is aimed at getting some control back in the neighborhood.

Mafia representatives said, " 'Don't let the [blacks] move in,' " recalled Leo Duarte, a recently retired prison-gang investigator and one of the state's leading Eme experts. Across Southern California, "even those gang members who didn't go to the meetings still abided by Eme edicts" because they had to answer to the Mexican Mafia when they went to jail.

In Harbor Gateway, graffiti and racist shootings climbed.

"There was no doubt that there were directives from the Mexican Mafia" coming from prison and at the meetings, said Robert Lara, a Torrance police sergeant who worked gang detail during the mid-1990s.

The 204th Street gang was too small to warrant a lot of Eme attention. But when the gang "lit off a grenade, or burned [a black person's] house down," Mafia representatives "would be like, 'That's what I'm talking about,' " said the gang member.

Residents fight back

In 1997, police, the county Human Relations Commission and neighbors organized to fight the gang and the blight.

The city added bulletproof streetlight covers. Residents repaired holes in fences — escape routes for gang members. Girl Scouts, accompanied by officers, picked up trash and painted over graffiti. More than 100 gang members — black and Latino — were sent to jail for parole or probation violations. Police patrols increased. Violence fell.

But the campaign dissipated, and gang members slowly returned. By 1999, the Latino-on-black violence resumed.

In April, Michael Richardson, a 22-year-old African American, was shot to death by a 204th Street gang member on a bike in front of Toni Bowden's apartment.

Bowden returned to Compton.

Charlene Lovett moved into her place, thinking she was leaving gang violence behind in her West L.A. neighborhood, just as 204th Street gang attacks increased.

By 2001, the 208th Street Crips, never rooted in the area, faded away.

With squad cars again scarce, neighbors stopped reporting shootings and chases. Instead, gang members now patrolled the streets, brazenly circling 207th Street and Harvard Boulevard on bicycles.

Marie Keith, who is black, moved from South Los Angeles with her three daughters in 2000, believing she'd come to Torrance. One day black children playing on the street began screaming that "the 204s were coming."

Keith watched as gang members drove through, shooting. Black youths dived behind walls.

Since then, Keith's children have not been allowed to play in front of their apartment. When she has to travel more than half a block, she drives.

In August 2006, Carl Wagoner, an African American auto-shop owner, was shot in the leg outside his 207th Street apartment. He lost his leg — and his shop — and is now bedridden, said his wife, Dunya.

As the years passed, older members of the 204th Street gang went into semi-retirement. Some moved as far away as San Bernardino and Rancho Cucamonga. They took jobs, bought homes, started families. Yet they returned on weekends to the Del Amo Market and drank beer with the younger members.

"They're keeping that 204th street notion and atmosphere alive," said Dan Vasquez, an LAPD detective who has worked on the gang detail recently.

Renewed attention

Since Cheryl Green's slaying, street sweepers pass through Harbor Gateway regularly.

Police roll by often, the city attorney's office is preparing an injunction against the 204th Street gang and Councilwoman Janice Hahn wants the city to buy land for a community center.

For now, no one hangs out at Del Amo Market.

Liavaa Moevao is back, now the LAPD's senior lead officer for the area. His task is to restore the sense of community that sustained the neighborhood years ago — though he said Harbor Division has half the patrol officers it had in the early 1990s.

Meanwhile, weakened by economics, the neighborhood remains divided by race, language and thug culture.

Or at least, that's how it seems until entering a certain darkened apartment on 207th Street.

One recent afternoon, a television screen lighted the faces of best friends Flavio and Gary, both 12. They were playing an online version of the card game Uno, chatting with opponents from Seattle, Kentucky and New York via video cameras.

Gary is black. Flavio's parents are Mexican. They understand little English and live in the building next door.

Though the two boys can connect to the world, they cannot walk this neighborhood together.

Fear of the 204th Street gang has forced Gary to live most of his life inside this apartment. That's why he is overweight, said his mother and grandmother. The family has several computers, televisions and video-game consoles to keep him and his brothers occupied.

Gary's mother, Lisa, runs inside every time she sees a Latino youth.

Still, in this neighborhood where so much divides blacks and Latinos, this apartment holds a secret: The families rely on each other.

Flavio's mother, Rita, drives the boys to school each morning before heading to her job as a 99 Cents Store cashier. Gary's mother, Lisa, picks them up in the afternoon.

It is a small daily act, born of common necessity — yet one the mothers protect like an orchid.

They declined to be photographed or reveal their last names, preferring that their secret not leave this darkened apartment, where they live like members of an underground resistance.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
sam.quinones@latimes.com

Times staff writer Doug Smith and librarian John Tyrrell contributed to this report.

Unchecked apartment construction in the 1980s and 1990s transformed the racial dynamics of this isolated 13-block neighborhood, heightening gang tensions. Violent crime committed by Latinos against blacks has become a problem.

Reported violent crimes*

Suspect Victim Crimes
Black Black 71
Black Latino 23
Latino Latino 117
Latino Black 111
--

* Includes homicide, manslaughter, assault with a deadly weapon and shooting at a residence or a vehicle.

--

1980 Total population: 2,139

Latino: 53%

White: 39%

Asian: 5%

Black: 3%

--

1990 Total population: 2,945

Latino: 55%

White: 22%

Asian: 12%

Black: 11%

Other 1%

--

2000 Total population: 3,548

Latino: 61%

White: 7%

Asian: 6%

Black: 24%

Other 3%

--

Note: Census Bureau statistics are for the area bounded by 205th Street, Western Avenue, Denker Avenue and Torrance Boulevard Crime statistics are from LAPD reporting district 504. Percentages may not add up to 100% because of rounding.

--

Sources: ESRI, TeleAtlas, Census Bureau, LAPD. Data analysis by Doug Smith and Sandra Poindexter

*

Victims of the violence

Interracial homicides* in Harbor Gateway, 1997-2006

Victim: Marquis "Mark"

Wilbert, 11, African American

Date: March 27, 1997

Shot to death on Harvard Boulevard by a 204th Street gang member riding a bicycle, who was convicted of murder.

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Victim: Michael Richardson, 22, African American

Date: April 19, 1999

Shot to death on 207th Street by a 204th Street gang member on a bicycle, who was convicted of murder and a hate crime.

Victim: Dino Downs, 41, African American

Date: May 21, 2000

Standing outside his house on 208th Street when he was shot to death by two Latino youths, possibly members of the 204th Street gang, who were driving by. Unsolved.

---

Victim: Manuel Flores, 32, Latino

Date: June 2, 1999

Shot to death by a black man on 208th Street. Unsolved.

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Victim: Mario Cervantes, 18,

Latino

Date: July 22, 2000

A recent 204th Street gang member, he was shot on 206th street by a black member of the 208th Street Crips gang, who was convicted of murder.

---

Victim: Kent Lopez, 20, African American

Date: Aug. 25, 2000

Shot to death during a fight with several 204th Street gang members as he walked to a bus stop. Witnesses testified that the gang members yelled a racial epithet and death threats at Lopez. Two gang members were convicted of murder.

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Victim: Robert Hightower, 19, African American

Date: Sept. 29, 2001

A Pasadena high school senior, he was visiting his sister when he was shot to death by a 204th Street gang member, who was convicted of murder.

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Victim: Eric Butler, 39, African American

Date: Oct. 18, 2003

Believed to have been shot to death by 204th Street gang members as he drove from the Del Amo Market, where he'd gone to help his stepdaughter, whom the gang was harassing. Unsolved.

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Victim: Arturo Ponce, 34, Latino

Date: Dec. 5, 2006

The Mexican immigrant and cook was shot to death in front of his 205th Street apartment as he talked with friends. Witnesses say the shooter, masked and hooded, yelled an anti-Mexican epithet. Unsolved.

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Victim: Cheryl Green, 14,

African American

Date: Dec. 15, 2006

Killed allegedly by a 204th Street gang member who fired into a group of black youths on Harvard Boulevard. Three others were wounded. Police say the gang member was angry after having a confrontation with another black man outside a nearby store earlier in the day. He and another 204th Street gang member face murder and hate crime charges.

* The list may not be complete. Some cases are unsolved but suspected to be interracial homicides.

Sources: LAPD Harbor Homicide Division; L.A. County coroner.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me ... -headlines

[jimpasz]

I read this in the LATIMES this morning and can only wonder what the liberals are thinking? They blame poverty, lack of education drugs and
broken families for the conditions in the story.

Why is their answer to import (allow encourage) millions of thirld world uneducated aliens into the United States? Its only a mater of time till we have riots in the cities. We can no longer support so many illegal aliens and with more to come they will riot when their living conditions worsen.
It will not be just the blacks the hispanic gangs go after.

[dem4labor]

The Hildabeast & the Mayor From Mecha are focusing on
litter & graffati. Seems they need to focus on the safety
of American children.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070304/ap_ ... PzmdVq24cA

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Varrio 204th Street

Brief History:
Varrio 204th Street is a small neighborhood located in the City of Los Angeles that crosses the City border west into the City of Torrance. Their territory is from Del Amo Blvd/203th Street (north) to Torrance Blvd (south) between Denker Avenue (east) to Western Avenue (west) and their central location is 204th & Harvard. Varrio 204th were originally a click of the larger Tortilla Flats (TF) neighborhood located in Torrance, but in 1988 they broke away to form their own gang. Since that time V.204 has been engaged in a conflict with TF and the other Torrance based gangs, East Side Torrance.

Many black residents were displaced into this predominately Hispanic community when they were moved out of their original housing which was demolished for a new redevelopment project in 1995. Their relocation into this neighborhood led to the murder a black youth at the hands of Varrio 204th in 1997. Cheryl Green, 14, who was killed on Harvard and 206th street on December 15, 2006 is the fourth black resident murder in this neighborhood since 1997.

According to the LAPD there are about 120 active members from this gang.

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By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

Published: January 17, 2007


Cheryl Green, 14, pictured in the photos in her mother's hands and on her bracelet, was murdered because she was black, investigators say.

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 16 — The Latino gang members were looking for a black person, any black person, to shoot, the police said, and they found one. Cheryl Green, perched near her scooter chatting with friends, was shot dead in a spray of bullets that left several other young people injured.

She was 14, an eighth grader who loved junk food and watching Court TV with her mother and had recently written a poem beginning: “I am black and beautiful. I wonder how I will be living in the future.”

“I never thought something like this could happen here in L.A.,” said her mother, Charlene Lovett, fighting tears.

Cheryl’s killing last month, which the police said followed a confrontation between the gang members and a black man, stands out in a wave of bias-related attacks and incidents in a city that promotes its diversity as much as frets over it.

Ethnic and racial tension comes to Los Angeles as regularly as the Santa Ana winds. Race-related fights afflict school campuses and jails, and two major riots, in 1965 and 1992, are hardly forgotten. But civil rights advocates say that the violence grew at an alarming rate last year, continuing a trend of more Latino versus black confrontations and prompting street demonstrations and long discussions on talk-radio programs and in community meetings.

Much of the violence springs from rivalries between black and Latino gangs, especially in neighborhoods where the black population has been declining and the Latino population surging. A 14 percent increase in gang crime last year, at a time when overall violent crime was down, has been attributed in good measure to the interracial conflict.

This month, the authorities reported that crimes in the city motivated by racial, religious or sexual orientation discrimination had increased 34 percent in 2005 over the previous year. Statistics for 2006 have not yet been compiled.

Rabbi Allen Freehling, executive director of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, a group created after the 1965 riots, said the recent growth in hate crimes reflected a failure by government and community leaders to prepare residents for socioeconomic changes in many neighborhoods, “and therefore people have a tendency to lash out, out of desperation.”

In November, three Latino gang members received sentences of life in federal prison for crimes that included the murder of two black men — one waiting for a bus, another searching for a parking spot — and assaults on others in a conspiracy to intimidate black residents of a northeast Los Angeles neighborhood.

In another case, a twist on past racial dramas, 10 black youths, some of whom prosecutors say had connections to a gang, are on trial for what prosecutors contend was a racially motivated attack in neighboring Long Beach on three young white women who were visiting a haunted house on Halloween. Long Beach also experienced an increase in hate crimes in 2005.

But even with the alarm caused by the recent increase in bias crimes, Constance L. Rice, a veteran civil rights lawyer, said that, considering Los Angeles’s diversity, race relations remained relatively calm and were even marked by many examples of groups getting along.

Still, in several corners of the city, particularly where poverty is high and demographics are shifting, tensions have been flaring.

“You don’t find entire segments of the city against one another,” Ms. Rice said, “but in the hot spots and areas of friction you find it is because the demographics are in transition and there is an assertion of power by one group or the other and you get friction.”

In Harbor Gateway, the neighborhood where Cheryl Green was killed, tension had grown so severe that blacks and Latinos formed a dividing line on a street that both sides understood never to cross and a small market was unofficially declared off-limits to blacks. Ms. Lovett had warned her children not to go near the line, 206th Street, but Cheryl had ridden her scooter near it to talk to friends when she was shot.

Neighbors said the dominant 204th Street gang, which is Latino, had harassed blacks and Latinos alike and effectively kept the groups divided, though language and cultural differences also have contributed to segregation.

“We wave hello, but I cannot really talk to blacks because my English is limited and I don’t want to mess with the gang,” said Armando Lopez, speaking in Spanish, who lives near where Cheryl was shot.

A man who described himself as a former member of the 204th Street gang said black gang members had shot or assaulted Latinos, too, and explained the violence as a deadly tit-for-tat.

“They shot a Mexican guy right around the corner from here and nobody protested or said anything,” said the man, who asked that his name not be used for fear of retaliation. He referred to neighborhood speculation that Cheryl’s killing was in retaliation for the killing of Arturo Mercado, a Latino shot to death in the neighborhood a week before Cheryl in what the police call an unexplained shooting.

The violence in that neighborhood and others has prompted a flurry of announcements by Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa and police officials promising a renewed crackdown on gangs, particularly those responsible for hate-related crimes. Mr. Villaraigosa plans to meet Friday with Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, about expanding its assistance in investigating gang and hate-related violence; the agency has been working with the police on such investigations in the San Fernando Valley, where gang violence has increased the most.

Chief William J. Bratton has said the Police Department would soon issue a most-wanted list of the city’s 10 to 20 worst gangs, with those most active in hate crimes likely to land on it.

“It’s to say, ‘We’re coming after you,’ ” Mr. Bratton said.

A city-financed report by Ms. Rice released Friday said Los Angeles needed a “Marshall plan” to address gang violence in light of a growth in gang membership and a lack of a comprehensive strategy to curb the problem.

Despite the spike in hate crimes in 2005, the total number of bias-related incidents in Los Angeles, 333 in a city of 3.8 million people, was down from peaks in violent crime in the mid-1990s and just after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Cheryl Green’s killing particularly alarmed community and civil rights advocates because of her age and the indication that the neighborhood’s long history of racial violence was continuing. Two Latino gang members have been charged with murder in the case. With the district attorney having filed a formal allegation that the men were motivated by hate, they could be eligible for the death penalty or life in prison without parole if convicted.

Mr. Villaraigosa, the city’s first Latino mayor in over a century, was elected in 2005 in part on a promise of keeping peace among racial and ethnic groups. He attended a rally in the Harbor Gateway neighborhood Saturday, one of a few demonstrations calling for unity. He hugged Ms. Lovett and Beatriz Villa, the sister-in-law of Mr. Mercado, the Latino killed earlier.

“Our cultural and ethnic diversity are cornerstones of a strong L.A.,” the mayor said Friday, “and violent crime motivated by the victim’s skin color will not be tolerated.”

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, an African-American syndicated columnist who plays host to the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, a weekly gathering in the Leimert Park neighborhood of South Los Angeles, said blacks complained that illegal Latin American immigrants were stealing jobs. Latinos, particularly newcomers unaccustomed to living among large numbers of African-Americans, in turn accuse blacks of criminal activity and harassing them.

“I think L.A. is a microcosm of what could happen in big cities in the future,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “When we have the kind of tension you see in L.A. in the schools, the workplace and now hate-crime violence, my great concern is this is a horrific view of what could happen in other cities.”

Ms. Lovett, Cheryl’s mother, said the family moved to Harbor Gateway six years ago to get away from a high-crime neighborhood in another part of Los Angeles. A relative of a black neighbor was shot by the gang a few years ago, she said, and recently she had begun looking for a safer area.

“I feel it is unfortunate my daughter had to be the sacrificial lamb,” she said. “But I just hope there is a change in this neighborhood.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/us/17 ... &partner=r

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Gang members charged in killing witness

By Amanda Covarrubias and Sam Quinones, Times Staff Writers

1:26 PM PST, February 23, 2007


Members of a Harbor Gateway gang accused in the racially motivated slaying of 14-year-old Cheryl Green have killed an eyewitness to the attack, fearing he would testify against them, prosecutors charged today.

The Los Angeles district attorney's office accused five members of the 204th Street gang -- one of whom is already charged in Green's killing -- with fatally shooting Christopher Ash on Dec. 28.

Prosecutors said Ash was an acquaintance of the suspects. His body was found on a Carson street; he had been stabbed numerous times and his throat was cut, authorities said.

The charges mark another twist in a murder case that outraged the community and prompted a major LAPD crackdown on gang violence, focusing particularly on crimes in which victims are targeted because of their race.

Green was standing with a group of friends on Harvard Boulevard just south of 206th Street when two men approached in broad daylight. Without saying a word, one suspect pulled a gun and opened fire, killing Green and wounding three others, witnesses and police said.

Authorities declared Green's slaying a hate crime, concluding that members of the Latino 204th Street gang killed her as part of a larger effort to intimidate black residents of the Harbor Gateway district.

In the wake of her slaying, the LAPD vowed to add more officers to the area and listed the 204th gang as one of 11 across the city it plans to target as part of a new crackdown.

It's unclear how Ash came to witness Green's death, but prosecutors believe the other gang members became worried he would cooperate with authorities.

The five suspects are accused of one count of murder with the special circumstances of intentional murder of a witness to a crime, lying in wait, and carrying it out to further the gang's activities. The suspects are scheduled to be arraigned in Long Beach on Monday.

amanda.covarrubias@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-ex ... -headlines