The phone call came about 9:30 p.m. Jeanette Chavez remembers it was a cold, windy, rainy Saturday night. It was the call every parent prays never to get: her child had been shot and killed.
"I've had my roller coaster moments," the 39-year-old woman reports. "I mean, I cry a lot, and my second daughter and husband are there to comfort me." Her eyes, in fact, fill up during a pause. "It's not faith that I ever question. It's, you know, a mother being apart from her child. That's the toughest thing that a mother has to deal with when something like this happens to you.
"Waking up and you're not taking your kid to school anymore. You're not dropping her off to the Confirmation class or doing something with the church like you used to, text messaging her and telling her that you love her. Or giving her that call to see if she's out of school ready to be picked up, because every morning we dropped both girls off and then my husband would pick them up.
"And not being able to celebrate holidays with her anymore," she adds with a doleful sigh. "It's a tough thing."
Racial rivalry?
The thing that continues to engulf the daily life of Jeanette, as well as her nine-year-old daughter Brittney and husband Oscar, is the brutal slaying of 16-year-old Sammantha Salas, her older daughter by a previous marriage. It happened during what the Los Angeles Times called a "spasm of cross-racial gang shootings" in or close to usually peaceful Monrovia. The shootings, involving suspected long-time rival African American and Latino gang members, also took the lives of two black men - one 19, the other 64.
Sammantha, who lived with her mother and stepfather, was staying the weekend with her dad, Samuel Salas, at his apartment complex in the 2500 block of Peck Road in unincorporated Monrovia. She and another teenage girl who lived in the complex had walked across the street to a neighborhood dairy market to buy a pack of Orbitz gum. When the Latinas returned, two black young men walked up to them and started shooting.
Eight bullets tore into the Alhambra High School sophomore's body, who died at Methodist Hospital in Arcadia. The other girl was wounded but survived. Their attackers escaped.
There was no known motive, according to Lt. Dan Rosenberg of the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department's homicide bureau. He pointed out that the teenagers were not gang members, but they were "specifically targeted." He noted it was "quite unusual [for gang members] to target females."
While Monrovia Police Chief Roger Johnson said the violent incident appeared to be retaliation between gangs, Monrovia Mayor Rob Hammond pooh-poohed any racial connection of the shootings, claiming that "over-simplified the situation."
And Captain Richard Shaw of the sheriff's department, who headed a newly formed anti-gang task force in the area, said, "I don't see it being race-related because the issues between these ... gangs have been going on forever." The gangsters he was talking about came from the Du Roc Crips, an old black street gang, and Nuero Vario of Monrovia and Duarte Eastside, two Latino gangs.
Incensed by the brazen attack on the innocent girls in Monrovia, L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca promised to come down hard on local gang-bangers. "The most disturbing thing is that [Sammantha] didn't even live in that community," he told the Pasadena Star-News. "[She] was just visiting and she was brutally killed."
Jamba Juice and 'Apple Bottoms'
Sammantha Salas liked to sew purses for friends and herself. She learned to knit from her maternal grandmother and once made a blanket that turned out to be nine feet tall. "Mom, I forgot to stop!" she explained.
She loved the Raiders and the Dodgers. And her passions included writing poems, drawing, playing miniature golf and collecting antiques at flea markets with her grandfather and at swap meets with her stepdad. "Hey, Mom, I found a Bauer bowl!" she'd exclaim.
Her favorite jeans? "Apple Bottoms," of course. And she craved Jamba Juice concoctions, especially Citrus Squeeze.
Sammantha attended kindergarten at Sacred Heart School in Lincoln Heights. When her family moved to Eagle Rock, she went to St. Dominic's through the fourth grade. Then they moved to Alhambra and she transferred to a public school. At Alhambra High, she was a 10th-grader who struggled with math and honors English. "Two more years!" her mom would encourage. "Two more years and you're done."
The teenager dreamed of going to USC. She wanted to be a criminal lawyer for juveniles. But her backup plan was to become a marine biologist who studied dolphins. She already had a dolphin ring and earrings, along with dolphin statues and posters.
Before last Thanksgiving, Sammantha, Brittney and their mother helped Uncle Carlos (Valles) with his St. Vincent de Paul ministry at All Souls Church in Alhambra. They bagged groceries before making place mats with happy faces, setting tables and putting up decorations. On Thanksgiving Day, the girls helped served the traditional turkey dinner to homeless families, with Sammantha proudly in charge of the stuffing.
"She liked to do a lot of different things," Jeanette notes. "She really did."
No reward
Weeks after her daughter was slain, her mother wondered why rewards were being offered for higher profile gang killings, but not Sammantha. One example was Jamiel Shaw, Jr., the 17-year-old Los Angeles High School football player who was killed in the Mid-City area of Arlington Heights. Two alleged members of the 18th Street Gang pulled up beside him in their vehicle and asked if he belonged to a gang. When he didn't answer, at least one jumped out and shot him.
Like Sammantha, Jamiel, or "Jazz" as he was called, didn't belong to a gang and was murdered near his home. But unlike the Salas murder, Jamiel's drew a lot of sustained media coverage on TV and in newspapers; he was a football star, and his mother, Army Sgt. Anita Shaw, was serving in Iraq at the time of his March 2 killing.
Moreover, his suspected Latino killer had gotten out of jail the day before and was living illegally in the United States. He was apprehended less than two weeks after the killing. LAPD Chief William Bratton labeled him a "sociopath."
Comedian Bill Cosby phoned Jamiel's parents, offering his support. President George Bush sent along a letter of sympathy, too. CNN covered the funeral.
Jeanette doesn't begrudge any of this attention. And she's been assured that the sheriff department detectives handling her daughter's case are making progress, so a reward at this time isn't necessary. "I've been told by Supervisor [Michael] Antonovich's office that they're still working hard to solve Samantha's murder," she says, adding, "but I don't know if they're just trying to pacify me. I have no clue."
'What can I do?'
But what Sammantha's mother doesn't want is for her daughter to become another cold case file in Los Angeles' seemingly endless tally of gang-related homicides.
She is well aware that the media's ravenous crime beat appetite has moved on to not only Jamiel Shaw but to a parade of other horrific incidents. Like the 13-year-old Latino boy who was gunned down in Echo Park while on his way to pick lemons. Or the six-year-old black youth critically wounded by two Latino males who flashed gang signs before opening fire on the family's vehicle in the Harbor Gateway neighborhood.
"I don't want Sammantha to be just another gang statistic; I don't want my daughter to be forgotten," Jeanette says, bringing her hand down hard on the dining room table of the family's cozy house stocked with antique toy soldiers, miniature metal cars, guitars, dishes and other collectables. "I want her name to be alive until these guys are caught. Because they're going to go out there and kill someone else, and that's not what I want on my conscience.
"I don't want that to happen to anyone, because it's a horrible thing. Those guys are breathing, eating, sleeping, drinking, watching television - enjoying themselves - living life while my daughter is gone. But [these killings] are on TV and in the news only a couple days, and then they're gone away and they don't talk about them. I don't want that. I want to keep her name alive. I have to."
She wipes her eyes with a tissue and tries to catch her breath. Still, she wants to continue, to explain the unexplainable:
"I mean, when you're a mother, you talk to your kids every day, having long conversations about everything and anything, and when something like this happens a mother feels helpless. Because you're always there for them. You're always there for whatever they need. Always! And that's a hard thing.
"So right now I feel so helpless," Jeanette says in a wrung-out voice, "because it's like, 'OK, what can I do?' What can I do to make sure that no other family has to go through what I have to go through?"
College scholarships in memory of Sammantha Salas and Brandon Lee, a 19-year-old African American youth who was also killed in Monrovia this year (Jan. 29), are being established. For more information, e-mail Tina Yamashiro at tinayyama@aol.com. Editor's note: This is the first of a three-part series on gang violence in Los Angeles. |