SAPD plans to beef up role in curtailing gang-related violence

Since he turned 36 less than a week ago, Fred Ybarra has anticipated his impending death.
"They're going to kill me," he told his father at his birthday celebration. "I don't know who, but they're going to kill me."


On Friday, Ybarra, whom police linked to the Mexican Mafia despite his family disputing the connection, was found shot in the neck and dumped at the corner of West Mulberry and Michigan — far from his West Side stomping grounds.

A resident who lives about two houses down, and didn't want to be identified, said he told police he was taking a nap when he heard what sounded like a shot, then a thump "like someone got hit, or run over, then after that the car speed off."

Ybarra appeared to have stumbled down the street, he said, leaving a trail of blood before he collapsed.

Residents of this quiet neighborhood, whose only whisper so far of gang violence has been washes of graffiti, were shocked.

"It's too close to home," worried Beatrice Espinoza, 65, who said the neighborhood has never had much trouble during the 18 years she's called it home. On Saturday, Jehovah's Witnesses ambled down the street and a man prepared to take his two toddler sons for a bike ride. Detectives and evidence technicians had long disappeared.

Ybarra's killing was the fourth apparently gang-related death in a week filled with bloodshed after a wave of what officials have characterized as retaliation attacks. On Tuesday, another supposed Mexican Mafia member was killed while working in his West Side garage; hours earlier and on the East Side, a young pregnant mother was slain after a possibly gang-related argument between her boyfriend and other men and a New Orleans gang member was shot to death while standing outside a party.

"This is the type of violence we want to curtail," police spokesman Joe Rios said. Police Chief William McManus this week said it appeared separate gangs on both sides of town were having problems. He called for a "complete lockdown of gang activity," met with his commanders and expanded the role of a specialized mobile police unit.

Ybarra's death brought the number of gang-related slayings to 10 of the 76 homicides recorded this year compared to 2006, when 12 of all the city's 119 homicides were considered gang-motivated.

And for his family, it marked an abrupt end to the life of the brother they knew as a jokester with a hearty laugh who loved to watch the Food Channel, spent spare time barbecuing in the park and cleaned obsessively. After his release from prison for a burglary conviction, they said Ybarra had tried to change his earlier bad ways.

Eight months ago, he left his West Side neighborhood and moved in with his sister near Lackland AFB. He wanted to get away, he said, from the people and the neighborhood; mostly, he wanted to stay out of trouble. He curtailed his drinking. He spent time with his three children and applied for Section Eight housing so he could get his own apartment. He worked in his sister's cleaning business.

But a few weeks ago, his brother said there was a "conflict." Several Mexican Mafia members beat Ybarra and chased him but he got away. Since then, Ybarra expected the worse. And Friday, after he returned to his old side of town to make a doctor's appointment, the worse came.
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