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Santa Ana ShowdownAfter Oscar Gallegos shot two Long Beach cops, he swore he’d never be takenalive. His run for the border ended with a trip to a Santa Ana strip mall.

By NICK SCHOU
Thursday, January 18, 2007 - 3:00 pm

Frankie, left, and Tony with photo of Oscar in Mexico, photo by Russ Roca
The streets are unfamiliar: Bristol, Main, Tustin. Frankie Gallegos hasn’t spentmuch time in Santa Ana. He was there a week or so earlier at a Sears outlet, buying designer furniture. Now his brother Oscar is in trouble with police and needs to hide out for a few days before he figures out how to get back across the border to Mexico.

As Frankie drives eastward through Santa Ana, he notices the houses are getting bigger. It’s a far cry from the densely populated, graffiti-ridden inner city neighborhood in Long Beach where he and Oscar grew up together, Frankie as a U.S. citizen born there and Oscar—at least until a drug conviction got him deported—as a legal permanent resident of the United States.

They make small talk. Frankie will later say it was a “normal” conversation, as if they were simply driving to Home Depot, the kind of “normal” conversation you have when your brother just tried to murder a couple of cops and you’re helping him escape. After a while, Frankie pulls over to the curb and looks at the big houses and trees everywhere. He figures he might be in Irvine.

Five days later, Oscar Gabriel Gallegos walks up to the front counter of El Taco Vaquero, a tiny Mexican restaurant on Warner Avenue in Santa Ana, and orders two burritos to go. It’s 5 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 28, and the sky is almost dark. Minutes earlier, undercover Long Beach police detectives had spotted Gallegos walking out of a nearby Santa Ana apartment complex. They had called Santa Ana police, who had a SWAT team on standby and who had been helping the Long Beach cops search for Gallegos for nearly a week.
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Gallegos starts walking to a market next door to the taco shop in the tiny strip mall. Three heavily armed Santa Ana SWAT officers surround him and order him to surrender. Gallegos has no intention of being handcuffed. He pulls out a .40 caliber Glock handgun equipped with a laser sight and begins firing wildly at police. In the next few moments, 50 shots erupt inside the strip mall.


Officers Wade (L) and Yap: miraculously pulled through, photo courtesy LBPD
Although several bullets hit police vehicles in the parking lot and shatter the windows of nearby stores, Gallegos is the only casualty. After being struck by several bullets, he continues shooting at police as he squats on his knees. When the firing finally ends, he has been shot 15 times and has a gaping, fatal wound in the back of his skull. As a testimony to his reputation, police put handcuffs on his corpse. They find two extra clips of ammunition in his pocket.

“He was either going to kill the officers or be killed,” Santa Ana Police Chief Paul Walters later tells reporters at a press conference. “Fortunately, the right person got killed.”




* * *



The death of Oscar Gallegos is the bloody conclusion to a massive manhunt that began shortly after 1:30 p.m. on Dec. 22, when Long Beach police officers Abe Yap, 35, a veteran training officer, and Roy Wade, Jr., 39, a rookie who had been on the force for only three weeks, pulled Gallegos over after he ran a red light in downtown Long Beach. Thirty minutes earlier, an undercover cop had noticed Gallegos shopping for handgun holsters at Turner’s, a Long Beach sporting goods store. Seeing his shaved head and gang tattoos, the cop figured Gallegos matched the profile of an ex-convict who had no legal right to own a firearm.

The cop followed him out of the store, south along Long Beach Boulevard. He called in a description of the vehicle Gallegos was driving, a white 1998 Pathfinder. Yap and Wade responded to his call in their police cruiser, and after Gallegos ran a red light, they hit their lights. Seconds later, Gallegos pulled over to the left-hand lane, right in the middle of the intersection of Sixth Street and Long Beach Boulevard. Before either cop could move, Gallegos strode toward them, firing through their windshield.

Three bullets struck Wade in his neck and chest, just above his bulletproof vest; a fourth bullet pierced Yap’s lip and cheek as he turned to protect himself from the barrage. Gallegos climbed back in his Pathfinder and continued south on Long Beach Boulevard, still followed by the undercover cop, who called for backup and medical assistance for the stricken officers. As Gallegos reached Broadway, he exchanged gunfire with two police officers who tried to block the intersection. And then he drove.

It would be hours before police located his vehicle, parked in the garage of the apartment complex where he lived with his mother and older brother. It was another five days before police tracked him down and killed him. Miraculously, both Yap and Wade recovered from their wounds after being rushed to Long Beach Memorial Hospital. But Gallegos’ murderous intentions, as well as his status as an illegal immigrant and gang member with a lengthy police record, quickly earned him headlines in the national news and on right-wing talk shows.

KFI-AM talk show hosts Jon & Ken giddily celebrated Gallegos’ death, referring to him as a “scumbag.” The slightly more sober Fox News and CNN’s Lou Dobbs also gave Gallegos’ death prominent play in their evening news segments the day after his death, highlighting the fact that he was an illegal immigrant from Mexico who had been deported three times and questioning why he had been able to stay in the country.

Marvin Stewart, a Long Beach resident and Minuteman Project board member told CNN that Gallegos was just the latest proof that illegal immigrants are a menace to society. He blamed the Long Beach City Council for refusing to routinely deport illegal aliens from the city’s jail. “They owe the people, particularly of Long Beach, a formal apology,” Stewart said.

While Gallegos was indeed an illegal immigrant—he lost his green card after being convicted of a felony—the media has so far failed to offer any explanation of why he tried to murder two innocent police officers during what otherwise would have seemed simply a routine traffic stop. Although Gallegos was a longtime member of the East Side Longo gang, he had never been convicted of a violent crime. And while he may have feared being deported as a result of the traffic stop, Gallegos had made repeated trips to his hometown of Tanhuato, Michoacan, as recently as several months before his death, according to family members. He routinely came back across the border with the help of coyotes.

Gallegos’ attempted murder of two police officers had less to do with his status as an illegal immigrant than his upbringing on the streets of Long Beach, a story of poverty, violence and perpetual conflict with police that began decades ago in the gang-infested neighborhood where he grew up. He blamed police for putting his older brother Carlos, a fellow East Side Longo gangster, behind bars for life on what he considered trumped-up charges. And he blamed them for what he felt was a lifetime of official harassment culminating in his mistaken arrest in 2002 for rape charges. Ultimately, Oscar Gallegos tried to murder officers Yap and Wade for one simple reason: he hated cops.




* * *




The first inkling Tony Gallegos has that something is wrong is when he hears the voice on the police loudspeaker and recognizes the number of his apartment unit. “You in 302—come out with your hands up!”

It is late in the afternoon on Friday, Dec. 22, and Tony hasn’t seen his younger brother Oscar in two days. But that isn’t unusual. Oscar has a habit of disappearing for a few days at a time and then coming home as if nothing had happened. He lives with his mother in a unit upstairs from Tony in a building at Elm and Third Street in downtown Long Beach. Tony is supposed to drive with Oscar that evening to their sister’s house in Rialto for a family Christmas gathering.

He had called Oscar on his cell phone several times but got no answer. Then he heard sirens and a police helicopter overhead. Looking out the window, he saw police had cordoned off several blocks around the building. But since that was a common occurrence downtown, he had ignored the commotion and started a load of laundry for the weekend. Tony walks out of the laundry room down the hall from his unit and immediately bumps into a heavily armed Long Beach SWAT officer.

The cop grabs him, throws him to the ground, handcuffs him, and drags him down three flights of stairs. “Who else is in the apartment?” the officer shouts. Tony tells the cop he lives alone, but that his mother lives with his brother Oscar upstairs. “And when I said ‘Oscar,’ they reacted and I knew they were looking for him,” Tony recalls. “They just told me Oscar was in trouble, that he had done something very bad.”

Police bring Tony to a staging area down the street and spend the next few hours grilling him about Oscar’s whereabouts. “It was very evident to me that they weren’t taking my word for it that I hadn’t seen Oscar in a couple of days,” he says. “But after a couple of hours, two SWAT members told me that my apartment was clear and they were going to take me up there to talk some more.” Instead, police take Tony to the fifth floor of the police station downtown, remove the handcuffs from behind his back, and then re-cuff him to a metal table.

For the next several hours, two detectives question Tony about his brother. “They kept asking the same questions over and over,” he says. “Where is he? Why am I hiding him? They kept leaving the room every hour or two hours and would come back and ask me the same things.” The next morning, at 8 a.m., the cops finally tell Tony that Oscar had shot at two police officers, who after several operations were no longer in danger of losing their lives.

Then the detectives place Tony’s cell phone on the table and play a message Oscar had left for him at 10 p.m the previous night, by which time Tony had already been in police custody for more than five hours. “After I heard that message,” Gallegos says, “I realized some of the things that go way back affected him more than me.”

“Tony, it’s me, Oscar,” the message says. “I’m okay. I had a run-in with two officers. I shot at them. It’s for getting back at them for what they did to me and Carlos and the 15 years my brother has done so far for nothing. I hope they ****ing die.”




* * *




A week after Oscar Gallegos died in a hail of bullets in Santa Ana, Tony and his youngest brother Francisco, who goes by the name Frankie, are laying tile in the garage of Frankie’s small house in a rough neighborhood just south of the 405 freeway and west of the L.A. River. A rusting sports car sits on cinder blocks in the back yard, surrounded by discarded children’s toys. They take a break from their work to talk about Oscar, who has yet to be buried. Tony, who plays lead guitar for a Long Beach-based punk rock group, Los Restos, has long curly hair. His arms are covered with Gothic, Aztec and tribal tattoos.


Oscar (l) with a neighbor, circa 2003, photo courtesy Gallegos Family
Frankie is sipping grape-flavored Smirnoff vodka coolers and chain smoking Camel lights. He also has tribal artwork on his bulging forearms as well as a “USMC” tattoo. Born a U.S. citizen in Long Beach in 1980, Frankie joined the Marine Corps in 1997, straight out of high school. He never joined a gang. By the time he was a teenager, his family had moved to a safer neighborhood further away from downtown Long Beach.

He now works with Tony as a supervisor at a hazardous waste disposal company in Long Beach. But the rest of the Gallegos brothers—Felix, the oldest, Tony, Carlos, and Oscar himself—were born in Tanhuato, a small pueblo in the impoverished southern Mexican state of Michoacan. Their father, a butcher, had already headed north to work as a cook in a Mexican restaurant in Long Beach.

With their mother, they crossed the border illegally in the mid-1970s and settled briefly in Wilmington before moving to a poor, gang-infested neighborhood northeast of downtown Long Beach. It wasn’t long before the oldest brother, Felix, fell into the orbit of the local gang, the Viejo Varrio subset of the East Side Longos, a well-entrenched and ultra-violent Latino gang. According to Tony, every young male resident of the neighborhood seemed involved in the gang, especially after the local youth center, which provided after-school and summertime recreational activities, shut down in the early 1980s.

“You have a poor neighborhood where all the youth centers where a kid has something to do after school are closed, and you put in liquor stores, what is a kid going to do?” Tony asks. “We were poor kids. We didn’t have any money. We had to wait for our parents to save money to buy sneakers or whatever, and you hear about some kid somewhere making a little money selling dope or whatever, to buy cool shoes that other kids who had money were wearing. And, well, that’s how it started.”

Tony’s oldest brother Felix was the first of the brothers to join the East Side Longos. But after being arrested at age 16 for selling drugs, and spending the next four years in juvenile hall and state prison, he dropped out of the gang. “I guess you could say he reformed,” Tony says. “He got out of the neighborhood and wasn’t active in the gang. He started working, at first the typical job someone who is just out of prison can get at a restaurant or wherever. Now he’s a big-rig mechanic—he has his own shop in Wilmington.”

Tony says he stopped hanging around with gang members when he was 14 years old. On Christmas Day, 1982, a rival gang member shot and robbed him while he was sitting in front of an apartment building with his best friend, who lived there. A walkway from the building led to a small alley.

“I remember a figure walking to my left side along the walkway, but I didn’t pay much attention,” he says. As he continued talking to his friend, the figure suddenly approached them. “All I saw was a shotgun on the left side of my face,” Tony said. In the instant before the person pulled the trigger, he was able to move a few feet away, but had to be rushed to the hospital with shotgun pellets buried in the back of his neck and shoulders. “That completely changed me around,” he said. “I just figured that was it for me.”

Three years later, when Tony was 17, he began dating a girl who lived in Fullerton. She urged him to move to Orange County to escape the neighborhood. He spent the next 10 years in Fullerton and Huntington Beach, visiting his brothers every other weekend. By then both Carlos and Oscar had become active members of the East Side Longo gang. Carlos, who was three years older than Oscar, rose to become the leader of the Viejo Varrio subset of the gang.

According to Tony, both Carlos and Oscar quickly found themselves being stopped in the street by police, beaten up, then placed in a police cruiser and driven to rival gang neighborhoods. They claimed there were two police officers who did this so often that whenever East Side Longo gang members saw their car approach, they’d scatter and run for cover. “A lot of the times people would get beaten up or stabbed, but they’d be okay,” Tony says. “Oscar got stabbed by rival gang members one time because of this. It was always the same group of officers that were picking him up.”

In 1989, police arrested Carlos for being in a car that carried out a drive-by shooting of a rival gang member and, a week later, for shooting at a woman who had testified against him in a vandalism case. Prosecutors charged him with two counts of attempted murder based on eyewitness testimony of the woman and rival gang members. After a jury convicted him of two counts of attempted murder in a week-long trial, a judge sentenced him to life in prison. He is eligible for parole in 2017.

Frankie claims he and Oscar were home asleep—they shared the same bedroom—the night police hauled Carlos away to jail. “That was a big blow to me,” he says. “The case was a joke. One witness could identify him and the other couldn’t. Their story was so ****ed up. I was maybe 11 years old and when I turned 18, I thought, ‘Man, I’m the same age as my brother when he was locked up and I’m still lost; I don’t know which direction to go.’ They never gave him a chance, and it was bullshit. Of course, he wasn’t no angel.”

Carlos never admitted guilt in the shooting and claimed he was framed by police because he was a prominent East Side Longo gang leader. According to Frankie, Carlos’ arrest affected Oscar deeply. “It affected all of us; it was terrible,” he says. “He was 18 and had a baby on the way. But it affected [Oscar] particularly, being in the same gang with him, on the streets and hanging out.”

Tony claims he tried to convince Oscar to drop out of the gang, but he refused. “Whenever I heard he had been in a fistfight or was in another neighborhood when one of his buddies got shot, I would try to talk to him and say, ‘Listen, that could have been you,’” he says. “But his relationship with his friends on the street was very tight. And a few years after Carlos went to prison, the same things started happening to Oscar. He was always getting picked up and harassed.”

Frankie remembers one such occasion when Oscar was 15 years old. “He and a buddy were walking to our apartment and he felt something hit him on the back of his head,” he says. “He fell face first and woke up at the police station and they were yelling at him. They asked his age and couldn’t believe he was 15 because he had facial hair and everything. He told me he knew it was the police who had hit him from behind.”

In 1990, police arrested Oscar for illegal possession of a firearm. He was convicted and went to county jail for several months. Four years later, he was arrested again, this time for selling crack. He did another stint in jail and was deported to Mexico. In 1997, after illegally entering the United States, police arrested Oscar yet again, this time for assault with a deadly weapon and making terrorist threats. The charges were later dropped. In 2001, cops busted him for public intoxication.

The following year, police arrested Oscar for a much more serious crime—raping a woman in Texas. But after he spent five days in jail, they determined that the real culprit was a person in Texas with the same name. Oscar sued for the false arrest, but a judge dismissed the case. The experience not only seemed to solidify Oscar’s hatred of police but to justify his self-destructive refusal to take responsibility for his own problems. Tony tried to get him work at the hazardous waste disposal firm where he worked, but Oscar would always find an excuse not to show up. He frequently disappeared for days and would travel to Mexico for months at a time.

In the months before he shot officers Yap and Wade, Frankie and Tony claim, their brother seemed especially angry at police. He felt he couldn’t leave his mother’s apartment without being followed by cops. Lt. Dave Cannan, a Long Beach Police public information officer, said both Yap and Wade have told police investigators that neither had ever seen Gallegos before. “At no time did either officer Yap or Wade ever come into contact with him before that day,” Cannan says. “One of them was still learning his way around a police car and the other was a good cop trying to work his beat when that person tried to take their lives.”




* * *




When police play him the message, and Tony Gallegos hears his brother say he hopes the two cops he shot would “****ing die,” he tries to explain what Oscar meant when he claimed he pulled the trigger to exact revenge for “what they did to Carlos and me.” But the police seem convinced Oscar must have been high on drugs. “They kept playing that message over and over,” he recalls. “One of them kept telling me, ‘Your brother was doped up, right?’ I said ‘No, you heard the message,’ but they wouldn’t let me tell them what he meant by what he said.”

Instead, police ask Tony to call Oscar and offer to bring him money. He refuses to help arrange a meeting that would lead to his brother being arrested. “I felt very weird with what they were asking me to do,” he says. “Of course I was shocked at what he had done and wanted him to turn himself in, but I felt like I couldn’t betray my brother that way.”

At 9 a.m., police let Tony go. They have already sent squads of detectives and patrol officers to every location that Oscar has ever visited. But they don’t catch up with Frankie Gallegos until later that evening, as he walks out of the Long Beach Performing Arts Center with his wife and young daughter, who has just acted in a performance of The Nutcracker.

Earlier in the day, Frankie had called one of the police detectives working his brother’s case and told him he hadn’t seen Oscar in two days, but that he had heard the description of the Pathfinder Oscar was driving and recognized it as his car, which he had recently given to his mom. He offered to drive down to the station to talk some more, but the cop told him he’d call him later.

At the Performing Arts Center, police handcuff Frankie and drive him and his family to the police station. “They immediately took my wife to another room and I figured they were going to question her first,” he recalls. “After a couple of hours went by the kids were sleepy and lay down next to me and I went to sleep as well. I felt a dude kick me in the leg.” The detective brings Frankie into a room where two U.S. Marshals are waiting for him. “I told them the last time I saw [Oscar] was two days ago,” he says.

A detective tells Frankie his story is “bullshit.” Frankie repeats the lie—he hasn’t seen Oscar since days before the shooting and has no idea where he is. The detective leaves the room and returns with Frankie’s wife, who is in tears. “Just tell them the truth,” she says.

Frankie looks at the detective. “I’m not going to turn my brother over to you guys,” he says. “I love the dude. I know what he did was wrong, but he’s my brother, man. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”

Then Frankie takes a deep breath and admits that he helped Oscar escape Long Beach just hours after his brother shot and nearly killed two cops. He tells them he knows Oscar will never surrender without a fight. “I told them that Oscar wasn’t going to let them put handcuffs on him again,” he says. “There was no way. I just knew it.”




* * *



Immediately after the shooting, Frankie is at home when Oscar calls him from the apartment unit he shares with his mother. “He told me, ‘I ****ed up, Frankie. I shot at the police,’” he says. “I was like, ‘What the hell did you do that for?’ and he said, ‘I just wanted to get home to mom and get her out of here.’ My mom got on the phone and I told her to get out of there, but she said, ‘No, he’s my son. They’re not going to kill my son. If they do, I’m going to die with him.’”

Instead of begging Oscar to turn himself in, Frankie tells his brother to come to his house. “It took a while, but he made it here,” he says. “I told him to hang out and I started driving around and I didn’t even know what direction I was going in.” Finally, Frankie calls his brother-in-law, tells him to go to his house and pick up Oscar, then drive to Santa Ana to meet him at a Sears outlet where they had recently purchased furniture. “That was the only place I knew in Santa Ana,” he says. “I just wanted to get my brother out of the city.”

After his brother-in-law drops Oscar off at the department store, Frankie exchanges vehicles with him and orders him to return to Long Beach with his truck. Then he drives off with Oscar. “We just drove around for a while,” he says. “We got into a nice part of town, near Irvine, I think. There were big houses. It was a nice area. We talked briefly, just a normal conversation, and I gave him some money I had in my pocket and said that I had to get back to Long Beach—the police were going to be at my house.”

Frankie knows he’s never going to see his brother alive again. Not once during their drive does either mention what Oscar has just done or discuss why he did it. There is no tearful farewell. As Oscar gets out of the car, he looks back at Frankie and thanks him for the ride.

“Later bro,” he says.